https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht9O7dNfULQ
Jordan Peterson
People like
Sam Harris
and
Richard Dawkins
they assume that the natural
person is the civilized creature that
you see before you in a discussion like
this, but I don't believe that. I think
that people are far crazier and far more
destructive and - and far greater as well,
than the typical
rationalist approach.
00:25
Rationality is a surface facade - that's
all - and the idea that people will
eventually be rational? It's much more
likely that they will be irrational than
rational. You could say for example
that Catholicism, let's say, for all its
irrationality, was as rational as people
can get. If you remove that level of
irrationality, that structure, say, then
everything falls apart and people get so
irrational you can't believe it - not more
rational.
00:57
Harris and his crowd think that we
were superstitious for thousands of
years kind of savage and and and
superstitious and then all of a sudden
the Enlightenment came along - the
scientific revolution - and "poof" we got
rational, and since then things have been
good. That's not how it looks to me
at all. I don't buy that. I think
that our rationality, as I said already,
our rationality, even our science, is
nested inside this larger metaphysical
structure. This is also something that
Carl Jung
would be an advocate of - that
there's an irrational, pragmatic, I would
say evolutionarily-determined ethic
underneath this rationality, and when it
goes then all that rationality goes to.
01:47
So yes, you can be a non-believer but the
funny thing about that is, too, you can't
be a non-believer in your action, you see,
because Harris's metaphysics is
fundamentally Christian. He acts out a
Christian metaphysics but he says "well I
don't believe it". It's like "Well, yeah you
do because you're acting it out. You just
say you don't believe it".
2:09
Host
What do you mean? What do you mean he's
acting? Acting it out like what for example?
02:13
Jordan
Well he doesn't rob banks, doesn't kill people,
doesn't rape, doesn't murder; you know I mean
look in crime and punishment for example...
Host
So you think, I mean, when you
don't do those things, basically the
underpinning of it - even though I think,
I certainly I can't speak for Sam, and you
guys have had, by the way, regardless of
where we get with this, you guys have had,
I think, two great conversations; one
where you didn't quite get there, but one
where you've come together, and I
suspect you both really relish in that,
right? I mean at the end of the day this
is someone that you respect whether you...
Jordan
Oh, yeah. Oh, no no no, look, I mean, yeah.
Host
I just think I need to preface, because you guys
are so "at each other's throats" all the
time, that when I saw two people that I
respect just disagreeing on things but
really trying to get there, I thought
"this is good". And there's a certain
amount of people that, you know, that
want you guys do tear each other apart...
Jordan
Well there's a good case to be made for
atheism. I mean, let's make no bones about it.
I actually think it's an easier case to
make than the alternative because you
could say in some sense there's been 300,
400 years of brilliant scientists who've
been doing nothing but laying the
foundation for an objective, empirical
atheism. So it's an unbelievably powerful
argument, but it's not going to lead to
the to the rule of rationality. I
don't believe that because...
03:34
Host
Do you think anything could get you there?
Do you think somebody could lay out a case
that could eventually turn you on this the
same way you would want someone like Sam
to come around to what you're saying? Do
you think that that's even in the realm of
possibility?
Jordan
I don't. I can't see
how because it's it's not like I haven't
thought these things through. I mean, I am
a scientist, you know? I understand the
scientific worldview. In fact everything
that I am saying and thinking about
religion is nested inside an
evolutionary viewpoint; an evolutionarily
biology viewpoint and an evolutionary
psychology viewpoint. I do believe
there's a fundamentalcontrast between a
Darwinian worldview and a Newtonian worldview,
which is the worldview that i think sam harris and
his crowd basically have. he didn't agree
with that but... and it's complicated
but... see I guess in some sense
I'm more romantic in temperament than
Sam, and I think then his followers too -
and because of that I can see the
irrational and malevolent side of human
beings - I believe much more clearly than
they can, and I also think I have far
more experience with that sort of thing.
04:43
Host
So let's say Earth is crumbling. We
have two ships we're gonna send the
people that believe what you are saying
here - basically that we need this sort of
religious underpinning - and then the the
Dawkins/Sam people, they're going to take
their hundred people, you're going to
take your hundred people, were going to go
to two different planets and set things
up "the way they should be", you know,
blank slate for each. I
guess the part that I would struggle
with here is to understand how that...
how their ship lands, they're rooted in
science and in in basic liberalism and
and acceptance of others and all that...
how that society would not flourish from
them from the base level if we could
just reset. Now I think you could make a
great argument that we can't do it here
because there's just so much history
here and all that stuff; but if we were
just resetting on another place why
could we not do it that way and have it
work?
Jordan
First of all, you know, there's
an assumption that science and the
scientific worldview in some sense has
won - and because it's so
self-evident, let's say, because of what
it can produce, that people just will
accept it and move forward with it.
I'm not sure about that either. I mean,
I think there's a strong anti-science
movement afloat now. I don't think
there's any reason to assume that a
scientific attitude of that sort would
be stable.
I mean, it it's only 300 years old... 400... People don't like it when I say that because - okay, fine you can chase it back to some degree to the ancient Greeks, you know, barely - but really it was Newton and bacon and and Descartes, and and that's not very long ago. We take it for granted, but there's anti-science movements popping up... well look the whole debate over biology, to some degree is profoundly an anti-science movement, and not unconsciously so, consciously so!
06:41
Host
Yeah.
Jordan
I don't think that there's any reason to
assume something like that would be
stable; there's no evidence that it's
stable, let's say; whereas there is
evidence for the stability of cultures
that were non-scientific for thousands
of years - millions of years, for that
matter - at least hundreds of thousands of
years.
