The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Jonathan Rauch: Free Thought, Democracy, and the Nature of Science

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Jonathan Rauch was 30 years ahead of the curve. In his book Kindly Inquisitors, written in 1993, he described the very mechanisms by which ideology can undermine both the search for truth, and the democratic ideal of free thought—mechanisms which have now become endemic in our society. But more than that, in that book, and in The Constitution of Knowledge, written in 2021 he lays out more clearly than anyone I have ever read, the philosophical and sociological basis of science. The search for truth, and the proper functioning of democratic government both require the same social contract: the implicit acceptance that all ideas are subject to open attack, but that ultimately when the community as a whole has access to open debate and discussion, to the logical attacks and counter-attacks, social consensus can emerge about which ideas remain productive, and which are consigned to the dustbin of history. Science is therefore a social activity every bit as much as governance is. This does not mean that science is a social construct however. It is precisely the need for open debate, without no constraints on whose claims have merit based on authority, gender, race, or religion, that ensures that the search for truth moves in the right direction. It was a delight and revelation for me to learn, belatedly, about Jonathan’s writing, and to have a chance to discuss some of his ideas in depth in this podcast. He is a gentle, eloquent, and thoughtful soul, and I hope you find the discussion with him as enlightening as I did. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to the Origen's podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. Jonathan Rauch was a revelation for me when I first began to read him. I am embarrassed to say I really didn't discover his books until a year or two ago when I came upon Kindly Inquisitors, his 1993 book, The Full Title is Kindly Inquisitors, The New Attacks on Free Thought, which presented an incredibly prescient picture of a situation that was emerging then, as he recognized, but which has come into full four now, where ideology-based thinking has replaced inquiry-based, open inquiry, free inquiry, free discussion, not just in the public arena, but even

in academia. And in that book he discusses many things, including the nature of science, a topic which he then picks up on and discusses beautifully in his more recent book, which we We spent a lot of time during our dialogue discussing the new book was the Constitution of Knowledge, a Defense of Truth, which came out a year or two ago. But he presents a picture of science as a social activity, required to be a social activity because it only progresses because of the confrontation of ideas, your willingness to present ideas to be confronted by others who question your ideas in an important way in order to push forward the search for knowledge and to get to the point where we understand the universe

as it really is rather than the universe as we want it to be. And that the current notion that ideas cannot be subject to attack is an anathema to that whole process. He discusses much more than that and our dialogue together was enlightening for me just as his books were. As a scientist, I really think my understanding of the nature of science as a social process was changing and raised by reading Jonathan. He's an incredibly pleasant and relaxed thinker, and we discussed a wide variety of topics related to his work. His history is as a journalist,

and I thought he was trained as an economist at Yale, but no, in fact, his training was more in philosophy, and that's clear. The philosophical background of much of his discussion is also equally enlightening. So I hope you'll enjoy this podcast, and it will put what's happening now, a current conundrum in higher education, government, and the media that we need to address is put in global perspective. And we understand how crucially tied together the nature of science and the nature of democracy itself are, which I think is a very important issue, which he raises.

So I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did. and I hope you are enlightened as much as I have been by my meeting and learning from him. Whether you watch this podcast on the YouTube channel, in which case I hope you'll subscribe to it, or whether you watch it on our Substack channel, I hope you'll subscribe to that. In particular, the podcast is part of a nonprofit foundation, as you know, the Origins Project Foundation, and your your paid subscriptions to substack will not only allow you to see this

in an ad-free way, but will provide funds that are necessary foundation to help keep the podcast and its other activities going. So I hope you'll consider subscribing to that. Either way, I hope you enjoy this discussion with Jonathan Rauch as much as I did.

Well, Jonathan Rauch, I can't tell you how pleased I am to have you here virtually to talk to. I am a huge fan of yours. It's mutual and second only to transporting to CU, which according to the physics of Star Trek would require more energy than exists in the universe. We will have to settle for Zoom. Yeah, that's right.

Well, you know, and now you've gone even up further in my esteem, but the fact that you know the physics of Star Trek makes you a truly Renaissance man. I am old enough to remember watching it when it was new. Yeah, that's right. But knowing that it's a transporter, unfortunately, require more energy is something that many, many diehard fans, Star Trek fans do not know. I want to get to, in fact, I'm interested, I'll get to this in a second. Just so you know, one of my questions will come down to why are you not a scientist,

but we'll get there. I have to say, I want to talk about a number of VR ideas which were prescient at the time they were written and brilliant. And I don't want to puff you up too much, but. Oh, go ahead. Okay, go ahead. What that? I want to talk about two of your books, Connoisseurs and Constitutional, although I'll focus on Connoisseurs because it is perfect. And by that, I mean, there are two books I know I can think of where it's like the Mozart Symphony where any note you remove is going to, where I just felt in reading it, not just that I agreed with it, but boy, this has stated perfectly. hey this is an insight I didn't realize I should have had and the only other book that I

that I remember thinking that about in recent times was a book that actually caused me I wrote the author and Christopher Hitchens and that led to Christopher and I becoming friends when I taught his book God is not great where I basically said there's not a word that should be removed from that book and I feel that way about about Con the Inquisitors so I think I've let my bias be clear at the beginning. But I want to go back. This is an origins podcast and I'm intrigued by your background, which I don't know much about except for the Yale University part, which is interesting. And I taught at Yale for almost a decade, but after you were there and experienced a variety of interesting phenomena there. And I want to know in some sense how it's affected your thinking.

But I want to go to your background before that. What did your parents to my father was a lawyer my mother was a teacher until kids were born and then she became a mom it was a troubled and turbulent family in the 60s i was born in 1960 i tell people i was born canceled because i knew from a very young age that i was different from most people um i didn't know the words for it but i knew i was jewish and thus an outsider to the mainstream religion i knew i could You grew up in Phoenix, which doesn't have a large Jewish population. I mean, if you were born in New York saying you're Jewish, you might not feel like. Yeah, my father actually moved to Phoenix because in the early 50s, he couldn't get a job in New York

because there were quotas on the Jews in law firms. Oh, wow. In the big law firms. He graduated from Yale Law School, but not in the top half of the class. So he went across the country to find opportunity in the West. and set up a law practice. I was born in 1960. So, yeah, we were Jews.

There was a tight, very functional Jewish community there. I went to a religious school, but I knew from very early age that I could not believe in God. Some people, most people have that gene. I did not. Even, I was a kid, and I thought it was childish to believe in, you know, some creator in this guy who cares about us and works magic. It is childish. you were just insightful. Well, and then I also, although it was many, you know,

took me till age 25 to acknowledge in full that I was homosexual. I knew that I wasn't straight and that I was very different. Even very early as a young man, as a young child, when did you first sort of real think of, well, I don't want to focus on this much, but it's intriguing to me and it might be relevant to some of the stuff. Well, it inflex kindly inquisitors, as you know. Yeah, yeah.

It's not irrelevant. Yeah. So around age, five aged by it must have been five because we were still in the old house before we we moved I fell in love with a cartoon character named sinbad Jr who was a skinny teenager who would tighten the belt and turn into a muscle god and smite his foes you're nodding as if you've heard of this of course I'm older than you of course I've heard of submission how old are you I'm uh I'm I'm I was born in 1954. I'm actually I'm actually 67.

Well, yeah, so you might know some of these things. Anyway, so I knew I was reacting to this character in a very obsessive and strange way, and I didn't know that there was a word for that, and it would be many, many years before I understood it. But I knew it was strange and not like the other kids. So I was an outsider growing up. And did you feel that you felt that way in school as an outsider? Yeah.

I mean, I had friends. I wasn't antisocial, but I was also bad at sports. So, yeah, I was always understood myself to be not a member of the club. Which is always a good thing because you don't want to be a member of that club if it has you as a member. I think it's not Lee-Bolt's character, but well, in any case, I know that feeling, but you must have been a good student. I mean, you went to Yale. Now, you were obviously, now I didn't realize you were a legacy student in some sense, but, but, but, and, But maybe the law school isn't considered legacy.

Did your dad go to Yale as an undergraduate before? No. No. He went to, got out of high school early, joined the Army for a couple years. And then went to, on the GI Bill, went to City College in New York. Okay. So it was from me. Okay.

And so your parents, do they, well, they encourage you academically? It was assumed. It was an upper middle class Jewish family with a lawyer for a dad. So there was no need to nag kids about doing homework. It was just what we did. Plus, in my case, I knew instinctively from maybe preteen that I needed to get out of Phoenix and go somewhere else. And so I worked and studied very hard at everything and tried to be the best at everything to get my ticket punched. Sure. And you went and you chose, why did you choose Yale?

It was, it was just obviously a good fit for me. I got in some other places, but Yale was a place that was serious about academics. And it was big enough not to be tiny. I didn't want to be in one of those postage stamp size liberal arts schools. It was urban, which I liked. It had a reputation for good food. And I was a, accepted into a life-changing program there called Directed Studies, which should exist at every American university, but it's a miniature Yale within a Yale that's a freshman year program. Three credits, writing intensive teaches the great books, and I knew I had to do that. Oh, sure. That's a little bit like University of Chicago then. They're great books thing. But I don't think it existed when I taught there. At least I didn't ever heard of it. When did you teach there? I taught there are 85 to 93. It did exist there.

