Rev Left Radio - Deconstructing Liberal Intellectuals: Peterson, Harris, and Pinker

Episode Date: April 23, 2018

Aimee Terese (@AimeeTerese on twitter) joins Brett, all the way from Australia, to critically analyze the work of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and Steven Pinker and shine a light on the broader socio-political interests they serve.  Resources for further study: Psychoanalyzing the Politics of the New Brain Sciences  Author: Samuels, Robert (2017)   After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and "Strong Objectivity"  Author: Sandra Harding (1992)   THE MYTH OF SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVITY Author: William A. Wilson (2017) Available at: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/11/the-myth-of-scientific-objectivity   Have wars and violence declined?  Author: Michael Mann (2018) Support the Show: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org Outro Music: "Drop Kick The Punks" by The Faint

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Welcome everybody, took it in and turn it up loud. Revolutionary Left Radio starts now. Welcome, everybody. This is Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today we have on Amy Therese to talk about basically liberal intellectuals, focusing on Sam Harris, Stephen Pinker, and Jordan Peterson. Amy, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background?

Hey, Dad. I'm Amy. I'm a former philosophy major and current law student in Sydney, Australia. And I've developed a particular affinity for criticizing these centrist, liberal intellectuals online. And Brett kind of picked up on that. And here I am today to talk about it. Yeah, that's one of the amazing things of how this episode, and some episodes in the past have actually come about, was I'm just online interacting with, you know, different people. And I saw you making really interesting points and doing threads on, on like Stephen Pinker, I believe. And I was like, wow, I really enjoy your analysis. So let's have you on the show. And that's kind of cool because I like to give platforms to people

that aren't necessarily already platformed. You know, you might not write for a big magazine or you might not have a teaching position at a university. But regular people have plenty to offer these conversations. So I'm really happy to have you on board. And I think this is an important discussion. All right. Now, before we begin with the questions, I do want to make a caveat up front. We're going to be covering, you know, three people that have written multiple books that have multiple interviews, endless hours of lectures online. We're just not going to be able to cover every single aspect of all three of these people's thoughts. So the idea in this interview is to do sort of a bird's eye view of three big liberal figures, centrist figures, kind of break down what

they basically stand for and offer some critiques of what they get wrong, the interests they serve, and then at the end kind of wrap it up with how leftists can better approach the sorts of people that tend to gravitate towards these sorts of thinkers. So inevitably there's going to be aspects of their thought that you wish that we covered or that we didn't have enough time to cover properly or in depth, but that's just the nature of this format. So having said that, Amy, what initially got you interested in these guys' work and ideas? How did they catch your attention in the first place, and why did you begin to focus on them as something to analyze? I suppose, if I'm being honest, and this is a bit of a self-owned here, I'd had a fairly

neutral approach to, at the very least, Pinker and Harris. Certainly up until a few years ago, I just considered them kind of, certainly Harris slightly provocative, but I still consider them quite, you know, respectable intellectuals and kind of leaders in that particular academic disciplines. But it really became apparent with Harris a couple of years back and certainly pinker around six months ago that so much of their work was kind of feeding into a lot of really reactionary and hashtag problematic political discourse. And as I began to kind of see them being interviewed, particularly Pinker and Peterson, it became really apparent that a lot of the people interviewing them were unable to kind of grapple with the sum total of what they were doing

and what they were contributing to public discourse. So just in relation to your disclaimer a little bit earlier about, you know, we're not going to be able to handle everything they've ever done in the public sphere. I think a huge part of the problem with the way they've been attended to is if you look only at narrow kind of sets of facts or the exact content of what they said and you kind of pick that apart in, you know, just disagreeing with facts, you're unable to actually see the broader picture of what they're doing. And all that ends up happening is a bunch of fanboys storm you online saying,

you know, you took them out of context. You haven't watched all their videos. And it became apparent to me that, A, even if you watch, you know, or absorb a huge amount of all their content, there exists a really significant critique that no one's dealing with. It also became apparent that when you kind of dig behind each of them, there's a whole lot feeding into what they're doing that almost nobody was contending with. So particularly, like, the thread that you noticed. that got you to invite me on was one that I did about Pinker,

where it turns out he has quite significant connections with libertarian content farms and really anti-Marxist, anti-left ideas. But then when they come into kind of the mainstream sphere, you're just being presented with a non-ideological academic, so-called. And you're not able to actually get at what's behind their ideas. So yeah, I just figured it was worth kind of doing a bit of a deep dive into each of them and figuring out what's actually going on in a broader picture rather than in a narrow fashion. Definitely, and for my end of it, I've been interested in, I mean, I kind of parallel to what you said,

Pinker and Harris goes back to my teenage years when I went as people, listeners to the show, no, I went through a rather cringy new atheist phase. I think a good portion of listeners or leftist today probably went through some libertarian or new atheist or a weird liberal phase. And during my phase, I certainly read Pinker, and I've read, I think, every Harris book, and I've listened to every Harris podcast, even as my leftism developed,

and I discarded my liberalism and my new atheism. I've still continued to follow Harris, precisely because I think analyzing him is really a doorway to analyzing a broad centrist, center-right, liberal tradition, and it has a real effect on the populations. And the point about fan boys is interesting, too because almost certainly when we release this episode, there will be people that will flood

the page, especially when it comes to Peterson. I think there's a whole army of his fans out there who just search Twitter for the name Peterson and when they see any critiques, they just kind of swarm on it. So I guess I'm kind of looking forward to that because that'll be interesting to see. But when I presented this idea to some of my listeners, most people were absolutely on board and they understood why it was an important thing. But some people question why even do an episode dedicated to these people. Why dedicate time and energy to people like Pinker Peterson and Harris? So why don't we just ignore them and focus on other? Some would say more important things. What's your thoughts on that?

Well, I think it's pretty easy as someone on the left to kind of see the semi-sharleton elements of what they're doing and accordingly dismiss them. But I guess in part because I had a cringy new atheism. phase for a little while as well. I can sort of empathize with a lot of people who are seeing something of value in what they're doing. And I think because so much of what they're doing is tainted and can contribute to quite, really quite bad politics, I think it is worth attempting to disaggregate, like what they've contributed in the academic fields, what they're doing in terms of providing something to people in the centre, but then also recognising the fact that they're not non-ideological,

they're not purely rational and objective in the way that they like to frame themselves, that actually what they're doing is packaging up a very real set of quite reactionary and conservative political ideas, but tying them in a kind of shiny bow and presenting them to the mainstream as non-ideological, purely scientific ideas. And given the world that we live in,

non-ideological, purely scientific ideas, I received by technocrats as incredibly worthwhile ones. And for that very reason, I do think it's worth kind of demonstrating the fact that these are not uncontested ideas that they're bringing out and that a lot of what they're doing is actually counterintuitive.

to what they're saying. So there's that component. And then there's also the component that they speak to a lot of very real needs of either anxious liberals or young men who are alienated by neoliberalism. And I think recognizing that need or that kind of gap and offering something superior is essential if the left wants to win. So it's kind of those two elements that I think weren't interrogation. And that's something I really admire when you and I were discussing how we're going to talk about these subjects and stuff. You really made a point to talk about there has to be some sort of empathetic approach

to the people that these people attract. And sometimes the fans of these people are complete shitheads, but oftentimes they're confused, desperate people looking for answers in a world that doesn't give them any. And in that sense, there is at least a segment of those populations that, the left can reach out to and probably should reach out to to to try to bring them over and give them a more coherent worldview so that they don't fall into the traps of reactionaryism or maintaining the status quo.

So I do appreciate that empathy on your end and towards the end of this episode we'll absolutely get into that in more detail. But before we begin, a crucial distinction that you make when it comes to these guys is to point out what they are doing as opposed to what they are merely saying. And I think this is a really insightful and necessary thing to understand. So can you talk about that distinction and lay out your argument for what they're doing?

