The Munk Debates Podcast - Spring 2021 Munk Dialogue with Jonathan Haidt: Episode 1

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

COVID-19 has fast-forwarded us into a confusing and uncertain future. Nowhere are the accelerating forces of the pandemic more evident than in our democracy. We are being challenged by rising authoritarian regimes, a reckoning on race, and intense debates on cancel culture, identity politics and free speech. The Spring 2021 Munk Dialogues host some of the world's brightest thinkers for in-depth, one hour conversions on the fate and future of democracy in a world remade by COVID-19. This episode features Jonathan Haidt in conversation with Munk Debates Chair, Rudyard Griffiths. Jonathan Haidt is a leading social psychologist, professor at the New York University Stern School of Business and author of a series of internationally bestselling books on psychology and politics including The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. For information on the Munk Dialogues visit www.munkdebates.com/dialogues. The Munk Dialogues are a project of the Munk Debates and the Peter and Melanie Munk Foundation. They are sponsored by Gluskin Sheff, Onex, Bond Brand Loyalty and Torys, LLP. If you like what the Munk Dialogues are all about consider becoming a Supporting Member of the Munk Debates. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents). To explore you Munk Membership options visit www.munkdebates.com/membership. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Monk podcast listeners. Rudyard Griffith here, your host and moderator. The following is an audio version of Jonathan Heights's recent Monk Dialogue. The Monk Dialogs are in-depth interviews with the world's sharpest thinkers on the big issues transforming society. To access dozens of Monk Dialog videos streaming commercial free on our website, consider becoming a monk member. Monk membership is free at monkdebates.com forward slash membership. You can also check out the show-neutral notes for this program on your podcast app for more information. I hope you enjoy the program. Hi, I'm Rudyard Griffith, the host and moderator of the month Dialogues. Welcome to our spring 2021 series. Over this month and into May and June, we're going to hold a series of talks with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers on the fate and future of our democracy. This we know. Coming out of this pandemic, our democratic institutions and values will be essential to our recovery, everything from our economy, to our culture, to our relationships with one

another. We are going to rely on our democracy in ways maybe that we have never had before. The purpose of the Spring Dialogues is to provide you with a series of hopefully new and original insights into the state of our democracy, both its problems and challenges, but also solutions. What are the different ideas that we can think about now to make our democracy stronger, more vibrant, more equitable. We'll get into all of that over the coming weeks. Joining us for the first monk dialogue in our 2021 series is Jonathan Haidt. He's a professor of ethical leadership at the NYU Stern School of Business. He's one of the world's leading social psychologists and thinkers. He's the co-founder of the Heterodox Academy and the Open Minds Platform. And he's the international

best-selling author of a series of books, including the coddling of the American mind and the righteous mind, why good people are divided by politics and religion. Jonathan Haidt, welcome to the monk dialogues. Thank you, Richard. Pleasure to be here. Really looking forward to today's conversation so much for us to unpack together over the next hour. And I want to begin with just a simple question that perplexes me and I know you've thought long and hard about, which is, If we think where we are today versus a generation ago, we're a much more prosperous society, we're a society that's connecting and communicating

with each other in ways that 20 years ago, we never would have imagined. And arguably, we're a society that's more conscious about issues of gender, race, discrimination. Yet, John, you know, it's clear that we hate and fear each other more now than we did a generation ago. Why is that? So yes, that's the question I think about day and night.

That's the question, especially now that Donald Trump is out of the picture, now we can sort of think about that rather than just him, at least in the United States. And the answer, I think, is really interesting. This is an amazing time to be a social scientist because it's a time of great change. I would say, first, we have to lay down that overall things are getting better really, really fast.

if you care about racism, sexism, homophobia, the change over the last 50 years, the progress has been astonishing and we should all be celebrating. So why is it that a lot of people don't perceive that? A lot of people perceive things are getting worse. And I think there are many, many reasons, many threads come together,

but by far the largest thing we really should focus on when we discuss almost anything is the rapid change in the media ecosystem and the informational ecosystem. And the key thing to keep your eye on is that the late 20th century was an anomaly because we had broadcasting. Before then, there were lots of newspapers. They were all partisan and full of lies. Mid to late 20th century, we have very professional journalism. We have editors who, you know, information has to come through and then it goes out to people and everybody gets the same information. But that was a temporary thing from the 1940s until the 1990s.

It probably will never come back in our lifetime. So even though things keep getting better and better, we are now all immersed in microcasting, narrow casting, and what comes to us doesn't come through editors, not as much anymore. So especially if you're on social media, you learn about all sorts of things, not you never know what the average is. All you hear about is the outrage is. And now, since everyone has a video camera in their pocket since around 2010, now we see the outrageous more, even though the outrages are getting less and less. Things are getting much better, but because of the media ecosystem and social media, we are drowning in outrageous anecdotes. And therefore, people think the other side is more and more evil and people think things are getting worse and they're just wrong. Fascinating stuff. Let's, John, move through some quotes of yours.

I find this is a helpful way for me to kind of understand your key thinking and ideas. And I hope our audience feels the same way. So what I've done, John, has gone through some of your recent work and writings and come out here with a couple of quotes that I think can allow us to dig into your key thoughts and ideas. The first comes from you saying human beings are unsuited for life in large, diverse, secular democracies, unless you get certain settings finally adjusted to make possible the development of stable political life. So that's a really interesting kind of encapsulation of a political theory. Jonathan Heights political theory. Let's have that. Expand on that quote for us.

Unpack it. So that was from a talk I developed. So I started noticing things are going haywire in 2015. It was happening on university campuses and then right-wing populism and then sort of left-wing wokeism. And so by 2017, I really had the sense that things are going haywire everywhere. It's as though God had reached in and changed one of the fundamental constants of the universe, like double the gravitational constant or something like that. Because there are physicists have observed that our universe has about 24 constants,

and some of them, if they were just a little bit different, there would be no life in the universe. Matter would never have congealed. So they talk about a fine-tuned universe. And in the same way, a diverse liberal democracy has never existed before until fairly recent. attempts at democracy have generally been very unstable and certainly a large diverse secular one, not united by God. That's the sort of thing that shouldn't exist. Now, it has existed so we can do it, but the analogy is we can only do it if we get certain settings right. We don't have a big margin of error.

