Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Social Media Is Ruining Everything" with Jonathan Haidt

Transcript

"Social Media Is Ruining Everything" with Jonathan Haidt · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
Some conversations need to be uncomfortable
0:05
because they're functioning at the frontline, the call face,
0:09
the fiery front of the culture wars or of politics
0:14
or even to personal disagreement.
0:16
And then there are other conversations
0:18
that don't need to be uncomfortable
0:20
because not because they necessarily operate
0:24
in the absence of uncomfortable ideas,
0:26
but rather because they are meta conversations,
0:29
they are conversations about conversations.
0:32
They've never been in a conversation with someone
0:35
and you realize we're getting nowhere
0:37
and so you step outside of the conversation
0:39
and remark upon it.
0:41
So instead of having an argument with somebody,
0:43
you say, so I think what's happening here
0:46
is that I'm doing this and you're doing that.
0:49
So can we stop doing that thing
0:51
and can we stop tussling this way
0:53
and can we find another angle to come at this?
0:56
Much of what I would like to do
0:58
and what I think we all need to do more of
1:00
is having meta conversations
1:02
where we remove ourselves from the heat of the battle
1:05
and we try to cool the analyze
1:07
what's really going on when we're talking to each other.
1:10
One thing that has made that impossibly difficult
1:13
is social media.
1:15
So we need to have more conversations
1:17
about how we have conversations,
1:19
more meta conversations,
1:20
about what we're really doing when we're talking to each other
1:23
when we're hostile to each other.
1:25
When we are being needlessly aggressive
1:29
and because meta conversations are by definition
1:33
one step removed from the actual issue
1:35
that they're contemplating,
1:37
they can be warm and fruitful
1:40
and thoughtful and amicable
1:43
even as they discuss things
1:45
that are dirty and grimy
1:48
and troublesome
1:50
and yes occasionally very,
1:52
very uncomfortable.
2:04
Today on the show
2:05
there are some guests
2:06
who I would just have on the show
2:08
every single episode.
2:09
If I could,
2:10
I'd really just talk to them every week.
2:11
Have a once a week show.
2:12
It'd just be the Josh Lebson Jonathan Height show.
2:16
John Height is an American social psychologist.
2:20
It's funny.
2:21
After I'd recorded this episode
2:23
and this episode is one in the series
2:25
that I do with the University of Technology Sydney
2:28
where I'm a visiting fellow.
2:30
These are a video tapes.
2:32
You can see them on the UTS website.
2:34
The series is called Permission to Think
2:36
where we try to have mind-expanding conversations
2:38
about some of the things
2:39
that are outside the usual bubble
2:41
of academia
2:43
and the sort of cultural dogmas
2:45
that you might find therein.
2:46
And after I'd had this conversation
2:48
I was sent by three different people
2:51
in different countries all over the world,
2:53
a link to John Height's latest piece in the Atlantic.
2:57
They were ignorant of the fact
2:59
that I knew the guy
3:00
and had just spoken to him
3:01
and indeed had done a tour of Australia
3:05
and New Zealand with him in 2019
3:08
before the pandemic.
3:09
And nonetheless,
3:11
they found his latest article
3:13
so compelling that they wanted to send it to me specifically
3:16
and I encourage you to read it if you have not.
3:19
You can find it on the Atlantic website.
3:21
It's entitled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life
3:24
Have Been Uniquely Stupid,
3:26
subtitled It's Not Just a Faze.
3:28
And that is perhaps a little bit more click-badiate title
3:32
than the article deserves.
3:34
Jonathan is a social psychologist.
3:36
He's at NYU, the New York University
3:39
in the Stern School of Business there
3:41
where he's a professor of ethical leadership
3:44
and he basically focuses,
3:46
he's devoted his life really to analyzing the psychology
3:49
of morality and moral emotions
3:51
and why we feel one way or another about things.
3:54
And that has never been more relevant now
3:57
when we are so emotionally riled up
4:00
about our own righteousness
4:02
and about our own ethical intuitions
4:04
and we are so quick to demonize the other side.
4:07
So John is the expert that we need in a time like this.
4:12
He's written three books.
4:14
The first one, the Happiness Hypothesis,
4:16
finding modern truth in ancient wisdom,
4:18
was looking at sort of the relationship
4:21
between modern science and ancient philosophies.
4:24
His second book, The Righteous Mind,
4:26
which is a really interesting book.
4:28
It's subtitled Why Good People Are Divided
4:30
by Politics and Religion.
4:32
And he talks about how morality really is shaped
4:36
by emotion, not by reason.
4:38
And our reasoning minds are generally doing a bang-up job
4:42
of trying to find reasons retrospectively
4:46
as to why our moral intuitions and instincts are correct,
4:49
rather than our emotions being driven
4:51
by a careful and judicial analysis,
4:54
judicious analysis of the issue at hand.
4:57
And his third book,
4:59
which really became a bombshell
5:01
and I think put him on the,
5:03
at the forefront of the American intellectual landscape
5:07
if he wasn't already,
5:09
was the coddling of the American mind,
5:11
how good intentions and bad ideas
5:13
are setting up a generation for failure.
5:15
He co-wrote that with Greg Lutlianoff
5:17
and was just looking at college campuses
5:20
and free speech issues and de-platforming
5:23
and saying that we're basically training
5:25
a new generation of people to be vulnerable
5:28
and to be hysterical
5:31
and to find victimhood and grievance
5:34
in around every corner.
5:36
We're kind of training them in,
5:38
with the tools of resilience
5:40
and discipline that we know work psychologically
5:43
and make you live a happy, fulfilled,
5:45
and functioning life rather than quivering in a corner,
5:48
thinking that everything is making you upset
5:51
and that you're a victim in this world.
5:54
That book came out of an article
5:57
that John had written in the Atlantic
6:00
with Greg Lutlianoff
6:01
and that article caused a lot of,
6:04
a big flurry of conversation all over the world
6:07
and that turned into a book.
6:09
I'm hoping that this new article
6:10
also is the basis for
6:12
an as yet unpinned future book
6:15
that John will write.
6:17
I hope you enjoy this all too short conversation
6:20
with truly one of the great minds.
6:22
I mean, he's been called, you know,
6:24
to say that he's considered one of the top 25
6:26
most influential living psychologists
6:28
to say that he's among the most cited researchers
6:31
in political and moral psychology
6:33
to say that foreign policy magazine
6:35
called him one of the top global thinkers
6:37
to say that Prospect Magazine
6:39
called him one of the top world thinkers
6:41
is all by the buy
6:43
because all you really need to know
6:45
is that this conversation
6:47
is just scratching the tiniest little millimeter
6:52
and to American listeners
6:53
a millimeter is not very much.
6:54
It's probably like, you know, a billionth of an inch.
6:57
It's not.
6:58
But you don't know what it is anyway,
7:00
so just roll with it.
7:01
This is just scratching the,
7:02
the billionth of a millimeter surface
7:04
of Jonathan's intellect and insight
7:06
into the calamitous
7:08
palace state that we find ourselves in.
7:10
Nonetheless, do enjoy this chat
7:12
with the one and only John Hunt.
7:25
John is fantastic to talk to you
7:27
thanks for being part of this conversation.
7:29
My pleasure, Josh, how nice to see you.
7:32
You've got to piece in the Atlantic recently
7:35
where you compare us to Babel
7:37
or as Americans call it Babel.
7:40
What's the analogy?
7:42
So that ever since around 2014,
7:46
I felt like something changed,
7:49
something just changed deep in the matrix
7:52
of the universe.
7:54
And I've been struggling to figure out ever since.
7:57
I started going crazy and weird on campus
8:00
and then in other parts of society.
8:03
And I love metaphors.
8:05
I crammed too many metaphors.
8:07
Everything I write.
8:09
But I came across the tower of Babel's story of people.
