Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Noam Chomsky on Religion, Consciousness, Black Lives Matter #BLM, and Education

Episode Date: September 5, 2020

Patreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb440:00 Introduction 0:32 Chomsky's views on consciousness and free will (and marijuana) 6:04 Views on "God" (do you believe in it? how do you define it?) 8:02 Chomsky's views on Moral Relativism vs Objectivism 9:55 Views on mythology, and religious upbringing 13:30 Personal story on Chomsky's childhood (religion is based on the assumption that "God is an idiot") 17:53 True Christianity is pacifism and the US squelched Liberation Theology 22:12 The most important activism is the liberation of the poor 24:02 Where does Neoliberalism come from and what's it maintained by? 30:40 Having a job is placing yourself under the control of an autocrat, worse than Stalin 36:48 What can be done to make education more democratic? 39:32 The Neoliberal "crisis" 42:20 Do schools run counter to our evolutionary "learning instinct"? 49:00 What's wrong with Illich's "de-schooling"? 52:15 Why not allow multiple competing school systems? 54:52 The problems with Charter Schools 57:36 Is there such a thing as too much openness / diversity / equality? (thoughts on Black Lives Matter) 1:00:28 Chomsky was afraid of being imprisoned. Why didn't it happen? 1:01:38 The war crimes of Trump* * *Subscribe if you want more conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, God, and the mathematics / physics of each.* * *I'm producing an imminent documentary Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com on the topic of "when does the left go too far?" Visit that site if you'd like to contribute to getting the film distributed (in 2020) and seeing more conversations like this.

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All lowercase, that's shopify.com slash theories. Professor Chomsky, you're a serious person. Most people know you as a serious man who has serious views on U.S. foreign policy and so on. I'm curious, what do you do to unwind? What makes you laugh? Do you watch The Simpsons, Rick and Morty? I can't say it or my animals will race to the exterior exit. I'm curious about your views on consciousness.

If you've ever had any experiences, whether it's with psychedelics or marijuana or an unconscionable amount of alcohol or meditation that has changed your views on consciousness? That's part of my universe. I'm probably the only person you've ever spoken to who never used marijuana. So what do you think the function of consciousness is? think the function of consciousness is? Our window into the world and into ourselves. Very fragmentary. Most of what's going on in our mind is completely inaccessible to consciousness. Do you take a materialist standpoint that is that the world is made up of atoms and from that

consciousness is a epiphenomenon or do you see consciousness as foundational at some level ontologically there is no clear notion of materialism so it's impossible to answer by materialism we mean anything we more or less understand. I'm curious to know what your views are on free will. Free will? Like a hundred percent of other people, even those who deny it, I think I can decide right now whether to lift my finger up or down. right now whether to lift my finger up or down. Science tells us essentially nothing about this. It only tells us we can't incorporate it within our current understanding of science. So there's a certain sense that material reality from

some of the people that we've been speaking to is is uh secondary to that of consciousness they think that it's the material that's more epiphenomenal uh that's more of an epiphenomenal as opposed to consciousness being something that sparked from the material world and we were curious because we know you have more kind of materialistic aspects or atheistic aspects in your thinking um If you thought there was something that was more transcendent or if you think it's something more material, something more like it's just us on earth. Well that discussion can only be pursued if you have some notion of what the material world is. So what is it? Actually, if you look at the history, there was a quite interesting debate about this several centuries ago. So the foundations of

modern science, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Huygens, Leibniz, the great scientists of the 17th century, developed a concept of material world. The concept was called the mechanical philosophy. Philosophy meant science, so it's philosophy, mechanical science. The idea was that the world is a machine. It's like the complex artifacts that skilled artisans were producing and spreading all around Europe. Mechanical clocks, performances that looked like real actors, digestion of a duck, the fountains at Versailles,

all over the place, incredible machines. And the assumption was, well, the world is just a bigger machine. Machine meant what it means to you and me. Levers, gears, and things pushing and pulling each other and so on. And that was the reigning doctrine. Galileo and others considered a theoretical account not acceptable if you couldn't construct a machine to duplicate it. Well, Newton came along and showed that there are no machines, none. He thought that was a total absurdity, spent the rest of his life trying to overcome it. The other great scientists of the day, Leibniz and Huygens and others accused him of reinstituting occult ideas, interaction without contact. He agreed. The problem was never

resolved. Science just abandoned the quest. They basically said, well, we'll just construct intelligible theories. Newton's theories were intelligible. The world he described wasn't intelligible, but they said, we'll forget it. Science lowered its goals. try to construct intelligible theories. Whatever the theories tell us, that's the material world. So there's nothing to discuss. The material world keeps changing as we understand more. So the question whether something transcends the material world is just a way of saying we don't know how to incorporate it within our intelligible theories. Maybe we never will. Maybe someday we will. Does this mean that you also take an agnostic view when it comes to God? That is, who knows? When it comes to?