And that's why, again, I think that the massive, very rapid change in the nature of information flow has pushed those parameters way beyond what they can be to have a stable democracy. So unless we, my prediction would be that unless we can get a handle on this, unless we can do something to get more common information and have better ways of finding truth and working together, I would think that the trend looks pretty bad for liberal democracy and is unfortunately looking better for authoritarian democracies. So, John, let's talk about that a little bit more

because there's an idea out there that, liberal democracy is in a sense an aberration in human history, that it is the exception and not the rule, and that the natural state of human beings are proclivities, how we're wired in terms of our evolutionary biology could, maybe is very undemocratic. Do you subscribe to that view? Oh, yes, absolutely. That doesn't mean that we can't do it because, again, obviously we have. and there are many democracies now in the world. But I think that's the way to think about it, is what are human predispositions?

And those predispositions come to us from our evolutionary nature. We're primates, different from others in many ways, but we're tribal, hierarchical, prone to violence, but also very good at making friends and peacemaking, very good at trade and exchange. So our human nature comes to us by evolution, but it's not a single hardwired thing.

It's a flexible set of responses, including enormous cultural learning. So the framers of the U.S. Constitution, they studied a lot of history and they were a very good psychologists. They knew about our tendency to faction, our tendency to divide and focus on hating and hitting the others as opposed to the common good. So they set up all kinds of things to check passions. One of the things that figured into their theorizing was that the country is so vast. from Georgia through Maine or Massachusetts colony, whatever it was called back then. That, you know, if a spark starts, if somebody starts an outrage in Georgia, it's going to take weeks for the news to get up to Maine or Massachusetts.

And of course, you know, now it takes seconds. So even though things are getting better overall, much more tolerant about race, gender, LGBT, everything, anytime anything happens now it sparks outrage. And once we hate the other side, we cannot think clearly. You can't be angry and be learning at the same time. Let's talk just in that context about the pandemic and what we've all just experienced in the last 13 plus months. Is this a moment where our evolutionary hardwiring,

which we've just talked about, has kind of come to the fore that we've in the face of the pandemic reverted back into these us versus them polarities, binaries. Yeah. Is that what we're seeing coming out of this? Or are you hopeful that we're pushing back, that we're overcoming that impulse towards fear, towards withdrawing from the public square, literally, which we all have, in a sense, left the public square for a year.

What is the effect of that on our democracy and on our institutions? Yeah. So the first thing is never say hardwired, almost nothing interesting as hardwired. Okay. We have these predispositions and then they will be activated in part based on our culture, our experience, and then local context. Second, let's be really clear about what pandemics have done historically. They don't bring people together. They divide people because people are afraid of each other and there's not enough food. And so pandemics never build social capital. They usually destroy it. What's amazing about this pandemic is that is that capitalism is so far advanced and the supply chain is so flexible that the only real shortage we had in America was toilet paper and it wasn't a shortage just because we all feared a shortage. So we didn't actually get hungry. We didn't have to fight each other for products. Secondly, we did have amazing

communication abilities. So and so, um, so, um, so, Things got off to actually a very good start. And especially in the United States, many were asking, oh, is this going to be like a common enemy that brings us together? To which I would say, no, of course not, because a common enemy only works if it's a person or a group. It doesn't work if it's global warming or a virus.

It's a very social thing about fighting a war against our enemies. So given that, given that the predisposition is that a pandemic is not gonna bring us together, actually the share, the shared adversity globally did it first. And that was beautiful. We had all these scenes of, you know, people in lockdown in Italy, singing and connecting to each other,

and then people in China, wishing the people in Italy well. And, you know, it was really kind of beautiful in the early days. But given that diverse, secular, liberal democracy is not a very stable thing. And if you have, in our country, we had a demagogue in charge. He quickly turned it into us versus them. He quickly turned it into, you know, nationalism, America first, and then he turned it into left versus right. On April 15th, Donald Trump tweeted, liberate Virginia, liberate Michigan, meaning the lockdowns are oppression put on you by Democratic governors. Get rid of them. You know, good Americans don't wear masks.

So, you know, he polarized things. And to this day, we have an astonishing divide where by far the largest group of vaccine refusers is Republican men. So the pandemic has been fascinating coming during a fascinating time, and we've learned a lot, but it's all like real, there's no simple lesson. It's all like really mixed in and subtle. And John, how would you respond to those who say, look, you're putting forward a kind of an elite view here of how the public square and public dialogue should unfold? You as a prominent author, as a commentator, you know, you and your like should be the gatekeepers. You should be filtering back to the Hoy-Polloy, to us, the masses, what we should think and what we should think is important. There's no reason to go back to those days. Those days are, in a sense, an information, feudal system that we were bound up in.

We were the serfs. Those of you that went to Harvard, Yale, NYU, Princeton, the University of Toronto were setting the democratic dialogue, the conversation in ways that were completely disportional to your numbers, your actual influence, the extent to which you're representative of our democracy. So it's a fair critique in that America has had an elitist system, originally based on who your family was, who your father was, and then beginning in the 50s and 60s, optimized for SAT scores, meaning optimized for elite universities. And so that has given us bad elites. That's one of the contributors.