8:13
And you know, most people know,
8:15
oh, you know, people built a tower
8:17
and got knocked over because they were,
8:19
the humans were arrogant.
8:20
But if you read the story,
8:22
there's a key line in there.
8:23
God sees them building the tower.
8:25
Let us go down and confound their language
8:29
so that they will not be able to understand one another.
8:33
And when I reread that line,
8:35
I thought, oh, my God, that's it.
8:37
That's what's happened to us.
8:39
We can no longer understand each other.
8:41
You know, now the world was never such that,
8:43
oh, we all understood each other perfectly.
8:45
But there was, there were shared understandings.
8:47
Like there were things that like most Americans
8:49
could believe.
8:50
Like Osama bin Laden attacked us at 9 a.m.
8:53
But most of us believed that very quickly.
8:55
But that's not going, that doesn't happen.
8:57
And so that's what I was trying to get at.
8:59
That something has changed,
9:01
where fragmented into our little bubbles
9:03
and we, we can't understand each other.
9:07
So let's chart that change.
9:09
You talked about the first decade of the 21st century
9:11
as being a time of techno utopianism
9:13
where the idea about the internet was,
9:15
how could you have a, have tyrannies anymore
9:17
when the, when the demos can all talk to each other?
9:19
This is going to be a utopian time,
9:21
where there'll be no more misinformation
9:23
because the system will correct itself
9:25
because everybody will be able to override sources of misinformation
9:27
and communicate with each other directly.
9:29
And you point to 2011
9:31
as being maybe the high points of, of that.
9:33
You had the Arab Spring,
9:35
you had Occupy Wall Street.
9:37
These were these called sort of organic networks
9:39
that really brought out the power of social media.
9:41
And in the decade or so since,
9:43
what's happened?
9:45
That's right.
9:47
So first, let's back up even before,
9:49
before 2011.
9:51
2011 is a pivotal year.
9:53
But only recently have I come to realize
9:55
those of us who were conscious in the 90s,
9:57
it really did a number on us.
9:59
Because it really makes you feel old
10:01
when you say those of us who were conscious in the 90s
10:03
because you just made me realize
10:05
I was like, wasn't everyone?
10:07
And then I realized, oh, there are human beings
10:09
walking around this.
10:11
There were fully grown adults who were born in the 2000s.
10:13
Some of the young people.
10:15
We call them children,
10:17
but so I went to college in the 1980s.
10:19
And I was very much a child of the Cold War.
10:23
And when I was a kid,
10:25
I was like, oh, my God, overpopulation
10:27
and pollution.
10:29
And the 70s was a gloomy time.
10:31
And the 80s was not much better.
10:33
And then suddenly,
10:35
the Berlin Wall falls.
10:37
And the Chinese want democracy,
10:39
at least for a little while.
10:41
And the economy is booming.
10:43
And the US actually runs a surplus
10:45
in its, you know, we've had the gigantic budget deficit.
10:47
It's except for a few years in the 90s.
10:49
And peace breaks out in Israel.
10:51
And the Palestine is like, wow.
10:53
You know, it's a real decade of incredible optimism.
10:55
And tied in intimately to that optimism,
10:59
were two trends.
11:01
Democracy and technology.
11:03
So if this was the time, you know,
11:05
the 20th century was this giant referendum
11:07
between democracy and tyranny or authoritarianism.
11:09
We won.
11:11
We totally won.
11:13
We didn't get their asses.
11:15
Complete victory.
11:17
You know, we had the phase the end of history.
11:19
Not that nothing would happen.
11:21
But that the end or ultimate aim or goal or direction up history
11:25
is towards liberal democracy.
11:27
So we all believed that by the late 90s.
11:29
And then this miracle thing called the internet comes along.
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And it links everyone together.
11:33
And it brings education.
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And, you know, so the incredible optimism of the 90s.
11:37
I mean,
11:39
it was a joy to be alive then.
11:41
And then it goes on to the 21st century,
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which gets darker.
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We have 9-11.
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It's not quite so optimistic.
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But the early days of social media,
11:51
it was a continuation of this techno-democratic optimism.
11:53
Reaching, as I say in the essay,
11:55
reaching a high point in 2011,
11:57
because that's when you have the Arab Spring.
11:59
And that's when we really felt like
12:01
that was the last shoe to drop was the Arab world.
12:03
Like there was no democracy in the Arab world.
12:05
And wow.
12:07
You know, all it takes is Facebook.
12:09
And before you know it,
12:11
there are going to be democracies and Baghdad and, you know,
12:13
Iran and everywhere.
12:15
And then you're going to occupy.
12:17
When you go, we're going to finally address inequality.
12:19
Like, you know, so,
12:21
oh, and then the final point.
12:23
I just learned this recently is that
12:25
2011 is when Google Translate becomes available on all devices.
12:31
Which is a little footnote in history.
12:33
But if you think about the BabelStore,
12:35
you know, humanity's divided.
12:37
We can't talk to each other.
12:39
Because the key thing about the Babel is
12:41
there were everyone spoke one language
12:43
before God destroys the tower.
12:45
And what God does is he creates this multiplicity of language.
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So we can't understand each other.
12:49
And in 2011,
12:51
oh, my God, the curse is lifted.
12:53
We can literally talk to people through a different language.
12:55
So that's when I was trying to convey
12:57
in the first part of the Atlantic article,
12:59
this long, long human history of division,
13:01
and war, and tribalism,
13:03
bursts into flowers in the Gyingese
13:05
and reaches its culmination in 2011.
13:07
And God says,
13:09
the line is something like,
13:11
and this is only the beginning of what they will do.
13:13
And that's the way it's up.
13:15
This is only the beginning.
13:17
And just to clarify, to clarify for anyone
13:19
who might be averse to religion,
13:21
we're speaking in metaphors here about what we can take from the tile.
13:23
You are not a creationist.
13:25
Or a literal religion.
13:27
I'm a naturalist.
13:29
I'm a social scientist.
13:31
I'm one that's rather sympathetic to religion.
13:33
And I used to be enemies,
13:35
and then we became actually friends who disagree on these things.
13:39
So I'm quoting a character in April.
13:43
Yes.
13:45
And John, there's something else that's going on around that time,
13:47
which is that these social media companies
13:49
that we're all just signing up to for the first time
13:51
in the late 2000,
13:53
the end of the first decade of the 21st century,
13:55
they start innovating in interesting ways.
13:59
Facebook comes up with the like button
14:01
which it didn't previously have.
14:03
And you make the point that the,
14:05
the so you know, your Facebook feed used to just be
14:07
a reverse chronological list
14:09
of anything that your friends had posted.
14:11
There was no tweaking it.
14:13
There was no putting in front of you things that might agitate you more
14:15
or that might entice you to click them
14:17
or like them or share them.
14:19
There was none of that stuff that you didn't like
14:21
and you didn't share anything.
14:23
You typed in
14:25
www.facebook.com on a web browser
14:27
because we didn't really have smartphones yet.
14:29
And you saw what all of your friends were doing.
14:31
Exactly.
14:33
And then Twitter introduces the,
14:35
the reach week button at the same time
14:37
as Facebook introduces the like button.
14:39
You see those things is pivotal. Why?
14:41
They, they are actually transformative.
14:43
And I didn't realize this until I teamed up
14:45
with a guy who actually knows about technology
14:47
to buy us rose stock.
14:49
Well, it was worked in Silicon Valley
14:51
and he's writing a book now called The Outreach Machine.
14:53
So I invited him to help me write
14:55
an article of the Atlantic in 2019
14:57
where we explored what is it about social media
14:59
that has made democracy go haywire.
15:01
And it was from from Tobias
15:03
that I learned about just how transformative those changes were in 2009.
15:07
Because if you go back to 2003-2004
15:11
when I think my space
15:13
and friends are founded
15:15
and Facebook is 2004
15:17
there was no newsfeed.