God. God? I don't even know what I'm being asked about. What is it that I'm supposed to believe in or not believe in. If possible, then just to give you a certain dimension, something to question, because we understand that the word, like a coin that's lost its face and become nothing but sheer metal, loses its value. And to sort of put aside ambiguities. There's a certain move now towards understanding, or maybe even rediscovering, the idea of God not so much as a man in the sky, but you could argue

it's the highest value as to how things should be and the principles that we should abide by. Certainly in your life you've… Yeah, I certainly think we can talk about the principles we should abide by. Certainly in your life you've... Yeah, I certainly think we can talk about the principles we should abide by. What do you find your most driving principle, just even if it's something personal in your own life experience? We all have principles. We don't want to torture children. We don't want to slaughter people. We want to bring justice and mercy to people who need it. There's all kinds of values that we share. Nothing is added when we give them the name God or give them the name anything else.

Sure, we have values. We can look into where these values originate, how they've developed over time, we can discuss and debate how they can be sharpened and applied in particular circumstances. That's what we can do constantly. Nothing is added to this discussion if we say there is an X and I can't tell you what X is. I recall you said that there are no moral relativists, that is, people who can theorize about morals are relative,

change from culture to culture, and therefore there is no overarching morality. They're just theorizing. They don't act like that in practice. Does this mean that you hold the view that there are objective morals? There are. We are organic systems. We're not angels. We have internal, cognitive, emotional, moral, other structure. We can investigate what it is.

You can't really go beyond it. You can say, here's our moral nature. We can try to refine it. We can sharpen it. We can carry out informed, intelligent discussions to see if we can determine whether certain things conform to our concept of what is good or bad. But if you ask, how do I show that it's really good or bad? It's a question that we can't formulate.

You can formulate the words, but you have nothing to say about it. It's like asking, we have certain modes of trying to understand the world. We have certain ways of investigating, analyzing results, making conjectures, confirming, disconfirming them. If somebody comes along and says, how do you know those are the right ways? It's not a meaningful question. is confirming them. If somebody comes along and says, how do you know those are the right ways? It's not a meaningful question. By what standard do we discover whether they're the right ways? Since there are no standards proposed, the question is just empty words. So there's many different ways that we arrive

to an understanding of truth. There are different epistemologies that we use. Some are respected, as you mentioned, more than others. Amongst these tools, some cling towards tradition, either in the form of respected mythologies, which they believe either fundamentally or allegorically or somewhere in between. And my question for you is just in your own development, in your own education as you advance, what was your view towards these mythologies,

these sort of founding either religious myths or mythologies in other cultures? Did you ever have a fascination with mythology? Was it just regarded as superstition? My own history, which is of no interest to anybody but me, up until the time I was about maybe 11 or 12 years old, I accepted the religious beliefs of the culture that I grew up in, intensive Hebrew education

culture. I didn't seriously question it. By the time I was a young teenager, I realized that none of this makes any sense. So I just abandoned it. I'm not telling other people to give up their beliefs. It means a lot to them, improves their life, it's fine, none of my business. As long as they don't interfere with others, people can have whatever beliefs they like. There's no way I should share that. Sure. Many find that this transition from the superstitious beliefs of their upbringing to something either more allegorical, maybe possibly still religious, or something more atheistic. And in this sense, we mean material, devoid of any superstition. That transition often occurs in adolescence, I would say. And it impacts people when they're growing up. Did this transition for you impact you? Did you find that it changed the way you viewed the world? Or was it something more negligible?

Scarcely. Actually, I was brought up in an intensive Jewish culture, but Judaism is more a culture of practice than belief. Like my grandfather was extremely Orthodox Jew, super Orthodox. Grew up and lived in Eastern European Jewish communities, practically medieval in character. If I had asked him, do you believe in God? He probably wouldn't have known what I was talking about. The religion is doing all these things. Get up in the morning, perform the rituals, go to the shul, pray with your

friend, come back. He was what's called a mashkiach, a person who supervises butcher shops to make sure that they're kosher. So go around to the butcher shops, do all the job, then go to the afternoon prayers and do the other things. That's religion, okay? Amen? Okay for him, not for me. But if you want a personal experience, there was one that gave me an insight into the nature of religion.