And there's a lot of great writing these days on the failures of the elites. So it is a fair point to raise. But I would say be careful what you wish for, or rather, you should have some alternative. That is, you might say, oh, you know, let's take them down. Let's not give these people, let's not give these people so much power and voice. But first of all, you have to look at what was a good. accomplish under that. And again, the incredible rights sprint from the 50s or 60s through the early 2000s, you know, the speed at which various groups have gotten full political rights and things

have improved is astonishing. And so if you want to knock the late 20th century elites, you have to at least acknowledge, boy, did the world move in the right direction on almost everything other than global warming, which is going to be, we are making a lot of progress on now, but on almost everything else about rights, that sort of left-leaning, you know, center-left hegemony did pretty well, I think. Now what we have is we've torn them down. People don't go to the New York Times or Washington Post as much anymore. And those newspapers have become more politicized, more clearly on the left in their news coverage. I don't find them as reliable as I used to. But the alternative is sort of informational anarchy, which is not freedom. So I want to be a bit of information.

read, there's an amazing book coming up from Jonathan Rauch in a few in a month or two called the Constitution of Knowledge about how knowledge comes to be. And there's an amazing quote. I always keep it handy in case somebody asked me, like the kind of question you just asked. Sure. I'll just read this part here. He says, the techno-utopians of the information revolution assumed that knowledge would spontaneously emerge from unmediated interactions across a sprawling peer-to-peer network with predictably disappointing results. So he's describing from like the 90s through about the Arab Spring, we thought, yes, let's tear down the elites and let people decide. Okay, that sounds great for many people, for techno optimists, but then here's the next

sentence. Without the places where professionals like experts and editors and peer reviewers organize conversations and compare propositions and assess competence and provide accountability everywhere from scientific journals to Wikipedia pages, there is no marketplace of ideas. There are only individuals running around making noise. And that, I think, is what has happened. The Tower of Babel was knocked over between 2009 and 2012, that period when social media changed.

And in the Tower of Babel story, God says, let us go down and confound their language so that they may not understand one another. And that's what happened between 2009 and 2012. 2012. So, you know, those who want to tear down the leaves, they got their way. We're running around, screaming, making noise. I don't think it's better. John, what do you do about it? Is there a way to build the tower again? Can we, can we, is this a question of reform? Is that possible? I mean, you are competing against these very large companies that seem to have incredible, not just power, within the media, but actual kind of raw political power to allow them to continue to operate largely as deregulated industries. That's right. So the optimistic view is that this is, with any

information revolution, we have social unrest. I'm not a historian, but as I understand it, when the printing press came in, there were two or three hundred years of wars in Europe as ideas spread challenging the Catholic Church and reformed reformed reformation. So a couple hundred years, they got sick of all the killing. And then ultimately, books are a good thing. We're very glad that we have printing presses. So I think it's likely to be that way with social media.

A hundred years from now, I think things will be a lot better. In general, historically, it's good to be more connected. But the problem is it's good to be more connected like by the telephone or by email or by Skype or FaceTime or Zoom. Those are good connections. What I'm focused on as a social psychologist is when we connect, not so that we can talk to each other, but so that we can say things that others are commenting on and they're liking and they're retweeting. That is the moral grandstanding.

That's the kind of communication, which is incredibly toxic because people aren't communicating. They're showing off and the more you are clever in your insults and the more you try to destroy people, the more likes you get. So that has to change. And the social media platforms, the big ones, because it's especially Facebook and Twitter are the main ones. YouTube, there are a few others that play a big role.

But so two points. One is you're right that in the United States, they have so much power that we're not likely to get major reform. That's why I'm really excited whenever Australia or the UK or the EU, because these platforms are global, they can do things over there that we can't do in America. Also, they have functional governments.

And you do in Canada, you have a functional government. Ours can only, we can only, We can only make policies for two years out of every eight or 10 when one party controls all the branches. And even then, if you only have 59% of the Senate, you can't really get big things done. So don't look to us for regulatory relief in the next few years. What I'm hoping is that the platforms, they know they know that they need to make changes. They are mostly very good people. There are a lot of social psychologists working at Facebook and they're trying to make things better.

They're not going to do anything that really impacts the business proposition, but they're trying to do things. My big suggestion with Tobias is stop focusing all of this effort on content moderation. You know, there's billions and billions of pieces. You're never going to be able to really change things by just doing content moderation. Rather, change the incentives so that jerks and people who make threats are, they lose followers. They become less prestigious. And that could be done by one, having some kind of identity authentication, like know-your-user-type thing. Not that Facebook needs to see my driver's license, but that an independent entity could verify that I'm a real person in a particular country and that I'm over 18, or 13 or whatever age it matters.

So there's one thing is they could actually try to verify they need to verify there who's using it. And that way, you know, trolls and Russians and North Koreans can't so easily mess with it with all of them. The second thing is give me two dials, two software dials. One is on aggression or toxicity or something. And so if you're always shouting and using obscenities and insulting people, and AI can easily pick that up, I want to filter you out. You know, on a one to five scale, I'm, you know, you have to, I'm not going to take a, let's see it, it's toxicity, I'm not going to take anyone who's a four or five.

I'm going to filter that out and they can't see me. I disappear for them, they disappear for me. And the other dial is integrated complexity, meaning you occasionally say on the one hand, this, but on the other, that, or you acknowledge that there's some exception. You know, just anybody who occasionally does that would score, you know, above a zero. And so I would, you know, I'm going to filter at anyone who's a zero or a one or whatever it is. So give me those two dials.

I can knock out, you know, 70% of the, or some percentage. But even if it's only 10% that I knock out, that puts a big pressure on people to not do those things. If they want to get prestige and followers now, they should sometimes show some nuance. So the platforms are brilliant at optimizing social motives and social engagement, and they could just as well do it for quality engagement. Great points. Another issue, John, that you've written a lot about, a book about it, as a matter of fact, is what you feel is a crisis of education happening within our institutions of higher learning that isn't just contained within those institutions is now in a sense consequential to our democracy. So to get into those ideas, let me read

another quote of yours to you. Here it is. Everything is about power. Every situation is to be analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is an induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down a road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence. Wow, John, a lot in there, a lot that I think many listening today, unfortunately, would agree with you on. What is the crisis of higher education right now? And talk to us more about the connection of that crisis to our larger democracy, to the tone and content of our public conversation.

Yes. So that quote is, that's from a talk I gave, but it's referring to a book that I wrote with my friend, Greg Lukianoff. We wrote a book called The Coddling of the American Mind. Because I think it's very important to keep your focus on institutions here. Don't talk about like, oh, you know, free speech in general.

