Are You Skeptical Enough? Challenging Your Beliefs with Michael Shermer
If you don't find some of your beliefs challenged by this episode, you weren't listening hard enough. Michael defends holocaust deniers, debunks anti-vaxxers and much more in a sweeping conversation that hits at the heart of some of the most controversial issues of our time. How do we search for truth in a world full of noise? How do we uphold free speech and freedom of inquiry during that quest? How do we wrestle with some of the biggest and toughest issues we face as a society today?
Dr. Michael Shermer is an author, the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, a regular contributor to Time.com, and Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. His new book is Giving the Devil his Due, a defense of Free Speech and Open Inquiry in Politics, Culture and Science. He is also the author of The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies, and many others. He appeared on such shows as The Colbert Report, 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, and Larry King Live (but, proudly, never Jerry Springer!). He has been interviewed in countless documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, and other science and learning channels. He regularly contributes opinion editorials, essays, and reviews to: the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Science, Nature, and other publications. His two TED talks, seen by millions, were voted in the top 100 of the more than 1000 TED talks.
We have to give the devil his due, for the sake of our own safety
Should we defend holocaust deniers and let them speak?
Censoring people often backfires and builds the credibility of that which is trying to be silenced
The "backfire effect" that happens when you try to "ban evil"
No one's omniscient - there is no 100% certainty on any issue. The only way to improve our thinking is by talking through issues.
We often THINK we understand things, but we actually don't.
Most people in the general public don't understand most issues.
How do we deal with the dangerous of "deniers" in a world where most people don't understand most issues?
It's a virtue - when the facts change, you change your mind.
Any polarizing claim is usually not rooted in empirical truth, but rather a more fundamentalist idea
What does it mean to be an enlightened humanist?
How do we build a moral system that maximizes human flourishing?
Often most political positions are simply expressions of deeper fundamental beliefs
Thank you so much for listening!
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Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research
General
Podcast THE MICHAEL SHERMER SHOW
Media
Wall Street Journal - “‘The Scout Mindset’ Review: How to ‘Update’ Beliefs” by Michael Shermer
Patheos .com - “Jordan Peterson and Michael Shermer Muddle through the Resurrection” by Esther O’Reilly
Popular Mechanics - “How You've Been Conditioned to Love Conspiracy Theories” by Joshua Pease
Article Directory on Scientific American, Closer to Truth, and Big Think
Evolution News - ““This Is Not Your Father’s Creationism”: Atheist Michael Shermer Meets Stephen Meyer” by David Klinghoffer
Macmillian Publishers - Author Profile - MICHAEL SHERMER
General Surgery News - “The Complexity of Conspiracy Theories” By Bruce Ramshaw, MD
TED Radio Hour - Why Do We Believe In Unbelievable Things? (2014)
[Podcast] Into the Impossible - EPISODE 38: GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE: A CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL SHERMER & BRIAN KEATING
Videos
Michael’s YouTube Channel
Mythvision Podcast - The Believing Brain: Why We Believe Anything At All? - Dr. Michael Shermer
Cambridge University Press - Michael Shermer on his new book, Giving the Devil his Due
StarTalk - StarTalk Podcast: Coronavirus & Conspiracy Theories, with Michael Shermer & Neil deGrasse Tyson
Powerful JRE - Joe Rogan Experience #961 - Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson & Michael Shermer
Books
Amazon Author Page - Michael Shermer
Audiobook Directory - Michael Shermer
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer
Giving the Devil his Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer
Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet, bringing the world's top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts, Matt Bodnar and Austin Fable.
[00:00:18] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than 5 million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries.
If you don't find some of your beliefs challenged by this episode, you weren't listening hard enough. Our guest, Dr. Michael Shermer, defends Holocaust deniers, debunks anti-vaxxers and much more in a sweeping conversation that hits at the heart of some of the most controversial and polarizing issues of our time. How do we search for truth in a world full of noise? How do we uphold free speech and freedom of inquiry during that quest? How do we wrestle with some of the biggest and toughest issues we face as a society today? We talk about all that and much more in this interview with Michael.
Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on there along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time For What Matters Most in Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word SMARTER to the number 44222.
In our previous episode, we brought back author Charles Duhigg to share the secrets and the science of building better habits. Be sure to check out that episode. Now, for our interview with Michael.
Dr. Michael Shermer is an author, the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, a regular contributor to time.com, and a presidential fellow at Chapman University. His new book is Giving the Devil his Due, a defense of free speech and open inquiry in politics, culture and science. He's also the author of The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies and many other works. His two TED Talks seen by millions were voted in the top 100 of more than a thousand TED talks. And he's been featured on media outlets around the globe.
[00:02:35] MB: Michael, welcome to The Science of Success.
[00:02:38] MS: Thanks for having me.
[00:02:40] MB: Well, we're very excited to have you on here today. And some of the themes and ideas you talk about in your new book, I think, are really important. And you open the book with a question, which I want to start with now, which is who is the devil and what is his due?
[00:02:59] MS: Right. Yeah. So giving the devil his due comes from that play and movie, the A Man for All Seasons, in which the argument is made that we have to censor speech and control people's lives and have to change the laws for that. And then the rebuttal is, yeah, but what happens when you're the person who's being challenged and the laws are all cut down that would normally protect you. Now you're in the minority position. You have no defense. So we have to give the devil as due for our own safety’s sake. So the devil is whoever you disagree with, whoever is you're in opposition to, whatever it is, politically, religiously, whatever your ideology your beliefs are. And it's kind of counterintuitive. Historically, the force of big agencies and governments and institutions to silence people has always been there. It's just natural to want to keep power, get into power, keep power and squelch anybody who challenges you. And in a modern society, that's largely done through rhetoric, through language, through speeches, through protests. And it's natural for governments to want to do that. So the founders of the country outlined exactly why you have to have a free press and the freedom to assemble and protest and free speech for individuals to say whatever they want. It's the only thing – The fact that they even had to write it down tells you that that's not natural.
And even today, the so-called cancel culture. It's just natural for people to want to silence those who are not going along with what you think is the right program to institute better race relations, or gender relations, or a more just and fair society and so on. And so we have to kind of remind ourselves of this all the time.
So the book, it’s a collection of essays over the years mainly focused on those and related themes. And then I gave some examples of why this is important. And like for example, I even defended David Irving, the famous Holocaust denier, who I’ve written a whole book about, the Holocaust denial called Denying History. And so I knew him and had interviewed him for the book. And I pretty much debunked all of his claims. So I think he has really nothing useful to say that has any semblance of reality when it comes to the Holocaust, right?