If you don't mind a personal story. Please, share. We'd love that. We'd absolutely love that. Well, we visited, my family lived in Philadelphia. My father's family, which was extremely Orthodox, lived in Baltimore. And we would go to Baltimore for the holidays just to visit. And I remember when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, we were visiting on Passover. And I noticed that my grandfather was smoking. So I asked my father, how can he be smoking? I knew the Talmudic law, which says there's no difference between the holidays and the Sabbath, except with regard to eating. So on the holidays, you're allowed to cook a dinner. You can't do that on Sabbath. holidays, you're allowed to cook a dinner. You can't do that on Sabbath. So my father said,

well, he just decided that smoking is a kind of eating. And then I did get an insight. Religion is based on the assumption that God is an idiot, that you can fool God very easily. And if you think about it, it's true. Nobody can live up to the prescriptions that are told. So everybody finds ways around them. Actually, Pascal, I later learned, had a wonderful passage about that in City of God on the Jesuits and how they find ways to give interpretations that are the opposite of what the text says, and they live by the interpretations. And that's correct. I mean, if you think about it, it's completely impossible to live up to the prescriptions. Well, the Catholics have a way out of this. You go to confession every whenever, periodically, and you tell the priest all the terrible things he did and he says, fine, you're okay. If the Jews, it's a little harder.

You have to wait once a year, the Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and you say all the things he did, make them up if there weren't any. I have Catholic friends who tell me that when they were kids and went to confession, they couldn't think of anything to say, so they had to make something up. I took a toy from my little sister or something like that. But every religious faith has some means to avoid keeping to the letter of the prescriptions. So, okay, essentially it means they're based on the assumption that you can get around God's prescriptions by one or another device. That was an insight, I have to say. So you mentioned the Talmud, and I believe there's a scene where the spirit of Moses comes back

and sees a bunch of rabbinical scholars, and they're analyzing a text, and God brings Moses there. Moses looks at the scholars and goes, what's happening? I didn't tell them any of this. And the, and God, you know, kind of gives a bit of a shrug, like, well, now, you know, like how it feels. And so that, that idea that there's this movement away from either the foundational belief or

that things become a farce, right, is a theme, I think, even within those religious traditions. What fascinates me and what I'm curious of in yourself is what you see reflected in those traditions, either in terms of their utility or the potentials in human beings that they espouse to? And do you think those are reachable? Do you find things that are admirable? What is your sort of goal morally? It's something that just interests me to touch on.

Well, if you take the religious faiths that exist, they're all interpreted. Nothing takes literally the words of the holy texts. So, for example, in the Jewish tradition, the huge rabbinic, Talmudic, later rabbinic tradition, which I didn't study when I was growing up, is just ways of interpreting the texts so that they become feasible for ordinary life. tradition modifies and reshapes the words to fit a possible existence in the culture in which it was done. And it can be done in various ways. So you can have one of the most dramatic examples in recent years is what happened with Pope John XXIII calling Vatican II, Second Vatican Council, 1962, which tried to revise the Catholic tradition that went back to the fourth century. In the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The cross, which had been a symbol of human suffering, was put on the shields of the Roman legions. put on the shields of the Roman legions. Hans Kuhn, the great historian of Christianity,

describes this as a change from the church becoming the church of the persecuted to the church of the persecutors. And it pretty much remained like that, if you look at the history, until Vatican II, when Pope John urged that the church return to the Gospels. That's pretty radical. The Gospels have a radical pacifist message. And it was taken seriously, especially in Latin America. was taken seriously, especially in Latin America. Bishops, priests, nuns, sisters, laypeople went out to peasant communities, tried to organize them, get them to read the Gospels to understand the preferential option for the poor, which is the lesson of the Gospels, and take it into their own hands, try to reconstruct their own lives and communities to overcome the terrible repression in which most of them suffered.

That was liberation theology. The United States went to war to destroy it, and did. That's why there were so many religious martyrs in the following decades. Furthermore, interestingly, the U.S. government takes pride in that. If you look at the School of the Americas, since been renamed because it's got a bad reputation, but the School of American which trains Latin American officers, mainly the killers in the national security states, violent states that the US imposed and supported through the region. They have advertising points, talking points. One of them is the US Army helped defeat liberation theology. So we beat back this effort to reconstitute the Gospels successfully, and we take pride in it. But that's one of the things that could come out of religion,