Yeah. So, I mean, as kind of increasing number of reviews and media attention has been paid to the three of them, I've been sort of formulating what I guess you could now vaguely call kind of a thesis of what's been going on, like the pose that they're striking in public discourse. And I sort of have come to this realization that I think it's been. best to frame, at least my analysis, with the idea of speech acts as opposed to just speech. Because I think that will allow us to more comprehensively assess what these guys are doing as opposed to just what they're saying. So I think all three, Pinker, Peterson and Harris,

have framed their engagement in public from a vantage point of reaction, right? Like, all three of them have had their public profiles catalyzed by positioning themselves as victims of, quote-unquote, free speech police, right? So Peterson jumped to major attention in his reaction to the Canadian Bill C-16. Harris is generated just an inordinate amount of controversy in relation to his, quote-unquote, forbidden knowledge episode of the waking-up podcast last year, where he gave Charles Murray a platform, reigniting a bunch of very questionable scientific ideas and controversies

that, you know, one would have thought we put to bed in the early 90s when the Bell Cope was released, and certainly also his reactionary ideas in relation to Islam of no short supply of public attention. And then Pinker as well has spent much of his academic career, positioning his scientific work as counterposed to a bunch of, PC police who completely deny the idea that genetics can have anything to do with the differences between people. And so when all three frame their public engagement from a point of

reaction, as though they are being victims of censors, what that does is play into the liberal value of freedom of expression. And then because also, three of them is set up a straw man, they then allow themselves to be framed as the reasonable scientific authority on particular issues. But this framing device is an action, right? It helps insulate them from criticism because they've flattened all their critics into straw men and position themselves as enlightened, rational truth tellers. And I guess what I want to suggest is that what follows from there is necessarily in bad faith and is performative as opposed to a good faith attempt to engage.

Because what ends up happening is that all critique of their content is framed as hostile SJWs trying to silence them or an insistence that their opponents don't understand their work or have taken it out of context. And I think that the reason this is performing, informative is that it has a consequence of eliminating space for actual disagreement, right? Like if all your opponents are just hostile senses, then it allows you to not actually engage with reasonable and good faith criticism of your ideas.

And like actual criticism and disagreement and contestation of values is the stuff of politics. And so when you remove it off the table, as all three do, it renders all engagement free from the substantive texture of politics and what we get is basically a cult of personality or just an empty kind of performance. And so what that ends up doing is that it allows existing power structures to be preserved. Like when we're not doing politics,

we're necessarily by default preserving the status quo. And so I guess as someone who's incredibly anti-authoritarian, just by my very nature, I began to notice something really totalitarian to their approach to public discourse because their framing device renders it impossible to legitimately disagree with them. And this tends to be exacerbated by the social orthodoxy of attributing authoritative status to scientists, especially those ten-year-ed elite universities, even if they're engaged in subject matter that is so far outside their own academic. field. Yeah, that's amazingly said and incredibly insightful. I haven't quite heard the analysis

be framed and articulated in that way. I think that that's worth like rewinding and re-listening to because that's extremely important. And this notion that they are constantly under attack by politically correct operatives in the broader culture or in academia, one of the effects of that, and I think one of the tactics, whether conscious or subconscious, that they employ to play up that fear is that they have all played up the fear of campus PC culture, of sort of creating a context in which what goes on on campuses is somehow indicative of a broader cultural attack on them and free speech. And even though what's happening on campuses is relatively marginal compared to the overall culture, it's played up by them and it's given a platform

by people like Joe Rogan for them to come on those shows and talk to millions and millions of people and play up that anxiety and that threat precisely because I think it plays into their broader concept that they're constantly being intact by the PC. But you're also your notion that they are fundamentally here to maintain the status quo, which we will flesh out in detail as this interview goes on, I think it's extremely important and it's worth noting that all three of these men, well, first of all, they're white men, but they're also in academia and they're also very wealthy. So for them, just sort of a material class analysis of, of what interests they serve, of course they're going to want to maintain a system in which they

have a completely intensely privileged position therein. So if this hierarchy allows them to sit comfortably in leather chairs behind desks and academia, well then of course any threat to that hierarchy is going to be something that's going to affect them personally, whether they think about that consciously or not's another question, but certainly that has to play some subconscious role in how they approach these problems. But if you have nothing else to say on that topic, I'm ready to dive into the individuals one by one. Yeah, no, that sounds great. I'm happy to move on to that.

Okay. So to start off, we're going to address Stephen Pinker. So I'm sure a lot of people know who these people are, but at the same time, it's worth just kind of laying that foundation of understanding before we get into the critiques and whatnot. So who is Stephen Pinker? And what are the primary ideas or books or concepts that he's known for and pushes? So Stephen Pinker is a cognitive psychologist who is tenured.

faculty at Harvard University. Ironically enough, he actually developed quite a bit of Noam Chomsky's early linguistic theory, but the two of them couldn't have politics that were further apart. But basically, what he's done, particularly in his last few books, is malign the humanities and kind of reiterate that science and technology and progress are absolutely interlinked and that we need to not worry so much about politics, not assess concepts and think too deeply about the underlying ideas at play, but just that we need to keep on a technocratic path and that will helpfully get us towards progress.

And so what he does, particularly in his most recent book, is pluck an inordinate quantity of data that helps support his ultimate thesis that enlightenment rationalism is good. He has graphs to prove it and everything that was bad subsequent to the enlightenment was not really a result of the enlightenment and that we should just hang back and let the scientists handle these issues and not attempt to quote unquote politicize science. And if that sounds a bit oblique. Basically, I think the primary concern is that he attempts to take politics out of politics and tells us just to hand it off to the technocrats, which, you know, if you look at the past 20 or 30 years of politics, particularly in the United States, it becomes remarkably apparent that handing

things over to the technocrats is no way to achieve progress, right? Like, all you need to do is, look at Robbie Mook and Nate Silver to recognize why it is that simply quantifying things and leaving humanities and conceptual analysis out of the picture is wayfully inadequate in our world. Like, there are a great deal of actually political value contestations that take place. To simply hand things off to technocrats is to allow the existing hierarchies to be preserved because a great deal of progress is not charted through ideas and in petri dishes. It's charted through fights, political contestation and activism and creating enough force to

move the needle. And when we let technocrats take over, things don't move forward, particularly for those who are not privileged enough to be in that technocratic class. And so I have a chapter on reason. I have a chapter on science. I have a chapter on humanism. But in the chapter on reason, I ask the question, why does it, on the one hand, it appears that we're getting smarter. There's the Flynn effect of rising IQ scores. And there are a lot of areas in life where you see just much more intelligence being applied than just a few years ago. So just for example, you know, movement in evidence-based medicine. A lot of what your doctor does is just based on kind of superstition and tradition. And now people are saying, well, let's just, you know, let's do a randomized control trial, see what works, what doesn't.

So medicine's getting smarter. You look at policing. One of the reasons that the crime rate has gone down so much, another positive development that I talk about that people aren't aware of, is that policing has gotten smarter. Every day, especially in New York, they would gather data as to where the homicides were, which neighborhoods, which blocks on which neighborhoods, and they would concentrate the police forces. on that day to prevent things from getting out of control with cycles of revenge. You look at sports, you know, Moneyball, where you've got kind of smarter teams that can beat richer teams. You look at policy and you've got, you know, evidence-based policy. So all these areas where it looks like the country's getting smarter,

but then there are all these areas where it looks like the country is getting a lot stupider. And a lot of them are, I argue, cases where issues get politicized and then people just go. go with their own coalition. And the ideal would be, and this is an ideal that's at least preached in science and to some extent practice, you know, there's not left-wing science and right-wing science.