And yet when he showed up in Austria to give a speech, he was arrested at the airport. His passport was flagged. So when they scan the passport, they just pull you aside, and the police come and that was it. Next thing you know he's in jail, he has a trial. He's convicted and. So I wrote a letter to the judge saying, “Hey, I don't agree with this guy, but I put the principle of free speech. And above that even, it's even more foundational than anything else. And that essentially he was arrested for a thought crime. He hadn't even spoken yet. He was just thinking about giving a speech and he got arrested.” That's pretty draconian.
The fact is, for your listeners who are not familiar with this, Holocaust denial is illegal in quite a few countries in Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada. Even in Canada where hate speech laws are pretty strict. And so denying the Holocaust is under that rubric. That it could incite violence against Jewish people. Therefore it's hate speech. Therefore it should be censored. And we don't go along with that, at least legally in the United States, and for a good reason. Because who's to decide what's Holocaust denial?
I mean, Irving says, “Well, it was only like 1 million Jews who died, not 6 million.” Well, is that denial? A million still a lot. What if he said it was a hundred thousand? Where do you draw the line? What if one historian says it was 5.1 million and another one says it's 6.2 million? That's roughly the range that you see in the historical literature. Is the lower estimate, is that denial? What is that? Is it revisionism? Or if let's say there's a great debate in North American circles, North American historians, about how many Native Americans died after the European colonial movement began in the early 16th century? And it's a debate because no one kept track of how many there were here, say, in 1500. It could be 90 million, 70 million, 50 million, 10 million. The numbers kind of bounce all over the place. And how many died of disease versus guns and swords? It's not clear.
But let's say I think it was 10 million who died out of the 90 million, and therefore it doesn't count quite the same as if it was 80 million out of the 90 million who died, am I a denier for offering a different perspective? So you see where I’m going with this. That the problem is once you set up that system to censor people that are out of the mainstream, where do you draw the line? And who, who's going to decide this? You're going to have something like a thought police system, a language police? Somebody who monitors this stuff in the government or anything like that? So that's kind of the focus.
[00:08:17] MB: Well, we're jumping right into the meat of it. I figured we would probably talk a little bit about David Irving and Holocaust denial, and I have actually some questions around some other perspectives you have on that. But you bring up a really interesting point, which is this idea of if that kind of speech is banned, then you can't really have an intelligent discussion or exploration trying to get to the truth of the matter, right? How many Native Americans were killed, right? If we can't ask some of those questions, then we can't ever really find out the truth about what happened and how many actually died. And it becomes a very slippery slope.
[00:08:54] MS: Yeah, exactly. And once you start censoring people, then that becomes a cuss of love for them. So like, for example, when there was a movement to censor them in the late 90s and early 2000s, they kind of took that up as a cuss. Like, “Ooh! We must really be on to something, because look what they're doing to silence us. So send your donations right here at this PO box. We are getting the attention of the sensors,” right? So it even backfires against you, because it leads them to be even more motivated.
And then bystanders who know nothing about it might look from the outside in and go, “Huh! Yeah, why are they silencing these people? What are they saying that they don't want me to hear?” So you get the band and Boston effect. And what do you mean that book is banned? In that case, I really want to read that book if they're telling me I shouldn't read that book. So my approach is just the opposite. Just let them have their say. Say whatever they want. Publish all their newsletters. Write all the books that they want. Let everybody have their say. And that's how I approached it. That particular case I said, “Just send me a list of the things that you think are most problematic about the traditional story of how the Holocaust unfolded and why and so forth.” And they did. They sent me this list of like the 39 unanswered questions about the Holocaust. So Alex Grobman and I co-authored this book Denying History. We just went through the list. And we went to Holocaust historians. We went to all the death camps in Europe, all six of them. We went to Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. We went through the archives. And we just kind of knocked them down one by one and we published all that first in Skeptic Magazine and the short version, then the much longer version in a book. And say, “Here's what they say and here's how we know they're wrong.” Boom! End of story. And then you decide.
No one's silencing anybody. And to me, that's the best approach, because then eventually they'll just go away, because it's clear they don't have a good argument. And we do this with everything. Creationists, what are their best what are their best arguments about the theory of evolution? And in both of these cases I noticed observing debates in which, say, a professional biologist would debate a creationist like Duane Gish, and they did terrible, because they thought if I just walk in there with knowing a lot about evolutionary biology, I’ll have no problem. Well, the debate isn't about evolution. It really isn't. It's about their particular talking points, and religion and science and kind of meta issues. And if you're not prepared for that or the particular strategies of like tiny little minutia, like how do you explain the evolutionary origins of this particular organ and this animal? And if you're not at the ready, if you don't know that particular one, then you just go, “Well, I don't know.” And then you look like an idiot and that other person looks like they got you.
And the Holocaust deniers, they do the same thing. Like why does the door on the gas chamber at Mauthausen and not locked? Come on. What's the story with that? If you're going to gas people in a gas chamber, you got to lock the door. So Alex and I, we went there. We went to Mauthausen. We went to the gas chamber. And sure enough, the door doesn't lock. And it's like, “Yeah, that's kind of weird. So what's the deal with that?”
And so we had a little guide with us and she didn't know. And then we got to her boss and he didn't know. And then we got the next guy up and he didn't know. And then all of a sudden I’m on the phone with the vice pre, whatever he was, the head of the department of all parks and recreation and memorials throughout all of Austria, like the top guide. He's like, “What's this about the door not locking?” I’m like, “Yeah, what's the story with that?” “Why do you want to know?” I’m like, “Well, we're historians. We're here to you know debunk the Holocaust deniers,” just so he understood we were not there to cause trouble. And he's like, “Oh, I see. All right.” And he didn't know. He's got to look it up.
And so finally it took me like two years to get the answer to that question, which was that that door that was put on there after the war, because the original door was – The gas chamber was dismantled and the parts were sent to different museums around Europe. And I forget where it is now, it's in Hungary or something in some museum. I was like, “Oh, all right.” So I mean nobody seemed to know that. It took me a long time to find that out.
Now, this is unimportant in the big picture really. It's kind of a tactic that deniers use. Like if you can't explain the door, then there was no Holocaust. They have a whole chain of reasoning about that. David Irving famously said during his trial in England, “No holes, no Holocaust.” It was like almost a t-shirt slogan. And people were baffled by this, “
What the heck is he talking about no holes, no holocaust?” Well, it was focused on Auschwitz II-Birkenau, had four big gas chambers and crematoria. And the design of these things was there was the – It was a subterranean gas chamber so that the SS guards got on top of the roof, which is only like three feet above the ground, and then they pour these Zyklon-B pellets through these holes in the roof.