going back to the original texts and seeing what they meant. And it can be a very radical message. And it can be a very radical message. That's frightening. You may recall there's even literary exemplifications of this. Dostoevsky's great passages on the Grand Inquisitor, for example. We know the fellow, Alexander Christianopoulos, who is going back to the Gospels and looking at them through what he considers to be a Christian anarchist lens. And the conclusion kind of comes to is this pacifism that he would find that would resonate with fellows like Tolstoy. And you look at these

with fellows like Tolstoy. You look at these Christian anarchists, Tolstoy, Ivan Illich, and they tend to come up with these rather interesting responses to our contemporary problems, particularly to neoliberalism. That's something that interests us. Do you think that the answers that these Christian anarchists like Gilich, like Dorothy Day, give to our contemporary situation could be helpful? What do you think is the good we could take? What do you think we could throw away? My feeling is that the most important messages are those taken up by the activists in Latin America who took seriously the injunction to return the preferential option for the poor and tried to apply it in practice. So people like, most of them martyred, Rutilio Grande, Archbishop Romero,

Father Ea Correa, all of these people were trying to do it in a concrete way. I don't care much what people were saying. They were doing it. That's why they got killed. Given the various perspectives on neoliberalism and its origins, where would you locate the institutions, the institutional centers of neoliberalism? Corporate sector.

It's a, the corporate sector worked, and the business world in general, worked very hard through the 1970s to reverse the civilizing effects of the 1960s, the democratizing effects. They're very explicit about it. If you look at the Howell Memorandum or on the liberal side, the Trilateral Commission's Crisis of Democracy, they were deeply concerned about the entry into the political arena of sectors of the population that are supposed to be passive and obedient, not interfering with the rights of the powerful to run the world. It was showing up in things like even militant strike actions like Lordstown, where young workers were not just asking for better wages, but asking for some control of the workplace, of reduction of the rate of profit.

The liberal side, the trilateral report, warned against the failures of what they called the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. Schools, colleges, churches are not indoctrinating the young properly. That's why you have these demonstrations in the streets. That's why you have people protesting against the war. Sorry to interrupt. You said they're not indoctrinating the young properly. That to me sounds like there's a proper way of indoctrinating the young, which sounds like you don't hold a negative view towards indoctrination per se. I'm speaking about the liberal side of the spectrum. There is a spectrum of opinion. At the right, you have things like the Powell

memorandum handed to the business community through the Chamber of Commerce saying, we have the money, we have the force, we have to fight back to beat back all these threats to the business world and business rule. Very straight. Then you have the liberal side at the opposite end. The best exposition of it is the first major publication of the Trilateral Commission, liberal internationalists from the United States, Europe and Japan, basically the Carter administration, they were drawn from its ranks. I'm quoting from them, they were condemning the universities and the schools for their failure, the failures of indoctrination of the young. Proper indoctrination means return the general population to passivity, obedience, what they call more moderation in democracy.

So don't press for your demands. Just take it easy. Go back and stay where you belong. We'll take care of things. Okay, that's the liberal side. The harsher side is expressed, for example, in the Powell Memorandum. These are just exemplifications of developments that were taking place in documents. But the idea was to reverse the basically New Deal programs that persisted

through the 50s and the 60s or even extended, reverse them, return to where things ought to be, with power in the hands of private power. That's where decisions ought to be. Private unaccountable power. That's neoliberalism. It was made explicit by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who sort of escalated it all almost as soon as they took office. So Reagan's inaugural speech said, the government is the problem, not the solution, which means take decisions away from government.

He didn't say this, but government has a flaw. It's partially influenced by people. So take decisions away from government, take initiatives away from government, put them in the hands of private power, which is totally unaccountable to the population, totally. And to drive it home, they had an economics guru, Milton Friedman, Milton Friedman, who came out with the since reigning doctrine that the sole responsibility of corporate leaders is to maximize profit for shareholders and themselves, of course, the sole and only goal. And then laws were changed, regulations were changed to implement this, you go on into the neoliberal world with perfectly predictable consequences. Sharply concentrated wealth, so right now, for one tenth of 1% of the population, twice what it was when Reagan came in.

For most of the population, it's basically stagnation. People try to get by from paycheck to paycheck. It's claimed that unemployment was low, but that's highly misleading. And for one thing, it doesn't take into account people who just dropped out of the workforce in desperation. Count them in labor participation measures, turns out that unemployment is more like 7%. And even that's misleading because it doesn't deal with the fact that the new employment that's come under Obama continued more or less under Trump, not quite as well, but more or less,

is mostly precarious work. It's not good solid jobs. It's the kind of job where maybe your employer will call you to come for the midnight shift. There's a sense that one of the crises of neoliberal ideology is the fact that it restricts this human potential. I'd imagine there'd be more who have a job, but do not feel that they would be living up their true potential, working sort of mindlessly or numbingly at an occupation that they would rather avoid but feel more or less cornered into. role, but how deeply do you feel that government has been sort of integrated with this private sector? Who's running the government here? And if it's not the people, if it's these corporations, how do we fight back? How do we circumnavigate this system? Well, first of all, I don't know if you want to go into it, but having a job is not an ideal.

