Is Moral Progress a Fantasy?: A Conversation with John Gray (Episode
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 พ.ย. 2024
- Sam Harris speaks with John Gray about the possibility of moral and political progress. They discuss historical and current threats to freedom of thought, the limits of law, the spread of dangerous technology, failures of convergence on norms and values, Arthur Koestler, de-industrialization in Europe, fellow travelers and the progressive embrace of barbarism, Bertrand Russell, the absurdity of pacifism, utilitarianism, the moral landscape, George Santayana, moral and scientific realism, pragmatism, atheism, Schopenhauer, liberalism as an historical accident, and other topics.
John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including "The Silence of Animals," "The Immortalization Commission," "Black Mass," and "Straw Dogs." His latest book is "The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism." He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and he has been a professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, and a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. He now writes full-time.
Website: www.newstatesm...
February 16, 2024
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There was no back and forth in this interview. Dr Gray just sucked all the oxygen out of the podcast by talking and talking without pause for reflection or allowing input from Sam. I pity his wife.😢
Then every few words Sam says, John loudly goes "MMMMM", "mmmm, MMMMmmm", with inflection throughout. Very distracting.
This guy is insufferable. If Sam has him on again ai will skip the podcast that week.
Unbearable! Cutting my loss and skipping this droning logorrhea.
John Gray is my favourite writer and philosopher, so I'm not bothered if he talks all day.
@@ajs41 Sam Harris is probably my favorite writer and philosopher, so I'd be particularly bothered if he gave a crap interview by railroading it and breaking being any semblance of a good listener in order to be a good orator.
I love how John just eats his delicious cookies while Sam is talking
😅
MMMMMMMM! Mmmmm!
That is a hilarious comment!😂😂😂
LOL! I'm listening to this on Sam's website and just came here specifically for the comment section to make sure I wasn't the only one noticing this. His 'cookie eating' is actually so annoying I can't even finish the episode.
Between the constant hmmm and interrupting Sam every time he made a statement or asked a question, that was a tough listen.
Moral progress is real, but the _inevitability_ of moral progress is a fantasy.
I feel compelled to respond to this as there are evolving factors that may curtail immorality en mass.
The few examples I can roughly make are as follows; Medical prevention / intervention of various psychopathologies, Artificial Intelligence and the maturation of education and government to form more effective and efficient justice systems and therefore deterrence from antisocial behaviour, the institutionalization of modern social philosophies that truncate antisocial behaviour.
+1 SH & John Gray
I feel compelled to respond to this as there are evolving factors that may curtail immorality en mass.
The few examples I can roughly make are as follows; Medical prevention / intervention of various psychopathologies, Artificial Intelligence and the maturation of education and government to form more effective and efficient justice systems and therefore deterrence from antisocial behaviour, the institutionalization of modern social philosophies that truncate antisocial behaviour.
+1 SH & John Gray
Exactly
@annoyingcommentator1582progress morally
Like in israel !
The constant "Hm hm hm yes yes hm" while Sam is trying to formulate questions is kinda rude
I noticed this too.
It might be the way his brain’s “software” takes the measure of new inputs and files it for internal processing. Different people do this same thing by blinking or nodding at certain points, for example. But yeah, in an audio format it can seem a bit grating, like impatience on the part of the listener.
On the other hand, his guest didn't even take a breath until 15 minutes in.
He is just the same old human I keep running into. Someone who craves attention so badly he can't stop talking. As long as he is talking, he thinks someone is paying attention to him, stroking his ego. He has no communication skills. He can't listen. He can't compare ideas. He can't learn. All too common.
Oh my God it drove me nuts. It was asinine.
This wasn't really a conversation. This was a monologue, bordering on lecture.
hmm but that's true for virtually all of his podcasts
There are certain people who will just talk when they feel the need to almost like its a compulsion for them. You can either get annoyed about it or just adapt. It can be nice because sometimes they dont care if you interrupt them either, they don't see it as offensive they just think it's how talking works.
John doesn’t seem to be a great listener. Thoughts are formulated into words without hesitation 😂
@radscorpion8 100% false. Sam is famous and admired for having open, two sided conversations. This was a one off.
(This was a monologue, bordering on lecture.) was and I loved it.
It’s hilarious how he was constantly interrupting - even until the very end when Sam was just trying to say goodbye.
Still interesting and entertaining.
Did you listen to this podcast on Sam's streaming site? Because he wasn't saying goodbye here, and there were no interruptions. It just faded into Sam's standatd commentary about subscribing.
Mmmmm, MMMMM
yep, the full version.@@toby9999
What about the future?
16 All Scripture is inspired of God+ and beneficial for teaching,+ for reproving, for setting things straight,+ for disciplining in righteousness,+ 17
Okay this will be the time that i finally subscribe to hear the rest. Interesting guy, and I was waiting for you two to talk about Arthur Koestler.
Thanks for this, Sam. He’s interesting. But he’s about 40% insufferable.
Yeah, I just finished the whole episode, on Sam's site ... I almost made the mistake of calling it a conversation. Some guests need a flashing light system ... Green - keep going; amber - let's wrap it soon; Red - we're dying here. JG spent far too much time in non-green territory. At one point I had to laugh, when he said he liked to state difficult concepts as simply and clearly as possible. Erudite chap, I'm sure, but I almost drowned in his deluge of side comments and tangential excursions.
He wouldn't stop saying "hm" "yeah" "hm" and interrupting every three seconds. It was asinine.
I switched over to TH-cam to vocalize the distracting habit Gray had of sounding each breath or some other need to be an audible nuisance.