You have to focus on what are the norms, what's happening in high schools, in universities, and corporations and courts. And then you can see, why things are really coming apart. Because each institution has a purpose, it has a telos or an end, a goal. And for universities, it's truth.

It's finding truth, it's light, you know, light knowledge. You look on the crests of our top universities, they always have those words on them, that's what we do. And we do an imperfect job of it, but that was the game we were all playing until 2014, 2015, when all of a sudden, a wave of students came in who are much more depressed,

much more anxious, and that has other causes, including social media and overprotection in childhoods. We get this wave of much more anxious and depressed students, and we get the spread out of certain departments, gender studies, race studies, culture studies, media studies, anthropology. So there have been a set of ideas in the university that are based on either a Marxist

or the views of Michel Foucault that see everything in terms of power. And so a university is a big, complicated place. And if there are some departments that have a kind of a Marxist or Foucaulian, Foucauldian, they say, mindset, okay, fine, that's what they do over there. But what they teach is everything is to be analyzed in terms of power, oppression, and privilege.

Now, a great education gives you multiple lenses to look at a complex world. That's what I got as an undergraduate at Yale in the 1980s. And fine, by all means, expose students to Marx and Foucault, let them, because power sometimes does matter. But what happened when you had this confluence of anxious, depressed kids coming in, and social media knocked down the walls of every institution so that ideas just move and circulate. And these ideas about how everything is oppression meet up with the Gen Z, kids born 1996 and later,

who are more anxious, and they're told, you know, welcome to Yale, like one of the most progressive places on the planet, devoted for decades and decades to fighting racism and sexism. Welcome to Yale. But you should see everything in terms of power and privilege. You should see every outcome discrepancy as being an example of racism or sexism. And we're giving you this one lens, one lens. And even in, you know, now in high schools, in woke high schools, even in math class, they have to use a racial lens to understand math.

So you take this one lens, you graft it onto their eyes, and now you send them out into the world. So we had this huge problem. It blew up on universities in 2014-2015, and that's what our book was about. The book comes out in 2018, and it wasn't so much in the corporate world then, because Gen Z just began to graduate in May of 2018. So our book comes out in September of 2018, and that's when a lot of, Gen Z, many of them, if they went to these elite schools,

they carry this woke ideology. And companies are hiring them like, okay, we're a team. We're going to make a product. No, everything's about racism, sexism, and privilege. And we have to fight that. And so employers are finally like, you know, we're all progressive here. We all hate racism and sexism. Why are we now paralyzed that everything is about racism and sexism?

And so in any industry that is consistently on the left where there's no viewpoint diversity so the creative industries and journalism museums non-profits you know the arts in any of those industries where there's not a lot of viewpoint diversity as soon as you get these woke ideas coming mostly from young people and especially well i'll just say especially from young women once they these ideas come in if they if the leadership that grants them credence and yes you're right we'll try to do better then they spread and they take off and so now as andrew Sullivan put it we all live on campus now these dynamics that really really just spread rapidly and led them just you know confusion babble in 2015 now are in the corporate world not all

industries but in the creative industries and it affects and I should just be clear we've been talking mostly about this sort of this intellectual problem on the left but the intellectual problem the right is a is a weird mirror image because we have the right wing populism we have the actual neo-nazies so i'm not blaming this all on the left because actually it's a polarization cycle the left is always pointing to the extreme you know the one percent of the right that's what actual like you know Ku Klux Klan rights and whatever it is and then the right is energized because they're always poking to the great point to the crazy of the woke left.

So we're caught in this ever-expanding polarization cycle, and it is now, yes, it is now affecting most of our institutions. And again, if it continues, we're doomed. Now again, I don't think it's going to continue because most people hate it. Most people are reasonable. They're what's called the exhausted majority. Even most people on the left hate wokeism, most African Americans, most young people. Most people hate wokeism, and most people hate neo-Nazis.

So I think we're going to get through this. I think we're going to get through this, but for now, the dynamics are messed up. John, why is it so powerful? Because, you know, ideas only kind of capture an entire generation, influence, as you say, broad swaths of media, corporate America, corporate Canada, because they've connected with something. They've spoken to something on the part of the people who are expousing them. So what is that? What is that mechanism in the case of intersectionality or whatever you want to call it? Why is it so potent?

Because you're thinking in a pre-2009 mindset. You're thinking in the old world. In the old world, ideas spread for many reasons. But an important one was that people like them or agreed with them. That used to be important. It's not very important now. In the new world, post-2012, ideas spread because you're better off, espousing them than not espousing them. It doesn't mean you believe them, but you're better

off pretending you believe them. Because the consequences to you for expressing any doubt is literally, I mean, you can really get fired. The main thing people get fired for these days, you know, when we hear the blowups, it's usually for questioning a diversity policy, not for saying a bad word, but just for questioning a diversity policy. You can get fired because that creates a dangerous or frightening attitude for some of the, or environment for some of the students. So, again, the things always keep in mind, always look at what is the average and how is the average changing, and then look at the extremes and the anecdotes. And as I forget who told me this is so brilliant, he said, you know, in the old days, if a company got, you know, 10 letters complaining about a product, they would think, wow, 10 people bothered to write. There must be, you know, a thousand people out there who are upset with the product.

We better do something. And that was pre-2009. But post-2012 in the new world, if a company sees a thousand angry tweets, they should say, wow, there must be at least 10 people who really hate us. So it just, you know, it's this warping dynamic. People will join a witch hunt and then sometimes they'll even apologize to the person if it's a friend of their. I'm sorry I had to say this. So it's not that the average is going crazy.

It's not that the average is becoming more illiberal. It's that what happened, you know, Twitter gave a loaded gun to three-year-olds. So imagine you got a bunch of three-year-olds on the left walking around with guns and a bunch of three-year-olds on the right walking around with guns. And the other, you know, 90% of us, we're not espousing ideas because we believe them. We're espousing ideas because we don't want to get shot. John, how would you respond to people who say that this incredible kind of upswell of a reckoning on race that we experienced during the pandemic and the final year of Trump's president? residency was, you know, a positive result of this, of this new focus on the part of younger people on power and power dynamics and relationships.