15:19
It was just look at me.
15:21
Here I am. You're a photos of me.
15:23
Here are links to my friends.
15:25
My favorite bands.
15:27
So it's self-presentation.
15:29
But it's not harmful. It's definitely not harmful to democracy.
15:31
And you can link to other people's pages.
15:33
And that's what it was originally.
15:35
It was kind of just a way to connect.
15:37
And then I don't remember
15:39
what your the newsfeed comes in.
15:41
But that's where things get start to get darker.
15:43
Because now it's not about, hey, look at my wedding photos.
15:45
It's like George Bush said this.
15:47
Or that. Or something like that.
15:49
So the newsfeed is an innovation
15:51
that pulls it away from human connection
15:53
and now brings it more into
15:55
current events, public events,
15:57
and posturing around them.
15:59
But even still,
16:01
what you're getting is what your friends post.
16:03
No algorithms. And nothing to,
16:05
you can't do anything with it.
16:07
You read it.
16:09
And in 2009 though,
16:11
just as Facebook has now achieved total dominance
16:13
before the number several platforms.
16:15
In 2009, it's clear.
16:17
Facebook is winning.
16:19
It completely dominates by number
16:21
three.
16:23
So Facebook introduces the like button.
16:25
So that now you can say that you like certain posts.
16:27
And at the same time,
16:29
Twitter introduces the retweet button.
16:31
So it's not just that you like a post.
16:33
You actually can say that here I like it so much
16:35
I'm sending it up to everybody who follows me.
16:37
And then because you now have two different measures
16:41
at an age, of course, Facebook copies,
16:43
Facebook copies everything.
16:45
They copy the retweet button as their share button.
16:47
And now Facebook has so much information.
16:49
Not just about the links you clicked out.
16:51
They've always watched that.
16:53
Now they have lots and lots of bits of information
16:55
as a user clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks on likes and shares.
16:59
So now they use algorithms
17:01
to feed you more of what is most likely
17:03
to develop engagement.
17:05
And there was no nefarious purpose here,
17:07
I don't think.
17:09
It was just, you know,
17:11
they want to keep you on.
17:13
It's, you know, magazines want to keep your readings.
17:15
They look at their ads and same thing with Facebook.
17:19
But the net effect is that what the algorithms find out on their own
17:23
is that what most engages people is what makes them angry.
17:27
And so that is really the turning point
17:29
where social media is not about connecting people
17:33
who are pursuing their own goals of connecting.
17:37
And it becomes much more about
17:39
hooking people on through emotions that make them generate content
17:44
that makes other people click and like and reach, reach we.
17:48
So that you get everybody sort of in a mutual cycle of outrage.
17:52
And that's the beginning of the end.
17:56
Now, John, a few years ago,
17:58
which feels like a lifetime ago,
18:00
and also feels like yesterday,
18:02
you and I did a tour of Australian New Zealand
18:04
when you came out here and we had a series of conversations.
18:06
I guess this was just before the pandemic.
18:08
Was this in 2019 or that's right?
18:10
It was. It was July.
18:12
And you were sort of a ghost of Christmas future in a way,
18:16
saying like, I have seen the opposite of the promised land.
18:20
It is not a good place. You don't want to go there.
18:22
You don't want to find your society and your culture
18:26
torn apart by where these technologies could potentially take us
18:30
and where the decay of democracy could take us as a result.
18:34
And I suppose if you parachuted us into this scenario three years later,
18:40
my first question would be, what has happened if things
18:43
gone better or worse than you'd feed in recent years?
18:46
Yeah, pretty much everything has got worse.
18:49
And sometimes more quickly than I expected.
18:52
So yeah, so I just looked this up.
18:56
It was great fun traveling with you.
18:58
We did our act in Melbourne and Sydney and Auckland.
19:04
And I just looked at my slides.
19:06
I said that the little mechanism that I did for my talks was I said,
19:09
I am the ghost of British inspired secular multi-cultural
19:13
liberal democracies yet to come.
19:15
You know, like Christmas Carol warned because what I've seen,
19:19
so what I've seen happening as if it's study universities is that
19:23
these weird problems that I wrote about with Greg Lupeon,
19:25
often the cobbling of the American mind,
19:27
they broke out in American universities in 2015.
19:30
And pretty much simultaneously in Canadian and UK
19:34
university, it's the same, the safety isn't the shouting down of
19:37
speakers who students thought were offensive or violent or dangerous.
19:42
All these things hit America, Britain and Canada at pretty much
19:46
the same time, but they seem not to be as bad in Australian
19:50
Zealand.
19:51
And at least what I knew from a distance.
19:53
Now, when I came down to visit it, you I realized actually you
19:56
have all the same trends, they're just a couple years late,
19:59
which is what often happens down under.
20:02
And so the gist of my talk was world very simple.
20:06
All about our countries that descend with British institutions,
20:10
which I believe are the best in the world.
20:12
Travel in Latin America, you know, thank God we were colonized by
20:16
Britain, not Spain or Portugal.
20:19
So I'm a big fan of British institutions.
20:23
And I was sort of warning like, you know, we've messed it up in America.
20:27
We're much more polarized than any other country,
20:29
much more polarized than the other Anglo-Soviet countries.
20:31
And so the question is, is it going to hit you all the same way
20:34
just three years later?
20:35
Or is America uniquely bad?
20:37
We have unique aspects.
20:39
And I'm not sure what the answer is.
20:41
It's clear that things are from what I hear from heterodox
20:43
academy members like Alan Davis, for example.
20:47
What I hear from them is, wow, you're things are getting worse.
20:50
You have all the same trends.
20:52
And I believe that's what the Atlantic article was about.
20:55
All of our institutions are getting stupid at the same time
20:59
for the same reason.
21:01
So that's at least my diagnosis, but I'd love to ask you,
21:04
do you have the sense that this kind of craziness,
21:07
this outrage, this inability to listen?
21:09
Is it just getting steadily worse in Australia?
21:12
Well, I think it's worth picking apart a couple of things
21:15
that we might be talking about that overlap a little bit.
21:18
One is the corrosive effect of misinformation
21:22
and the siloing of people's opinions that social media can create
21:27
so that a person who only ever hears or sees things
21:31
that reinforce their prejudices that either make them,
21:34
you know, paired it to what they think is true
21:37
and demonize things that they don't think is true.
21:39
I think that is having an equally corrosive effect.
21:41
It's harder and harder to talk across the boundary line
21:43
of political and cultural divides.
21:46
Then there's what you just alluded to,
21:48
which is in places like universities and in media institutions,
21:52
there's more and more of a modern mentality against anyone
21:55
who expresses an unpopular opinion,
21:57
especially if that unpopular opinion smells
21:59
or sounds a little bit like something, for example,
22:01
a right wing person might say,
22:03
or heaven forbid a racist might say.
22:05
If it contravenes a conventional progressive notion,
22:09
then the sky falls,
22:11
and of course, then we can also talk about the way
22:13
that social media reinforces that,
22:15
because the social media Twitter mob then puts enormous pressure
22:17
on CEOs and hiring managers and things
22:20
to fire people for having tweeted a stupid joke
22:22
that could be misinterpreted or something.
22:24
And then I think there's a third component,
22:26
which is what it does to our heads.
22:28
And this is another area of your specialty
22:30
to be constantly curating our own existence
22:33
and pulling at these screens
22:35
and judging ourselves in comparison to other people
22:37
and trying to find out how it's in our sense of connection online.
22:40
So if we separate those three things,
22:42
I don't think there's as much cancel culture in Australia.
22:46
There are fewer examples of people being fired
22:48
for having said something that upset the Twitter mob.
22:52
But I do think that there is an equally dire scenario
22:57
in which people who surround themselves
23:00
by information that pandas to them
23:02
and reinforces what they want to believe
23:04
careen off into their own channels.