And so Irving had this whole thing, “Well if you go there, you'll see there's no holes in the roof.” And like, “Huh! Yeah, that's weird.” So we went there and sure enough there're no holes in the roof because there's no roof. If the Nazis dynamited at the whole place, it's just rubble.” So it's like, “Oh! Okay.” So that was an easy one to debunk. But it's like that's the kind of strategy that if you don't rebut it, then either people that know something about it or baffled, or at worst, outsiders is looking in going, “Huh! Yeah. What's the deal with that? Why are there no holes? Hey, I wonder if there is something about this Holocaust thing we've been bamboozled about. Maybe this Irving guy has something interesting to say. I should look into this more.” Then you have a rebuttal, “Oh, okay. So the Nazis dynamited the gas chamber. I see. Okay. Never mind. There's nothing to this Holocaust denial thing.” Again, just people have their say and rebut their speech with better speech.
[00:14:35] MB: I think it's really important to highlight the fact that you quite literally wrote a book refuting holocaust deniers, and yet you still staunchly advocate for the David Irvings of the world to be able to share their opinions. And correct me if I’m misunderstanding this, but the reasoning is basically that by letting those opinions out, you can freely debunk them and let people realize, “Hey, this is completely ridiculous, and it's totally disproven.” And by bottling them up or trying to, as you later called in the book, ban evil, you actually start to let some of those things ferment and you rob people of the ability to have the discourse around what those issues are and why those things are or aren't the case.
[00:15:22] MS: Yes, and this this backfire effect as I call it, it's particularly prominent in college campuses now with the whole censorship, and safe spaces, microaggressions, things you can and cannot say. It's political correctness from the 80s and 90s just run amok. And this is mainly related to race and gender issues. People that are not in the academy, they’re kind of watching this clips on Fox News pretty much every night about campus craziness. And they think, “Huh! Yeah, what's the story with that? What's the deal? Why can't we talk about gender? Why can't we talk about these race issues.”
And on campuses, everybody knows there's certain things you just cannot talk about. There's a lot of self-censorship. This is a big concern that a lot of us have. But that aside, the backfire effect is that people of all places, the academy, universities and colleges, people are thinking, “Well, what's going on over there? Why should I send my kid to some college that cost fifty thousand bucks a year and they're not even allowed to talk about important issues? I mean, come on there's not one right answer.”
And just to kind of give one more fundamental principle here underlying all this is that no one's omniscient. No one has the answers for sure. There's no 100% certainty on any issue. So the only way to find out, kind of approach the truth or get closer to truth, is to talk about it. We only have our thoughts that are locked in our heads. And the only way to get those thoughts out is by pan or speech. And so we have to protect people to put that out there even if it means defending the David Irvings, or let's say, Jared Taylor, or any of the you know kind of modern neo-Nazi or white supremacists. Let them have their say and just show, “Well, why is it that they're wrong?”
I mean, if somebody says, “Well, blacks are score lower on IQ tests than whites. And white score lower than Asians. Okay. Well, why is that? Well, it's obvious it's just pure culture, 100% culture the tests are biased.” Well, yes. That's one hypothesis. And there's some evidence for that. But there's other arguments that are made of which you're not even really allowed to talk about on college campuses. And that only makes people think, “Huh! Yeah, I bet there is something else, and that's why they don't want to let us talk about it.”
So instead I said, yeah, go ahead. Charles Murray wrote that famous book, The Bell Curve, in which he talks about these genetic inherited differences along with cultural differences. And he was roundly criticized for that. And, well, to me let the Charles Murrays of the world have their say. And then just explain exactly why that argument is wrong. I want to know. What's the counter argument to that? Or the climate deniers, how do we know global warming is real and human caused? How do you know that? This guy says it isn't. What’s the story? I want to know. Where can I read about this? Well, this issue particularly, we're all over that. We have a couple of really classic articles at skeptic.com if you just Google, go there and just search under global warming, you'll see these, “How we know global warming is real and why it's human caused. Here are the 25 arguments, or the 15 arguments.” And here's what the skeptics say and here's why they're wrong. Boom! Boom! It's because people really do want to know that. Again, no one knows for sure. I mean, climate science is a technical science. How do I know? What do I know? I’m not a climate scientist. I just see stuff on CNN. I see stuff on Fox News. I read the Wall Street Journal. I read The New York Times. I don't know what to think. That one person says this. The other person says that. They don't agree with each other. How am I supposed to adjudicate this as an outsider? So you got to let people have their say. And that's giving the devil his due.
[00:18:56] MB: And this really dovetails into the broader importance of freedom of inquiry, right? And this idea that, to me, and you touched on it a moment ago, there's a really important humility in admitting that I don't know all the answers. And oftentimes if we can't explore and truly have an open dialogue about why certain social or political issues are the way that they are, then we can't really get to the root cause and actually solve it. And when you start to criticize people for the questions they're asking, even if those questions are coming from a place of curiosity, humility and desire to ultimately solve an issue, to me, that's when things start to get very dangerous.
[00:19:44] MS: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of research in cognitive psychology about people's – The sort of mismatch between people's ideas about what they know and what they actually know. And the latter is usually far less than the former. So if you ask somebody something simple, like do you know how an internal combustion engine works? Or do you know how a zipper works? Or do you know how a toilet works? People, “Oh, yeah, of course.” “Explain it.” “Well, the thing goes there, and the thingy does that.” They're dumbfounded, right?
So most of us think we understand something. You kind of visualize it in your head. And that's something simple. But if you say, “I’m against NAFTA.” Or, “I’m against our current immigration policies.” Well, what is NAFTA? Well, it's that North America Free Trade. Yeah, I don't even know what countries are in that. They're dumbfounded. What is our current immigration policy? What percentage of U.S. GDP is allocated or the federal government budget is allocated for foreign aid and support? Oh, it's like ten percent. No. It's like less than one percent. Now people have an idea of what they think is right and wrong about things or that they understand things, but they don't.
So really when they opine about issues like global warming, or evolution, or whatever, really what they're doing is just kind of socially signaling I trust the institutions of science. Therefore I think global warming is real and human cause because that's what scientists are telling us. And I trust them. Or I don't trust big scientists. I don't like government agencies and big corporations and things like that. And therefore I don't trust them. And therefore I doubt it, vaccines, or climate change or whatever.
But if you ask people, “Well, what is the science behind climate center? What do you know about vaccines?” Again, people are largely dumbfounded on both the left and the right. So liberals who say, “Yeah, I fully accept global warming is real and human cause.” Studies show that, in general, they have very little knowledge more than conservatives who doubt it. In other words, no one really understands climate science in the general public. I mean, we just have this kind of general understanding like, “Yeah, I know how an internal combustion engine works.” Or, “I think I know how zipper works, but I really don't.” In a way, I’m just saying, “Yeah, I trust the government to give this sound advice on vaccines. So I’m going to go get vaccinated.” Or I don't trust the government. Or I don't trust big pharma. And so it's really kind of a proxy for something else that's a deeper foundational principle in their world view of trusting or not trusting government or corporations.