Host
There was a lot of war and death
involved in those cultures, too, but
I guess that would be
your argument: That this is just the
nature of this battle between these
two worlds that we live in.
07:10
Jordan
Yeah, well you know, the other thing that often
happens with with with Dawkins and
Harrison and and their crew is that they
attribute war and conflict to religious
motivations. You know, I find that quite
interesting because, first of all,
chimpanzees go to war. So, you know, we
could just lay that right on the table
and say "well, so much for the religious
theory; they're territorial, we're
territorial."
You could consider religious sentiment as an aspect of territoriality, but the fundamental motivation for the battle is territorial - and that's grounded; like you can see that in animals always. That was only discovered, you know, the chimps went to war and in about mid-70s. Goodall suppressed it for quite a while because she thought maybe she had warped the chimpanzees by provisioning them - and so that they were manifesting abnormal behavior - but they were studied for quite a while and they do do raiding. They'll wipe out another colony, no problem, and brutally. They seem to have absolutely no inhibitions on their aggression whatsoever; they'll tear them into pieces. Chimpanzees are about six times as strong as an adult male. They're super strong, and so when they let loose they're vicious with no control.
8:23
And so, unless you're willing to
attribute religious sentiment to the
chimpanzees (which I think you could to
some degree, by the way).
Host
How do we make that jump for a chimpanzee?
Jordan
Well, because the precursors to religious
belief are in place so for example animals
organize themselves into a hierarchy you could
call it a
dominance hierarchy,
but it's not exactly the right way to
conceptualize it because dominant sounds
like power, right?
That's sort of the social justice warrior postmodernist claim - that all hierarchies are based on power.
08:55
Frans de Waal,
a dutch anthropologist who studied chimps for a
long time, has noted that the brutal
chimp dictatorship tends to be unstable
and end in a very violent manner.
If you're a brutal chimp leader and you're always tormenting everyone and you don't do any reciprocal grooming and you don't have any friends, and then one day two chimps who are nicely bonded together, three-quarters your size, wait and ambush you and tear you into pieces... and so one of the things do all has noted is that the stable chimpanzee troops tend to have a leader that's quite pro-social, lot of friends a lot of social bonds, a lot of mutual grooming; and so you could see even there...
Imagine that there are sets of hierarchies among chimpanzees and there is different principles of leadership at the top; then you could imagine a competition across time; which principle of leadership is going to produce the most stable and functional chimpanzee hierarchy?
Well, that is exactly what does happen and so there's some shape that the top of the hierarchy starts to take, and you could think about that as the beginnings of an ideal. It's even more complicated than that because... let's say you get a stable hierarchy set up and then - this is what happens in human beings it doesn't happen in chimps, or it does but only to a limited degree - you get a stable hierarchy set up and then there's some pattern of behavior that emerges that reliably moves men to the top of that. They leave more offspring, so what happens is that the male dominance arc, the male hierarchy, forget about dominance... the male hierarchy becomes a selection mechanism. It promotes men to the upper ranks and Then the women peel off the top because - we know that human females do that; chimpanzee females don't - they're promiscuous mater's; the dominant males are more likely to mate with the females, but that's because they chase the subordinates away - it's not because the females are choosy.
10:54
Jordan
So the reason I'm telling you this:
It's really important because imagine
that there's a reliable pattern of
behavior that will move you up a male
hierarchy across time. What that
means is that men over time have become
biologically
adapted to that pattern. The hierarchy
is there; it's stable; it exists across
millions of years, and so it acts as a
selection mechanism by promoting men.
And so, the men who have the genes that
are most likely to get them promoted put
those genes forward, and so we get more
like the group ideal as we progress
through time, both biologically and
culturally; and we then also start to
articulate that group ideal, and that's
partly what a religion does when it when
it's coming up with the idea of an ideal.
There's a distinction made between [countries that rule by the ruler, who's God] and [countries that are ruled by God, who's not the ruler]. Okay, so, strip it for a minute of its religious language and imagine this instead: Imagine that what we consider God is the abstraction of the ideal by which people have to orient themselves to produce a functional society. It's an abstraction right?
Host
So it's just sort of the the basic
underlying truth of how we are able to
function as a group of people.
12:10
Jordan
Yes, properly; and you can't identify it with
any one person because when you identify
it with the person then the system gets
corrupted because the person gets
inflated, let's say.
Host
This would be like the Pharaoh.
Jordan
Yes, exactly like, precisely like that;
that's the canonical story
in the Old Testament. The Pharaoh is
the earthly ruler who demands everything
that you should provide to God. What's
God? Well, we can speak about it
from an evolutionary psychology
perspective: God is the idea of the
abstract ideal, and you separate it out
from the actual ruler just like in
in in in our society. The idea of
sovereignty is abstracted from the
president, right? The president comes and
goes; the sovereignty of the president
remains. The sovereignty of the president
is a very abstract idea because it's
disembodied, right? Its disembodied.
Jordan
13:10
We were chimps, for God's sake! How
long do you think it took us to figure
out how to disembody the idea of
sovereignty from the individual? Man!
it was like, well, maybe it took us
until 150,000 years ago to
start formulating that - you know, in
some articulated way, in some abstract
way.
I think we could recognize it before then, and the way you recognize it is through admiration. Alright if you meet someone that you admire, there's someone you want to imitate.
Imagine this pattern that will move you up the hierarchy; and then you see people who manifest different elements of it; and you see someone who manifests an element that you don't have and something in your response to that with admiration. It's unconscious, right? because it pulls you towards them. It's not voluntary. You see [that] really with kids a lot when they hero worship someone and start to imitate them. The same thing happens throughout culture.
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