This galvanized not only African Americans to once again assert the primacy of their dignity and equality in American society, but it brought out onto America's streets tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of white Americans who became allies. And that this is an amazing social movement that bears fruit from this new kind of what you see is very kind of toxic theory about how society and power dynamics work. Yes, that's a very legitimate charge. And I think much of what happened was long overdue and needs to happen. And the two things I think are really good about it are one, I think white Americans really heard from black Americans about daily life and the indignities of daily life.

Just the other day, Jonathan Capehart, a black journalist who's on the news hour on PBS, was talking about the things he has to do differently, how he can't keep his money in a money clip. He has to use a wallet because that glint of metal might make someone think it's a gun. And especially hearing from from black professors, even black congressmen about the indignities they face. So I think that was great. You know, reading those, I really felt like, wow, I didn't sympathize with this enough. I didn't have a feeling of what it was like. And so that, I think, is wonderful. And the polling on what Americans think of Black Lives Matter, it was huge.

And it was like very positive in the first few months of that. that people realize that, wow, you know, you're right, things have to change. So that's all to the good. The problem is that the framework for change is this power and privilege thing. And it's a framework that says, if you question it, we're going to destroy you. And any movement that harms dissidents, any movement that suppresses dissent within its ranks, you can bet all your money that they will not understand the purpose. problem and they will not have an accurate understanding to provide a solution.

So what do they do? One other thing which is really good, the police in the United States killed too many people. We have lots of police shootings that should not have happened. But four studies have looked at whether the police differentially shoot African Americans. All we hear about is that is the raw numbers. But if you look at whether, if you just look at when police have engaged with someone, Are they more likely to kill that person if they're black or white? Four studies have looked at it and said no.

Now it's complicated. There's debate around one or two of the studies, but it clearly isn't a big effect because it's people can't prove that there is racism in the police shootings once you limit it. My point is you can either commit to solving the problem, which I would like to do. And the police are shooting too many people. And there are too many obstacles to African Americans getting into, you know, again, getting into good educational systems. So let's work on those, but it's like, you know,

this power privilege framework, it says, here is the tree that you're gonna bark up. This is the tree, structural racism, this is the tree where all answers are to be found and just bark up, you know, just keep barking. And sometimes they'll be right, sometimes it is there, but most of the time they're barking up the wrong tree. And so we can throw however much money we want at it,

We're not going to solve the problem and often we make it worse. There's a debate over whether the more vigorous to protest against police, the more the police pull back and therefore the murder rate goes up. I'm not an expert in that area, but it's looking like that, that phenomenon happens. So my point is, yes, we still have huge problems around race. Things are getting better in most ways, but people don't know it. And therefore, they want to do radical reforms that are more likely to harm than help.

Let's, before we go to some audience questions for you, John, because we're a lot that came in in advance of your appearance here in the monk dialogues. Let's talk a little bit about solutions, because I know you're somebody who's not thinking just about the problems we face, which are real and serious, as we've discussed for the last half hour or so. But how do we move beyond this in terms of our own individual attitudes? and maybe that's really where we should begin. And I want to take a quote from an academic who I think really inspired you when you were a student, I believe, at the University of Chicago, Richard Schuader, who writes, if someone asserts it, try denying it and see if that makes sense. If someone denies it, try asserting it and seeing if that makes sense.

What was Richard saying here? Yeah, so one of the most important phenomena here is called confirmation bias. And the way the mind works is we don't go out searching for information on both sides. If we're trying to buy a washing machine, we actually do. But if we care about something or if it's related to our group identity, we don't look on both sides.

We just try to confirm what we want to believe is true, confirmation bias. And so the best solution to it is other people who don't share your confirmation bias. That's what a university is supposed to do. That's what a jury is supposed to do. So we put people together so they disconfirm each other's biases. And what Schuader is saying, he's a brilliant anthropologist

and very provocative. In the 20th century, it was good for professors to be provocative. Now you can get in big trouble for that. But Schuader was great at questioning the received wisdom. He still is. And so the point is just, if you want to be successful in the university or as an intellectual,

if someone asserts something, especially if they assert it very strongly and with great conviction, try turning it around and try, you know, let me invest. to get the exact opposite of what he's saying. Is that true? And often it's just as true, or maybe it's a little less true,

but it clues you into something that refines what he's saying. So that's what we used to admire. But now that everything is so polarized, and now that many academics are on one of the teams, you know, they're on the blue team in America, it doesn't happen as much anymore. And if that doesn't happen,

then what we do at universities doesn't deserve, of this big public subsidy, in my opinion. We need, I do think we need to depoliticize. We need to recognize that our function is to do scholarship and research, not political activism, especially not for one of the political teams. So there's a lot we can do at universities to be more constructive and to regain the trust

of American society. Americans on both the left and the right have rapidly declining trust in universities. A lot of your early work including your first best-selling book, was about religion. And you've written about how, as a postgraduate student, a trip to India to study religion there, which was completely alien to you, both obviously culturally and religiously, really opened your mind to a kind of a different attitude towards difference. Talk to us a bit about that.

And what you think are some of the kind of the secular, the secular, the same. secular lessons of religion for democracy today? So, yeah, so I'm just the sort of person who should have become a new atheist back when Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins were writing those books around 2004, 2007. I'm Jewish, but Jewish atheist, you know, very into science when I was, since I was young. So I'm just the sort of person. And I thought that, you know, I read the Hebrew Bible in college for the first time. And, you know, there's like God commands genocide.