Oh, see, I didn't know about it up on the hill. But science people didn't know about it. Well, that's, but it goes both ways. Because Yale, more than any other place I'd been, I wouldn't say discriminated against the sciences, but separated the sciences out of, you know, it was like I'd like to say, and it's now in the modern world,

it'll be offensive to say this, but it wouldn't have been like a Chinese man near where you pick something from Colom A and some and so Yale students might be required to walk up the hill and take a science course but many of them got out of it without ever having to go near science. Or took physics for poets. Yeah, exactly, which is I taught at Yale for many years. But what strikes me about this interesting is I, you understand science, what science is more clearly than almost any scientist I've ever met. And therefore I'm intrigued. What did you study there?

Other than the directed program, I mean, the great books. Well, it's interesting. You say that I understand science better than many scientists. And I'd say it's a high compliment, but it's actually not because most of the scientists I know don't understand science. They understand what they do in their particular field but but they don't understand the larger process so and they don't they don't have to by the way which is they don't have to right that's not their job I often say so you know people ask me about philosophy of science for example and I know you you like a few philosophers of science a Coon and Popper and such from reading you but I like to point at most first of all most scientists

can't spell philosophy but but they don't need to know it to be I mean they know it by action, you know, they know it by the process of what gets them headed in their career, sort of empirically without thinking about the details, which clearly you've done. And so that's okay, you know, it works because if they don't understand how science works, they don't not being successful because the whole process weeds, weeds people out as we'll get to in your... Yeah, yeah, we'll come to that. That's the subject of the Constitutional Knowledge, the implication of professional norms. So in my case, I was very early on.

I don't know why, but I was interested in epistemology, the problem of truth that may have had to do with being an atheist and the challenge that you always get. Well, how can you believe in anything then? Yeah. And then I, in my Yale career, my third and fourth years, I discovered the writings of Stephen J. Gould and became interested in history and philosophy.

of science. I wrote a thesis on the history of geology. British geology. Of course, that that crumbs into your book. Yeah, that's, I use a bit of my undergraduate thesis in my new book. So when this was a period when what we now know is geology, the whole idea of geology that there could be such a science. I mean, I don't mean the specific discoveries. I mean, the very idea that you could look back into time in a systematic, objective way and discover things was actually created over a period of about 40 or 50 years by named individuals who worked in an intentional way. And when I saw that, I said Eureka, this is how science works. And it's a very human institution that is not people in labs with wearing white coats and just following, you know, where the evidence

just tells them where they're going. That's not it at all. It's much more interesting than that. Oh, yeah. In fact, yeah. And as I say, I hadn't. their insights, and I've thought a lot about science. And as you know, I've talked a lot about science. In fact, we met the first time, I think, when I was speaking in Washington about science and nonsense, I think. But I have to admit that the social context of science is something I don't think I understood as clearly until after I read your book, really, truly. But now this is, in a way, it's interesting, but it sort of disappoints me in a way because I didn't realize you were so primed in your study. First of all, I thought you're clearly enamored with philosophy.

I mean, from Plato on, the discussion of philosophers and utilizing them in your arguments. The reason that surprised me is I assumed you studied economics. Because here I, well, the reason being you became a journalist and largely studying, covering economics, right? And you, and a bunch of your examples in the book are your experiences about, about fundamentalist economists. So I had assumed you studied economics at Yale, and then I had no idea where there's interest in science and philosophy of science and philosophers and epistemology came in. Because of course, economics and epistemology are almost the opposite. Yeah, yeah, they are. Economics was very incidental. I just covered it for two and a half years

in Washington as a reporter. So I love philosophy and I loved writing. And I loved writing. did not however want to be an academic because I have a restless mind and could not see spending six years to get a doctorate on British philosophy between 1830 and 1850 and then doing the same thing for another 10 years and then if I was lucky getting tenure that wasn't the life I wanted journalism gave me the opportunity to ramble and I wanted to be a great writer too so in those days, it's different now, but in those days, there were, you know, a handful of people like Stephen Jay Gould who could be writers and essayists and scientists, but very, very few. So I'm... There still aren't that many, but yeah. Yeah, it's better now. And it's, I think writing is now

maybe a bit better valued in the sciences because so many people have been successful at it. Yeah, yeah, I think you can see that. You're one of them. Yeah, but when I started it wasn't that way, But yeah, when people see that you can be successful, it makes a big difference. In some sense, every scientist I now know wants to write a book. I keep telling them for most people, in terms of dollars per hour, it's not very good. If that's why you're writing, you're not going to make much money. Right, right. But the year I graduated, a landmark book came out called Gertl Escher Bach.

Yes. Oh, yes. By a mathematician, and it was a runaway bestseller. It was a brilliant book. It was magnificently written. And I think that kind of opened the door to a different way of thinking about writing about science. It certainly did. I have to tell you a story because Martin Kessler was the publisher of basic books, which was my first publisher. I met him when I was at Harvard, and he convinced me to write my first book. It turned out not to be my first book, but he signed me up in a contract.

My friend Stephen Weinberg, who's a physicist, had written a really wonderful science book called The First Three Minutes, and knew I was interested in writing and introduced me to Martin. And basic books published Good Alashebaugh. It was their one runaway bestseller, probably the only one they had at that time. And I asked Martin about that book, and he said, that book will always sell. And I said, why?

And he said, as long as there are bar mitzvah boys, that book will sell. So I thought you could appreciate that. Martin was very insightful. But you're right, it changed every, it really, it really was a remarkable book. Well, in the sense of its success, unexpectedly, I mean, it wasn't so surprising later on when Stephen Hawking's book became a bestseller. It wasn't so surprising, even though it was clear that almost everyone who bought it didn't

read it. But I still suspect the same, something was true. Good-Lashvalk was a long book, and I still suspect its popularity was built more on its breath than actually people reading the details, but I could be wrong. Yeah, I don't know. You know, people buy books for a lot of reasons. I've been very surprised, blown away, in fact. This book, Constitution of Knowledge that I've just published, the one that you don't think every exact word is is most of our team. No, I mean, I thought, you know, it's, it's, it's looser, it's baggier, there's more stuff in it. Yeah, there's very challenging. It's got a lot of moving parts. So I've been

doing a lot of podcasts. Oh, great. And I've been trained as a journalist, So just go to the top line. No one wants the details. Well, guess what? Everyone wants the details. They want to do a deep dive. They want to understand. So what are these rules?

What are these institutions? How are they being undermined? Give me the specifics. So I think maybe we underrate our audiences. Oh, we all do. Give them a great meal like Gertel Escher Bach. They respond less superficially than we imagine. Oh, absolutely.

The big enemy, there are many big enemies of knowledge, a lot of whom you discuss in both books. And by the way, Constitution Knowledge is also a fantastic book. In fact, I was just talking about it with my good friend who read the kind of inquisitors in audiobooks, and we were both raving about it as well. But besides all the people are the enemies of knowledge, two sets of people are editors and TV executives, because people are interested in the details. and one of the reasons you don't see more science on TV

is that people don't realize, media producers don't realize that people actually are hungry for, they really are interested in this stuff and this stuff is interesting. And what one of my first editors who edited actually the physics of Star Trek said is that people want to go to the horse's mouth.

They want to hear directly what's happening, not secondhand. So it's absolutely true. And to the extent, this is people who read, which I guess is now, I mean, people who read more than the something the length of a tweet, which is, unfortunately, I'm a little worried as a smaller part of the population than used to. Reading lengthy discussions is among younger people, especially, is not where they get their information so much. It's interesting sociological question, whether, to what extent, you know, I know that books,

books don't sell as much as they used to in terms of number of copies, but in general. But I don't know if that is a direct relation to the reading. But, but, but kind and quixers, you're right, is short. And I think probably I like, that's another reason why I like it. Because I try and with my science books to make them as short as possible. My feeling is that biography books should be as long as possible and history books too. But science books, because of the intimidation factor, should be, if you pick up a science book and it's 700 pages long, it's much, science is intimidating enough on its own that if someone picks up, say,

physics Star Trek or University of Nothing or something like that and sees that in a, you know, less than 200 pages, they, it's one bit less intimidating than, then it would be otherwise. So anyway, but I, go on. When I wrote kindly Inquisitors, I was very much, under the influence of AJ Eyre, whose philosophy I don't agree with, but who every word counted. And as a teenager, I had discovered Bertrand Russell, a great essayist. Sure. His essays are not necessarily great philosophy, but he had that same kind of philosophical writing style where everything is defined and meaningful.

And I knew that's what I wanted. And it's pretty delightful that you identified that that book, although very short, is meant to be impactful in that way. How did you discover Kindly Inquisitors and when? Because as you may or may not know, to quote Hume, it fell stillborn from the press. It was completely ignored for the first 20 plus years of its existence. Yeah. Now, it's really interesting how I learned about Kindly Inquisters.