It's what do the data say? What's the evidence say? Let's do an experiment. Let's see who's right, who's wrong, and either side might be embarrassed. And I think in the case of these great political and economic issues, we'd be better off if we thought like scientists,

kept an open mind and say, well, what works? Does a minimum wage lead to higher unemployment because labor becomes more expensive? Well, maybe it beats me if I know. Let's look at areas that have tried it and see what happens. Does too much welfare make people unambitious and lazy? Well, I can't figure this out from my armchair. Let's look at, compare different countries, compare different states and cities. Issue after issue, I think we need to be much more pragmatic and open to evidence. And there's, I'm going to read from different articles throughout this episode because other people have made interesting criticisms and I want to give a platform to those criticisms as well. So Princeton historian David Bell writes for the nation and he kind of sums up what you're talking about with the neoliberal technocratic nature of Pinker. And David says, given Pinker scorn for intellectuals and disregard of social movements, it's no surprise that his politics and his hopes for the future can be best summed up as technocratic neoliberalism. He puts his trust in free markets and the guidance of enlightened scientists and moguls.

Is it really a surprise that Bill Gates calls Enlightenment Now, my new favorite book of all time? Let the rich get very, very rich, as long as everyone else's income is rising, and don't worry about the power they may be accumulating in the process. And when it comes to public policy, trust an expert class that proclaims its allegiance to science and progress alone and believes it is beyond politics. To make public discourse more rational, Pinker proclaims, issues should be depoliticized as much as is feasible. If protesters

start to march and shout in the streets, calling for politicians to respect the will of the people, then what is called for is a quote, effective training and critical thinking and cognitive debiasing, so the people will respect the will of experts. And I think that kind of sums up the technocratic push that kind of

underlies all of Pinker's work, but to go a little deeper into what Pinker gets wrong and what interest does Pinker ultimately serve with his work. As you read from one of the reviews, I've read quite a number of amazing reviews and not being a scholar per se, I found that essentially in terms of the enlightenment, he gets just an inordinate amount of it incorrect in terms of the facts on

the page. But he also, and I think this is, at least to me, the biggest problem in terms of what he gets wrong is that when he's writing outside of his area of expertise, that being history, not only does he cherry pick the data to support a conclusion he's already come to. And I think that's almost inevitable when you start from a vantage point of reaction, right? Whether you're conscious of it or not, the data and the arguments you're going to recruit are those which help support your particular stance in reaction to what you perceive to be a bogeyman out there. A very prominent scientist, very well-credential scientists.

Some critics say that your book, though, is less of a reasoned scientific argument, more of a polemic, because it doesn't put forth a hypothesis, tested against the evidence, and then come to a dispassionate conclusion. You start backwards. You have your conclusion, and then you spend around 450 pages trying to find data and graphs. Some say cherry-picked data to justify that conclusion. What do you say to them? Totally wrong. It's just dead wrong. We all agree on what human well-being consists of, like life expectancy, like death from disease, like death from violent crime, I plot them, and the graphs go in a particular direction. They did not check it.

By ignoring data that doesn't fit your thesis? Absolutely false, no. Which data? Well, let's talk about it. Well, let's take global poverty. You have a chapter in the book on prosperity. You want to make the case that the world is more prosperous and less poor than ever before, and you point to data showing the number of people living on the extreme poverty line,

as defined by the World Bank today at $1.90 a day is down from $2 billion in 1990 to 700 million in 2015. The world is becoming middle class, you say. But surely you know, I know you know, because you're a very clever, well-qualified guy, that there are numerous studies, and a number of scholars who dispute that poverty measure as arbitrary, as inaccurate, that in reality, to quote from a recent academic paper by an anthropologist at the LSE, quote, around 4 billion people remain in poverty today, around 2 billion remain hungry, more than ever before in history. That's completely irrelevant to which way the numbers have gone. Of course, the definition of extreme poverty is going to be arbitrary.

If you make it higher than more people will be in poverty, make it lower fewer people. Exactly. But no matter what cutoff you said, the direction is downward. Yes, it is. Actually, if you look at the work done by Jason Hickle at the LSC, if you take a poverty line of $5, a billion people have been added to the number of people on that poverty measure since 1981. The trend shows the exact opposite when you move it to $5 a day.

Secondly, and this to me is really fundamental, he seems to think that history is advanced by ideas, ideas and the occasional piece of technology that move things along. And so having listened to far too many of the fanboys, who would criticise me for not having read his work, I actually read Enlightenment now. And throughout, you see an alarming number of references to the idea that ideas are what move history. So a couple that I found particularly fascinating were he cites a whole bunch of ideas of Enlightenment thinkers who, sure, admittedly, like the Enlightenment was a pivotal period in human history. It had some fantastic elements of it, elements that we should preserve and utilize.

even up to this day, but it was complicated and nuanced and there was good and there was bad, but what Pinker seems to do is pluck out the elements that a 2018 intellectual would approve of and then vest them with some kind of historically advancing power. So he says things through the book, like the idea that from the 18th century, all children and young people were now enabled to live a free and liberated existence, and that this idea gave children an innocent childhood as a birthright, right? And that's nice, and I'm sure it perhaps did influence some, you know, wealthy white children. But during that era, working-class kids were in coal mines, and African-Americans were still slaves for a country.

couple of hundred years after that initial comment was made, right? So throughout, you see this unwillingness to acknowledge that history is not necessarily advanced by ideas in isolation. And I found it particularly problematic too, that anything that was associated with science and that was problematic, he says, is not scientific, is not rational, was not an enlightenment idea, it was actually part of enlightenment backlash. And so it just became increasingly clear that he's unwilling to contend with the more complicated and gritty elements of what science and progress can lead to. And that to me bodes a particular risk for the future.

Like if we're unable to see the problems and the elements of risk within particular disciplines, then we're unable to hone that discipline in a way that minimizes that risk in the future, right? So when he spoke about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, he was incredibly flippant about it, implied that, no, no, that wasn't actually science and we need not worry about that. As someone who really cares about preventing exploitation and making sure that any science and any experiments, take into account the full dignity and human worth of individual people, I think it's not enough to simply dismiss that as not scientific or not rational. Like, we need to be fully aware of the risks associated with a particular discipline

in order to mitigate them. And so the fact that is unwilling to account for those really troubles me in terms of the risk at poses going forward. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. And you touched on it too, but there's connecting. all three of these thinkers is a huge strain of idealism, meaning that they do think about ideas as the primary engine of history. There's a complete sort of ignorance about actual history

or when history is discussed. It's discussed in a very either Eurocentric or one-dimensional way. And then there's a sort of irony that they all think of themselves as torch carriers for the Enlightenment. And what the Enlightenment did back in the day of the Enlightenment itself was it used reason and with the with the advent of science and modern philosophy it used reason and logic to sort of challenge the hierarchies that existed in their time because in their time you know hierarchies were formed basically through the divine rights of kings through monarchism through feudalism and they used reason and logic to push back against those hierarchies and advocate for progress in the social political and economic sphere but what people like pinker and peterson and harris all do is they actually use science and and logic to maintain the hierarchies of today. So if you're really trying to claim that you're carrying the torch forward for the Enlightenment, then you better be using all tools at your disposal to actually challenge the hierarchies, the unfair hierarchies of wealth and power in our world, as opposed to

basically protecting and defending and maintaining them through your work. So that's something that comes up all over, but it certainly comes up in Pinker. And one thing I would also say, and we talked about this in our last episode on capitalist realism, which is this way that capitalism is naturalized, where the hierarchies and the poverty and the war that we experience in our capitalist world is naturalized as just an unavoidable sort of fact of nature, and they use science in today's world to do that. And I'm going to quote really quickly from the third chapter of a book by R. Samuels, and he's talking about Pinker, and he's talking about this naturalizing of the status quo. And Pinker makes great use out of

evolutionary psychology, as does Peterson, but the quote says, evolutionary psychology thus attempts to naturalize culture and social relations as it presents a theory that denies that it is a theory. As an anti-ideological ideology, Pinker's discourse reveals the hidden truth about neoliberalism. The new brain sciences are often a political rhetoric disguised as natural facts, and this naturalization of social construction serves to rationalize the neoliberal political and social status quo. And I think that really

cuts to the core of what Pinker's work especially does. Do you have any last words on Pinker before we move on to Peterson? The reason why people like Pinker, Harris, and Peterson are so adamantly opposed to scholars from the humanities and even

ideas from the humanities is that what the humanities do is they contest concepts, right? And so it's really interesting the more I dug into Peterson and Pinker and Harris, the more I discovered that so much of what they are saying feeds into really long-running battles between the humanities and the natural sciences.