In fact, having a job is a severe attack on human rights and human dignity. We can go into that if we want. But it's now what's called conventional common sense these days, not in the 19th century. When you say having a job is deleterious, you mean to say that needing to have a job is not ideal or even having a job at all? Having a job. Having a job means placing yourself under the control of an autocratic ruler for most of your waking life. An autocratic ruler has the kind of control over you that Stalin never dreamt of. Like Stalin never thought he could tell people you're allowed to go to the bathroom for five minutes at three o'clock, or you have to wear these clothes and not some other clothes, or you have to race if you're allowed to go to the bathroom for five minutes at three o'clock, or you have to wear

these clothes and not some other clothes, or you have to race from this spot in the warehouse to the other spot in the warehouse by a path that I laid out for you. And if you go a little bit to the side, you get a noticing, you get an emeritus. Stalin didn't do that, but that's having a job. merit. Stalin didn't do that, but that's having a job. 19th century workers regarded that as a fundamental assault on human rights and human dignity. The Republican Party agreed. One of the platforms of the Republican Party is that wage labor is no different from slavery, except that it's temporary until you have a chance to become a free person again. That's the 19th century. It goes back

millennia. The idea of being dependent on another person is a fundamental attack on dignity. And having a job means that's most of your waking hours. It took a long time to beat this into people's heads and make them think that that's the goal in life. Okay, there's a lot to unravel about that. And I think it can be done. But to go back to the narrower question, how do we get government to be more responsive? We know the means for that. You can do that through the political system. It's often been done. Activism has done it all the time. Take the New Deal, which I'm old enough to remember, I mean, which I'm old enough to remember, from the depression hit about 1934, 1935.

The labor movement was picking up. It had been almost completely crushed in the 1920s. You started getting CIO organizing militant strikes, leftist political parties, a lot of activism. fairly sympathetic administration moved on to give you the New Deal measures that have greatly improved life for a great mass of the population that we still know there's efforts since the Second World War particularly to chip away at them to beat them back and neoliberalism is another effort to beat them back. But to the extent that they still exist, yes, they make life much more tolerable. The same is true now.

Take a look at what's going on in the Democratic Party. They have been forced to the left by the Sanders movement, by continuing popular activism. There's a battle going on. The DNC, the Clintonite donor-oriented, basically conservative part of the party which manages the party, they're trying to prevent the programs that would move to the left, and there's a struggle going on. If the activists continue at it, they can continue to shift the party's programs. They can develop new parties, other forms of activism. Now, all of these options are open. We don't live in a brutal dictatorship where the dissidence means you're sent to the gulag. There's plenty of repression, wouldn't deny that, but it's nothing at all like really

repressive states. We have a very great range of freedom, opportunity. We can do things through the political system or through modifications through the political system or through modifications of the political system or alternatives to the political system to change the nature of the society. Speaking of freedom, democracy, John Dewey, the pragmatist, was like, education, what's important for it is democracy. I'm curious, what do you see that we can do to democratize education or to make education more democratic? In addition, we know you went to what you described as a Deweyite school. Do you mind explaining that experience?

One thing we can do is to reverse what's been happening through the neoliberal years. One part of the neoliberal programs has been to undermine and destroy the public sector. That includes public schools, includes state colleges. So state funding for the schools has declined, funding for state colleges has sharply declined. The business model has been imposed in the colleges in which you try to maximize profit and reduce what's called waste. So instead of having senior faculty teaching courses, which is expensive, hand them over to adjuncts who you don't have to pay anything, pay practically nothing. They have no way of protecting themselves. They're basically gig economy, They're basically gig economy, graduate students and so on. But simply defund. The public schools are vastly defunded.