23:06
And it's becoming harder and harder to stitch together
23:09
the fabric of democracy and the fabric of trust.
23:11
Right.
23:12
Okay, that's very interesting.
23:13
It's very helpful.
23:15
Because if you suppose that we're just,
23:18
we're just little information processing centers
23:22
and then we get social media,
23:25
the siloing effects and the misinformation effects
23:27
would be similar all around the world.
23:30
But if we focus now on the moralist part
23:33
on the mob mentality,
23:35
the elements that really look like a fundamentalist religion.
23:39
And there's been a lot of writing in the United States,
23:41
John McWhorter being the best of them all
23:44
on the beginning.
23:45
He was one of the first to say,
23:46
this is exactly like certain strains of Protestantism
23:51
except without any of the good points.
23:53
And so if you see this as a religion,
23:57
then I think we can see there's two reasons
23:59
why this religion is much more intense than the United States.
24:02
One is that even within the United States,
24:05
there have been maps drawn based on what part of England
24:09
the people came from.
24:10
America has different values.
24:12
And so the Puritans, who settled in New England,
24:14
who then moved across the upper Midwest,
24:17
they were the most moralistic and intense.
24:19
Whereas those who settled the mid-Atlantic reach,
24:22
like Virginia, I think they came from southern England.
24:25
They weren't as morally intense.
24:27
They were more about commercial interests.
24:28
So America is very different based on where in England they came from.
24:32
And I'll just go ahead and a limb here and say
24:34
if the initial group of Brits in Australia were convicts,
24:37
like Puritan ministers are thundering about finally.
24:42
Yeah.
24:43
And then the list I would think.
24:45
Yeah. And John, this predates the social media as well.
24:48
I mean, I remember during nipple gates when Janet Jackson exposed
24:51
her nipple at the Super Bowl, you know, Australia,
24:53
Australia would say, thank God we were settled by convicts
24:57
and not Puritans.
24:58
You know, during Bill Clinton's, you know,
25:02
Monica Lewinsky and those sorts of things,
25:04
those things don't carry the same level of outrage here as they do there.
25:09
But I am interested in your thoughts about what it's doing to our sense of.
25:12
And we should probably define this as well,
25:14
because not everyone is as online as we are.
25:16
But when you talk about John McWaters idea of this being a new religion,
25:19
John McWaters a linguist at NYU.
25:21
Is he an NYU?
25:22
Exactly.
25:23
He's a Columbia.
25:24
Sorry.
25:25
And his theory is that basically the new progressive racially aware
25:30
what one might call sort of woke consensus,
25:33
where which sees societies like Australia and America as being
25:37
irredeemably racist and built upon white supremacy
25:40
and tries to filter all controversies
25:44
and all social relationships through a prism of equity, diversity,
25:49
inclusion, and everything is either sexist or not sexist,
25:53
racist or not sexist.
25:54
That's the context that he's talking about this being basically a sort of
25:57
unfulsifiable religion rather than a rational view of the world.
26:00
Is that fair?
26:01
Yeah, that's right.
26:02
That's right.
26:03
And because it really does not bond to many aspects of Protestantism.
26:06
And he talks about, you know,
26:07
all the rituals of confession and original sin, which is waitness.
26:12
So, you know, my main book, the main book where I wrote about my own work
26:16
is called The Righteous Mind by good people are divided by
26:19
politics and religion.
26:20
And my argument is we evolved to be religious.
26:23
We evolved to have all these mechanisms that find us together
26:26
in order to compete with others.
26:28
That's why we have religion.
26:29
Wouldn't have religion if we didn't have group selection in which groups
26:32
were competing with groups and sometimes killing them,
26:34
or at least out competing them.
26:36
So I think religion is built deeply into our minds.
26:40
And it's secular liberal societies that are the exception that we have to understand.
26:44
The normal state of affairs is to be religious.
26:46
And then the interesting question is,
26:48
what happens when you take people who evolved for intense animistic small scale religion?
26:53
And you take out God, what happens?
26:56
Do they just become rationalists?
26:58
Do they become scientific type people who just want to follow the evidence?
27:02
Or is there a God-shaped hole at the heart of every man, as Pascal said more or less?
27:08
And I think Pascal was right.
27:10
There is a God-shaped hole.
27:12
And people will fill it no matter what.
27:15
And so this is, I think, John McFordor's analysis.
27:18
And I have literally 30 other essays that have made this analysis.
27:23
The similarities between woke culture and religion are overwhelming.
27:26
Andrew Sullivan, so many people have made this.
27:29
It's really hard to miss it.
27:34
And so, and my view as someone who's interested in both biological evolution and cultural evolution
27:41
is that institutions that evolve over time do tend to be what's the word,
27:48
may kindler and gentler.
27:50
They tend to, the institutions evolve and certain forms of religion are pretty functional.
27:56
In the United States, people who are involved in churches tend to have better mental health.
28:00
They tend to be more charitable.
28:02
There's a good things that happen.
28:04
Whereas if you have an institution that comes out of nothing, that just appears on the scene and is untested,
28:11
it's likely to be pretty inhuman.
28:13
And so that's what I think a lot of this is going on.
28:15
It's we have the evolution of a kind of a fundamentalist religion, which is incredibly mainstream,
28:20
not because the people in it are bad, but because they are, in a sense, inventing a new religion against its evil enemies,
28:29
they see as racists primarily.
28:31
And it is evolving not based on what works, but based on who gets the upper hand in terms of prestige.
28:38
What's prestigious?
28:40
So it's kind of a mess, and it's messing us all up.
28:43
And this wouldn't happen if not for social media.
28:46
Social media is making it so viral.
28:48
It seems to be so quickly.
28:50
So that's sort of a messy statement of what I think is going on in the post-babel era.
28:57
That's interesting.
28:58
So you've got a collision, basically, of this new secular religion in which people are jockeying for positions on a hierarchy of almost oppression or righteousness to take the title of your book.
29:10
You've got, as you mentioned, the confession where when someone gets called out by the mob for having told the wrong joke or done the wrong thing or having hosted a panel on which there wasn't a person of color or whatever the transcription was,
29:24
you know, we all know now they release a statement.
29:27
I'm deeply sorry I'm taking some time for myself to look into myself.
29:31
This is a time for me.
29:32
The work I'll try to do better.
29:34
I'll do the work exactly right.
29:35
It's a cleansing.
29:36
It's almost quasi religious cleansing.
29:39
And then on the other hand, you're saying you've got the social media dynamic, which is creating an explosive pressure cooker in which that can happen.
29:48
I'm still interested in what you think is actually going on between why it's social media weaponizing the secular religion of workness so effectively.
29:57
Yeah.
29:58
Okay.
29:59
So first, so let me share with you an amazing discovery.
30:01
I made this morning to give you the backstory and then I'll answer your question.
30:07
So a friend sent me this quote from Jonathan Roush, who is this brilliant commentator.
30:11
He's a journalist.
30:13
He's a scholar at the Brookings institution in Washington.
30:16
And he's been he's he's gay.
30:18
He was really active in making the case for gay marriage.
30:22
He's sort of center right.
30:24
Really interesting guy.
30:26
And he's a great exponent of free speech back in the 90s.
30:30
So he's really heterodox.
30:31
Someone sent me an article that he wrote back in 2002.
30:37
After 9-11, there was a large group on the left that was basically saying.
30:42
Bin Laden isn't the problem America is.
30:45
This is America's fall because America is so oppressive and look what America does.
30:49
And so so Roush writes this amazing essay in 2002.
30:54
This isn't the Atlantic.
30:56
And he talks about Aaron Wildabski was a great social theorist.
31:01
Who had analyzed egalitarianism.
31:04
Egalitarianism is generally good thing, but all virtues carried to access become vices.