And a huge amount of that controversy read its head in the early 90s, particularly in response to a book written by a woman named Sandra Harding. And I just want to read a quote from her that also, kind of gets at the idea of ideological neutrality and the positionality of the people in the natural sciences who are attempting to position themselves as non-ideological. So she wrote that the normalizing routine conceptual practices of power are exactly those that are least likely to be detected by individuals who are trained not to question the social location and priorities of the institutions and conceptual schemes within which their research occurs.

So I think that a huge reason why people like Pinker, Peterson, and Harris are reflexively antagonistic towards the humanities is that the humanities questions kind of the underlying assumptions behind the sciences and begins to reveal the fact that it is not non-ideological. Like it has a bunch of ideological assumptions and maybe they're valid, maybe they're not, but it kind of calls into question the unexamined authority of people like Pinker. And I think that plays a huge part in his framing of issues. It attempts to allide those conceptual questions. And so I think actually facing those questions and sharpening the natural sciences in response to them is something that is in fact progressive.

And just papering over gaps and blind spots is to me something that poses an enormous risk. Yeah, definitely. Well said. Kind of connects to this conversation is in a lot of academia, there's just capitalism is just a dirty word or someone now called neoliberal. liberalism. And, you know, a certain percentage, surprisingly large percentage of academics are actually Marxists, probably about 15% in the social sciences. And to say the obvious fact that capitalism is better than communism. I mean, just a fact. I mean, just compare, we would rather live in South Korea or North Korea. We'd rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany. Do you rather live now in Venezuela or in Chile? And it's just obvious that

capitalism makes people richer and freer and better off in pretty much every way. Now, that's a fact that's almost unmentionable in academia. But if you say it by itself and suddenly people discover it for the first time, then you can get the extreme right-wing position that any amount of regulation is bad, any amount of social spending is bad. we need the most extreme form of almost anarcho-capitalism, like radical libertarianism. And that's because, I argue, that if you never have a discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of different economic systems, you never hear the arguments for why

some mixture of a free market with regulation of things that have to be regulated because the market won't take care of them, like pollution. I mean, the market just won't put a price on the atmosphere because no one owns the atmosphere. And so having a combination of a free market with environmental regulations gives you the best of both worlds. Likewise, social spending for the elderly, for children, for the sick, for the unlucky, that's not incompatible with a free market. And in fact, some of the countries with the strongest social safety nets also are the ones with the most economic freedom. So that argument that I've just given you right now just doesn't take place because there's just such a commitment to the idea that capitalism is bad, opening up the possibility that someone discovers, hey, capitalism isn't so bad, then they leap to the strongest possible conclusion. Well, as soon as you have Social Security, then we're going to be like Venezuela or carbon pricing.

and the rational way of organizing society with just the right balance of free markets, regulation, social spending is just something that doesn't get discussed out in the open. You get these polarized extremes. Now, let's go ahead and move on to Jordan Peterson. A lot of people know who he is again, but just baseline, who is Jordan Peterson and what are the primary ideas and concepts that he pushes and is known for? Okay, so Peterson is really interesting. He's a psychology professor attended at the University of Toronto and he was catalyzed into the public sphere

a couple of years ago in reaction to a proposed bill C-16 and essentially he framed himself as the enlightened truth teller who was objecting to the large, overzealous government, compelling speech from him and that he would not stand for that. And that, of course, plays into a whole lot of liberal tendencies. But basically, he catalyzed an enormous public profile in response to that. He subsequently put hundreds of hours' worth of content on his YouTube channel,

established a Patreon profile, which is at present. I checked it this morning. He's the number 10 most lucrative earner. on the entirety of Patreon. Wow. Yeah, it's followed closely at number 11 by Sam Harris, incidentally. But Peterson is really interesting. And I think a lot of people in the mainstream media,

as well as even the alternative media, have been thrown by a loop in terms of what to make of him because he doesn't easily fit into any existing boxes. He doesn't play the neutrality. like rational atheist man character in quite the way that people like Pinker or Harris do. He's this quite idiosyncratic set of worldviews that basically mash together a kind of Jungian archetypes as well as a really extensive set of historical mythologies and then in conjunction with contemporary psychological developments to put together basically

this worldview that is kind of incredibly piecemeal from a variety of different sources. So what he's able to do in having done that is position himself outside of the specialized critique of any particular individual, right? So psychologists themselves can't necessarily critique half of what he's saying because it's not psychology, right? Like all his stuff about Jungian archetypes is not. the content of psychologists or other natural scientists, so they don't feel equipped to criticize it. And then all the kind of anthropological literary stuff he's using is so matched together

with other elements that kind of literary scholars can't quite, don't quite know what to make of him. But essentially what he's doing is remarkably similar to Harris and Pinker in that he's positioning all critics as completely out of control, big government run amok, SJWs are trying to silence him, et cetera, et cetera. And what he's doing is essentially reassuring people in positions of relative power and privilege that they are justified. And he's reinforcing a whole bunch of existing social hierarchies. And of course, everyone's familiar with his,

at least most people would have heard of his 12 rules for life, many of which are kind of harmless, like just generalised self-help problem. But what he's then done is embedded all manner of revanchist, socially conservative nonsense kind of wrapped up within it, with Jungian archetypes and biblical narratives. And I think the major problem with what he's doing as opposed to what he's saying is he's effectively de-politicising young people.

So whilst Pinker attempts to de-politicise politics, right? I think Peterson is doing something quite different than that he is encouraging individuals not to be engaged with politics. He's framing all young people who take up political positions and activate and organize in order to change the world around them.

He's framing. them all as outlandish and stepping outside of their lane, and he quite explicitly and repeatedly tells young people that they don't know anything, that they are illiquid to question anything, and that the only righteous move for them at this point in their lives is to clean up their bedrooms, to stand up straight, and doing anything beyond that is just completely inappropriate and they're ill-equipped to engage with the world at large. Yeah, and there's times where he explicitly states that if you're not perfect, if you have your own issues in your personal life, then don't you dare even think about criticizing the world? Because until

you have fully sort of addressed every individual flaw that you possess as a singular person, then you have no right to go out and criticize the world. To his fan base, this de-politicizes them, as you say, but it also creates the sort of anger and hatred towards other people who do go out and try to, you know, organize for better conditions. One of the other things about Peterson that I think actually puts him apart from Harris and Pinker is the sort of incoherency of his books and of his sort of lines of argument that this allows him to sound profound while saying very little, but it also allows him to sidestep criticism because as he always says and has his followers always say, you don't actually understand what he's saying.