[00:22:21] MB: That's a really fascinating insight. And something that I wrestle with, which you just touched on, is this idea that the reality is most people in the general public don't understand most of the fundamentals, the data, the science, the things that underpin anti-vaccine, climate change, all of these different ideas. How do you think about – And the Covid response over the last 18 months has been a really interesting catalyst to explode a lot of these issues. But how do you think about the flip side of the coin in terms of the holocaust deniers, or the anti-vaxxers, or whoever, the anti-maskers, all these kinds of people? How do you think about the idea that the denial in and of itself can be dangerous in a world where people don't understand most of the issues?
[00:23:12] MS: Yes, and the Covid one is certainly interesting. Well, in the early days, of course, no one knew much of anything. So we were kind of groping for what the right thing to do was. The masks, no masks, then masks, and social isolation, close down the economy, businesses and so on. And now we're kind of approaching that again with the Delta variant. What’s the right thing to do? Pretty sure we're not going to shut down the economy again. Businesses will stay open. And we'll just have to be careful about being masked and so on. And that would be far less concerning if everybody was vaccinated that can get vaccinated. Again, there're a small percentage of people that can't get vaccinated for medical reasons, their age, or immune-compromised, or they’re very young children. And therefore the argument that people surrounding them cannot be vaccinated should be vaccinated so that the disease doesn't spread. That's the argument.
But we're not near that. I mean, we're like 70% now. It really needs to be like 80% to 90% for herd immunity. And even that may change because of the Covid variant. And so at the moment, as we're speaking here on August 4th, 99.99 of the people being hospitalized or dying from Covid from the Delta variant are unvaccinated. And it's not that the vaccinated can't get Covid, the Delta variant, they can. But the viral load will be so low it won't cause them to have to be hospitalized or to die, and they're less likely to spread it. Well, this is now changing by the day. But slightly less likely to spread it because they have a lower viral load to give, sneeze, or cough, or whatever to get it out there. Anyway, so that's the argument. And what you usually hear with the vaccine hesitancy people is, “Well, what about the side effects of the vaccine?” And I have to say, I went through this recently with one of my own employees who I found out was not vaccinated. Well, why? Well, because I heard about this guy that got a seizure. Probably, I think she was talking about anaphylactic shock and/or another person that died, or somebody who had a blood clot or whatever.
Well, if you look at the CDC, they say, “Well, yes, no vaccine, and more generally, no medical procedure of any kind ever is 100% effective and has zero side effects.” So it's a risk benefit analysis you have to make. And this vaccine happens to be the best vaccine ever invented ever. It's incredible the form of technology. That's not injecting your body with a portion of the SARS-Covid-2 virus. You're not getting any of the virus. It's a genetically modified system. And yet nevertheless, there're some slight side effects. So with the anaphylactic shock, for example, when you get your vaccine, they have you sit there for 15 minutes. You would know within 10 minutes if you're having a reaction or not.
And when I got mine they asked me if I’ve ever had that. I said, “Yes, I had a bee sting like five years ago when I was out on a bike ride and I swelled up. And I practically blacked-out. It was a concern. My wife had to take me to the ER and so on.” They're like, “Okay. Well, you just sit here for half an hour just to make sure.” I said, “Okay.” And I had no reaction. Okay.
In other words, even the side effects, we know about them and we can deal with them. But even with that, compare that to the 600,000 dead. What about the person that was on the news last night, two nights ago, 31-year-old guy, has a wife and a six-year-old son. He's in the hospital dying from Covid. I think he may pull out. But he could barely breathe, barely talk. And while he was talking he said, “I didn't get vaccinated because we're a strong conservative family.” It's like, “Oh my god!” This is the kind of thing that's what I’m talking about with proxy truths. It's a stand-in for something else. I’m not getting vaccinated because why? Well, because conservatives don't do that. What? I mean, where are you getting this first of all? Every one of the Fox News hosts are all vaccinated. They're all socially isolated. They live in gated communities. The kids go to private schools. I mean, come on. That's not a conservative value. But that's the impression people are getting.
Anyway, it's just how to combat, it's really hard in this particular case. I had no effect at all. Just going through all the analogies, you have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than having an anaphylactic shock. The numbers are roughly the same probability. And last year, 38,650 people died in automobile accidents in America. 38,680. And no one has any driving hesitancy. People just get in the car and just drive around. They text, they check emails, they read the paper and they put their makeup on and eat sandwiches, all this without a second thought, right? But it's like, “Ooh! The vaccine. Oh dear! It's like I’m concerned about that .00001% side effects. Compared to the 600,000 dead.” So the thinking is not clear on that. And there's not been quite a bit of research on this, “Well, why is a vaccine, say, different from car risks?” And it has to do with to what extent you have control over what you're doing. And the vaccine as well as the virus is invisible. You can't see it. They stick in your body and you just hope for the best. It feels like voodoo, or witchcraft, or feel something paranormal, supernatural, spooky evil.
And that goes back to the 19th century original anti-vaxxers. When the vaccines really were until recently just a piece of the actual virus that causes you sick and it makes you slightly ill. And then your body builds up immunity so that when you get the real disease it can fight it off. That was kind of overly simplified argument for vaccines. But this fact, you understand why people might go, “Ooh! You're going to inject me with some of that bad stuff?” It'd be almost like saying, “Well, here's a little nuclear radiation now such that when the nuclear plant nearby melts down you'll be protected from that.” No one's going to go for that. It's like I don't want to get a little bit of nuclear radiation. It probably has something to do with that and lack of control and shaming people. Like don't you feel a sense of moral obligation to protect your family, kind of a common response to that 31 year old man? Isn't the conservative family values thing to do is to protect your family and yourself from dying? But studies show that shaming people like that makes it even worse. They're even less likely to get vaccinated. So I really don't know what to do other than here's the facts. Just please think about it. Just sit on it for a day and just think about it. And yet still, I think the – Let's see, 30% of people who have not gotten vaccinated yet in America, I think it was 80% of those said they will never get vaccinated under any conditions no matter what the evidence is. And short of a legal just mandate where you have to do it. I don't know what's going to convince them.
[00:30:13] MB: I mean, I’m a huge believer in in freedom of inquiry. And to me, that's one piece that I just think about the damaging side effects of the other side of the coin, which is the people who are spreading the message of anti-vaxxing, for example, or Holocaust denial, or any of these things. In the Covid case, I mean, they're causing real social harm potentially. How do you think about reconciling that with the fundamental importance of ensuring that we have freedom of inquiry and debate and free speech?
[00:30:49] MS: Yeah. Well, in that particular issue, again, I just say let everybody have their say. You think that hydroxychloroquine is going to be a curative for Covid-19? By all means, write a blog about it. Post about it on Twitter and have a podcast about it. Or either – What's the new one? Ivermectin I think it is? I keep stumbling on that word. But now that Brett Weinstein was talking about on his podcast. And then YouTube's, “Oh! We're going to demonetize you because you talked about that drug that doesn't have any evidence for it or has only partial evidence that it could work against Covid-19.” Well, come on. Who is YouTube to decide? Who's making that decision about who can talk about what on their own podcasts that of course are platformed on YouTube? So that's the problem. Just let everybody have their say. What's the story with these drugs and I’ll decide. That's what I’m thinking about that.