I wish I could tell you. Is it how much? It might have been Penn. I might have been, you know, and that's Penn Gillette read it on. And because of you, I was reading it. But I bought, I got the audiobook version too. so I could listen to Penn read it as an enjoyment factor. I'm not sure if was that or I also,

the issues that have been, which were so prescently raised in Clining Inquisters, it's hard for me to believe that book came out, what, 89? 93. 93. Okay, the year I left Yale. But it's still, I had, the issues what it's dealt with are,

are so vital, especially today, but there was so much ahead of its time, and that's probably why it fell stillborn. I mean, it was, I think most people, other than you, weren't aware of the dangers that were brewing. And I wish more of us were, because if they were, maybe more of us, maybe what's happening right now may not have happened, or we would have been past that curve, because I think it's what all of the things that you were warning of have become. true in multiples I use that word and and and I it's going to I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better and I kind of wish people were more if people were more aware of the especially in the academic community of the dangers

maybe people would have stepped back before they bought into it so it's interesting what motivated you what motivated you to write Kanda Inquisers I miss I know that the Rushdie episode episode had a big impact on you. But why? What motivated to write that book? Well, apart from the Rusty episode, which was what impelled me to quit my job and go to work on that book, which, by the way, I had no prospect of actually publishing when I began it. Oh, you wrote it without an advance. You just wrote it. Yeah. Yeah. It was totally uncommercial. I couldn't find a publisher. I finally found an agent. My agent couldn't sell it, returned it to me.

said I couldn't I got he said he got one nibble so he said make me an offer in the low four figures and then they wouldn't do it uh base stick rejected it um it wound up i i barely managed to get it into print um and so here it is it's true of a true of a lot of original works right a lot of good no one knows what they're looking at so the other reason i wrote it um the broader reason was it seemed to me that defending free speech per se on the grounds of John Stuart Mill on the First Amendment, although extremely important, and I'm second to none in my passion for that quest, that's not sufficient. It's not good enough to just say, well, the law requires free speech. Because what we were seeing in the Khomeini episode, and also this was the initial rise of speech codes, political

correctness, radical egalitarian ideas on campus, postmodernism, deconstruction, all of that stuff was first bubbling up. Let me interrupt for one second. I'm an awful interruptor. People complain about me doing this. But were you at Yale during the peak of the deconstruction? Yeah. Oh, okay, good.

I was going to be an English major when I got there. I took one look at the English department. It was a nest of deconstruction. People who hated books and reading. Yeah. And I wanted nothing to do with that. Okay. So yeah, that was in the background at this time.

So just falling back on free speech arguments wasn't enough if people didn't understand the reason we have free speech. And also if they didn't understand what you have to do to turn free speech into knowledge. It's part of a whole knowledge-making system, which I called liberal science, a phrase that didn't really work then and still doesn't really work. But I argued that this is a vast social knowledge-making enterprise built on a lot of rules and not just plain old free speech. and that what the attackers were going for was not just about silencing people. It was undermining the whole system that allows us to distinguish truth from falsehood. It's more fundamental.

And I thought someone needs to make an argument that's grounded in those basic foundations and does not fall back on legalism. Oh, interesting. Okay. And wow, but that, you know, I agree with you. But I still, it's amazing. I'm trying to remember those. times, but it still seems amazingly prescient. I mean, there were some, I wasn't aware of, I was aware

more of it from the right than the left at that point. That was after the Reagan period, which may have, which certainly radicalized a number of people. But to recognize that threat and as more of a threat to to knowledge. It's kind of interesting to me. You were braver than me. I got involved, you may or may not know, but part of my public whatever became my public persona began when I was speaking out against some of you talk about in the book, the creationists, the efforts of to impose, not necessarily impose creationism, but impose equality. All views mentioned in high schools was a big deal when I moved to actually Ohio, the Ohio School Board wanted to do it. And the first time I sort of became national, got involved in National losers when I

spoke at a big event with the Ohio School Board against that. But my reason wasn't, my reason wasn't that I, I mean, I obviously cared about evolution, but I viewed that attack as attack on science. And so the question was, why should I, as a physicist, get involved in defending the teaching of evolution. There were two reasons. One, the biologist didn't seem to be doing it. And two, I had somewhat of a public name, so I had the opportunity, at least had a platform. But that whole notion of all sides being presented and creationism being presented as if it were science was a fundamental attack on science. And that's what upset me. So I guess. Yeah, me too. There was a lot of

that going on. And that's one of the things that led me to see that the free speech defense, was not adequate because creationists and others were turning the free speech argument to advantage by saying, well, this is freedom of speech, right? Our views are our views, your views are your views and freedom requires that both be presented to students and they should be allowed to make up their mind. That's freedom, right? Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so you and I and other people had to start out almost from scratch making the case to the public. No, wait, there's discipline, not just freedom and both are important. Their responsibilities here as well as rights. And as you say somewhere, and I have a million notations and notes from your books, which I'm not going to get through probably. But science doesn't, you know, freedom of speech is one thing, but it doesn't mean freedom of knowledge, which we'll get to, which is a really important distinction, I think. Let me, interesting when you say make the case. I'm just going to one last bit of before we get to the maybe more hardcore arguments. Had you thought of going, some of the arguments are,

clear and almost seen legal to me. Did you think of going to law school? Was that ever an option for you? I mean, your father was a Yale educated lawyer? Because the arguments, the logical arguments, presenting the pros and cons, almost socratically, but my brother happens to be a professor of law and, for better or worse, and lived right near you,

taught at George Mason for a while. But did you think of becoming a lawyer? Did that attract you? I took the LSAT because I thought maybe it would be a fallback, but no, I didn't want to be a lawyer. And I got the best advice I've ever received, which I pass on to every 22 or three-year-old who's interested in law school, which is don't go to law school unless you want to practice law for a living. And this lawyer who gave me that advice, I told him I took the LSAT. I did well. Should I apply to law school?

He said, do you want to practice law? And I said, no. And he said, well, then don't go to law school. don't go to dental school unless you want to be a dentist. Don't go to law school unless you want to be a lawyer. So no, I never considered it seriously. It's interesting because a lot of people say, oh, no, law school is a great training of the mind. It's okay to have a law degree even if you're not going to be a lawyer.

But that's interesting. And I think a lot of my old colleagues at Yale, some of my best friends were at the law school when I taught there. I think they would have argued, oh, it's a great training for the mind. But interesting. If you can be a professor at Yale law school, that's great, but that's not the life most lawyers lead. Yeah, yeah, no, no. exactly. I hear it's not so great at Yale anymore, but that's another. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's, yeah, I hear that. Now, you, you actually, so you quit your job to write Conno Inquisitors. I'm sorry, I'm intrigued by these things, because you didn't have an, I mean, it wasn't as if you had an advance. You create your journalism job. Is that way you had before you wrote that book or not? Yeah, I talked my way into a six-month fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, where we met some years later. You had, I wonder why you were there. Okay. A wonderful philanthropist. gave them enough money to put me up for six months to start the book and talk to actual scholars

who told me I didn't know squat and needed to go to grad school if I wanted to write this book. They were right. The book was completely drafted twice and then completely thrown away twice. What you finally read is the third draft, very different from the first. And that's after it went through peer review, which was very helpful in my case. case and helped it greatly. So it didn't start out that way, but yeah, I was so passionate, I realized that just doing Washington journalism at that point seemed like too much a distraction. And I had the young man's conviction that the world was waiting to hear what I had to say,

which did not prove to be the case. Or let's just say it waited a long time. Wait a long time. Well, that's good. Better late than never. It's why, you know, and in fact, having your words appreciating your lifetime is something many. great writers never had that opportunity. Yeah, Melville died thinking Moby Dick was a complete flop. Did you know it's a footnote, but I can't resist. Did you know that George Bisei died thinking that Carmen was a complete flop?

No, I didn't know that. Wow. He premiered it. It was hated. He rewrote it. Then he died. The second performance, it was to smash it and has been ever since. Well, I think if you're a musician, dying is a really good way to get your work.

You appreciate it as far as I can tell. It's true for an artist, too. Work always immediately. I like art and I bought art, but when an artist dies, their work suddenly goes up. Anyway, it's not so true for scientists, I'm not sure. Generally not, in fact. Although something that you actually mentioned in here

about the Supreme Court, about someone saying, well, the Supreme Court is not going to be that way forever because I'm going to die reminds me of a of a one of my favorite quotes about the way science progresses which is which is kind of related to the social fabric of science that you talk about it I promise we'll get there but um you know the statement from max plank who said you know science progresses one funeral at a time which is a really important because what happens is yes there are people who don't buy as you point out Einstein didn't buy into into quantum mechanics. There are people who didn't, you know, and you know, you'd point out other

geologists who never bought into the, what was ultimately geology, but, and that's fine, and science tolerates that. It, it marginalizes them in the sense that, you know, it moves on. It moves on, and one of the ways it moves on is they go away. And, well, I, I, I, I want to, okay, well, let's, let's talk about, let's talk about the definition of liberal science, because I think it, it's probably a good way to go. I wanted to go through some of the arguments of your book. I found interesting about the book, because you present in the introduction,

kind of a general survey that hits all the points and then go in more detail later. You said, by the way, it was peer-reviewed. So eventually you did get it published, but the publishers only sort of accepted it if it went out for peer-review and then brought back in. Is that the way it was? Yeah, so what happened is my agent couldn't even give it away.