I mean, there's a lot of bad stuff in there, if you take it literally, which I did. And so I was pretty anti-religion. But by the time I reached my late 20s, early 30s, and I was studying morality, and I was reading about different cultures and trying to understand morality from different perspectives. And then I got a fellowship while I was working with Schwader to spend three months in Buba, Eshwar, India on the East Coast. And I was there to study their notions of purity and pollution. which you find in the Hebrew Bible, you find it in the Quran, the idea that we shouldn't approach God until we have in some way cleansed our bodies and our minds,

and then we're ready to approach the divine. All right, it sounds kind of superstitious and stuff that religion does. But what I found both in my trip and then in subsequent reading is that, and here I'll give a dictum, another dictum from Schwader. Every culture is an expert in some aspects of human flourishing, and blind to others. And, you know, I'm thrilled that I was born in a modern, secular, liberal democracy, and the United States in particular, I'm thrilled.

But we're experts in certain things and we're pretty blind to others. And even though Hindu India has a lot of problems, and I wouldn't say, well, that's the moral exemplar. It just, you know, as with the racial reckoning, you put yourself in other people's shoes, and suddenly you can see, well, you know, hierarchy isn't always bad. And religion and tradition and rituals serve a function. And the research bears that out.

Religious people are happier, religious rituals buying groups together. They trust more. So the point was when I came back from India, 1993, for the first time, I could sort of understand the religious right in the United States. Whereas before then, I just hated them, and I was closed to them, and I thought they were the enemy. And so that really blew my mind. It was like taking the red pill in the matrix.

That was my first big step out of the moral and political matrix that I had lived in my entire life. That set me up to do the work I later did on left versus right and the work that led to the righteous mind. Final quote from you before we go to questions, because I just think this is a nice piece of wisdom to leave us all with at this moment. You write, again, building what we just talked, the lesson from so many ancient traditions and from social psychology is that we need to be slower to judge and quicker to forgive. You can't be hating and learning at the same time. Yeah. Yeah.

So my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth and Ancient Wisdom. And I read all the wisdom literature I could find. I took out every psychological statement, grouped him into clusters, and then evaluated, are they true? Now, the ancients were not smarter than us, but the things that come down to us were filtered through, you know, 50 or 100 generations. of things that really resonated with people. So yeah, the filtered wisdom of the ancients is fantastic and is a guide to life forever. And they never say, you know what?

You need to condemn people more quickly. You need to be more judgmental. Don't let the bastards get away with it. Okay, no great wisdom tradition says that. Twitter says that, but no great wisdom tradition says that. Rather, they say, you know, why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye when you cannot see the plank in your own eye? They urge us to be more humble, more forgiving.

And so most of the world's religions emphasize virtues. They're virtue ethics systems. They're not utilitarian. They're virtue ethics. And what especially alarms me is that between 2009 and 2012, once all young people got on social media, all of the input channels to their brains are mostly filled up by stuff that was created in the last week or two.

And there's very little room for anything, even from the 20th century. I mean, they know very little about the 20th century. So, yes, I'm, you know, I think ancient wisdom is, you know, about physics and chemistry is useless, like we can throw that all out, but about human relations and consciousness and flourishing. I mean, it's a fantastic guide. And what Greg Lukianov and I found is that what's happening with kids now in their educational system is they're taught the exact opposite of ancient wisdom. And so the first chapter of the coddling the American mind is about the great untruth. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you weaker.

So don't be exposed to anything that could upset you because that will make you weaker. No, it actually can make you stronger. The second great untruth is always trust your feelings. And if you feel that you've been insulted or marginalized, well, then you have been and the person should be punished. Of course, there are cases where they really were doing it indirectly. the word microaggression has some meaning, but the way it's used and talk to kids is you should be offended by many more things.

And you should judge quickly and don't, there's no complexity here. So this is really setting people up for failure and conflict in their lives. And then the third grade untruth is life is a battle between good people and evil people. And, you know, if that's the way you were approaching your college education,

and that's the way you're approaching your employment relationships, and that's the way you're seeing everything. You're not going to add value anywhere to any company, to any marriage, or to any political system. And so the rapid spread of unwisdom is very alarming to me. The rapid spread of unwisdom. Let's all kind of think about that in our day-to-day lives. Let's go to some audience questions for you, John.

A number came in. We've selected what we think are some of the most interesting. that build on our conversation today. So Douglas is asking, looking back at large societal crises like the Depression, World War II, how did our democracy and public conversation change? And were these effects long lasting or not? And I think that's an interesting way,

maybe to talk a little bit about what you think's going to come out of this pandemic longer term, John. How will it change our public conversation? Yeah, that's a great question. And so much has happened in the last few years. So the one thing we know for sure is that a foreign attack bonds people together and gives them the ability to trust each other and work together for the rest of their lives. And in addition to the historical evidence from World War II, which affected people in all of the allied countries and in Germany, in addition to that evidence, there's additional evidence of Joe Henrik and I forget who else he worked with at Harvard. they had people play cooperative games.

You trust people enough to, you know, you put in money and you put it more if you trust them and can you grow the pot? And they did this in, I think, Sierra Leone, in the country of Georgia, you know, places where they had foreign attacks and wars. And people who were young, I think it was in their teens during those attacks, when they played these games 30 years later, they were more trusting and they could go further with each other.

So big wars do that. And that's hugely important for understanding what's happened now. Because once again, you have to see that mid to late 20th century was an anomaly. World War II created enormous amounts of social capital and trust. And that was partly why liberal democracies flourished in the late 20th century. And here I'm just quoting the work of Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. It's not that something happened to us in the 60s and 70s. It's that the World War II generation began dying off.

So wars matter a lot. Pandemics, as I said before, don't generally bind people together, although shared adversity sometimes does. I'm very concerned that the way this pandemic has played out is that we're going to be less trusting of each other more fearful. And here I'm just so upset at the CDC and other health authorities who knew a year ago that coronavirus, that the virus is only spread by respiratory means.