Now, the related issue on this to what you'd said has to do with freedom. A lot of countries like America that are very freedom-oriented like this – We’ll just say the United States. People have a misunderstanding of what freedom means. They think well it means I could do whatever I want. No. That is not what it means. It doesn't mean that at all. To live in a civil society and a rule of law with the constitution, and norms, and customs, and regulations and so on, these things are there in place so that you are actually freer by preventing you from doing certain things. So my simple analogy is you're not free to drive on any lane of the highway that you like, left side of the road, or the right side of the road. Hey, I should be free to drive on any side of the road I want. No. No, you're not. And if you think that, then you're not going to get a driver's license. We will outlaw you, ban you from driving. And if you do it anyway, we'll lock you up. And that's to make everybody freer. So the standard libertarian line on this is freedom to swing my arm ends at your nose. And all libertarians understand that. They go, “Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. We got to have rules. We believe in the rule of law.” “Yeah. Okay. Well, how about vaccines?” “Oh, except that.” “Well, why? Shouldn't I be free from your germs?” Like the smoking issue. The reason we ban smoking in restaurants and airplanes and so forth is because it there's some evidence for secondhand smoke, but it stinks. It makes my life lower quality and less pleasant when you smoke. So don't do it. Smoke in your own house. Stink up your own house or whatever. You're free to do that. Or I should be free to ride my motorcycle without my helmet. Yeah, but when you crash and bust your head open and you don't die, then I got to pay for it through healthcare through higher premiums and through taxes and so on. So it affects me. So these unintended consequences of your allegedly free behavior any more than we don't allow the fossil fuel burning coal plant to just dump the waste down the river that I get my water out of. Nobody thinks that's all right. No economist would say there should be no cost for that. even the most libertarian economist.
So people get confused about this, I should be free not to get vaccinated. Well, sort of, yeah. But then your kid can't go to school. You can't work in a public job where you encounter people, because these are what are called collective action problems. How do we solve problems that we all have to do our share? It sounds like a collectivist, socialist, communist kind of thing. But it's not. It's what all civil societies, all of them. Even the most democratic libertarian-free, they all have restrictions for good reasons. And so I think the vaccine argument should be construed in that context too. I should be free from your germs and is to whatever extent we can through laws and regulations.
[00:34:45] MB: How do you think about the other side of the coin, which is the second piece of this? And you touched on it earlier as well, this idea that most people don't understand a lot of the fundamentals that underpin a lot of these big decisions, right? If I’m a member of the general public and I don't have the time, energy, inclination to research about whether or not I should get a vaccine or whether or not this race or gender issue is really important and kind of where it comes from, how do you think about how we can help provide those people with the tools, the abilities, the resources, et cetera, to form thoughtful opinions about things and sift through the deniers out there?
[00:35:29] MS: Yeah, this is a hard one. And so we have fact checking sites and the idea that media sources have fact checkers. All the fact checking sites, like Politifact and Snopes. These are good sources. Any major media institution usually has a deep base of editors that fact check things. You hope some most of the bad stuff gets filtered out as opposed to nobody's blog or podcast where there's no fact checking at all, there's no editing. So you should trust the former more than the latter. Not that the latter. Some lone person on a podcast can't come up with the right idea. You can. But most of us are ignorant of most things. And so if you're not engaged with other people that check you and fact check your own statements, then you're more likely to make errors. So that's the reason in science we have peer review. But that would be true for journalism as well.
Which sources? And we all know that The New York times has a left-wing bias and wall street journal has a right-wing bias. We know CNN, Fox News quite different even on the same issues. You can toggle back and forth. You can't believe they're even talking about the same thing that they're so different. So there you just have to you kind of do a little bit of heavy lifting yourself and just read and decide.
And another principle to remember is it's okay to change your mind. In fact, it's a virtue. When the facts change, you should change your mind if that's the right thing to do. There's no virtue in just saying, “Well, I’m going to believe X no matter what the evidence is because that's what I said I believe. That's what politicians tend to do.” They tend to say, “Well, I’m a liberal, or I’m a conservative. So these are my half dozen core beliefs. I will never change them because it's how I define myself.”
Well, then what do you do when a new evidence that comes in that shows that one of those, say, six core beliefs is wrong? Do you change your mind or not? A lot of people do, but a lot of people don't. They just say, “Well, I don't care what the evidence is.” Okay. That's a problem. So to deal with that you have to kind of do an end run around it and say, “No. No. Keep your political beliefs, your religious beliefs, whatever. And just on this one particular issue here, it's okay to change your mind. You have to give anything up.”
So like I was at this conference, Freedom Fest, last weekend and one of the speakers was talking about – He started telling this story about when he was a journalist covering the AIDS crisis when it began in the late 80s and into the early 90s. And he was talking about the Journal of the American Medical Association published this article, research articles, showing that the AIDS virus can be transmitted through just like swimming pool, showers. It's in the air. It's respiratory. You can get it from just being on the same bus with an AIDS victim and so on. And of course we found out that was absolutely not true. It's a blood transmission and bodily fluid transmission through sex and so on, and blood transfusions. But this guy, the reason for telling the story is the guy then pauses and says, “And guess who the author of that article was? None other than Anthony Fauci.” And the whole room erupted in just laughter, like, “Ah! Not Anthony Fauci. What an idiot. He once believed that and now he doesn't.” Yeah, that's right. New evidence came in that showed that study was wrong. And Anthony Fauci said, “Well that was wrong. Okay, here's the new evidence.”
And so fast forward to 2020. Anthony Fauci says this, Fauci says that. And you watch Fox News, like you see the guy's an idiot. He doesn't know anything. He's an ideologue. He just keeps flip-flopping. He's a flip-flopper. Because in politics, that's a bad thing. But in science, and when it counts for reliable knowledge, flip-flopping is a good thing. You change your mind when the facts change. And we've seen that happen over and over and over in the last year and a half. Should we have mark or no mark? How far apart should we be or not? When should businesses open? What's the rate of spread at which a governor, or a mayor, or the president has to say, “Okay, we've reached a critical barrier here.” That usually has to do with to what extent local hospitals can handle the number of patients that are coming in. And here we are first week of August. And we're starting to approach that here in L.A County, for example.” So yeah, that's normal. That's good. So you kind of have to pay attention to what's going on, which you would do anyway for other parts of your life. The people that are vaccinated, for example, they hold down jobs, they have families. They're able to maintain a bank account and pay their bills. They're rational people. Why are they irrational on this one particular issue? It's baffling. And so a lot of us are trying to figure out how to deal with that.