Commercial publisher said this is really interesting, but we don't know how to publish it. So at that point, I was ready to cut my losses because I'd spent four years on it, not all of four years, but a lot of four years on it unsuccessfully. I brought it to my friend David Bose, who was vice president at the Cato Institute, and said, could you bring this out as a think tank book, just a little print? He liked it. And then he said, well, we have a partnership with University of Chicago Press. And through that partnership, Chicago picked it up and became the publisher.

And they put it through peer review. And that turned out. It was a terrific thing. I think one of the reviewers was perfunctory and said, yeah, sure, publish it. But another whose identity is no longer a secret, Donald Downs of University of Wisconsin, one of the great thinkers of our time in the areas of free speech that I was writing on, I got, I can't remember, four, six pages of single space notes with just great ideas and suggestions. Really made the book and we're friends to this day.

It's wonderful when that happens. When it works, it's great. Yeah. When, you know, someone asked me about peer review what it is. I explained the process of science. Actually, when I was combating a creationist, I said, you know, you submit things for peer review and what's that? Well, that's you send it out to idiots who, who, who, then come up with stupid reasons why it shouldn't appear and then you try and convince them

and eventually you get, if you're lucky, you get through and then you're published. But even that doesn't make it science because it's, you know, lots of nonsense gets through the publication process. But if other people like it and find it interesting and begin to test it, then it becomes science. And, you know, as opposed to the argument about creation science, which is you sort of try and avoid all those steps and simply go directly into the schools. But it's wonderful that has happened in my scientific career too. It's really rare. when a peer reviewer takes a job and really improves the paper. And it's kind of a shame in some ways that peer review is blind in that sense.

Because you want to get something that you say, I give credit to an anonymous reviewer who said this. But one of my colleagues, when I was at Harvard, who was an editor of a journal, once said that he would, he would publish everything he got along with the referees reports, but the referees reports have to have their names on it. I mean, they didn't do that, but that would have been his preference. Because then if your name's on it, you take it more seriously, first of all.

And then you can read the referees reports before you read the paper to decide if the paper's worth it or whatever your opinions are. But it would be an interesting way of doing it, and it's part of the... What do you think of that? Because it kind of goes into your argument that's criticism, of quote, not your argument, but the truth, that criticism is really the central part of what makes liberal science a social construct. We're not construct, a social process.

Yeah, so as we get into it, we can talk about this. There's a constitution of knowledge, the book, infolds and builds on the framework of kindly inquisitors. Sure, yeah, it does. But I think is in some ways a more accurate description of what goes on. And the reason for that is kindly inquisitors is basically a, Paparian view of science. Yeah. Which is that you've got a global network of people looking for each other's mistakes,

trying to disconfirm each other. And that's very true. And so, yeah, that's the model. You've got a kind of marketplace of criticism in which you don't necessarily know the person or anything about the person, but you're criticizing the idea instead of the individual. And that is indeed a transformative social technology because until it came along, as Popper said, we killed the hypothesis just by killing the person. Or jailing the person or kicking them out of polite society.

So only by changing the system so that we kill our hypotheses rather than each other, do we make it possible for you as a working scientist to make errors again and again and not lose your career until you get something right? Okay. Even my dog should be. Yeah, sorry. I like the rule of the phone. a video cast, which is that all animals should be seen.

So the dog needs to make an appearance. Okay, let's see if he's gone out. You need to show the dog. Oh, no, hold on. Bring him in. Oh, he was just escorted out by my wife who thought he was, hold on a second. Levi, I'm sorry, he was kidnapped.

He was kidnapped. Dog nap. Yeah, dog naps. He's defending the house because someone came to the door. All right. I would love to happen. Normally he sits for me. Yeah, Matt, he likes to come up and keep me comfortable.

here, which is one of my pleasures. But you're right. I think Levi is famous. I tend to post lots of pictures of him. But in any case, he definitely knows what to agree with and not, and he agreed with what you're saying. And so where were we? We were... So peer review, blind, not blind. Yeah, but we... And the fact that the new book indeed is more, well, it's a, the, the, Kindly Inquisitors, as you're saying, is a preparing view, and the new book sort of fleshes that a little bit. Yeah, the, the, so kindly inquisitors, I'll just, I'll say what I think is important about that book, what I think it established. And then if you want, I can say a little bit about how how constitution of knowledge builds on that and in some ways kind of changes it. Is that a good

agenda? Sure. Well, we'll see. I mean, my experience is that whatever agenda we have will end up going somewhere else, but it's okay. So, so constitution, I'm sorry, kindly inquisitors insight is that we have a social system for deciding matters of truth. And it's similar to economic capitalism and liberal democracy because it substitutes rules for rulers. And I make the move, which was unusual at the time, and still makes a lot of people uncomfortable if they believe in a foundationalist idea of truth.

I said, you know what? The postmodernists are right. All systems for making knowledge are political. You can't claim that one of these things is neutral, has no point of view, has no political ramifications, they're right. And that's only the beginning of the argument, because once you sell all the systems are political, you need to say, okay, so what's the best political system? For example, is German fascism in the 1930s just as good as American constitutional democracy? It's no good to say they're both political. And I said, this is where we've got

to start making the argument that one of these political systems, liberal sciences, I called it, is different qualitatively from all the others. It's the only one that does not rely on central authority is the only one that enshrines freedom of thought. It is the only one that relies on non-course of means to settle disputes so you get peace as a result. All the other political systems, including the Marxist one and the fundamentalist ones

and the deconstructionist ones, postmodernists, all of those things at some level wind up relying on authorities, telling other people what to think or believe. And that's a disaster. And so that was that was the central tenet of what I call liberal science by which I mean not just bench science. I was looking for a term that was broad enough to include all of the knowledge making industries, including literary criticism, journalism, all the professionals who follow these

rules of checking, of impuricism, of depersonalization. Yeah, you make the point later on in the book, which I think is important. Maybe in the afterwards, I can't remember that, yeah, you're talking about. liberal science isn't just talking about, well, checking, which is a key part of science, doesn't just involve the standard argument we tell people about science. You know, you go do experiments, you test, you retest, you do the hypothesis, you test, and it's not just, but that there's a moral knowledge that comes by the same process that is checking, but checking by argument, by open criticism, and by which we can also, therefore,

so it's not always just empirical testing. It's in fact, it's usually not. Yeah. That's part of it. But in philosophy, it's rarely empirical in moral argument, which I believe is subject to knowledge and progress over time. In most fields, it's a variety of things. It's aesthetic. As you know, of course, better than most people.

Physicists use aesthetics as an important guide to truth. Yeah, I think that's overrated, by the way. I think that's what they say more. I mean, people like to say, yeah. I remember in both of your books you talk about the fact that physicists like to say beauty is a guiding principle. And I think they say that after the fact. I really think that's because really because for physicists, just like for people, beauty is in the eye of the holder. And I can tell you from almost every physicist I know that they think their theory is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is.

Well, I need to push back on that. I mean, you're the physicist. So what do I know? But my impression is that something that makes a lot of physicists kind of unhappy right now is the big, hairy complexity and complicatedness of the physical, the physicist worldview of basic particles and forces. And they're all out there saying, well, it kind of works, but it's kind of just taped together, and it's too complicated, and we want something simpler and more elegant. And it seems to me that's an aesthetic discomfort at some way. Well, to some extent it is. I think that, yeah, but I guess, and this is really important, and I think Fiamond,

push back on this and as you may know if I'm and influenced me a lot but I felt the same way that elegance is not a criteria for good science. It's just not it whether it works is what the criteria is and for a long time that question didn't even important because the world, especially of particle physics was so flooded by data and sometimes contradictory data that physicists were looking for ways to try and understand it. And theories which helped make predictions rose to the four. What happened after the early 1970s when the standard model was finally established, again, not, I mean, by a series of rather offhanded developments. For example, some people would say that Steve Weinberg and Abdu Salam, Michelle in Glashow won the Nobel Prize for, for,

unifying the weak and electromagnetic interactions, the first great unification of physics since Maxwell who'd unified electricity and magnetism. And those are towering things. And in a way, in retrospect, are quite beautiful. But they have a certain ugliness. And Weinberg's paper, 67 paper, had zero citations until 71 or 72 when experiments started suggesting it might might be relevant. So and and but it now is viewed as beautiful but obviously somehow people didn't think so at the time and what happened I think is that what people object to more is the arbitrariness. If if for example I mean there's a lot of parts to the there's a lot of going on in particle physics, which has a beautiful, frustratingly successful theory, the standard model, which explains

every experiment we've seen to first approximation. And that's really frustrating for scientists. But what makes it ugly is it has these sort of 26 parameters that seem arbitrary. But if you had a fundamental theory that explained why those 26 parameters were what they were, then that would be accepted as beautiful. Now, so I mean, you know, I guess I think that simplicity and elegance are part of the, are certainly part of what people are looking for, but they're driven more by, I hate to say it because it sounds trite by what works. So if a technique or an idea works, it tends to be pushed to

the end. And you only after the, these things only become beautiful after the fact. I don't want to be a lecture in history of science or anything. Even electricity and magnetism. Maxwell's equations are probably one of the most beautiful, mathematical, simple representations of almost everything happens in the physical world because everything governs you and I is more or less electromagnetism. Electromagnetism covers atomic physics. It basically covers everything on Earth.