31:09
And he was Wildabski and Roush are saying egalitarianism had been carried to this extraordinary extreme, which was bizarre.
31:16
It came in by 2002.
31:19
And here it is.
31:20
This is an exact description of things going on now.
31:22
He says route speaking about Wildabski.
31:24
He concluded that it's many impulses.
31:26
This is the impulses of the egalitarian left.
31:28
It's many impulses.
31:30
The impulse to regard all whites as oppressors and all minority members as victims.
31:35
The impulse to see America as encouraged or incredibly racist and classist and unfair.
31:40
The impulse to impose admissions and hiring quotas and then lie about them.
31:45
The impulse to politicize all academic disciplines.
31:48
The impulse to snuff out dissent.
31:50
We're all aspects of a single controlling imperative.
31:53
That common factor he contended is egalitarianism.
31:57
The belief in the moral virtue of diminishing differences among people of varying incomes,
32:02
genders, races, sexual preferences and especially power.
32:05
So that is an exact description of the woke left today in 2022.
32:12
And so that was true in the late 90s and it was Roush and Woldabski described it in 2002.
32:18
So it's been around for a while.
32:19
None of these things are new.
32:20
What's new is the dynamics.
32:23
So this is the way the left was in comparative literature departments in women's studies departments.
32:29
It was there in different parts of the left.
32:32
But it was far from dominant on the left.
32:35
I've always been on the left and I, you know, I saw this at university, but not in psychology.
32:40
This wasn't in my department.
32:42
This was just in, you know, seven or ten departments in the university.
32:45
What social media did, I believe, is, you know, I don't know if you ever see like,
32:50
when you see like the city gets flooded, it's not just like, oh, there's the city with water.
32:54
No, there's sewage everywhere.
32:56
Like whatever stuff just comes out, everything mixes together when there's a flood.
33:01
What social media did, I believe, is knock down all the walls.
33:04
With social media, all walls are down.
33:06
Everything is Twitter.
33:07
Everything's the public square.
33:09
And this ideology, this extreme egalitarian ideology, which had been confined to a few zones,
33:16
spreads out.
33:18
It's very aggressive.
33:19
It's intimidating.
33:20
And so it dominates, even though most people don't believe it.
33:23
People on the center left who are really the ones who run the institutions,
33:26
are so intimidated by the young people pushing this on social media.
33:30
They can't stand up to being called racist or sexist or transphobic.
33:35
They can't stand up to it.
33:36
So that's what I think is happening.
33:38
Social media changed the dynamics, not the ideas.
33:42
Can institutions like universities fight back against that, or is it impossible?
33:47
Well, it's possible in theory.
33:49
And there's one that did it a little bit, the University of Chicago,
33:53
because ultimately you have to see there are competing narratives in this perspective now.
33:57
Before Babel, it was possible to have a narrative that was widely shared.
34:02
And for example, in universities, we had the sense that we were the descendants of Socrates and of Galileo.
34:10
That's the guilt that I joined in 1987 when I entered graduate school at University of Pennsylvania.
34:17
There's a real sense of continuity in the academic world that we are here to discover truth.
34:23
That was different in the arts that's not the mission.
34:25
But most of the university's scholarship is different means of discovering the truth.
34:29
And right up until about 2014, that was the governing narrative that we are scholars.
34:35
And our goal is to discover.
34:37
But once the Tower of Babel falls, everything is confusion.
34:41
Everything is babbling.
34:43
Everybody is trying to put their narrative in.
34:45
And what I saw on campus after campus was the progressive activists, the group on the left,
34:50
come in with their new narrative, which is exactly what Rouch just described.
34:54
It's everything is racist, everything is oppression.
34:56
If there's inequality, it's because of white supremacy.
34:58
And even though this was obviously nonsense, especially at places like Yale,
35:02
I mean, to say that Yale was, you know, racist and white supremacists,
35:05
it's about the most anti-racist place you could imagine.
35:08
But nobody spoke up to say that.
35:11
Nobody dared contradict it.
35:13
I've spoken to a number of university presidents.
35:15
None of them are woke.
35:16
They're almost all true liberals.
35:18
But they're terrified.
35:19
They couldn't say anything.
35:21
So again, the point of my Atlantic article is, after Babel, it's all about intimidation.
35:27
It's the dynamics.
35:29
What most people believe is irrelevant.
35:31
It's the fear of speaking up.
35:34
That's what has made all of our institutions get stupid at the same time,
35:38
so quickly at the last five to seven years.
35:40
And there's another thing going on here, Jonathan,
35:42
which you address in your other book, The Coddling of the American Mind,
35:45
which you mentioned briefly that you wrote with Greg Lugianov,
35:48
where we're not just talking about this sort of justice mob mentality,
35:54
coming to impose its superior vision of racial equity
35:59
on all funny, dirty, older, middle-aged, straight white guys like you.
36:04
But there's also the fragility component here where it becomes more and more difficult
36:09
to talk about anything that might quote unquote trigger somebody who,
36:14
if they've had, I don't know, if they've been a victim of sexual violence in the past
36:17
or something, then you have to warnings before talking about anything
36:20
that might even broach the possibility of discussing sexual dynamics
36:25
in a way that doesn't pander to them.
36:27
There's a sort of a, I suppose a disrespectful,
36:30
a disrespect towards the resilience of one another,
36:35
where Richard Dawkins says,
36:38
I respect you too much to pretend to respect your stupid ideas.
36:42
And I sort of like that notion of robust debate.
36:47
I mean, that's what my podcast is all about.
36:49
You know, this is what I'm engaged in.
36:51
Like, let's actually have the conversations that are impolite to have
36:54
because that's the only way that you grow up your way towards the truth.
36:57
But is there a relationship there between the justice mob
37:01
which wants to take down anyone who makes the sexist joke on Twitter
37:05
and the students at university and elsewhere in society
37:09
who don't want anyone to be able to talk about anything that they will offend them?
37:15
Yes, there is a connection.
37:18
You know what I like to do?
37:19
I definitely want to segue into the fragility and the depression anxiety.
37:26
But before we do that,
37:28
I need to say something to sort of close up what we were just saying about the justice mob.
37:34
Sure.
37:35
Because what we've been talking about,
37:36
what I've been talking about here,
37:38
is the pathology on the left.
37:40
That's what we've been talking about here.
37:43
I'm a, I'm a, I used to call myself a liberal a while ago
37:47
then I called myself a centrist,
37:50
then I called myself nothing.
37:52
Now I call myself a liberal again,
37:54
but I don't need left.
37:55
I mean liberal, the John Stuart Mill sense liberal institutions liberal society.
37:59
And I'm in a university and I'm writing about the left.
38:04
But let me be crystal clear.
38:07
If you're on either extreme,
38:09
the same dynamics are happening.
38:11
And you are ramped up into a kind of a fundamentalism and extremism
38:16
and a use of intimidation that is devastating your society,
38:20
at least if you're in the United States.
38:22
And so just to be really clear about this,
38:24
the, the, the two biggest,
38:27
the biggest assault on democracy that has happened in my lifetime.
38:32
And since the Civil War,
38:33
is that a sitting president tried to literally steal an election when he had no evidence
38:38
that it would be literally wonder about trying to find evidence.
38:40
I mean, nothing compares to what Donald Trump did.
38:43
Nothing compares to a Republican party that let him do it.
38:46
And that tries to cover it up and lie about it.
38:49
Well, prosecute him for it.
38:51
The only thing that comes even halfway close is the fact that the Republican party
38:56
would not let President Obama appoint a Supreme Court justice seven or nine months
39:01
before this turn ended.
39:03
And then they rushed through one of their own.
39:05
So to be really clear here,
39:06
what I might say clearly in the article is we have this weird asymmetry in that
39:10
in the United States.
39:11
The Republican party is insane, irresponsible.