[00:40:08] MB: It's so interesting to me that this thread of free speech, freedom of inquiry, the quest for knowledge, the humbleness and humility to change your mind and try to rationally evaluate just what's true really has – In many senses, even just in the course of this conversation already exposed some of the ideological and dogmatic thinking on polar opposite ends of the political spectrum. I find that to be really interesting.
[00:40:37] MS: Yeah, totally. Well, the fact that it is polarized politically tells us that these knowledge claims are not just empirical truths that we can get to through better data and analysis and reason that they stand in for something else. That something else being political truths, or maybe religious truths, or ideological truths, or whatever. And if you don't understand it, then you're not going to understand why people are denying it or hesitant.
Just think analogously about conspiracy theories. Just take Qanon. So my next big book is on conspiracies, conspiracy theories. So I opened it talking about the insurrection on January 6th. And here's these videos of these people walking around the Capitol Dome with their selfie photos and what it’s like – And the guy with the confederate flag and the other guy with the Viking outfit, the so-called QAnon Shaman. So I just asked, “What are these people thinking? What did they think they're going to do when they get in there?” And I think most of them hadn't given any thought at all. They're walking around taking selfies like they're on vacation. It was just stunning. And so what if they had gotten into the chamber where Nancy Pelosi was say before they whisked her out, and Mike Pence for that matter? And what were they going to do? Would they have killed them? Maybe? And then what? They take over the government? How's that going to happen? I mean, they cannot possibly have thought this through.
And what is this all based on? It's QAnon conspiracy theory about the rigged election in particular and then the larger issue of the democrats are running this secret satanic pedophile ring by Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks and other – George Soros and other liberals that are conducting this nefarious evil plot. And we have to put a stop to this. And now do people really believe that? Well, one guy did. His name was Welch. And he went to the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. where this cult was allegedly conducting its pedophile blood drinking ring in the basement. And he went there and barged in with his gun. He had an AR-15 assault rifle. And where's the basement? There's no basement here. What are you talking about? And then he shot up the roof. And I’ve come here to rescue the children. They're like, “What? What are you talking about?” And so he got arrested. He went to jail. And now he's like super sorry he did this idiotic thing.
He sat down Ted Cruz, somebody like this. Do you really believe this or any just kind of rational thinking republican who takes the box on a survey? Do you think there's something to QAnon? Yeah, yeah, I think there's something to it. And you walk them through the scenario I just presented. Do you actually believe there's a secret satanic cult of pedophiles led by Hillary Clinton in a pizzeria? They would have to say, “Well, no. Of course not.” So what are they saying when they say I believe this? My theory is that it's a proxy for something else that I don't trust democrats, I don't trust you know government agencies especially run by democrats. That Hillary, she lied about other things and that just Benghazi. Remember the Clintons back in the 90s with the white water scandal and Vince Foster. Wasn't he murdered by the Clintons? Or Jeffrey Epstein. This is where the pedophile thing comes. Jeffrey Epstein famously like teenage girls, underage teenage girls. Well, these weren't children. These weren't like six-year-olds. These were like 15 year olds, right? But from there you can just go, “Well, yeah, Clinton was on Jeffrey Epstein's jet and that island. Therefore the Clintons – And they were underage girls. So that's pedophilia. Therefore the Clintons are involved in a pedophile ring. That's kind of the logic of where they get to that.”
Well, Clinton was never convicted of murdering Vince Foster. He wasn't murdered. And yeah, yeah, but I don't really trust those Clintons anyway. Or I don't like those democrats. Everything they touch turns to rot. It's just socialism. And we're not going to have that in America. They want to they want to destroy America.
So the QAnon specific conspiracy theory, even if you debunk it, those people aren't going to go, “Oh, in that case I think I’ll vote for a democrat next election round.” No. They're never going to vote for a democrat. They don't like democrats for these other deeper reasons that you have to kind of explore to find out.
[00:44:48] MB: So fascinating. And I want to pivot the conversation or zoom out a little bit and talk about the broader concept of scientific humanism or enlightened humanism and how you think about really what that is and how we can approach the world in a more humble, curious, open-minded and thoughtful way.
[00:45:12] MS: Yeah. So this enlightenment humanism or scientific humanism, the subtitle of my book is Reflections of a Scientific Humanist. Whatever you call it, I’ve kind of steered away from secular humanism as a phrase. That's been around since the 1930s. Largely emerged out of kind of far left liberal thinking from the Roosevelt era in the 1930s and into the 1960s, and they've always kind of towed a far left political agenda. And that's not my perspective. I’m kind of a classical liberal or libertarian, whatever phrase you want to use. I’m not a conservative either.
So I always was bothered by that. If you're not pro-choice and you're not this and that on these 10 different political issues, you're not a humanist. I thought, “Oh, that's a big mistake.” When I got involved in there in the 1990s with humanists, and then I just end up starting my own magazine, Skeptic Magazine, it's more science-oriented. But I always was bothered by the kind of limiting the umbrella of who's you're going to embrace and allow to be a humanist. So I like scientific humanists or enlightenment humanism because it's broader. Anybody should be interested in being part of that movement, because it harkens back to the enlightenment and the scientific revolution and the idea that we can achieve reliable knowledge. We can have something like – Or at least approach objective knowledge. We can find truth. There are truths about the world. It's not all relative. It's not just pure cultural relativism, post-modern deconstructionism or any of that. Those guys are wrong. You don't have to know anything about it to know that they're wrong, because if you just glance at any of their writings, they're just loaded with arguments. But they're arguing to say that evidence and arguing doesn't count for anything. Well, they just contradicted themselves. Why should I believe you and your argument that reason isn't sound? You just use reason to try to convince me that reason isn't sound. You've just contradicted yourself.
And so the enlightenment idea is that there is an empirical world. There is a reality. We can know it. Not a hundred percent, but we can approach it. We can get closer to the truth. And that some systems are better than others. And then from there you can expand out to not just empirical truths about science, but politics, economics. Some systems really are better than others. Would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? East Germany versus West Germany during the Cold War? It's obvious. Pretty much everybody will say, “Oh yeah, of course, South Korea versus North Korea.” If you ask North Koreans, they’re going to say North Korea because they know they'll be locked up and sent off to prison if they don't say otherwise. Not that pollsters can even get in there to ask, but we know that people want to be free. Would you rather be healthy or ill? Would you rather be alive or dead? Would you rather be enslaved or free? Would you rather be educated or ignorant? Everybody knows the answer to those questions. So from there, you have a foundation of a moral system that human flourishing, individual human flourishing is our starting point. And democracies are better than autocracies. And market economies, even regulated ones, are better than command control economies that put too many restrictions on free trade and so on. And international free trade is better than economic nationalism.