That I don't think there's even still to this day, I don't think there's a confirmed case of someone who got it by touching a door knob or an elevator button. Yet for the last year, we've all had to act like everything's contaminated, everyone's contaminated, be afraid, be afraid, be afraid, people are contagious. And especially for young people who are coming into social consciousness, this lesson could last for life. Now even before the pandemic, we had a giant sex recession. Young people are having far less sex than previous generations. I don't, we don't have data going back to the

40s, but you know then, but certainly since the 60s, the percent that haven't had sex in last year has been fairly constant, but all of a sudden with Gen Z, it spiked way upwards. And that was before the pandemic. So I think we can, uh, figure that given all their difficulties and the fact that they're more depressed and anxious and now that they're more likely to just see everything is more contaminating i think their dating lives and love lives are going to be worse i think trust is going to decline so i think we really handled this pandemic very badly and we could have done it i mean it was failures from the leadership at the top through the health authorities and look of course you know i you know this i i trust the science

but the politics and the failure to do cost-benefit trade-offs, which was, I think, the CDC's big flaw. They just didn't ever say, well, it's lower risk, but they wouldn't say, practically speaking, there's no risk. They would never say that. And so to this day, we're still spraying things. Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm just so upset about that thing in particular. But yeah, I think it's going to have long-lasting, mostly negative effects.

It may have very good economic effects. Many people are making the parallel to the roaring 20s that came about after the Spanish flu pandemic. Let's go to a question here from Dennis. He asks, are academics, the media and so-called elites just as ideologically biased, in his view, to progressive politics and susceptible to groupthink as the people they often vilify on the right? Absolutely. But rather just saying, yes, let's unpack the interesting reasons why that is. So polarization is mostly symmetrical.

polarization and bias studies by psychologists that have looked into it, that for the most part, things are fairly symmetrical at the individual level. The problem is that the more educated you are, the more polarized you are. And now that the left is increasingly, college grads, it didn't used to be college grads. In fact, Republicans used to be more likely to graduate from college. But college grads are more polarized, no matter which side they're on. And the left is more polarized. Certainly the elite left is mostly has you know Ivy League degrees, graduate degrees. So that would make them more polarized, more ideological. Secondly, the left tends to cluster into more politically homogeneous institutions. So it's typically the case,

as in my field, where nobody can name a conservative. You know, there are, there are, you know, there are two well-known social psychology. There's one, actually just one in social psychology. And among journalists, you know, at the New York Times, just where, if you're in a, left-leaning intellectual area, the odds are there are zero conservatives in your group. Whereas whenever I've given talks at conservative institutions, there are always people in the center and there are even some people who are center-left. So I think the left tends to concentrate much more tightly. Now, of course, on the right, I'm sure in churches and other places you get that concentration, but at sort of elite institutions or think tanks on the right, there's actually a lot

more diversity, intellectual diversity. And so they're not as blind as those on the left, in my opinion. And I should just note, I'm a sort of a centrist or central left Democrat. Let's go to another question here from Brian. He said, there's a perception that evangelicals, because of their religiosity are more vulnerable to authoritarianism, to popular politicians, and those types of messages vis-a-vis other groups in society. You studied this community extensively. John, they've had an outside political impact, at least, certainly during the Trump presidency. What's your assessment? Yes, so I think the questioner is on to something real.

We've seen in the United States the rise of what's called Christian nationalism, and especially appeals to evangelicals. So for that illiberalism on the right, it is especially white evangelicals who are attracted to it. They are the ones who are especially elected to believe the lies about the election was stolen, and they'll believe lies that they see on Fox News or other places. So there is a real thing going on where white evangelicals are, and part because they're so distrustful of the authorities, and there are reasons why they should be, why they should not trust elite media.

So yes, white evangelicals are sort of going off into outer space on a lot of their beliefs and they're prone to demagoguery. But this has especially been amplified by Donald Trump, who is, of course, not an exemplar of Christian virtue, not even religious in any way. But what he was tapping into was actually nationalism and sort of a, you know, it was not so much religion as a kind of a toxic nationalism, which often had elements of direct racism and certainly coming from Trump himself and some of the things that he said. So that's what's happening, I think, on the right. But as for whether they are more prone to it because of their belief, there's an interesting counterargument. I have a list of about 20 or 30 articles in the last year or two that have gone through the evidence about how wokeness is basically, it's not just a religion. It's Christianity, except without any of the good parts.

So, you know, original sin is whiteness and repentance and it's, you know, it's an orthodox belief and it has a mannequin sense of causality and good versus evil. And so, and many have observed, there's been some recent writing about it. I forget who just wrote about this in the Atlantic. Oh, Shadi Hamid, I think it was, that. So if you don't have a real religion, there's a space that can get filled in by any other ideology. The philosopher Pascal said something which is widely paraphrased as we all have a God-shaped hole in our hearts. And as a, you know, sect of a Jewish atheist who studies psychology, yeah, I think that's true. We evolved to believe in gods.

We evolved to be religious. So we have a hole there. And if it's filled with a long-running religion that has adapted to society, it's probably not going to be filled with garbage. It's going to be filled with virtue ethics. You know, you might object to some of the principles, but it's going to be virtues that will make you success. successful in life. Whereas if you rip all that out and the decline of religiosity since the year 2000 is stunning, a real drop off, less than half of the country now, I think, identifies as Christian. If you basically leave that whole open and suppose you go to a college where what

you're taught is this sort of Marxist Foucauldian, everything is power and privilege, oppression. You know, women are taught that they'll be paid 78 cents for the same amount of money that a man for the same work that a man does, which is not at all true. The gender gap is closed if you equate for hours worked and feel that you're working in. But young women are taught to believe that everything is structural sexism and they'll never get ahead. So that goes into their heart and they see the world as deeply threatening. And I think that explains why it's young white women on the left are the ones whose depression rates have gone up by far the most. In one recent study, it was found that the majority, literally the majority of that group say that they have been

they have been told that they, by a health professional, that they have a mental disorder based on data from a Pew study done a year ago, whereas no other group comes even close. So there's something about having that whole be open in a place where there's a dominant ideology and tremendous social penalties for not adopting it that I think is really damaging the generation of Gen Z, basically. Fascinating stuff. Let's go to Hadith for our last audience question for you. The question is, are racial tensions and anti-immigrant sentiments being driven by present-day factors, i.e. political polarization and economic anxieties. Or are they, in fact, the echoes of older, deeper traumas like slavery and institutional racism? Now, John, it's possible, obviously, to say both. But if we challenge you to put a weighting on this, what is it? Do we carry with ourselves these kind of ancient traumas that echo through our society today?