Gravity, yeah, sure, you fall from buildings, but really the dynamics of cells and everything else that happens in the world's electromagnetism. And it's incredibly beautiful. But of course, when Maxwell developed it, it wasn't beautiful. There were abstract explanations, we'll cogs and wheels. And it was presented in a way that is nowhere near as mathematically elegant as is now. But it was recognized nevertheless to be profoundly true for many reasons.

Again, historians of science will correct me perhaps, but for one of the main ones being that one of the most beautiful predictions is that light exists, is that light is an electromagnetic wave. And that was true. Maxwell derived that, but the beautiful picture didn't appear later. So I guess, you know, it is, physicists are governed by fads, and that's because it's, you know, part of the social context of what you're talking about. It's not done, it's not done in a vacuum. It's done, science is done in this social milieu.

And so, yes, what happened was that string theory became a dominant area of research. And it was so divorced from experiment that the criteria basically of whether theories of the people working on string theory, the work was good or not, was whether it was beautiful mathematically. And that was true. That became true in the 1980s and 90s. But a number of people viewed that as a real corruption. that people that's that's interesting um one shouldn't think by aesthetics that i mean necessarily beauty in the conventional sense of lovely and elegant but just for example we don't need to spend

too much time on this but it's super interesting to me okay because i don't get to talk to real physicists who really think about the stuff all that much the very desire for a theory and for unifying ideas is at some sense aesthetic so if i told you i'll tell you what laurence krauss Why don't we just suppose I have a computer and it's just a machine and we're just going to feed all the data into it. And it's going to explain particle physics and everything else. It's going to just crank it out based on the data. There won't be any theory at all. Just be a pile of stuff.

But it'll be predictive. You would probably not really say that that was satisfying. You would hunger for something that seems explanatory and right that makes sense to you that fits in with your world. All of this is a kind of aesthetic of science, right? Yes, now. I would argue that in the next century, that's probably not going to be the aesthetic of science. I suspect to the extent that AI or quantum computers may reveal things,

they may be back boxes that say, yes, this is the right thing to do if you're a doctor or whatever, but have no fundamental biomedical explanation, but people buy it because it works. But you're right, it wouldn't be satisfying to me. But I'm an old guy. it established that. So for me, for example, well this is the only four last for a into physics. I hadn't planned to do this, but you know, what the heck. It's relevant because a lot of people think, you know, physicists have invented multiverse just so we can do away with God, which is not true at all. We did away with God a long time ago. But it is an anathema to my upbringing as a

scientist because I, my upbringing as a scientist was I want to explain why the world is the way it is because it has to be that way. I want to find the fundamental theory, as you point out, the fundamental explanation, and that's why I got involved in particle physics. But it could easily be, and in fact, the wise money on the street is that in fact, it's equally likely now that the laws of physics that we have are just an accident, that there are many universes and they have different laws of physics. And, um, There may be no fundamental reason why certain key parameters of nature that are really fundamental to our existence are what they are, except that we're here to measure them. And that's an awful, it's very unsettling to me. And I think to many scientists, we've been driven there rather than seeking it out. But that may be, you know, and that would be, again, I guess the antithesis of, I suppose, of beauty. But my bet, I bet most people would, the most likely argument is that our universe is unique and equally likely is that at least some fundamental aspects of physics are perhaps anthropic. I hate to use that word.

Well, I guess, but if there's an infinity of universes and the only one is hospitable to life because all the constants are exactly right and that's ours and we're in it, then there's no consequences of this theory except that here we are. Yeah, well, actually, just to clarify, it may, it could, it's something I've been fighting against because the people who were, there's been a recent resurgence of these creationists that you fought and I fought, or at least intellectually fought, who are saying the world is fine-tuned for us. And the argument isn't that there's only one universe that's hospitable life. It's that our universe is hospitable to life like ours. And, you know, but no one knows, because we don't know the locus of all possible life forms, in another universe with the laws of physics were different, that there couldn't be other life forms that were.

And those people, those life forms would ask, why is, why is our universe so, why are we, why is our universe so finally tuned for us? And what they miss is that they're finally tuned for their universe and we're finally tuned for ours. But anyway, but, but if you can, it may not be predicted, but if it is, I mean, you might be, That's the whole point of the multiverse argument. You may be able to make certain predictions about correlations between theories. We're going way off. Yeah. Why don't I, should I return to my narrative?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess so. Yeah, yeah, I took you on a side. No, I love it. I love it. I'm so thrilled and fascinated. Well, and these are meant to be dialogues. Okay.

We're talking about the black boxes and whether you can have black box physics. Yeah. So kindly inquisitors, I agree with you. It's a masterpiece of philosophy. will outlive Plato and Aristotle. The last cockroaches will be crawling over it as the light from the sun fades. But there's something very important missing from it, which is it's a black box theory. It just says, okay, so what you need is a system.

You have lots of critics and they take shots at each other and what emerges is knowledge. And that I came to believe was woefully incomplete. And in fact, in some ways misleading because it leads to this notion that if all you have is free speech and people being critical of each other, what will come at the other end will be objective knowledge and science. And sometime around 2015 and 16 and the massive new attacks that we were seeing that I describe in the Constitution of knowledge, I realized that a lot of what was being undermined here was not freedom of speech or freedom of thought. It was all of these mechanisms, all of these social structures, the whole architecture we rely on to turn free speech into objective knowledge.

And that turns out to be extremely, extremely difficult. Yeah. Because it turns out that in a world with unstructured free speech, you get Twitter. You get people who are simply displaying to each other in order to enhance their status, attract attention, sell advertising. The last thing they want to do is systematically expose their views to rational critics who will then publish and then have to respond to that. This is not what human beings do if you leave them. alone. So it turns out you need an elaborate set of social institutions and principles that channel conversations into constructive knowledge-making directions. I picked this up. I think the revelation

started to hit me in a speech from Jonathan Haidt, who you probably know. Oh, I know, sure. Gave a speech in the Manhattan Institute a few years ago where he used an analogy from physics. He says, it turns out there are a whole lot of constants that you need to get right. in order to have the universe we're in. Likewise, in liberal democracy, there are a whole lot of social settings. You need to get right in order to have the kinds of free societies and productive societies we have. And I said, that's exactly right.

That's what the U.S. Constitution is. It's not just words on paper. It's a whole series of social settings for turning conflict into peace and into policy, into law. and doing that in a way that's productive and peaceful. And I said, so we have to go inside the black box of criticism. What are the structures that turn free speech into knowledge? That's the constitution of knowledge. So the big new insight of this book is how do we structure society

so that we can have productive and civil discourse that turns criticism into knowledge? And that turns out to be there's a lot of stuff involved. Yeah, sure. And it took you all those years of school, graduate training, all the stuff you've had to do to become a scientist. You mentioned earlier that even scientists don't understand these rules and norms. They don't have to because it's been wired into them. Yeah, it's been wired into them. But that's very much like until recently we had wired into us the idea that if you lose an election, you concede.

Yeah. Turns out democracy kind of depends on that. If you break that rule, there is some pretty, pretty bad consequences. Well, same in the Constitution of Knowledge. If you just decide, wait a minute, we're just going to, as Stephen Bannon said, flood the zone with shit, just pour out so much falsehood at such a rate that no one can keep up with it. There's no legal recourse against that, but it can destroy our ability as a society to stay in touch with knowledge. So that's what the second book is about. And has.

Yeah. And I couldn't help but think, well, I guess it's not, it's kind of explicit too, that were you motivated to write that because of the, well, there are many reasons, but most directly because of the Trump phenomena of the. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, one gets to sense. I was very worried about cancel culture too. And my other big insight in this new book is that cancel culture on the left and disinformation

on the right, although they have different political goals and different people are using them, they are both fundamentally forms of information warfare aimed at undermining the constitution of knowledge. And they're both very sophisticated, very effective, and need a more coherent and robust response than they have received so far. Yeah, well, okay. I guess I disagree. I think the council culture is much less sophisticated than what Steve Banner was talking about in the sense. It's much more.