Purpose is clear. When you defund the public institution, it means it doesn't work properly. Parents get upset. They don't like it. They want something else. You can drive them into the private sector. Okay, we have to reverse that. And then after we reverse that, and develop decent schooling, then we should move on to what you just described, using the methods that are understood

methods that are understood to, and sometimes applied to, enhance and develop creativity and dependence of mind, mutual participation, all the things that happened in a well-run Deweyite school. As I happen to personally know, from nursery school up to high school, that's where it was. It can be done very effectively. So what you've described seems to be the crisis of neoliberalism and education. Would you agree with that in part? I wouldn't call it a, I think it's one of the crises that follows I think it's one of the crises that follows from the neoliberal program of undermining the public sector in which people participate and which is responsive to them. So undermine that and turn everything over to private power, which is unaccountable to the public. In the curious rhetoric of today, that's called libertarian. It's a remarkable turn of phrase. Libertarian means put your lives in the hands of complete totalitarians. That's libertarian. It's an interesting usage. Of

course you can understand the rationale. So, Thatcher, Reagan, throw people into the market, destroy unions, destroy means of association. You're alone in the market. If you can survive, okay. If you can kick the guy next to you in the face and get ahead, fine. Do what you can to maximize your own power and rule. Now, that's the principle, and it's understood. Like, if you read the big thinkers, the leading thinkers of the so-called libertarian movement in the United States. People like James Buchanan, Nobel Laureate in economics, one of the major thinkers of the movement, highly respected, did important economic work, work in economics. Now he describes his position, explicit, as the economy should be designed so as to accord with human nature, which makes good sense. Then what is human nature? He tells us human nature is such that each person, each person's highest ideal is to live ruling a world of slaves.

In case you didn't notice, that's your highest ideal, to live ruling a world of slaves. That's the highest doctrine of libertarian theory. the highest doctrine of libertarian theory. And so when you're in the market, you try to do whatever you can to approximate that position. If you happen to lose out, it's your problem. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars rover. Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend

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head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash everything and use the code everything. So there's an evolutionary biologist by the name of Peter Gray, who argues a very different understanding of human nature. He works with the Evolution Institute, which has espoused the philosophy of Christian anarchists like Pyotr Kropotkin, and their mutualistic understandings of human nature. But in evolution, there's a force that shapes our humanity, our evolution of bonding with others, helping others out. Anyway, Peter Gray has looked at our evolutionary history when it comes to learning, you could argue sort of learning instinct, and seeing how that is unleashed in schools versus how that's unleashed in more democratic, more sort of unstructured play-based schools

like Sudbury Valley School. Do you believe that the schools that we have now unleash that learning instinct or run counter to it? And what would be the best way to sort of unleash this learning instinct in our schools? way to sort of unleash this learning instinct in our schools. Just to fix up the history a little bit, this goes back to Kropotkin, his mutual aid, a factor in evolution. Shortly, he was a naturalist. But as soon as Darwin's work came out, Kropotkin pretty soon published this book arguing that a major factor in evolution was simply mutual aid. He gave many examples in the animal world and in the human world.

That's opposite to the reigning interpretation Herbert Spencer made famous about it's just survival of the fittest. You get as much as you can. Now, the fact of the matter is we know virtually nothing about human nature from a scientific point of view. So, these proposals are saying, human nature includes both. Whatever humans do, that's part of human nature. So, there are various tendencies in human nature. There are probably some people who aren't totally appalled by James Buchanan's conception that what we want is to rule over a world of slaves. Somebody like Adam Smith would have regarded that as pathological. But there are people who accept it and believe it. There are people who prefer the picture that Kropotkin and others developed, that the parts of human nature we should foster and develop are those that turn towards mutual aid and support.

You can see it constantly, right in front of us every minute. So, for example, right now there's an effort to deal with the raging pandemic. One way, the James Buchanan way, is illustrated primarily by the Trump administration. They're not alone, but they're extreme. If we can get a vaccine, let's get it for ourselves. Screw the rest of the world, okay? Because we want it. In fact, Trump just, In fact, Trump just, there is an international consortium working on developing a vaccine, which will be a cooperative effort to develop, which of course is more efficient than local efforts, some measures to try to distribute it to the poor. Trump just pulled out of it. We don't want to have anything to do with these mutual aid, mutual support things. We're out for ourselves. And that means the rich and the powerful, not the poor among us.

So that's one extreme. The other extreme you see on the streets all over the place, mutual support groups are spontaneously developing in poor neighborhoods and crime-ridden neighborhoods, all sorts of places all around the world to help out people who are in trouble and to try to see if you can do something to bring a possibility of surviving the pandemic in places where people only have water, let alone the possibility of isolation. So those are two aspects of human nature. The question is, which ones do we want to work and foster? Okay, that's the choice. It's not a matter of science telling us what human nature is, it doesn't. It just says, these are various manifestations of human nature. From there on, we go to decide what we want to do.