So if you tried to pin him down, there's interviews online that just devolve into super awkward sorts of situations because the reporter doing basic reporting trying to say, okay, you say this, does this mean this? Like, what are you trying to say here? And Peterson will just act just totally taken aback that this person can be so disingenuous to sort of assume meanings that Peterson himself never said. Yeah. And I think that, um, That in particular is one of the aspects that I found particularly helpful in formulating that idea of like, we need to look at what they're doing as opposed to just like micro situations of what they're saying, right? Because in order to actually recognize and appreciate what it

is that Peterson is doing, you really very much need to zoom out. Because if you zoom in, he has, and I'm not even sure whether this is intentional, right? Like, I don't see the point of attributing motives where we can't necessarily demonstrate it, but what I think is demonstrable is the fact that, as you said, what he's saying is so all over the shop that he leaves enough wiggle room that if you attempt to make it just about what he is saying, you fail to appreciate what's actually going on. And I think, like the most obvious example of that would be,

of course is Kathy Newman interview on BBC 4 where she attempts to distill what it is that he is saying repeatedly. And Peterson, having left enough wiggle room, is able to just sit there really nonchalantly and just deny everything she is attributing to him. And I think if you actually read his work and forgive me if this seems a little reductionist. But I found so much of his book, and again, I read a huge portion of it, not all of it. but I really delved into it. It really hit me the similarity that he had with newspaper horoscopes, right? Like, when you read a horoscope, because it's so ambiguous,

as a reader you find yourself taking what you want from it. And I think the beauty of that for Peterson is that individual people who are already fans of his will intuitively fill in the blanks and take what they want from it. And then that generates a particular sense of affinity within them for him because what he has said to them is mostly elements that they've interpreted themselves. So they will be even more attached to what it is he's doing and saying because so much of it is actually just their interpretation. This sort of obscurantist way that he writes, like as you say,

lends itself perfectly to that rep, to that sort of interpret. So when you struggle through hundreds and hundreds of pages of obscurantist nonsense, he's really not saying anything of value mostly, but it sounds, it's hard to slog through. And so you feel as a reader that you've done something interesting and you feel like he must be profound because partially you don't fully understand what he's saying and that the obscurantism is always a cover for a lack of substantive thought, but also that you read into it whatever you want and then it seems profound. And so he can sort of act as a Roershock test for whatever it is that you want to say or that you want to believe or whatever it may be. One great article that I recommend to everyone who doesn't want to spend the time and energy to actually read through what is like a 600 page book, The Twelve Rules of Life. There's an article called The Intellectual We Deserve by Nathan Robinson. And he does a whole article, but he lays out chunks of writing. Just select it at random from Peterson's book, and I really encourage people to go check out that article

and read just little random snippets of what Peterson is saying, and look how obtuse he is, look how obscurantus he is, and when you really sit down and parse out what he's saying, he's saying almost nothing at all, or if he is saying something, he's saying something so common sense that is not even worth saying. But I do have a list of some things that appear in his book, just little one-liners that he writes that come off as profound to his readers, but if you really think about it more than a second, you realize

it's pretty fucking vacuous. So here are just some things. What shall I do to strengthen my spirit? Do not tell lies or do what you despise. What shall I do to ennoble my body? Use it only in the service of my soul. What shall I do with the most difficult of questions? Consider them the gateway to the path of life.

And other things he says is, there is no being without imperfection. To share. does not mean to give away something you value and get nothing back. That is instead what every child who refuses to share fears that it means. To share means properly to initiate the

process of trade. You can't make rules for the exceptional. And finally, the future is the place of all potential monsters. So this is just riddled throughout his book and they're really completely empty platitudes but do you have anything to say about

how he uses language or anything about how he's sort of opaque in the way he talks? Yeah, so I mean, I'm completely on board with the, like, the ambiguity and the opaque nature of what he's saying. But I think another element that warrants attention is his kind of cross-genre into the self-help field. And what I think is particularly worth paying attention to is the fact that most self-help kind of quote-unquote gurus, and even certainly most cults, Scientology in particular, will, particularly at the outset, provide people with actually effective strategies, right? And so what ends up happening is that these kind of narrowly

tailored particular portions of advice are useful. And so the degree of utility and the efficacy that that advice has in people's lives encourages them to be more attached to the advice. giveer and the problem is that once you go beyond cleaning your room there's very little left right and because Pinker is very much encouraged people not to look at the macro world in which they exist he's simply given them a bunch of vaguely useful advice that is incredibly narrow once you get beyond that he doesn't provide any kind of path but because his narrowly useful advice has been packaged up with a whole bunch of problematic characterizations of people who are lowered down the social runway. What he does is he feeds into a degree of hostility between people who are

ill-equipped to do well in this world, right? So a lot of the young men who are particularly interested in Peterson have found a great deal of utility in kind of cleaning up their rooms and getting their shit together. And he seems to have brought certain young men back from the brink in terms of the alt-ride. And he professes ideological disagreement with the alt-ride. The problem is, once you've cleaned up your room and stood up straight, if you still live in a world where de-industrialization and neoliberalism have made it incredibly difficult for you to get ahead, the reduction of unions and the inability to make a living wage mean that quite often you'll still be incredibly dissatisfied, right? And if you've been fed a whole bunch of myths and narratives that

frame women as, quote, chaotic and outsiders as causing problems, and you've simultaneously been told that you are ill-equipped to activate for change. in the world. I have some significant concerns about the long-term trajectory of what he's doing. And I don't think that can necessarily be quantified or demonstrated, certainly not as yet. But I do think it poses really significant questions. And one thing in particular that I just wanted to read aloud from his book is something that, yeah, to me, really is a significant problem. So, have you cleaned up your life? If the answer is no, here's something to try. Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Don't waste time questioning how you know that

what you're doing is wrong. Inopportune questioning can confuse without enlightening. Your entire being can tell you something that you can neither explain nor articulate. Every person is too complex to know themselves completely and we all contain wisdom that we cannot comprehend. And then a goes on and on, just to follow their gut instincts not to question themselves too much, not to question the world around them too much, and that then cleaned up their room, perhaps you will discover that your now less corrupted soul, much stronger than it might have otherwise been, is now able to bear those remaining necessary, minimal, inescapable tragedies. The implication being that life is tragic, but those tragedies are necessary, like don't question

them, don't question injustice, don't question the existing hierarchies of the world around you, they are just an inescapable fact of life. So all you really need to do is clean up your bedroom, stand up straight, and anything beyond that, you just need to harden up. Some people, through no fault of their own, have tough lives and that, no matter how much personal responsibility they take, that that won't change. So, for example, you and I, we've had a lot of good fortune in our lives. We've been born to, you know, reasonably affluent, peaceful countries. You know, I have a job that I have worked hard at, but I've had lots of luck.

You have written a book and done a series of lectures that have become embraced around the world. Some people don't get lucky breaks. That's for sure. Some people just die and horribly. Yeah, life's rough. No doubt about it. And if good luck comes your way, then you should be grateful for it. And if happiness manages to manifest itself, you should be grateful for that too.

But how do you give a personal responsibility message while taking account that for some people, it's harder to take personal responsibility and the deck is stacked against them? Well, I think the deck is stacked against everyone to some degree because life is very difficult and we all die. But some people do have it harder than others. And all of us have it very hard at sometimes in our lives. It's like, well, what's the alternative? You take responsibility for that and try to struggle uphill because the alternative makes everything worse.

It's not like it's fair. I know perfectly well that people have brutal lives. I've been a psychotherapist for 20 years. I've seen things you can't imagine. Horror shows that you can't fathom. And people who have been hurt in so many ways, so many dimensions. It's like bitter. Should they be bitter?

Should they be resentful? Should they become violent, these things don't help. They have to struggle uphill despite their excess burden. And it's responsibility, not guilt. It's not necessarily their fault. That's not the point. And I think that poses like enormous, enormous problems in terms of encouraging people just to accept their lot in life

in addition to looking skeptically and suspiciously at anyone who is activating for change. of a two-fold problem there in terms of depoliticizing people. Yeah, absolutely. And before we move on to Harris, I just wanted to make one last point because Peterson talks about it a lot himself, and he kind of is known for having a almost entirely male audience. And you touched on it a little bit throughout the book. He constantly does this masculine feminine thing where he will say that the masculine is synonymous with order and that the feminine is synonymous with chaos. And he'll have a bunch of really weird things

about women, but that once you press him on it, he'll back up into his obscurantism and sort of say, well, we need both order and chaos and blah, blah, blah. But one way to understand the social impact that a thinker is having is to look at what his audience says. Now, if on every Rev Left episode that I posted on Facebook or Twitter, I had just horrible, horrific comments from the people that support and listen to the show, I would deeply have to rethink what I'm doing. Why am I drawing in a crowd of people that are so toxic?