I'd be interested in telling you why I think it's sophisticated. Okay, well, okay. Well, yeah, let's, we'll get there then. let me uh but i because the word truth is there that's why you didn't really mention the word truth or 50 years earlier or whatever it was um 30 years uh and truth i guess become was more uh more relevant in an era of of of of uh of fake of falsification of truth so that's what i mean Trump's active denial of truth, which was the first time, and that was really done with that kind of extreme prejudice,

must have, you know, I'm wondering why the word truth, I guess is a long way of saying, coming about, because, you know, I mean, because let's just say, there's a distinction of truth and knowledge, and my own view of them have changed a lot now too because of reading you there is no such thing as scientific truth there's no absolute truth in science in the sense of truth is absolute science just

sort of finds out what isn't true and what's left over like the Sherlock Holmes story is probably probably got some possibility of it but so truth never when people talking about truth I always begin to get weary because it sounds really religious to me in some sense. So anyway, let me give you a chance to talk. But you would say you're a physicist.

So you'd say that you at least strive to get closer to truth. Oh, yeah, closer to the truth. Just that you don't have it. Yeah. So that's right. Truth and objective knowledge. That's the kind of knowledge we're talking about today. There's, you know, recipe knowledge and other kinds of things.

But we're talking about the stuff in the books that we rely on to tell us how the world works outside. They are different things. And you need them both. But truth is a value. It's, as Popper said, it's a regulative idea or it's a directional idea. It's like north or up. You don't reach it, but you can go that direction and you can, you hope, over time, approach it.

Objective knowledge, on the other hand, is a real thing. It exists. You can go to a library, take it off the shelf, drop it on your foot. It might break your toe. So it is a tangible thing. It is constantly changing and being updated. We hope it's getting closer to truth. In physics, we certainly have every reason to think that's true.

But you need both of these concepts, right? Truth is a value. And if you give up that value, if you go the full deconstructionist or modern, postmodernist, skeptical viewpoint that there's no such thing as truth, then you simply become incoherent because you've got no directional principle for all the things we do. So you've got to have the value. And then you've got to have the systems that translate that value to actually. processes and that's the Constitution of Knowledge, which builds objective knowledge. So those are

kind of, that's how I triangulate. Okay. It's funny. Yeah, okay. Now, some of the system, what I also, what you stress more, although I noticed it when I read back, I read the, the, the kind of quiz again after looking at the Constitution of Knowledge. And so I, you know, to see, to try and compare. And I did notice some things the second time that had noticed the first, but you emphasize a lot more in the Constitution of Knowledge, the relationship between the social infrastructure and of science and natural selection and economics, in the sense of the institutions of capitalism and in the case of biology, natural selection, which kind of enforces that kind of marketplace. in one case the marketplace of species,

in another case, the literal marketplace, and the last case, the marketplace of knowledge. But are you suggesting that the latter, the liberal science, requires a more concerted effort to ensure those institutions remain valid or that they have a way of propagating on their own, like in the case of capitalism? Oh, very much the former.

So I don't in either book, but I don't really use very much the analogies to evolution. I make a reference to evolutionary epistemology in a historical sense. But what I don't like about it is that evolution is, of course, a blind process with no intentionality and no goal. And that is not at all true of, say, the Constitution of Knowledge, or for that matter, the U.S. Constitution. Now, neither of them has a final resting spot, a final election, a regime that lasts, you know, the thousand-year right, or eternal truth that can never be questioned. But they all are constructed environments made by people to solve social problems and get us closer to right answers and adapt ourselves better. And they are both, especially Constitution of Knowledge is a cumulative system. It's building on knowledge from the past.

So it's more directional and above all, it's more intentional. And the whole point of the book, the Constitution of Knowledge, really both of these books, is we must not, we must not assume that these systems take care of themselves, that they just tick along on kind of organic principles. Like the U.S. Constitution, the Constitution of Knowledge, which is constitutional. It's not written down, but it does very much the same kinds of things. This is an intentional system that relies on the maintenance and sustenance of institutions and norms and rules, which are difficult to inculcate, require a lot of discipline and training to follow, and must be defended. They do not take care of themselves. And it's like if you neglect the U.S. Constitution and allow those institutions to decay and elect as president, people who lie, who obstruct. justice, who discount an election, who try to steal an election, you will not have a constitutional

regime. And similarly, in the constitution of knowledge, if you have people who don't care about truth or people in academia who become corrupt and begin indoctrinating instead of inquiring, if you start blocking the pathways of inquiry, if you start flooding the zone with shit, you will not have a constitutional knowledge. You will have chaos and conflict. And that's where we're headed. Well, I'd say that's actually that's where we are. I, you know, with with with with Trump and and and and and all of that,

it's it's much more manifest in public. But I'm I'm throughout your books, I keep thinking, well, you know, he thinks this is bad. But now it's just so much worse. I, I think we are already at the point. in academia of already having produced chaos, I'm not sure chaos, but having created a system where universities don't do what universities are supposed to do. You know, what specific? Well, you said, you know, what are the symptoms of that?

Are we talking about, you know, sort of rampant on wokeness? Well, wokeness is an example, but the fact that that you can't, well, There's two things, that it's generally accepted now. In fact, actually, early on in the first book, you talk about any system for deciding who is objectively right is a social system. So you point out that, yes, that's your refer, that liberal science is a social system and has political consequences. And it's, and but you point out, hey, that saying that science is political

is not the same as saying science is political. It's saying liberal science does not throw its opponents in jail, but it does deny their beliefs respectability. But and you point, the example you give, which is at the time was an anomaly, was feminists saying a feminist who said, the scientific method rests on a particular definition of objectivity that we feminists must call into question. That was an outlier, but that's now the norm. that sense that that that the process that that that the process of science is independent of who's doing it and should be and it should rest on a on a broad base of criticism and counter criticism independent of identity that's over

that's true in physics Yeah, yeah, in the sense that it is now a requirement for entry into the community that you recognize that identity is, well, that you recognize that science is systemically racist, which it isn't, by the way. Like, would you have to write in a paper that magnetic fields are in some way, Western or? imperialistic because Max will yeah well you wouldn't have to but that's but that's what's coming up I mean I just there's a someone who a young a young physicist who is physics I don't know very well her physics I don't know very well but you know who was nevertheless labeled by by nature I think is one of the rising stars

gave a talk on how black knowledge is really an essential problem that that that physics doesn't you know that needs to be done using black knowledge. And that's, that's, the fact that isn't laughed out of the, out of the room is, is amazing. And the fact that you, yes, that now, for example, in, let me give you some, a few examples, journals, scientific journals are regularly now censoring scientific discussions that may, that may offend. In fact, the Royal Society of Chemistry just put out guidance to their to their editors that that any any anything that might offend regardless of its intent should be considered not to be published and they and

the and the and the journal of hospital medicine just retracted a paper saying that because the the title was science a tribalism in medicine you know it was arguing against tribalism in medicine but they argued that the word tribalism was offensive. And the paper should not be, even though it was defined in that paper, so they removed it and then they rewrote it, removing those terms and then apologizing for it.

I mean, there are tons of examples, and the main example, which we were talking about beforehand, that now it's not that you can't, well, you can't. But there's a gatekeeper requirement that if you don't accept the notion as defined by someone else, by some institutional bureaucracy within academia called diversity, equity, and inclusion now in most academic institutions, if you don't accept that, you can't get the job in the first place. And it's not just doing a loyalty oath.

It's saying you will not just, you're not agree with it, but you will demonstrate, you must be able to show that you will demonstrate your agreement with that. in all of your actions as a faculty member. Otherwise, you won't even consider you as a faculty member. And so, you know, you talk about, at one point you said a no offense society is not a knowledge society. And there was another great line about a university that doesn't allow either offense or disagreement as a monastery, not a university.

And unfortunately, universities are. throughout at least the United States and North America and to some extent around the world, but more so North America are becoming monasteries. So I see these trends. Thank you for the new examples, though, which I had not seen, which are, of course, disturbing. I guess the question in my mind is, is it five minutes to midnight or is it more like 20 minutes to midnight? Because a lot depends on whether it's too late to begin turning some of these things around. I think we're starting to see,

so call me Pollyanna, but 20 years ago we got the foundation for individual rights and education, which started working on free speech. That hasn't won those battles, but it's there, and it's even the odds in many of these cases. I noticed in 2009, I noticed in constitutional or at least,

or maybe the end of your preff, you're afterward in Kindly Quizers. You say it's getting better, and that shocked me. You said because of groups like that. Well, there's something I didn't know then, which forced me to reassess that, at that point, optimism. And that's that the battle was, although it was never won against speech codes, the courts weighed in and there's now legal advice and colleges know that they get in trouble, especially if they're public universities and they introduce free speech. So at the legal level, there was progress.

What I did not know was about to happen when I wrote those words. Two years later, John Heights says it's 2013, 14, 15 is the problem begins to mutate and morph and become less about top-down speech codes enforced by administrators and more about bottom-up social coercion coming from students. And politicized faculty at the lower level using social coercion, not formal coercion, to live. limit discussion and dialogue. So it's certainly very bad if the American Chemical Society or whoever it might be issues a top-down edict saying here's how you will edit your papers, here's the new rule. But at least that's a target. We can look at it and criticize it.