What the schools are doing in recent years is training for obedience and passivity. That's called teaching to test the worst possible mode of education. We all know it from our own experience. I'm sure you've had the same experience I've had many times. You take a course because you're forced to take it. You're not interested in it. You want to do well, so you study for the final exam. You get an A. Two weeks later, you forgot what the course is about. How many times has that happened? We all know that that's teaching to test. Turns you into a passive automaton, follows orders, don't follow your... I mean, I've had, I talk a fair amount to teachers. I hear things from teachers, like a sixth grade teacher told me in one meeting in Massachusetts, a liberal state, that she was giving a section on something in class and a little girl came up to her after class and said

she was interested in pursuing one of the things that the teacher had brought up so she could suggest something she could look at. She had to tell the kid, you can't do it. You have to study for the MCAS test, because your future will depend on it. Though the teacher didn't say it, my future will depend on it. Because if you don't get a high grade, I get a demerit. So you can't pursue what you're interested in and try to develop your creativity, your inventiveness, work with other students in the class to develop. You can't do that. You've got to memorize what comes up in the test, pass the test, two weeks later forget what it was about. But now you're a passive obedient individual

that's called teaching to test okay right i heard you say that one of your favorite courses was real variables where the teacher just wrote a theorem or a possible theorem on the board and said you figure out whether or not this is a mathematical theorem have you heard of the concept of unschooling or de-schooling and And if so, what are your thoughts on it? That's illogical. I mean, I can understand his motivation, but I don't think it's the right solution. They're turning schooling into a creative experience which develops the child's abilities, capacities, abilities to work with others, and so on. I mean, as I said, I went to a Dewey-Ade school until high school. All I wanted to do in the morning is get to school.

It was the greatest experience. When I got to high school, an academic high school for kids who are college oriented, the city's top high school, it's the opposite. It was a burden. I had to go there and get all A's and hated it and couldn't stand it, tried to do my own things on the side, okay, but I was able to get a scholarship to college. Okay, in fact, until I got to high school, I literally didn't know I was a good student. It never came up. The years I was in school prior to high school,

everybody was encouraged to do their best. Actually, I realized later, hadn't thought about it at the time, that I'd been skeptic here. So one year I was in a different class, older class. Nobody paid any attention. I didn't notice it.

Nobody else noticed it. The only thing it was, it was new classmates and I'm the smallest kid in the class. It was about the only thing I noticed. But it was just nothing. As soon as you get to high school, you're ranked. Are you first? Are you second? Did you get an A plus? In fact, I saw with my own children in a liberal professional Boston suburb community. By the time they were in third grade they were talking about the smart kids and the stupid kids because of the tracking that was done. It's outrageous and that's the

liberal side. I'm not talking about underfunded inner city schools. These are the best schools there are. That's a way to destroy children, to turn them into passive automata. By no means has to be done, and it's not always done. There are teachers who struggle against it, do very well, have creative programs. Kids learn from them, they grow and develop from them. So it can be done, but it's not the way the system is designed. You have to kind of fight against it. This seems to be something more in the structure of our schools as opposed to the funding, this desire to assess, rank, have a certificate. If there were different institutions that gave certificates, wouldn't we see a diversification of these these assessment structures have more room for creativity? They have ways to do it. I mean they're very good teachers who do it and do very well, but the system is stacked against them. It's just as the

college system is stacked against constructive work. When the state defunds state colleges, which it's doing under the neoliberal period drastically, okay, I'm now teaching in a state college for the first time, sharply defunded, what can you do? You don't have a lot of choices. You have to raise tuition. You have to attract foreign students who will pay full tuition. You have to transfer classes to adjuncts. You don't have a lot of choices. You can fight against it and do the best you can, but the policies from the federal government on down, and this was true right through the Obama period as well, are designed to undercut the kind of educational programs which would be very successful. Now I don't want to exaggerate, there are very good programs being developed, particularly in science education. So a lot of

very good scientists, in fact the scientific institutions, main ones, are American Association for Advancement of Science and others, are developing very good curriculum on science education. We had time, I could talk about them, but there isn't time, which do, from the kindergarten level up through high schools, do a really good job on developing creativity, ingenuity, learning how to solve problems, learning how to work with others, very well done. So it can be done, but you're fighting against strong institutional pressures. We can overcome that by changing the institutional pressures. My question for you, and it relates to what I would call the crisis of neoliberalism in education,

is Betsy Davos, who's favored charter schools. Charter schools are something that have taken off in the United States, while here in Canada, there's only 13 in Alberta or something near there. What are your thoughts on charter schools, voucher systems? Is this something that Canadians should adopt as an alternative to have more of a diversity of education or more of a diversity of educational instructions? Or is this something that should be warded away like a plague? What's your stance on this? Well, it's a mixed story. Suppose you're a black mother in a poor community where the schools have been defunded so they don't work. The teacher has 50 students in the class,