So Trump, just to let you know, Trump is not a conservative. This is a foundational principle of all conservatism is free trade, international trade. Starting with Adam Smith and Trump saying, “No. No. No. Economic nationalism, that's just mercantilism that Adam Smith debunked centuries ago.” And these are tried and true principles we've discovered through science, through reason, through experiments, through just history. I think history is a science. These are experiments. These countries tried communism for almost a century and it failed. So let's not do that again. Or nationalism, that led to First World War and the Second World War, nationalism. Let's not do that again. That was a bad idea. Let's jettison that idea and do something else. And these are experiments, 50 different United States had 50 different state constitutions. They all have different laws and customs and norms about, let's say, gun control. Well, you can look at the outcomes and control for different variables. And so this is what social scientists do. You can say, “Well, look, this one leads to more gun violence. This one leads to less gun violence. Let's do the latter, because we agree, gun violence is not good.”
Now, that particular issue again is fraught because of these moral foundational principles that underlie it. I’ve met many conservatives and libertarians that say I don't care how many people die of gun violence. It's roughly the same as automobiles, about 35, 000 a year, suicide, accidental, and homicide. And they said, “I don't care if it was 350,000. I want my guns.” Their freedom, second amendment, freedom to own guns. Trump’s – Well, the kind of public health crisis of too many people dying from guns. Therefore you have to do something else. You have to try to get on the same page with them. Don't you agree it would be better if fewer people died of guns? Well, yes. Of course I agree with that. Or like with pro-lifers, I argue that abortion, the issue's not really about abortion, because if you make it about abortion, they're not going to budge. But if you say do you think it would be good if fewer women got pregnant that didn't want to have babies? Well, yes, because that would lead to fewer abortions, right? Because that's what an abortion is, the ending of an unwanted pregnancy. Okay, how can we do that? Look, here's some studies that show that women that are educated, women that have economic empowerment, women that have access to free or inexpensive birth control don't get pregnant as much. And therefore they have fewer abortions.
So instead of saying let's ban abortion or let's legalize abortion. Just let's see what we can do working together, all of us, to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. So there my strategy is to do an end run around the moral issue, because people aren't going to budge on that. They're too stuck, particularly if they've ever spoken out publicly about it. They're just not going to change their mind. Cognitive dissonance is too powerful.
[00:51:19] MB: Very insightful and the idea you've touched on a couple times that I think is really important is this notion that a lot of times a stance on a particular public policy issue really is just a reflection of a much deeper moral underpinning that really in some cases may have very little to actually do with the having logically rationally thought through the position and more to do with a core component of someone's identity. And the corollary of that is this notion that we have to think about intellectually creative approaches that can, as you said, do an end run around that. In some cases to try and get people to agree to social goods that may be in the benefit of everyone without getting tangled in a lot of the moral knots that we can so easily get tangled in.
[00:52:10] MS: Yeah, that's right. For like creationists, for example, who are they? Well, they tend to be mostly religious Christian fundamentalists or evangelicals. All right, what is it that bothers them about the theory of evolution? Because most of them don't know anything about it. Most people don't know about evolutionary theory. The average Harvard undergraduate cannot explain how natural selection works, right? So it's a separate issue. And, by the way, they tend to think it more Lmarckian. Like, well, if the giraffe stretches its neck, then it passes on the longer neck to its offspring. No. That's not how it works. So the average person can't even get it right. So that's not what's really going on. What's going on is they think, “Well, if I agree that evolution happened, that means I’ve got to agree that there's an older earth.” The Bible say seven days. Yeah. Well, maybe they are ages. No. No. It says days. And it said God created the sun and the moon, and then animals, and then the plants, and then the animals and so on in that particular sequence. I feel like if I give that up, then I have to give up the next thing in the next book in the Bible. And then pretty soon I’m not agreeing with anything that the bible says. And therefore there's no moral foundation to my life. Or there's no moral foundation to America if we go down this road, because don't those evolutionists, aren't they atheists? And atheism is a bad thing because they don't believe in any right and wrong and they don't believe in morals and anybody should be able to do anything they want. They have all these crazy ideas about atheism and humanism and so on. And so therefore they draw the line. They, “Okay, then I can't accept the theory of evolution.”
So I just do an end run around that. I say, “Hey, look. Most religious people actually accept the theory of evolution, a lot of Protestants. Most Catholics now believe it since the pope issued that encyclical in 1996 saying it's okay to accept the theory of evolution. It's true. It really did happen. And has nothing to do with the soul. And this is what religion deals with. And this is what we believe as Catholics. And you can accept the theory of evolution. Oh, boom! Okay. Good. That was a good move. Even though I don't believe in souls and in the afterlife and all that, who cares? At least the head of the Catholic Church said it's okay to accept evolution.
Well, now I would not give any evangelical fundamentalist a copy of Richard Dawkins book, like the Selfish Gene or The God Delusion or any of his books because he's an atheist. He's the most prominent atheist in the world. So they're going to read that thinking, “Oh, this guy's an atheist. So what is he? I can't trust his judgment about evolution.” So I’ll give him Francis Collins book, The Language of God. Francis Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project. He's now head of the National Institute of Health. He's one of the greatest scientists of our age, and he's an evangelical Christian whose book talks about why he accepts Jesus as his savior. And the rest of the book is about how we know that evolution happened and how we know that theory is true?
So there, I’m kind of doing a red team blue team sort of thing. Well, this guy on your team, your religious team, who's one of the smartest people in the world, one of the most accomplished scientists ever, he says the theory is true and it's okay to believe it. And you get to keep your belief in Jesus as your savior and so. Oh, okay. Now they're far more open to the idea through that strategy.
[00:55:30] MB: It's so fascinating. And lest we leave one part of the political spectrum or another unoffended by this conversation or their beliefs unchallenged, which I think is really important that we're challenging – You should be challenging yourself constantly and updating your beliefs and being humble and intellectually curious, which is the whole point of this idea of free inquiry and free speech. I’m curious coming all the way back to what we talked about at the beginning of the conversation, how do you think that a lot of the challenges to free inquiry and free speech have emerged out of our existant campus culture? And how do you think we should approach resolving that?
[00:56:10] MS: Well, to steel man their side, it goes back to the early Civil Rights movement and then the Women's Rights movements that language matters. What you call an African-American and what you call a woman matters. It could be demeaning. Of course, the N-word is the obvious example. But just calling – Just something simple like changing the mrs modifier for a married woman, miss or mrs. There's nothing like that for men. Why is that? Well, because historically men had all the power, the ownership and so on. It wasn't necessary to have that designation. So it was famously changed to ms. And there was a little bit of pushback like all these crazy feminists.