Right now what we see is 60 plus percent of students say that they are reluctant to state their true political views for fear of bad social consequences, well-duty. justified fear of bad social consequences. And this is, this is true among progressives, not just conservatives because progressives, progressives are the most vulnerable to canceling, because that's their community coming after them. Yeah, or they go after their own. So this is a harder problem, right? Because this is in the social environment and you can't, you can't sue it. You can try to pass policies against it, but you need to start pulling the culture back. that's part of why I wrote the Constitution of Knowledge.

The first thing that has to happen is understand that this danger we face is to the whole system that we rely on to keep society and ourselves moored to reality. And when that goes away, we're talking about chaos and conflict and ungovernability and extreme polarization and the collapse of knowledge-making institutions. So we got to understand that first. And then people like you and me and other small L liberals, pluralists, need to start pushing back in many levels. I think that's starting to happen.

The Academic Freedom Alliance, Princetonians for Free Speech, Foundation Against Intolerism, I can go on and on. Well, they're always a lot. We're seeing more counter-organizations, and we're certainly seeing heightened consciousness of the problem, including among progressive faculty members, but we're nowhere near yet the level of counter-mobilization that will be necessary to take this on. Maybe you're saying it's too late.

No, no, I'm not saying it's too late. I'm just thinking it's going to get worse before it gets better, and I think it's going to get a lot worse. The problem is, along the lines you talked about, about we need to defend the institutions associated with the constitutional knowledge, just like we need to defend the Constitution. One of those institutions is the academic infrastructure that supports academic freedom, not just freedom of speech, but academic freedom. So you're absolutely right. It's coming from the bottom up in the sense of social pressure. But what's happening, unfortunately, is that the institutions themselves, in response,

and response that I can understand, because it's a lot easier to accede to the mob than it is to counter the mob if you're worrying about getting new students, how parents are going to respond, how donors are going to respond, it's a lot easier to virtue signal. So you're seeing the institutions not only cave in, but more than that, going the extra mile to point out that they're that they're not systemically racist or they're not X, Y, or Z. Somewhere you talked about H. L. Mencken or so someone I like a lot and pointed out that in his diaries, you know, even though he's a staunch defender of blacks and Jews, he in his diaries he may have said something. someone writing said if you defend Mencken then you yourself are either anti-Semitic or whatever and you're seeing that now let me give you an example and you may know of this one because it's been publicized recently but it's the it's the it's the it's the it both I've talked about some of these

and something I've written for the Wall Street Journal which will probably be out before our piece comes out so or before our dialogue comes out but MIT you know about MIT you know this I've been following it. Yeah, it's appalling. It's appalling, but it would be appalling if it was an anomaly. And what you're seeing is that that's just one example of there are a variety of university professors who spoke out against, you know, as you talk about in your book. And I agree that affirmative action is something that reasonable people can differ about

and have dialogues about. But you're not allowed to have those dialogues at any fact. member who now expresses any concerns is marginalized or removed. Let me give you another example. A faculty member in Berea College, which is a small religious college or at least it's religious-based, it's a private college in Kansas, a psychologist and a relatively well-known psychologist decided to do a study of hostile work environments. And and did a not a survey, but basically one of these surveys were,

and he had to get permission from his office of human interactions, wherever gave them a survey, did it, about asking people whether this was a hostile, worst environment, whether this was, this was. And some of the examples were based on examples that had happened at their school people who were convicted of having a hostile work environment. The reaction among students was so strong that any of these examples were used that they asked for him to remove.

And the administration said, well, looked at it and said, well, the only way we can remove a tenure and faculty member is to say, you're incompetent, so you're incompetent and removed him. Creating a hostile work environment by asking about a hostile work environment. Okay, so I'm going to push back, not because you're wrong, but because I think the picture you're complaining is incomplete. At least I hope it is. And this is going to go back.

This will take a second, but it will be relevant. This is going to go back to the point we were, touched on earlier, which is, I said that canceling is very sophisticated. Yes, good. Cancelling, what's happening here, you're being manipulated by a numerically, comparatively small group of activists. Yes. Who are not representative of the students or the faculty on campus, who are using sophisticated

social technologies of information warfare to make it, appear as if they dominate the consensus. Yes, and it's always... Same thing anti-vaxxers did by populating the internet with anti-vax stuff. It's a tiny fringe belief, but if you go on Google, all the stuff, you'll see a lot of it will be anti-vaxed. You'll think it's respectable. So on campus, you've had captured by these relatively small groups of activists and

they're abettors in various administrative roles who shoot your head off if you stick it above the parapet. Now, this has two effects. One is the crude effect, which I think is what you had in mind when you said these were crude tactics, which is people keep their head down. They stay quiet. Debate is chilled because no one wants to take that risk. That's only the crude effect. The more sophisticated effect is that they're falsifying the consensus. They're making it appear as if lots of people on campus agree with what they're doing, that they're the predominant view. That has the effect of demoralizing you. This is, it's called, this is a well-known effect. Yeah, sure.

Pointed it out. Yeah, sure. It's called spirals of silence in the, in this, in the sociological literature. It's playing with your mind to make you think, well, I must be crazy to object to what these people are saying, or at least it's hopeless to go up against them. They control, they dominate the environment. Now, in fact, it doesn't take very many people to break a spiral of silence, right? That's what happened to the Soviet Union. After 70 years of everybody saying, I'm not going to speak up because no one else is speaking up. I don't know what anyone else believes. I'm probably wrong and it's hopeless anyway. This can collapse very quickly. It can. What it takes to collapse is some university leadership that will push back as President Zimmer

has done in Chicago. The only one I know of. The only one I know of is Zimmer. I think now 80 some schools have signed the Chicago principles, a clear statement of values. I just got back from speaking at a school last week, University of Denver, which inaugurated a new president who brought me in to say, you guys should tighten up your speech rules. And we brought up at his urging the MIT example. And he made a public commitment that if there was a similar cases at MIT, he would not de-platform that person. The reason was he was appalled.

Lots of people in academia are appalled by what MIT. IT did. So here's the question. It's not that it's a hopeless case because there are only 10 of us and a million of them. It's how do we get the demoralized majority to start pushing back in organized coherent ways and develop the leadership on campuses that will allow that to happen? Look, I couldn't agree with you more in that sense. And I've been thinking, I've been working with colleagues to try and figure out how you can turn that around. And the Soviet example, is the prototypical example of ultimately these these towers of subterfuge will will collapse but but you know there were as happened in the

Soviet case there are a lot of people who suffered for a long time before that happened and what's what it's good I'm not and what I think it is going to take are people willing at some point to sacrifice in some sense themselves for what they view to be a higher goal. You're absolutely right that these are very small groups. And that's what makes it so frustrating as academics. We, myself, my colleagues talk about that. The problem is, and it is, and I'm glad you say,

look, I've known many university presidents and almost none of them have ever impressed me and the more I get to know them. And Zimmer is an exception. What is surprising to me is how quick universities will respond to a group of one or two or three or four social media people who are clearly inordinately vocal but also clearly not a large group they will respond to cut that off immediately because the fear at universities

fundraising and otherwise is that any publicity is bad publicity in this regard and and so that the reason I don't think that the people you're talking about are sophisticated as maybe the reason I didn't think they were sophisticated. Unlike, well, maybe, unlike, maybe Steve Bannon does say overtly what to, is these people say overtly, they're not hiding what they're trying to do. They're out saying, this is what we want. And I don't think they are the ones who are making it appear as if they're a larger group than they are. The people who are making it appear, I don't think they've done anything

very sophisticated, other than being loud and being able to periodically get, get petitions. It's the university administrators who, and it's not even the university administrators, because the university administrators are now subjugated by this incredible bureaucracy. It's kind of like the Soviet Union in the sense that there's a secret police there. In universities, there are these incredible bureaucracies called diversity, equity, and inclusion properties that run independently of the faculty without supervision, without control. and I suspect the university administrators are feel powerless to address that. I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal called the ideological corruption of science

a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, worried about some of these things. I had faculty right to me from the country independently, I think four or five different faculty emailed me under pseudonyms because they were so concerned that it, If the administrators found out what they're writing, that their jobs would be on the line, that strikes me as something worth worrying about when it gets to be that point. Well, you know, part of the last chapter in my book says the real snowflakes are not the students who are protesting unsafe speech or whatever. It's the tenured professors who dive under the furniture, join the cancel campaigns, or even

worse, call up someone like Rebecca Tuvel when she got canceled at Rhodes College and say, gee, I'm really sorry about what's happening to you. It's a terrible thing. I apologize, but I can't say anything in your defense because they'll come after me next. So as in the Soviet Union, the reason they work so hard to cut off the head of every dissident to stamp it out is because they know, I think they're more sophisticated than you do, but maybe it's instinct. But they know that it doesn't really take that many voices to break a spiral of silence. And so they know it doesn't take 500 professors at a university. As Robbie George says at Princeton, sometimes it only takes five, if they're the right professors, to start blowing the whistle, making trouble for the administration, bringing the lawsuits, if necessary, providing the support for each other, bringing in the outside resources.