39:14
They've lost conservatism.
39:16
They have nothing to do with the tradition of conservatism or the Constitution.
39:20
So the Republican party is an incredible danger to democracy.
39:23
And they are being driven insane in part by these events.
39:27
Although for the Republicans,
39:29
cable TV plays a much bigger role than it does on the left.
39:33
So Fox News in particular.
39:35
So, yeah, but I would also just,
39:37
I would also just add that there's a feedback loop
39:39
going on between the clickiness of social media and what Fox News is doing.
39:43
Like Tucker Carlson's non-media.
39:44
He knows what's going to play well and what's going to go viral on socials.
39:47
Well, if you remove social,
39:48
you're right.
39:49
It's the ecosystem.
39:50
Maybe Fox News would be different.
39:51
Yes.
39:52
It is absolutely feedback loop because yes,
39:54
the people on on those right wing stations are,
39:57
they know what's going to play well on social media.
39:59
And if you watch the right wing stations,
40:01
so much of it is about Twitter.
40:02
So much of it is,
40:03
somebody tweeted something.
40:04
So,
40:05
so the problem for Republicans is not just social media.
40:08
It's, it's, it goes back to Fox News in the 90s.
40:10
So I want to make it clear.
40:11
I'm an equal opportunity centrist.
40:13
In fact, I'm thinking starting the movement called we are the 80%.
40:16
I know the middle 80%.
40:18
Like we really can't have a democracy.
40:20
If the outer 10%.
40:21
I mean, of course,
40:22
they're welcome to be in the country.
40:23
But social media has given the two extremes so much more influence.
40:27
And it has made everyone in the middle so much more fearful.
40:30
That this is unsustainable.
40:32
So the problem on the right,
40:34
I believe is the Republican party.
40:36
The problem on the left, I believe,
40:38
is that progressives dominate all the high points of the culture.
40:42
Universities, Hollywood,
40:44
advertising, the arts, museums,
40:47
education, kindergarten through high school, everything.
40:50
So, so both sides are human.
40:53
Both sides are intense.
40:54
Both sides are more realistic.
40:56
And both sides are super empowered by social media.
40:59
Okay.
41:00
So that just to be clear,
41:01
this is not just attacking the left.
41:03
This is about both.
41:04
Yeah.
41:05
Yeah.
41:06
Back to your regularly scheduled question.
41:08
Okay.
41:09
So you asked whether it's related to the fragility.
41:12
And I think it is several ways.
41:14
So when Greg and I first,
41:16
so Greg Lutheran is the first person who really saw this happening in 2013,
41:21
2014,
41:22
in his job as the president of the foundation for individual rights and education.
41:26
He saw this on college campuses on a few campuses by 14.
41:29
Came to talk to me May of 2014.
41:32
And I had just begun to see some of it at New York University where I'm a professor.
41:36
And so we wrote up this article in Atlanta.
41:38
And we thought that the problem was just for college students.
41:41
We thought college is doing something to kids teaching them to think this way.
41:45
So that was our original hypothesis that it was wrong.
41:48
Because we later found after the article came out at August 2015,
41:52
later we found actually it's not just college students.
41:55
It's the exact same stuff is happening to all kids who were born after 1995 or 96.
42:00
In other words, Gen Z.
42:01
We didn't have that label in 2015.
42:03
But by 2017, we knew there's a new generation born around 1996 a later.
42:09
So Gen Z has much, much higher rates of depression, anxiety, self-arm and suicide.
42:14
I've never seen hockey stick graphs like this.
42:16
You've never seen them in mental health where a generation,
42:20
like the curve in a hockey stick at 2012,
42:22
teenagers get much more depressed actions.
42:24
They weren't that way in 2011.
42:26
And by 2014, they're much more depressed actions.
42:29
So now I know, or now I believe,
42:32
that it's the fact that they largely were not on social media on a daily basis in 2009.
42:38
They would just begin and get on.
42:40
But by 2013, 2014, they were and especially Instagram for the girls.
42:45
So we have a, we have a generation wide mental health crisis, especially for girls,
42:50
that begins right around 2012.
42:52
And then these young people arrive on campus around 2013, 2014.
42:57
That's what Greg saw. That's what we wrote about.
43:00
So, and what we called, what do we call it?
43:04
We had a, a vindictive protective.
43:08
It's what we called it.
43:10
Because there are other people call it cry bully.
43:13
It's, it's, it's not even the claim that I'm a victim.
43:16
It's usually the claim that if we allow this person to speak,
43:20
this speaker will deny the existence of trans, transgender people.
43:26
He will be literally killing that or erasing that.
43:30
You know, he will be a danger to them.
43:33
So it was the sense that everyone is fragile.
43:35
And I am protecting these fragile victims.
43:38
And you, Mr. Presby University, you have to disinvite the speaker.
43:42
You have to shut this talk down.
43:44
So it was this indicative protectiveness.
43:47
So I think that's an answer to your question.
43:49
I love that vindictive protectiveness.
43:51
Yeah, cry bullying as well.
43:53
I haven't heard those. That's, that's fantastic.
43:56
I wonder what do you think?
43:58
As you were just talking there, I was thinking about the,
44:00
the retort that I often hear on when people hear someone like you
44:04
talk about something like this, which is, look, there's free speech
44:07
goes both ways.
44:08
I mean, speech has to have consequences as well, right?
44:11
You know, you have the right to say whatever you want,
44:13
but you don't have the right to be free from the consequences of your speech.
44:17
So if you say something that's a white supremacist statement,
44:21
then I have every right to exercise my right to free speech,
44:25
to tweet at your boss and try to get you fired.
44:28
Like you can't try, you don't say what you want in there, right?
44:31
But obviously, I can smell bullshit there,
44:34
but I'm not quite sure what the best retort to that is.
44:38
So, so it's an open question where there's something like
44:42
the first amendment, which says everyone gets to speak.
44:44
And if you wanted to know the Holocaust, go ahead.
44:46
We're not going to put you jail for it.
44:48
Or whether you're opinion style laws or Canadian style laws,
44:51
where you say, if you say certain things, we're going to put you jail.
44:54
So I believe certainly before the age of social media,
44:57
I'm quite confident that our way was better that those laws backfire.
45:01
I'm hopeful that that's still true of I don't, I'm not as confident now.
45:05
But, you know, if I, if I give a talk or if I say,
45:09
you know what, men and women are biologically different.
45:12
And I think that, you know, I think that people should be free to live.
45:16
However, they want it. If the person wants to change their sex,
45:19
that's fine. They should be able to live as a woman.
45:21
But, you know, I think that it would be different if they're playing on a sports TV.
45:26
Like, okay, so I have a right to say that.
45:29
And you have a right to say that I'm wrong.
45:33
And you even have a right to call me a transplant if I were to say something like that.
45:38
But, do you have a right to demand that Amazon stop carrying my book?
45:44
Do you have a right to put my name out in public and encourage people to come and harass me and my family?
45:51
So, and here we're not even talking about constitutional rights.
45:54
John Strattonville was very clear that the issue is not generally limitations from the magistrate,
45:59
and he said from the law, the issue is social.
46:02
He said in 1959.
46:03
And so if you have a climate in which I say something and you say something that's critical of it,
46:10
great.
46:11
But if I say something and you punch me in the nose, and then I say something,
46:15
and you let my house on fire, I'm...
46:17
Right, because of physical, the difference that the progressive or that the workster would say to that is,
46:22
punching you as physical violence, so let's outlaw physical violence, right?
46:26
Lighting a house on fire, that's an act of arson, let's rule that out.