And Sam Harris has explicitly talked about his confusion at having alt-right pepe people follow him when he's like, I'm against Trump. Why are all these people, you know, following me? This is so weird. Well, of course they are because, and we'll get into it later, why Harris draws those sorts of attentions. But so when you look at a Peterson video, and he even talks about how YouTube comments on his lectures are actually better than the general YouTube comment standard across YouTube. So he actually uses it as a bragging point, but there was a video where he was talking about feminism and about hitting women, and Peterson himself never endorses hitting women in the video, but the following were some of the most highly upvoted comments in the comment section. So these are what his fans were saying in response to this video. And this also speaks to this weird reactionary tendency where the only sort of feminism that reactionary men pay attention to is, can I hit women?

In what circumstances is it okay for me to punch a woman? And this happens all over the sort of MRA and anti-feminist right. But here are some of the comments from that video. Somebody said, My great-grandmother once told me never hit a woman, but you can sure as hell hit her back. That was upvoted 660 times. Somebody else said,

shouldn't hit anyone, but if someone attacks you, you can defend yourself, even if it is a woman, 745 likes. I would never hit a lady. An aggressive bitch is another question. 576 likes.

And then, he says, Peterson didn't say that he would never hit a woman. He only implied that every woman he had ever hit is dead. And then the last one said, I believe women deserve rights and lefts. That was upvoted 550 times. So this sort of rabid hatred of women, you know, this this anti-feminist hatred of women comes up again and again, and it's most pronounced in Peterson's fan base, more so than is pronounced, I would say, in Harris's or Pinkers. Yeah, absolutely. And I think at least one of minor differences between someone like a Peterson as opposed to Pinker and Harris. And, you know, as someone on the quote unquote far left, this is a minor difference. But I think he quite

like quite aptly fits into the conservative end of the spectrum in terms of liberal ideologies. So your Pinker and your Harris are kind of more on the liberal end of liberal ideologies and Peterson's on the more conservative side. So he very much reiterates conservative social hierarchies in ways that perhaps Harris and Pinker don't do, at least not consciously. Here's a question. Can men and women work together in the workplace? Yes, I do it. How do you know? Because I work with a lot of women. Well, it's been happening for what, 40 years? And things are deteriorating very rapidly at the moment in terms of the relationships between men and women.

Is there sexual harassment in the workplace? Yes. Should it stop? That would be good. Will it? Well, not at the moment. It won't because we don't know what the rules are. Do you think men and women can work in the workplace together?

I don't know. Without sexual harassment? We'll see. How many years will it take for men and women working in the workplace together? More than 40. We don't know what the rules are. Like, here's a rule. How about no makeup in the workplace?

Why would that be a rule? Why should you wear makeup in the workplace? Isn't that sexually provocative? No. It's not? No. What is it then? What's the purpose of makeup?

Some people would like to just put on makeup. Why? I don't know why. Why do you make your lips red? Because they turn red during sexual arousal. That's why. Why do you put rouge on your cheeks? Same reason.

I mean, look. How about high heels? What are they for? What about them? They're there to exaggerate sexual attractiveness. That's what high heels do. Now, I'm not saying that people shouldn't use sexual displays in the workplace. I'm not saying that.

But I am saying that that is what they're doing, and that is what they're doing. Do you feel like a serious woman who does not want sexual harassment in the workplace, do you feel like if she wears makeup in the workplace that she is somewhat being critical? Yeah. Okay. I do think that. But I think the real tragedy, and I'm probably going to get a little personal on this one, but the real tragedy of alienating and demonizing feminism in that way is one that I think the kind of

manosphere, MRA field of thinking hasn't dealt with effectively. And I say this as I was growing up, my mom was. both physically and emotionally abusive. And my dad, being the gentlest person on earth, would never in any way physically react to her. But I had to repeatedly engage the police and the judicial system in response to her behavior. And it would have been really, really easy

to lapse into Manosphere-type thinking about it, right? But I think if we look at the ideas that paralyze men and women in the existing world, like the problems associated with patriarchy and all of the inadequate understandings that we were met with in the judicial system, things like the police not taking us seriously because the offender was female, Now, like, so many of those problems are the type of problems that feminism seeks to solve, right? Like, feminism can be a liberatory force. And, like, feminism is a far better solution than men's rights advocacy, like, liberating all of us from socially restrictive roles and narratives. And I just think there's a real tragedy there in that if we alienate the type of ideology that,

would destroy those mistaken gender roles and hierarchies. We're kind of doomed to continue doing what we're doing, right? So siloing ourselves off into these little hug boxes of either men's rights advocacy or, you know, the very rare type of feminism that is misandry, and I really don't think that exists to any great degree. But like either way, the point being that feminism seeks to liberate all of us from gendered roles. and I think the real tragedy is not engaging it to do so. I think that a huge amount of what is doing

is reiterating the status quo, particularly in terms of gender hierarchy. Right, yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I just got to say thank you for sharing that, and I think what you said is 100% correct and a really important point for everybody to grasp, and there is sort of a tragedy to it

that there are those dynamics set up in popular culture and discussions around feminism that actually keep men in positions that feminism would otherwise help them get out of. But before we move on to Harris, are there any last words you want to say about Peterson? Are you ready to move on? I guess, yeah, the only other thing that I wanted to reiterate there was just the idea of what you alluded to earlier was the inability of people like Pinker, Harris, and Peterson to understand or be accountable for the social and political trajectories of their reasoning.

So they tend to kind of atomise what they're saying into these arbitrary little niches. And then they're completely bewildered by the far-right, alt-right contingent of their audiences. And so what they'll do time to time is throw out a fig leaf that allegedly puts to rest the idea that they are, you know, an alt-right feeding pipeline. And Pink has a tendency to do this particularly on Twitter. Every now and then, he'll share an article that in some way is supposed to be singing the praises of the Jewish community. And it is just such a blatant, tokenistic attempt to diffuse criticism that, yeah, I just find it kind of hilarious. How unable they are to grapple with, like, the macro trajectories of their ideas. Definitely.

All right, well, let's go ahead and move on to Sam Harris. now. We can be a little quicker with Harris because I think most people and certainly most listeners are hyper aware of Harris in a way that they might not totally be familiar with Peterson since he's relatively a newer person on the scene and pinker because he's more shrouded in academia than Harris is. But who is Sam Harris and what are the sort of primary ideas and concepts that he pushes? So I imagine obviously given he's much larger media profile and certainly the kind of hullabaloo that's occurred between himself. and Ezra Klein over the past couple of weeks. I think everyone is possibly at saturation point

in terms of Sam Harris. But he's technically a neuroscientist. He received his PhD from UC, I think, Santa Barbara in neuroscience. There are a whole lot of questions associated with the way in which he got his PhD. Like it's been said that his graduate students did an enormous amount of the actual scientific work underneath the PhD, but putting that all aside, he's technically a neuroscientist, but he spent most of his public career as essentially like a pundit or a polemicist. He came up in the new atheist phase that yourself and myself and many others were possibly a bit too amenable to about 10 years ago. When he first wrote letter to a Christian nation and following that he wrote End of Faith,

both of which were addressing the problems associated with religion in the world. But subsequent to that, he's spent an enormous amount of time in public media and certainly in his own podcast, criticizing Islam and feeding into Western chauvinous narratives about Islam and Muslims. We'd all remember, of course, the motherload of books, bad ideas incident on Bill Maher. But basically, what he's come to straddle is both the anti-Islam line, but also the science and neuroscience reinforcement of hierarchies in much the way that Pinker does, in addition to basically alighting the gap between science and moral values. So he put out a book