Universities and administrators are institutions, and they will respond to pressure. And it's startling to me how helpless, tenured professors seem. to feel themselves to be. They have, they seem to feel like they've been dormats for so long now that there's no longer anything they can do. I got a story two weeks ago. Correspondence from a professor I know, political scientist at a, at a public university who told me in detail. So he had one student, just one, it's usually just one. Yeah. Who filed a complaint against him because he was center right and she felt that endangered her safety and all of that and she had a list of complaints of things that he had done one example was that he had used the words black and african

american as nouns instead of adjectives and and there were like 10 items and they were all like that in other words none of them alleged professional misconduct yeah they were simply her complaints about his class, right? Yeah. With one minor exception, which is she alleged he called on her less than others, which would be misconduct if they were racist. But that's it, right? Yeah.

So he's called in. He's a, he's a professor. Yeah. And he is called in for 2.5 hours of inquisition by a mid-level human resources officer. Yeah, they're the worst. And he's supposed to answer all these complaints, which he has not been able to see. Only the officer has seen them, but she recounts them.

And then he writes a long response. And I'm like gobsmacked because I'm saying, okay, I understand this is reality. But in what universe is a professor accountable to a mid-level HR bureaucrat who has probably never set foot in the classroom as a teacher? In what universe does she get to grill him about what is not even plausibly premed? facial misconduct. Why isn't the American Association of University professors all over this, saying, of course, you can't do this? Because it's the norm, not the exception. That's the way... We're talking in circles then, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're, I think, well, having been a professor for many years, I think the first thing is professors are by nature kind of terrified. As a profession, they become

academics because it's supposed to be safe. So it's partly not subject to the vicissitudes of the real world. But most, by nature, most try to keep their heads down because everything the administration wants to do is going to interfere with either your funding or your research. And so you try and basically keep going and navigating those barriers or potential barriers with as simply as possible. you don't want, because anything new, and I've been to two institutions where I created new things, and the first response of most of my colleagues was no, until we, I tried to convince him the rising tide, raised all ships, and we got to do that. But anything new is potentially going to, because almost often it's a zero-sum game, a new program will take funds away from existing programs.

And so, faculty, I think by nature are very, very timid. And I think it's a characteristic for most faculty. But the second result is observing that, and this has been true for a long time, that these tribunals and these kind of Kafkaesque proceedings are possible. And so best to avoid it. Look, you know, you mentioned Jonathan Haid, who I know well, but what amazed me, and I'm not, I think it was in a talk, either when we were talking or a talk he gave, I don't know if he put it in any of his books. But he said, I know I changed the way I changed my course structure. I changed the lessons that I put. I removed certain lessons because I knew they would produce, there would be students who would object and it would endanger my job. And this is an outspoken person, right? But he's personally made sure that those kind of episodes don't have to,

happened in his class because he realizes that it's not guaranteed, but it's perfectly possible. Well, so I don't think either of us knows whether it's five minutes to midnight or even past midnight or 20 minutes to midnight. I wrote my book under the assumption that if we can get people to understand the stakes, you don't need everyone, you just need a core of people who are willing to push back. I think we're seeing that in the Academic Freedom Alliance and Heterodox Academy. And anecdotally, of course, you know, data is not the plural of anecdotes. Yeah, yeah, no, you're right. But something that's changed in the past couple of years is progressives on and off campus

have woken up to the fact that they are targets to. Yeah. That what used to be perceived as an anti-conservative campaign is now understood correctly to be a campaign to dominate the entire campus and especially to police progressives and that there's no amount of conformity that they can do, which will guarantee peace and quiet. and quiet for them. So that's beginning to sink in. And I'm starting to hear from more people. Again, it's anecdotal, but that they're fed up with it. They're fed up with being frightened of their students, which is something a lot of professors now say that they're frightened.

And students are frightened by students. Students don't like it. One thing we know about disinformation and epistemically corrupted environments is people hate them. It's like breathing air that's full of grime and smog, coughing all day, not being able to see. No one wants that experience. So you say maybe it gets worse before it gets better. Maybe that's right. Or maybe we're already starting to see the next phase of consciousness, which will begin to help people pull together and push back. I'm heartened by the Chicago principles. It's just to start. But nothing terrible happens to schools that adopt them. You saw the case, actually, it's the first Abbott case, Dorian Abbott before MIT threw him under the bus. So disgracefully, there was an

attempt to cancel him at Chicago. Sure, I know. The usual several hundred grad students, the usual gang said this guy should be investigated because he's whatever a racist. And you saw what President Zimmer did. He put out of one paragraph statement saying, we believe in free speech. The guy was exercising it. There's nothing to investigate. And as you know, the result of that was that the alumni went on strike. The university was defunded. The students all left the campus. Zimmer was fired. And the campus burned to the ground. Yeah. Well, you're laughing because What did happen, actually, nothing happened. The cancelers went off to look for a softer target.

Once you begin standing up to them, their power is reduced. It's shown to be a figment of the fact that they've manipulated the environment so that we're all afraid of them. So can we break that loop? I don't know. You tell me, you're in academia. I'm not. I'm not anymore. I'm retired.

But I, look, you made it the point perfectly as well as better than I could have, no doubt. I think we've thought about it. I think what it requires, when you think about either the McCarthy era, which to me is almost a better analogy, what it requires is either key people like Zimmer,

but enough of them to stand up and say, we will not tolerate this nonsense anymore. But I also think ultimately what it may require, and again, I've talked to a lot of my colleagues about this, is two things. One, where the examples get so utterly ridiculous that everyone says, this is so ridiculous we can't accept.

And I think MIT crossed a barrier. I think MIT got there. Yeah, I think MIT. And that's one example. But when that continues- If you're working scientist and you can't give a scientific lecture because of your political views, that's a warning sign to anybody in any science, right? Yeah, exactly.

And that's a clear example. By the way, it happens and it already does happen. And it's not unique. I've known a lot of the example. But this one at least has become publicized. anyway, it doesn't matter. A similar experience in MIT once, as a matter of fact, a few years ago. But the other is, ultimately, and you already alluded to this,

I think when enough faculty realize that this can really happen to them, not because of anything extreme they might do, but just because of what they may do in their everyday jobs, that they are threatened, that eventually, when enough of them do that, then enough people will speak up. But it's got to require, I remember my institute once ran a thing on sort of,

that had to do with revolutions. And someone had done an interesting study, at MIT actually, that if you look at sort of political revolutions, if you can get between three to five percent of the population actively engaged, that's it, it's over. And so. Yeah, there's super. torture that in literature, we have to wrap this up. But one way to think about the whole big question

is that we're asking and that I ask in the Constitution of Knowledge and Kindly Inquisitors is, can liberal societies defend themselves? And it's always a question. Yeah. It's always a question. And I think, look, I know we have to go. Maybe we'll continue us on. We'll see. But I think the bottom line is, and I often say this, is that, you know, the only hope I can think of is that is for people to speak out effectively. You know, as an educator, I believe in education. And that's why I think it's so important. That's why I think your books are so important besides being excellent.

If I wanted to talk to you. If I could build on that thought on the way out the door, the big goal of the Constitution of Knowledge is, remember these people, these activists, these information warriors, their goal is to demoralize you because demoralization is demoralization. globalization, which is what we're describing. You can pacify an entire population, even if there are only a few of you, if you can convince them that resistance, it's futile. And that can break down very quickly. So liberal societies have proved again and again against the odds and against all

predictions that they could eventually rise to their own defense. People said, you know, Hitler, look, powerful army. He works at force of command. He doesn't have cumbersome processes like Congress. know all these stories. Well, it takes a lot of hard work by some brave people to stand up, but we know that we win when we do because we have something to offer. We have the system that put the vaccine in my arm that's protecting me right now. These people who are attacking you and other professors and the academic will have nothing except a plan for them to dominate the dialogue, which, by the way, they think constitutes social justice. If they can all get us, get us all talking in a certain way.

That will solve the problems of terrible education in African-American communities. So we know that's not true, right? So if we band together, if we get this right, if we understand the Constitutional knowledge and rise to its defense, they're not 10 feet tall, we are. We squash them like a bug. But first we have to take those initial steps. Yeah, we have to. And writing books and discussing them, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do it here.

and also getting people to recognize your own misconceptions, pointing out, as you do in your book, very eloquently, that, sure, you may have a good intent, but your definition of social justice, what if someone else, I mean, exactly the same argument, people, you can't allow one group of people to say, we know what's right, because whenever you do that, even if they're well-intentioned,

you end up with the problem of who determines what's right, and inevitably, you're going to be on the wrong side of that, and you're going to regret that result. So I think, look, it's been great to talk, and I know you have to go. But thanks for the discussion, thanks for writing, and I look forward to both maybe some more recorded discussions and also some private ones.

I look forward to getting together next time I'm watching. I love that. I loved every minute, and I loved learning a little bit of physics, too. Good. Well, I learned a lot both ways. We got Maxwell's equations in here. Yeah, okay. Thanks again.

Take care. Have a good evening. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit OriginsprojectFoundation.org.