46:30
But that it's part of the big, roiling, you know, delightfulness and messiness of democracy
46:38
that some people will be asking, will be calling for the firing of someone because that,
46:42
or that, you know, let's say Spotify and Joe Rogan or something like Neil Young,
46:46
like I don't want to be associated with this person, so I'm going to pull my,
46:49
you know, all these sort of mini-active coercion that are amplified by social media,
46:54
I find it hard to get my head around what, because clearly I do have a right to call,
46:59
to write a letter to your boss at NYU and say that you should be fired because you're a trans person.
47:03
Like I have a, I mean, I have a right.
47:05
We don't want to live in a world where I'm, where I'm thrown in jail for doing that.
47:08
But I also understand that when, when 100,000 people on Twitter do that for a bullshit reason,
47:15
then you live in a, an untenable world.
47:18
Exactly.
47:19
So, so let's distinguish between what you have a legal right to say and what is conducive to the benefits of free speech and what is not.
47:28
And so, I would have a legal right to say whatever I thought about gender,
47:33
and you would have a legal right to write to the president, demand that I be fired,
47:37
or to say that publicly.
47:39
This is not a question of what you should be thrown in jail, but what I should be thrown in jail for.
47:42
This is a question of what norms give us a better society and what don't.
47:46
And so, if I say, you know, I believe in Jesus Christ, and if you doubt me,
47:53
you will be thrown in jail, or your house will be not not burned down.
47:57
You will be publicly shamed and basically shunned from society.
48:01
That would be a fundamentalist Christian community.
48:03
That would not reap the benefits of free speech.
48:06
I'd say keep the focus in the intimidation.
48:08
That's again, the point of my Atlantic article.
48:11
That's what social media involved in.
48:13
So the metaphor I use in the article is, you know, when you tweet, like, you know, you tweet,
48:19
you tweet, you know, that somebody is this or that, or they should be fired,
48:23
or come get your boy as a common thing.
48:25
What's that?
48:27
I haven't counted that one yet, John.
48:29
Somebody says something.
48:31
And then you tweet and you copy their dean, or the president of the company, or something.
48:36
And you say, oh, look, you know, your employee said this.
48:39
Come get him, like, meaning, you know, punish him.
48:41
Take him out bad, fire him.
48:43
And so, so the issue is not what you're legally allowed to say.
48:48
The issue is, what are norms of discourse?
48:50
And of course you should be allowed to argue back.
48:53
But if I make an argument and you use your speech to get me effectively fired and impoverished,
49:01
because now if there's a scandal, it's forever.
49:04
You can't get a job again, because it'll be online.
49:07
The record will be online forever.
49:09
So I would argue that if your response to speech is to get someone shamed, fired, canceled,
49:17
you know, unemployable, and to bring harassment on that person and their family,
49:23
I would argue that that's not literally violence.
49:26
But in terms of the beneficial or harmful effects on our speech culture or democracy,
49:33
it's the same as violence.
49:35
Most people throughout history would have preferred death to dishonor,
49:39
you know, being shunned, being ostracized, being bad.
49:45
So then the next logical pushback to that, John,
49:48
is well, what if you say that, you know, Hitler didn't have everything right,
49:52
but he got a lot of things right.
49:54
And you know, it is true that the Jews have been troublemakers since the dawn of time.
49:58
So you say something that is really beyond the bounds of reason,
50:05
beyond the bounds of humanity.
50:07
And there should be, I think we all agree, there should be a social, a program for that.
50:11
I wouldn't want to work in an environment in which a flagingly anti-Semitic person was working.
50:16
And I think that would probably be just grounds for firing them.
50:19
How do you...
50:20
So then the works just says, there's very much to them.
50:23
So here, I think we have to...
50:26
These conversations about where do you draw the line?
50:29
I find them to be impossible and unfruitful,
50:33
unless we specify the institution that we're talking about.
50:37
And so a lot of these conflicts have taken place on campus.
50:41
And so, you know, what speakers should be invited.
50:44
So if...
50:46
So on campus are telos, our purpose, our goal, what we do is to find truth.
50:53
So if some guy were to come and you see these people in the straight corner sometimes,
50:58
you know, yelling about homosexuality and sin and Jesus said this.
51:02
They weren't invited.
51:03
They have a free speech, right, to stand around the corner and shout that.
51:06
But if we were to bring them into a classroom or if someone were to bring them into a classroom to rant,
51:11
no, they shouldn't be invited into speak to a classroom.
51:13
This has nothing to do with our telos, our purpose of finding truth.
51:17
But what if there was...
51:19
You know, what if there was...
51:21
What if there was a scholar who discovered after the fall of the Soviet Union
51:26
that actually some of the things we thought about the Holocaust were actually not true?
51:30
And that maybe the number wasn't six minute.
51:32
It was four and whatever.
51:33
Just suppose someone's a scholar found documents that minimized something about the Holocaust.
51:40
Should that person be allowed to speak on campus?
51:43
I would say, of course, of course, if they're a scholar and they use scholarly methods,
51:48
then of course they should be allowed to speak on campus.
51:51
It doesn't matter if people are offended.
51:52
I'm Jewish.
51:53
I would love to see...
51:54
I mean, I would be perfectly happy to engage with somebody who had scholarship on Nazis or the Holocaust.
51:59
Now, there's no point in bringing in someone romantic and raping with no credentials.
52:03
So let's talk about the...
52:05
You know, let's talk about the institution.
52:07
Now, let's say your example, I think, was in a company.
52:10
So let's suppose you are in a company.
52:13
Now, in a company, you do not have free speech rights.
52:15
Absolutely not.
52:16
I mean, of course, you can say what you want outside, but even still,
52:19
the company can fire you for any reason other than race, gender, and five other categories.
52:25
So if you're in high executive Pepsi, and you start seeing that on your Twitter feed,
52:30
and that's bad for Pepsi, yeah, they can fire you.
52:33
I don't think they should have to let you rant maybe if you're going to harm the company.
52:37
So you tell me the domain, and I'll tell you what I think about when there should be consequences.
52:42
The point about a scholarly person making a scholarly point is also tricky,
52:47
because with social media, there are so many people...
52:51
I mean, there are so many people who have PhDs and who have illustrious biographies
52:56
that some of them are going to be batshit crazy.
53:00
And so, you know, I've alluded to Neil Young pulling his music from Spotify
53:05
over the Joe Rogan COVID misinformation scandal.
53:08
Well, Joe was only talking to scholarly people, you know, Dr. Malone,
53:13
or whoever this guy was, has a PhD, he was one of the early founders of, you know,
53:17
DNA technology.
53:18
And so it becomes really, really tricky, because he's a person in a public platform
53:24
who has credentials, he's not ranting and raving, but he's saying things
53:29
that the vast, vast bulk of medical professionals disagree with.
53:33
And he's making insinuations and illusions that are conspiratorial
53:38
and that are frankly, I believe, to be untrue and misleading.
53:42
On the other hand, in a big, boisterous democratic society,
53:46
there is space for those voices, so I can just see the whole social media edifice,
53:51
this whole mosaic of little people kind of swarming to and from
53:55
and trying to figure out in real time what is worth paying attention to,
54:00
what is worth objecting to, and how the objection happens.
54:03
I don't know if there's an answer to that.
54:04
I mean, I feel like we're muddling towards a sort of a higher idea of a program here.
54:10
Don't try to get a person fired for what they have said,
54:14
if you can avoid it.
54:18
Don't try to misinterpret what they say and publicly shame them on the basis
54:22
of your reinterpretation of their words.
54:27
Try to take them at face value and try to interpret them in the most generous possible way.
54:32
I mean, if everyone was operating on that baseline and all of the people
54:35
who you objected to, you were able to actually engage within good faith,
54:38
then the whole problem evaporates, doesn't it?
54:41
The problem is that, as you know, we're messy humans and we don't buy it that way.
54:44
Yeah, again, I would want to put it within specific institutions.
54:47
So what you just said is actually reasonable in an academic setting.
54:51
And that was more or less the way things were until 2015.