a couple of years ago, called the moral landscape, which apparently is solved one of the major problems in philosophy by suggesting that the divide between facts and values, often known as the is-aught gap, or simply the gap to philosophy notes, he's insisted that that's just philosophical fiction, right, and that science can solve moral problems. and that there is no real boundary between facts and values. The implication being that science itself can determine moral values and what is good for society. Now, having read the moral landscape

and listened to him pontificate extensively on this particular idea, I don't think in any way he's demonstrated how that's possible. And I think much like Pinkard, he's operating from a position of just complete failure to recognize the fact that he operates from a position of ideology. Like we all do. We all have a series of values that are kind of inculcated within us for the entirety of our lives. And he is seemingly unable or unwilling to step outside of his own vantage point. And I think, again, by positioning himself as this rational logic map,

people will tend to take what he says on authority without, necessarily questioning what's going on underneath. And much like Peterson, he's also developed a really active and emotionally attached set of followers who will use the same kind of, you took it out of context, you don't understand what he's saying type response to defend him against hell or high water, which I think, and maybe this is a little too hopeful on my part, but I get the feeling that that Rational Man persona is at least starting to crack because it seemed like Ezra Klein actually demonstrated like was Rational Man in a way that Sam Harris just completely wasn't in that particular engagement.

And I would encourage people to go listen to the latest Sam Harris podcast where he has Ezra Klein on a liberal commentator to talk about Charles. Murray and IQ, et cetera. I mean, one thing that that stands out about Sam Harris is Peterson is almost, he's more explicitly conservative, as you said, and Pinker, he actually has a libertarian bent to his politics, which becomes pretty clear once you do some investigating, but Harris loves to constantly maintain that not only is he a liberal, but that he has so many progressive values.

He'll always talk about this. He'll always be surprised that he has right-wing followers, and he's always dunking on Trump. And so he thinks that that gives him those liberal bona fides. And even when that discussion with Ezra Klein, he was saying, you know, I have way more in common with you than I do Murray. Like, I guarantee our politics overlap almost 100% between me and you, talking to Ezra Klein. But for as much as he claims he is a liberal, almost all the time that he talks about his actual political beliefs, he is either center-right or, like, dramatically conservative. For instance, and this was in the context. This was in the, soon after he said this on his podcast, he, he had that expression

where he talked about just being totally befuddled by the fact that he had so many Pepe and Trump supporters following him and listening to his podcast. But a couple episodes before that, he was talking about identity politics. And I'm going to read the full quote so there's no way that anybody can say I took him out of context. This is what Sam Harris said on his podcast word for word. He says, I mean it starts with in 2017 all identity politics. is detestable. And of course, I'm thinking about the West and I'm thinking primarily about America. I was commenting on Charlottesville. And I believe this, you know. I think Black Lives Matter is a dangerous and divisive and retrograde movement. And it's a dishonest movement. I mean, that's not to say

that everyone associated with it is dishonest, but I find very little to recommend in what I've seen from Black Lives Matter. I think it is the wrong move for African Americans to be organizing around the variable of race right now. It's obviously the wrong move. It's obviously destructive to civil society." End quote. So that is the liberal progressive Sam Harris opining on what he thinks African Americans should organize around. And I think that's just a profoundly revealing sort of quotation coming straight from his mouth that shows his really conservative instincts and his complete blindedness by his own whiteness. And he'll give Charles Murray a platform to come on and opine about racial differences in IQ and he'll go to the he'll die on the hill defending

him and actually have liberals come on and challenge him about that but he will not have somebody from Black Lives Matter come on and talk about what they want in this society and he does not he's not able to think about what it's like to be black in this society and so I think that that is just one of the most repellent aspects of Sam Harris is he dresses himself up as some liberal progressive, but almost everything he says counter, you know, counteracts that all the time. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think certainly what you were saying just at the beginning there is really gets at this idea that I want to reiterate, which is this kind of performativity of it all. And I think for a really, really easy example of that, just the

kind of nonchalant advancing of your quote unquote progressive values as being these discrete like three word slogans or just isolated ideas that you vaguely support as being sufficient to be quote unquote progressive we can look no further than someone like dave reuben right like he's constantly insisting that he is not revengist and not conservative in his political ideology because he's a gay man, he's a gay married man, so he couldn't be conservative. And I think that really illustrates incredibly two-dimensional version of, quote-unquote, identity politics is the version that they've operationalized, right? And so when I was talking earlier about the framing of all their opponents in this two-dimensional

fashion, I don't know whether that's intentional because it seems to me from the position they operate, They've operationalized that two-dimensional concept, both in terms of others and in terms of themselves. All they're addressing is a couple of just singular positions that they happen to hold. And they think that that alone is politics, right? These isolated statements are your politics. And I think as well, that kind of inability to grapple with the actual breadth of what politics is, what the social context is in which politics operates, like what it means to hold certain views

and the outcomes within the world around you are things that they just refuse adamantly to consider. So they've narrowed down politics as though it exists in a petri dish. And I think that particular element is one of the most alarming factors because there's nothing that operates in the world in a vacuum. And if you're not listening carefully or paying really close attention,

it's easy to get swept up in Harris and Pinker's, like, atomized versions of what politics is. So I think that also feeds into why it is that they seem so shocked when, as you said, they have all these Pepe's applauding what they're doing. I think it demonstrates their own inability to attend to,

yeah, social context. And the thing I found most jawdropping in the Ezra Klein interview with Harris is the fact that Ezra like kind of put a lie to this whole framing about liberal censorship was really instructive because at least for me, I'd been developing that idea of the framework of what they're doing. And hearing Ezra actually point that out and say that, But the issue here isn't some version of people trying to censor anyone. It's people saying history and context, it matters. And it influences the way that people evaluate what you're saying and what you're doing. And when you attempt to just straw man your opponents as being censors,

that's not actually getting it the issue that they had. Ezra in particular said, and I'm quoting now, I've not criticised you for having the conversation, the conversation being the one with Murray about race and IQ. I've criticised you for having the conversation and not dealing with or thinking through the context and the weight of American history on it, at which point Samin to Jek saying that the weight of American history is completely irrelevant.

I think that in and of itself is, it just crystallizes the essential problem with someone like a Sam Harris because he's both positing science as kind of outside the world in which it exists and operates, right? Like the idea that the weight of American history, and I want to be really cautious here because I think both history and present is what needs to be attended to. like the injustices that are visited upon African Americans are not in the past, right? Absolutely and brutally.

But they're also in the present. Right. And I think to attempt to isolate these abstract conversations as though science is something that exists outside of the past and the present, right, is absolutely delusional. The thing that I take biggest issue with is when you, deny that something has values or exists in a particular social and ideological context, you are actively blinding yourself to the vulnerabilities that that system has. And so despite Harris's protestations that he is not a racist, he's fundamentally missing the point in that science operates in a racist world.

The people who have power in this particular world have power, quite frequently at the expense of African Americans and other minorities and what they are doing within science is quite often reiterating, reinforcing and perpetuating those particular power disparities. And so I think for anyone who is to be taken seriously as a public intellectual to be making the claim that the weight of American history is completely irrelevant, that that person should not be taken seriously subsequent to that. Like that's just so fundamentally mistaken and delusional that, yeah, I don't even know what to do with it from there. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Here's my criticism of you now. I don't think you realize that the identity politics software is operating in you all of the time. And I think it's strong. So when you look at literature on the conversation about race in America, you often see the discussion broken into racist. and anti-racists. That's something that you'll read often in this debate. I think there's something else, particularly lately, which you might call anti-anti-racism,

which is folks who are fundamentally more concerned, or fundamentally primarily concerned, with the overreach of what you would call the anti-racists. And actually, that's where I think you are. And one of the things that I hear in you is that whenever something gets near, the question of political correctness, the canary in the coal mine for the way you yourself have been treated,

you get very, very, very strident. They're in bad faith. They're not being able to speak rationally. They're not being able to have a conversation that is actually going forward on a sound evidentiary basis. And the thing that I don't think that you're self-reflective enough about. And I apologize. I know that I statements are better than you statements, but I do want to push this idea for you to think about it,

is that there are things that are threats to you. There are things that are threats to your tribe, to your future, to your career. And those threats are very salient. So you see what happened to Charles Murray, the kind of criticism he gets. And that sets off every alarm bell in your head. And you bring him on the show and you're like,

we're going to fix this. I'm going to show that they can't do this to you. And you look around and you say, Ezra, you think we shouldn't take away all efforts to redress racial and equality? but that's a bias. You're just, you know, you're just being led around by your political opinions where I am standing outside the debate acting rationally.