But then in time we all got used to changing our language that way. No one today hopefully would use the N word certainly. No white should use the N word. I wouldn't. And I think that's okay. That's understandable. And language does matter. And those kinds of things over time can be tracked. You can you can kind of see in the history of literature, say, the last century. Approximately what decade a novel was written in, let’s say 1910s, or 20s, or 50s, or 60s of the kind of language used to describe blacks and women and Jews and other minorities. It's like, “Wow!” I mean, they're almost embarrassing to read now. It's kind of painful to read. Then you get these pushbacks, “Well, we shouldn't then have students read Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer and all that because it uses the N word.” Well, okay. It's okay to read literature for what it was, because that's the whole point. And in that case, Twain was pushing back against the racism of his own time and using the word purposely to kind of jar his readers and seeing how wrong this treatment of blacks was in the south, the Mississippi and so on.
Anyway, so I understand why political correctness took off in the first place. Then once you go down that path, then you start policing speech. It's like, “Well, if this word is bad. What about that word? And how about this phrase and all these descriptions?” And you end up with this laundry list of microaggressions that the University of California published a couple years ago. Distributed to all faculty and staff and students, these are the things that are triggering and racially or genderly sensitive. And you shouldn't use them. Like what? Well, like asking, “Where are you from?” if somebody has an accent.
Well, according to this list, this is a way of saying, “So you're not really normal here. You don't belong here. Where are you from?” As if everybody's going to take that as an insult or a cultural appropriation. Taco Tuesday, there was a big roll over that at Cal State Fullerton a few years, ago 2015, about white non-Hispanic students enjoying Mexican food. Well, if you've ever been to Southern California, you're not going to drive 10 feet without encountering Mexican food. It's one of the great cuisines of our time here. It's great. I love Mexican food. How is that culturally appropriating? That's culture. All culture is appropriating.
But you can kind of see how you say something like dressing up in blackface is offensive to blacks. Yeah, I get that, absolutely. Well, so dressing up in a Mexican sombrero or dressing up in a native American costume with feathers, is that the same as blackface? I think it's not the same as blackface, but you can kind of see the reasoning, the chain of causal reasoning from one to the next. But the problem is then then you go too far down the path. And then no one wants to say or do anything. They're afraid, “Well, if, gosh, this is going to open somebody somewhere, I better just keep my mouth shut.” That's not good, well, for culture, for a civil society, for a free society. The whole point of free society should be free to speak your mind. And even if you're offensive – Well, okay, then – But that's a slightly different distinguishing between government censorship and then just the kind of customs or norms of silencing people. We're not really free to say anything you want. You're not going to tell your spouse or your best friend something horrible that you just thought about them. That would just be being a jerk, just be offensive. Just keep your mouth shut.
From there, we all silence ourselves for good reason. It's better to live in a polite society where you don't say nasty things. So we all do that anyway. But what we're really talking about here is the silencing of people's opinions on ideas that matter, immigration, abortion, foreign wars, and racial issues, gender issues. Should trans women, that is men, male to female trans, should they be allowed to compete in Olympic Sports? Well, there was a big story in paper this morning about the weightlifter, the trans woman was a man weightlifter. Well, she ended up failing in her three attempts at getting this huge weight over her head. So no big deal. She didn't take anybody's medal away from them. That was a woman that was not originally a man and so on. So it wasn't an issue. But someday it's going to be an issue. This has already happened in some track and field events where a trans woman who was a man just out sprints these women. They're just competing for second and third place. And the fourth place person isn't going to be on the podium because of that.
Well, here you have conflicting rights, the rights of trans to be free to do what they want in society and the rights of women to not have to compete against men because of the physical difference. So how do you resolve that conflicting rights issue? You talk about it. You have a national conversation. You present all the arguments on both sides. But unfortunately that's another one of those sensitive ones. Wherever I comment on this on Twitter I get just hammered. I just get a heap of hate on my shoulders for being a transphobe. I’m not a transphobe. And I won't put up with you calling me that. I’m not. And if you're not mature enough to recognize that conflicting rights happen all the time, the rights of the fetus to live, the right of the woman to choose her own reproductive strategies and choices and so on. Those are conflicting rights. We have to make a decision. What's your best argument? You can't just say, “Well, that's just anti-woman to say you believe in the rights of the fetus.” No it's not. It's pro-life. The pro-lifers have good arguments. I’m pro-choice. But I think my arguments are better than theirs. But they do have arguments. And if you can't talk about them, then you don't know what you're talking about.
[01:02:33] MB: And so we've covered a sweeping swath of themes and topics here, which has been fascinating. For somebody who's listened to this episode who wants to approach the world more thoughtfully, curiously, humbly, in a more open-minded way, what would be one action item or action step that you would give them to put into practice some of the thinking tools and ideas that we've talked about today?
[01:03:02] MS: Well, the best thing is try to understand where somebody's coming from. Just ask a lot of thoughtful questions. Don't ask questions in a leading way like you're trying to catch them on something and then go, “Oh! I got you.” No, just curious. Like, “Well, why is it you believe that? Why are you vaccine hesitant? What's your concern?” in a genuinely curious way. Look at people in the eyes. Listen, nod, like you're paying attention. A lot of conversations people are just nodding, but they're not even listening. They're just waiting for their moment to jump in and make their argument. That's not conducive to good conversation. You got to listen to what the other person says. And then steel man their position instead of straw manning it where you convey what you think they're saying in a way that's obviously wrong and you can easily debunk it. Usually that's not what they believe. So if you say, “Let me see if I understand you correctly. Are you arguing?” And then you state it in your own words.
Usually they'll go, “Well, no not quite. Here's actually what I’m arguing.” And you go, “Okay, let me see if I can say it again.” And then you say it and they go, “Well, yeah, that's close.” And then you refine it. You'll often find if you don't do that, you're talking across purposes. A person says actually. You say, “Well, you're not even talking about the same thing,” and there's no point in having a conversation. Yeah, so that's a super important thing. And leave emotions out of it. Don't get all heated up, though it's hard to do on some of these issues. And don't call somebody Hitler. Instead of ad hominem, ad Hitlerum. The moment you say, “Well, that's what Hitler would do. Or that's a Nazi position.” The conversation's over. No one's going to listen to you. You just can't do that. Or don't tell somebody their ideas are crazy or delusional. I mean, I’ve done this. You've lost your mind. Okay. Well, the moment when I say that, I’ve lost the conversation. So you have to watch out for that.
[01:04:50] MB: Some really good insights. And there's so much more we could have dug into as well. I really like the idea you touched on briefly around this idea of human flourishing, being one of the underpinnings of a moral framework that we can use to build a culture and this concept of being an enlightened humanist. But there're so many avenues we could continue to explore here. But Michael, I really appreciate you coming on the show, digging into some very thorny issues and sharing your insights.
[01:05:19] MS: Oh, you're welcome. And thanks for having me on, Matt. I appreciate that. Good conversation.
[OUTRO]
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