54:54
Not in all disciplines.
54:55
There were some disciplines in which people are nasty.
54:57
But for the most part, if I was in any academic setting and someone made an argument
55:01
and I interpreted it uncharitably in a way that was distorting,
55:04
I would be called out for not getting it right.
55:06
But that doesn't, that's not as common anymore.
55:10
What you said would be lovely and wonderful if all of society did it,
55:14
but I recognize that's not really, that's not going to happen to public space.
55:20
To go to your example of Joe Rogan, I think what we need to really distinguish
55:25
here is between what would be beneficial in the instance and then what happens
55:31
if that becomes the policy.
55:34
And so, yes, you could definitely make an argument that stopping Joe Rogan,
55:40
having COVID skeptics on, would slow the spread of the virus if it increased for that.
55:45
You could make that argument, maybe it's even right.
55:49
And we've done that over and over again.
55:51
Anybody who suggested that COVID might have come from a lab
55:55
was shunned and destroyed and shamed and literally called a racist,
55:59
no matter what you do, you'll be called a racist.
56:02
And Google hides certain search results.
56:05
If you do certain searches, you won't get the results that you're looking for
56:08
if Google thinks that those are not socially valid or valuable.
56:12
And actually, these cases, you can make the case that that's for the good.
56:16
But what happens when you do that?
56:18
What happens when you do that is people who are on the right,
56:22
or now even in the center, they know that everything's bullshit.
56:26
They know that these, what Jonathan Ranch called Epistemic Authorities,
56:30
we should be able to trust professors, researchers, doctors,
56:35
the American medicalist, we should be able to trust them.
56:38
But we can't.
56:39
And I have to say, I don't trust the American Medical Association
56:42
and the Medical Association as much anymore because of how they behave in COVID.
56:45
They, you know, the use of noble lies, the many demonstrations
56:51
that they're on team blue, they're on the left, the democratic team.
56:56
I think I've devastated the authority of the scientific authorities.
57:00
Journalism, of course, has always been, you know, people love to hate journalists.
57:04
But boy, the New York Times, I mean, used to be much more respected
57:08
five or seven years ago than it is today.
57:11
And so when we lose trust in all of our Epistemic institutions,
57:15
by way, I mean 70% of the country, people in the middle and on the right,
57:19
when people lose trust in universities, newspapers, medical authorities,
57:23
then we're lost, we're in babble, we have no authority,
57:28
we cannot trust our institutions.
57:30
So I think we paid a tremendous cost by trying to silence people
57:35
in the name of what we now think, what we currently think is the moment of truth.
57:40
I'm so glad you brought it back to trust, because this is a great way to start to wrap this up, John.
57:45
The, you know, you talk about when trust is eroded
57:50
in all of those big institutions, journalism and the media
57:53
and the academy and public health and government and politicians,
57:57
every decision becomes contested.
58:00
And so the squabbling, and then social media empowers that, right?
58:05
So, you know, we can all have our arguments about everything.
58:08
We all have to do our own research about everything and figure everything out,
58:11
because the truth is, right?
58:13
And that reminds me of the three things that you say are sort of bind to democracy together.
58:20
You know, trust in institutions or, you know, the sanctity of institutions.
58:25
You also talk about shared stories, which you alluded to earlier,
58:28
but the idea of having a common narrative and social capital.
58:33
Do you want to just give a brief summary of that as maybe a way to wrap this up and tied together?
58:38
Sure.
58:39
So, a large diverse sector democracy is a miracle.
58:43
It shouldn't exist.
58:45
You know, I've heard it said that the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly.
58:47
I don't know if that's really true, but, you know,
58:50
but given everything we know about human history,
58:53
to have a diverse society that functions as well as our liberal democracies
58:59
did in the late 20th century is kind of a miracle.
59:02
And there are certain, you have to look at what are the forces holding us together
59:08
that what you could call the centripetal forces holding us to the center
59:12
and what are the centrifugal forces pulling us apart.
59:15
And traditional societies use shared blood, shared gods, shared enemies.
59:20
These are the ways the tribes hold themselves together as they battle out the tribes.
59:23
This is not what we want.
59:24
This is not what we can have in our modern societies.
59:28
But having a shared story of who we are that has some virtues in it.
59:31
And in America, we especially had to do this because we had nothing else in common.
59:36
So, as shared stories, institutions that we respect so that we trust them to resolve disputes
59:42
and we accept the decision.
59:45
And then social capital, networks of trust.
59:48
This is what Alexis Toteville observed about America.
59:51
When he traveled here in the 1830s, that when there's a problem,
59:54
we get together and we fix it.
59:55
We don't wait for the king or the nobles to do it as they would in France and England, he said.
1:00:00
So, because we had a lot of social capital in our communities.
1:00:04
And my argument is that social media has weakened all three of those.
1:00:07
It certainly has shattered any possibility of a shared narrative.
1:00:11
That's the babble metaphor.
1:00:14
It has spread extraordinary distrust in our institutions.
1:00:18
There's a lot of research on that now.
1:00:21
Because social media is very good at tearing things down.
1:00:24
But it's terrible at building.
1:00:26
That's what Mark and Goury says.
1:00:29
This brilliant form of CIA and this great book called Revolta Public.
1:00:34
And then the third thing is social capital.
1:00:36
The idea back to the beginning of our conversation, that golden age of technical democratic optimism.
1:00:43
It was, wow, social media makes it easy to connect with everybody.
1:00:48
You have so many more connections.
1:00:50
You can keep in touch with your high school friends.
1:00:52
It's going to be the greatest boom to social capital.
1:00:55
And it looked like it was.
1:00:56
It did in the early 2000s.
1:00:58
It did.
1:00:59
But now it looks like it does.
1:01:01
It's turned nasty.
1:01:02
Like a lot of these platforms, Twitter, TikTok, all of them start off.
1:01:07
They love the places they pretty soon get much nastier.
1:01:11
So I think that's where we find ourselves.
1:01:13
Having lost the binding, the border that holds us together.
1:01:18
And the challenge of the next decade or two is going to be.
1:01:22
To figure out how to counteract that.
1:01:25
Obviously we're never going to get rid of social media.
1:01:27
But how do we.
1:01:28
Changes that's not so toxic.
1:01:30
How do we harden our democratic institutions so that let's say our courts can still function.
1:01:35
Even though people don't trust them.
1:01:37
How can we restore trust in a polarized time.
1:01:41
And lastly, how do we prepare the next generation?
1:01:44
Because Gen Z, as we've just briefly spoke about, Gen Z is so anxious to crest and fragile.
1:01:50
And it's not their fault.
1:01:52
We deprived them of the opportunities to settle result to work out conflicts themselves.
1:01:56
We're always there supervising.
1:01:58
At least in America.
1:01:59
And also in Australia, I learned New Zealand.
1:02:01
They actually let kids out to play more.
1:02:03
But.
1:02:04
Good.
1:02:06
We've denied kids the very experiences of play of unsupervised play in which they practice democratic stills.
1:02:14
So I'm worried because these trends are all back at you odds are we're going to come through it.
1:02:19
History is long and it's full of setbacks, but they.
1:02:23
Oh, it's been a steady upward arc other than those setbacks.
1:02:27
So odds are we'll find a way through this.
1:02:29
But right now, I think we can expect things to get worse for another 5 or 10 years.
1:02:33
I mean, who knows how long.
1:02:34
But I don't think there's going to be any quick turnaround here.
1:02:38
On that optimistic pessimistic note, Jonathan, hi.
1:02:41
Thanks so much for being with us.
1:02:43
It's great to talk to you.
1:02:44
My pleasure, Josh.
1:02:45
Thanks for giving me this chance to rant and lament.
1:02:53
Uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postuma.
1:02:56
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1:02:59
May your day be fruitful, your mind humble, your enemies generous,
1:03:04
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