And to me, that's actually not what's happening at all. I think that you're not here. I think you're missing a lot because you are very radically increasing the salience of things that threaten your identity, your tribe, which is not the craziest thing to do in the world. It's not a terrible thing to do. We all do it. Without admitting or maybe even without realizing that's what,

you're doing. I think that there is a lot of discussion like this in the public sphere just generally at the moment. There are a lot of white commentators of which I am also one who look at what's happening on some campuses or look at what happens on Twitter mobs or whatever and they see a threat to them and the concern about political correctness goes way, way, way, way up. And then the ability to hear what the folks who are making the arguments actually say dissolves. The ability to hear what the so-called social justice warriors are actually worried about dissolves. And I think that's a really big blind spot here. I think it's making it hard for you to see when people have good faith disagreement with you. And I also think

it's making it harder for you to see how to wait some of the different concerns that are operating in this conversation. You're so concerned about Murray and what has happened to him. When, again, he's an extremely successful scholar in Washington. That's a point of confusion. When that you're not, I mean, in your whole show, Sam, you've had 120 some episodes. And, and And if I, and I could have miscounted this. I totally take that as a possibility here. It's amazing you would think this is relevant, but yes, give me the numbers. I think you've had two African Americans as guests.

I think you need to explore the experience of race in America more and not just see that as identity politics, see that as information that is important to talking about some of the things you want to talk about, but also to hearing from some of the people who you've now written out of the conversation to hear. This is the kind of thing that I would be tempted. to score as bad faith in someone else. But actually, I think this is a point of confusion, but it is nonetheless confusion here. So your accusation

that I'm reasoning on the basis of my tribe here is just false. Now, we're well over time, so I'm going to wrap it up with a sort of final question combining some of the last questions I had on the outline. What underlying social ills do these people's popularity reflect and how, if at all, can leftists sort of make inroads to these audiences and try to appeal to them and bring them over to our side?

I've got a couple of recommendations. The first one is one that will apply to a pretty narrow set of people. But wherever possible, anyone with a platform, I think repeatedly needs to engage both with what they're doing and with what they're saying in the least emotive or least moralizing terms possible. Because I think if you look at all three, the times where they have been most effectively stumped publicly is where people have addressed what they're doing on their own terms by looking at the actual facts and critiquing those, in addition to critiquing the underlying concepts. So if anyone wants demonstration of this, I'd say the three best examples are the Sam Harris-Ezra Klein interview, where Ezra addressed Sam both on his own terms, but then also with the underlying concept.

problems. And additionally, Stephen Pinker was interviewed by Medi Hassan on Up Front, which is an Al Jazeera program, but you can have a look on YouTube. And again, Medi questioned both the underlying concepts that Pinker operationalizes in his book. In addition to just the facts, and on both of those fronts, Pinker had nothing to say. All he could respond with repeatedly was, no, that's just flat wrong. And he really was dumped. And the same goes for a particular interview that Peterson did with a gentleman at the LSE, the London School of Economics.

And in that particular context, he was asked about climate change. And his only response was to question the interviewer as to whether or not the interviewer drove there, at which point the interviewer said, no, I walked. And I think that's so beautifully, beautifully illustrates, like the emptiness of this individualizing of what is ultimately. a collective action problem, right? Like, once you get past the individual,

these three particular thinkers have nothing to say and they've no way to actually respond. And so I think, yeah, holding them to account on both their own terms with facts, but also with the underlying conceptual model from which they're operating, that's number one. But secondly, I think because all three have weaponized a really two-dimensional version

of quote-unquote, the activist. I think it's really important wherever possible for people on the left not to play to that particular stereotype, right? I recognize that certain people in certain environments are sufficiently vulnerable that responding emotionally is the way that they respond, right? And this is no criticism of that. But for anyone who has the opportunity to just speak plainly and clearly to what these guys are doing and demonstrating that actually the left is about solidarity and the left is very much about an ethic of robust debate. I think that's critically important.

And then finally, I also think that in terms of appealing to their audiences, demonstrating that space for disagreement and kind of, you know, in no uncertain terms, like not playing to the whole vampire castle stereotype. Like that bolsters the narrative of these guys. So I think wherever possible the left needs to frame their vision in material terms and to use the most expansive and inclusive rhetoric possible. Like that sectarian inward-facing left jargon can't persuade people who are not already amenable to what we're about.

I think certainly someone like Bernie Sanders, and, you know, I recognize there are left critiques of him, but just putting that aside for a moment, the fact that he had such significant overlap with, you know, some portion of Trump voters speaks to the fact that he spoke to people where they're at, right? Like, he didn't feel the need to use alienating jargon. He spoke to them about shit that matters to them. And I think the more we can do that and be as, non-sectarian as possible, I think the greater chance we have of appealing to the broadest coalition possible. And just as I wrap up here, I think I wrote to you really early on when you first started, or at least when I first started listening to Rev Left, I found

it really impressive and I was really struck by the degree to which you, Brett, did that, right? Like just that element of solidarity and like non-sectarianism, I think is one that's really important. And I think wherever we can advance that, the greater the chances that we have of appealing to these people and kind of building the broadest coalition possible. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for those kind words. I really appreciate that. And thank you so much for coming on.

You had profound insights. And I think the strategies you outlined at the end are amazing and people should take them seriously. and we can't ignore, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of people. We have to have a broad-based appeal that speaks to people where they are, as you say. So thank you for coming on before we let you go. Can you let listeners know where they can find you online and maybe toss out a recommendation or two for anyone who wants to learn more about what we've discussed today? Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm online on Twitter at Amy, A-I-M-E-T-E-T-R-E-S-E-E-E-S-E. And as of just recently, I'm going to be, I don't know if anyone of your listeners are familiar with the podcast Dead Pundit Society. So I'm going to be co-hosting that with Adam Proctor going forward. Wow, awesome. So you'll be able to hear a bit more. Yeah, so you'll be able to hear a bit more of my grading Australian accent over there in picture. And then in terms of recommendations, I think I'll give Brett a couple of links that he can put in the show notes. But for anyone who's especially dedicated, what I found incredibly insightful was a book by Robert

Samuels. It was just released last year, and it was psychoanalyzing the new brain sciences. I think that book in particular does an amazing job at looking at what these particular neuroscientists are doing and the kind of toxic ideas that get smuggled in under the guise of non-ideological rationalism. So anyone who wants to do to a deep dive, I'd highly recommend it. And it's not super long. It's not enlightenment now.

It's only about 150 pages. So, yeah, well worth digging into. We will link to all of that in the show notes. We'll link to your podcast and we'll link to your Twitter when we post it on Twitter. Thanks again, Amy, for coming on. Let's keep in touch and maybe with your podcast and mine, we can collaborate again in the future.

Yeah, I love that so much. And thanks again, Brett. It's been brilliant working with you. I was my God be a food set see me like This cat a puppy rights revolution I know why Don't get the marks we want to change by spin the pump call out the flakes Pay off the jockeys and call the cops

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Bhop Bills are trying to pop your wrecking Revolution Thank you.