and half of them didn't have breakfast. The main goal in the class is to keep the kids quiet. And you don't want your child to be in that class. And there's a rich charter school down the street, privately funded, nice facilities and so on. So you want your kid to go to the charter school. That's very understandable. But at the next lower level, right in the background,

is the fact that this is a way to destroy the public school system. The right response to that defunded school in your neighborhood is to fund it, to reduce the classes to a reasonable size, to make it possible to have free breakfast for the kids. That's the way to deal with it. Not to say, let's throw out the public system and have a privatized system, which of course draws from public funding. So it reduces the funding for public schools. So from the point of view of that mother, I can understand his decisions. If it was my kid, I'd probably do the same thing. But we should recognize that it's part of a system designed to destroy us, to destroy the public institutions in which the society can thrive and turn them over to private hands where you'll be under control.

So yes, that's the decision as an individual you may make. Understandably, as I say, I'd probably do the same thing, but recognizing that it's part of a very destructive development. very destructive development. To close, there's obviously deleterious aspects to being too close-minded as well as being homogeneous, that is uniform. Do you happen to see any flaws to being on the flip side? Is there such a thing as too much openness or too much diversity or even too much equality? And if so, what's an example of that?

Yeah, things can go overboard, but that's not the problem. I mean, it's like, say, take the Black Lives Matters protests, which is a huge, incredible development. The biggest social movement in American history. Huge number of people involved. Spontaneously, solidarity, black and white working together, constructive goals, developed good programs, really great things happening.

Enormous support from the population, about two-thirds support. There's never been anything like that. At the fringes, there are people who are breaking windows, intimidating somebody in a restaurant. That's what the focus is on. Let's take a look at the fringe and talk about how bad it is. Okay. Yeah, it is bad. Things like that shouldn't be happening. But that's not what's going on. What's going on is a massive, nonviolent, constructive social movement. Same is true of what you're talking about. You can find people who push diversity beyond reasonable limits, limits at the fringe. But the call for concern for people's various ways of choosing a lifestyle,

that makes sense. And that's the main thrust. So take any movement you want, you can find the same thing. And you can understand very well why the major institutions want to focus on the fringe. In fact, President Trump is building his entire campaign on it. That's all he has left. No positive proposals that he can offer the population. Can't come to the population and say, I'm responsible for killing 150,000 of you, so vote for me. You can't say that or any of the other things. So what you say is radical anarchists are taking over the society and going to destroy your life and take away your family and everything else. Okay. So the fringe offers the right wing a great gift, wonderful gift, but we should be serious and take a look at the major things that are happening, discounting and correcting the things at the periphery.

I'm curious, you said in the 70s and the 80s that you were afraid of possibly getting killed from the government or being imprisoned. I was in the 60s. Okay, in the 60s, cool. Why do you think that didn't happen? Because of something called the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive in South Vietnam brought about a major change in government policy. It made the government realize they're not going to be able to win this war by force. They've got to move towards some sort of diplomatic settlement.

It took years. Millions of people were killed, but they began to move towards some way to get out. One of the things they did was try to conciliate the growing anti-war movement, to try to dampen it down, saying, we're your friends, we're all on the same side. A lot of efforts to do that. One of the ways was to cancel the trials I mean I was coming up for trial But the trials were canceled I appreciate that

There's only one audience question And you can answer it super quick Harley asks In the past you said that U.S. administrations For a long period Were guilty of war crimes Would you lay such claims against the current administration? Sure Just I think today or yesterday, figures came out about the bombing in Afghanistan

and the assessment of civilian casualties. Take a look at the figures. They're on the papers yesterday or today. The bombings under Trump have gone way up. Assessment of casualties has gone way down. They don't look for them anymore, civilian casualties. Okay, that's a war crime. It's the least of it, by far the least of it. The worst crime that Trump has committed and is committing day after day is working with dedication and fervor to destroy the prospects for organized human life on Earth. That's what it means to press harder, to maximize the use of fossil fuels, open up new reserves for drilling, cut back on the regulations that somewhat mitigate the coming catastrophe. Alone in the world, Trump is racing towards environmental catastrophe, which will come if we continue on this course, and not in the distant future. Now, maybe that's not called a crime in the criminal system, but in any moral system that we can even talk about with a straight face, that's an incomparable crime.

There is no criminal in human history who's been doing that. Not Hitler, not Genghis Khan, not anyone.