And is that what's shaping the public conversation, maybe polarizing it? Or is it more acute? Is it more forces of the moment? Neither. Neither. Yeah, because, again, you have to keep your eye on the average and the example, or the anecdote of the exemplar. So if you look at Americans' attitudes towards immigration, they were, you know, they were very negative 100 years ago.

But on average, it's not very negative. And then it's gotten much more positive in the last 10 or 20 years. And it gets more positive in the 2016 measurement. I think this was American National Election Survey. I forget which survey. And then Donald Trump is elected, and it gets even more positive. And same thing for what Americans think about Muslims. On average, I don't even know if it went down after 9-11.

It might have gone down a little, I don't know. But it's gone up and up and up since then, and since Donald Trump was elected, it went up even more. So again, we're getting much more tolerant. Examples of racial violence, overt racism, expressed racism, racial beliefs. All that stuff is getting better and better. So to say that, oh, why is there this explosion of racial tensions? Well, it's because we now are all tuned in and outraged by the anecdote. And of course, if you see a video of an unarmed black men being kneeled on or being shot,

it is incredibly powerful. And it is something that is part of the reality of African Americans. We need to know it. But to say, oh, wow, why are race relations getting so bad? Why is America getting so racist? It's just wrong. So, you know, look, I'm Jewish. There was a wave of synagogue shootings a couple of years ago.

And the next day after the Pittsburgh shooting, I went in for my mandatory diversity training class because at NYU we all had to do diversity training. And the diversity trainer was like so thrilled. And he said, yesterday America showed its true colors. Like, see, America is so deeply anti-Semitic. But it's not. It's not at all.

It's the most phylo-Semitic country on earth practically. And I looked up the survey evidence. And do you know what ethnic group is most liked in the whole country? the Jews. The Jews got the highest rating of any group. Now, it's only one or two percent higher than a few others. But the point is, America is a phyllosemitic. It's getting more phyllosemitic. It's a great place to be a Jew. But if you're into the power privilege white supremacy thing, well, you have to say that everything's getting worse and everything will never change. No, no, that is the most depressing and disempowering thing you can teach to young people. It's wrong, it's cruel, it's disempowering. Wow, thanks, John. We end each of these dialogues by having our participants recommend some books for us to read. Certainly here in Canada with a new wave of lockdowns on our hands, we've got some time to do some reading. So, John, give us your two titles. We'll bring them up on the screen here. I'll read them to you. The first is your own book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Why would you say that people should turn to that book at this book?

Yeah. So, you know, I'm, it's a little embarrassing to recommend your own book and just think, oh, is he on here hyping his own book? But I do think that Greg Lukianov and I did, we did analyze exactly what was going on on college campuses beginning in 2015 with an Atlantic article. And we went much deeper. So this book really explains the dynamics that then burst out and are going into industry. I have the exact same conversation with so many parents of, kids who are in a private high school in New York City especially. It's just what happened to us in 2015. Corporate world, same thing. I mean, so, so if you want to, you know, if you're puzzled, if you find yourself like, I don't understand what's going on. Why, you know, I would recommend reading the causing the American mind. It really does lay out the six different causal threads that caused it and what you can do

about it to maintain sanity and cooperation in your, in your business, in your school, in your organization. Yeah, I think that's a key part of that book. There's really practical advice and solutions to move us beyond this impasse. Your second book is the Constitution of Knowledge, a defense of truth. So Jonathan Rauch is just one of the most brilliant social observers.

He's been writing, I first became aware of his work in the 1990s. And he has been worrying about the same problem. have like, why is everything going haywire? Why is everything going crazy? But he zeroed in on how do we get knowledge? And so the constitutional knowledge is kind of a pun. On the one hand, it's what makes up knowledge, like what creates it. But it's also like the Constitution, like the U.S. Constitution.

And we need a kind of a constitution to guide us in how we process information, what gets amplified, what gets deamplified. And so that quote that I read before is just, so brilliant about how, in fact, and he goes into detail about how basically in a liberal democracy creates norms that gave us what he calls liberal science. And liberal science doesn't mean left-wing science, just means like the liberal tradition. It means, I can't be sure I'm right, you can't be sure you're right, but if we put us together in the right way, in a community of scientists that have standards of evidence, then the truth comes out. And that has done so well for us from the 1600s

through about 2014. We did great with that. And now it's, it's, you know, I'm exaggerating. Obviously science still works, but in the hard sciences, I think still work very well. But in the social sciences, we're now facing a challenge. And we're meeting, psychology, we are improving our game.

Anyway, sorry, that's all this distraction. Rouch's book is brilliant. So I just highly recommend it. Well, Jonathan, you've been brilliant with us this last hour. Thank you so much for coming on the Monk Dialogues, sharing your wisdom and insights with our community. We're all just so deeply appreciative. Thanks, John. Thank you, Reg. Thank you for joining us for the Monk 2021 Spring Dialogues. Just a reminder that you can support the Monk debates by becoming a donor. You can access supporting

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Bond Brand Loyalty and Tori's LLC. You can catch our next Monk Dialogue coming up in two weeks' time on May 6 at 8 p.m. Eastern with Scott Galloway. Scott Galloway has big views on tech, the influence of social media, Zoom, everything that we've been doing together

over the last 13 months. How is this changing our democracy, our culture, our values? We'll have that conversation for you with Scott Galloway on our next Monk Dialogue. And finally, thank you for the services provided to the Monk Dialogues by Amber Mac Media and our friends at Creative Harbor. Thank you for watching. We'll do this all again in two weeks. In the meantime, check out the future dialogues coming up over this month into May and June on our website.

www.munkdebates.com forward slash monk dialogues. Good evening, good night. We'll see you again in a couple weeks.