There was a conversation... JG had a conversation with himself. Sam was just an observer... and, try as he might... Sam could not find a crack in that wall of words Gray was building to find a place to respond. Worst "interview" I've ever had the displeasure to spend time with.@@TheWanderingPensioner
I had to turn this off after 25 minutes, Gray is a rambling bore.
John Gray took quite a bit of time to explain that many people choose religion based on something other than intellect and this is obvious (certainly to Harris) but he never made an argument for why this is relevant to the intellectual position...of atheism. Sam's point about slavery erased about 1.5 hours of John's diatribe (and possibly more than a few years of his life) and took him out at the knees. That hurt poor John so much that he consumed the remaining time (on the subscriber channel) with a meandering wall of irrelevant history. None of which has anything to do with the intellectual conquest of the "new atheist". By the way, here in the US, people claiming no religion are now the largest group. Science and intellect do inform our collective morality and politics. We have made progress....albeit slow and not without setbacks but even John can't argue that the collective of humanity today is no different than we were a thousand years ago.
Did you even bother to read his book?
@@keithhunt5328 No. I read all sort of books but not every single book on the planet. I tend to read something that would enlighten me or entertain me. Currently reading The Grapes of Wrath after just finishing East of Eden (both by Steinbeck) and Sabrina Hossenfelder's, Essential Physics. As an Engineer, I read white papers for a living...so I am fairly well read. What is your point about my not having read his book? What profound revelation is in his book that would convince anyone that Gray has a serious grasp on Atheism? What book? Harris has many profound perspectives across multiple subjects and from what I have heard so far, Gray is like a 3rd grader trying to argue with a PhD. He's not even out of grade school yet when it comes to Atheism.
@@rustyosgood5667I think white papers also have nothing to do with atheism at best you should give your definition.
@@rockthepunchx9547 Atheists don't accept any proposition that a God exist.
Maybe you can read his book 7 Types of Atheism to get a clearer view of what he thinks
Hello😊
Dr. Sam Harris and Thank you for clearity and soundness. ✨🌱
Jason B.
Lincoln, Nebraska
I don't recall Dawkins suggesting 'good' memes would necessarily supplant 'bad' ones as your guest seems to imply.
Yes, I think he said the opposite. I think some said (Deutsch) that true ones outcompete the false ones in the long run. But I guess not if the false ones destroy us first.
In contrast apparently to many others posters, I found this discussion quite rivetting.
Gray is an impressive intellectual, and he does make you think - if you listen carefully to his theses.
Much appreciated, Sam.
They guy is a moron. He whines about cancel culture today while he memory-holes the McCarthy era, the lavender scare and any many number of instances where people in the US lost jobs and more for being contrarian.
For a stunning intellect, the guy should try reading a 10th grade history book, hell, just watch Oppenheimer.
Moral relativism is a disgrace, some cultures are better than others.
Now you just need an argument for why that is true
@@Bailiolhow is it not objectively better? Everybody seems to want to come here. Not many refugees risking their lives to get into non-Western countries.
@@radscorpion8I imagine if you were forced to choose between moving to Iran or Sweden, you wouldn’t spend too much time on this philosophical problem. The reality is quite clear.
@@radscorpion8
That's like saying we need a proof for why some air feels warmer than other air.
@sharpenedge You either meant "a proof for whether" or "an explanation of why".
Appreciate the screenshot selected for the video cover - referring to people in academia being turned on by colleagues and having their careers stunted or terminated - nothing more. Very appropriate given one of the topics of conversation.
What is the image of? Attacking Galileo or something?
La mort de Cèsar or The Death of Julius Caesar is an 1806 painting by Vincenzo Camuccini depicting the assassination of Julius Caesar.@@Haliotro
Love you Sam
Thanks, Sam!!
About selection pressure for memes - there are some. It's easy to imagine that worst "feel good now, do stupid things, pay later" memes will reproduce quickly but they are also dying quickly and ppl do get "immunized" against them by seeing their results, or hearing arguments undermining them. Propaganda can squash or propagate certain memes too. They don't evolve from stupid memes, through intermediate levels to only the most rational and "best" ones. They evolve like organisms, there are weeds, herbivores, carnivores. And our environment of mind has changed drastically in previous years - much less direct social contact, decline in centralized media, much more social media. That big shift retarded out collective environment control abilities, we don't know how to garden this version of a garden so there is more weeds than usual.
"morality" is a set of emergent strategies for maximizing utility in social contexts. like other traits in evolution, they are adaptations for contexts of their evolutionary predecessors, rather than for any given social context; they are good enough to have not been selected out, and they aren't up to date. given how strange the modern world is in evolutionary terms, this applies even more. any utility maximization scheme will have tradeoffs. it's also incredibly difficult to define parameters. some systems will be better, some worse.
I like what you said but would guess that the social aspect is itself a recent emergence based on the fact that we still have greed and selfishness. Qualities that ants and bees don't have (for example).
greed and selfishness are heuristics for arbitrarily defined (not so much defined as vaguely intuited) thresholds of extreme behaviors. they're answers to the question, "what quantities of what resources should i keep for myself?" and then applying them to spheres of relatedness, for example, self, then family, then community, then country. (that's not exactly how it works but you get the point.) these heuristical intuitions are adapted to evolutionary contexts and aren't flexible in accommodating what will maximize utility (however utility might be defined in a given instance) in very many circumstances. in any case, even though our social intuitions of "good" and "bad" are apples and oranges relative to the interests and realities of other species (let alone other humans in different evolutionary contexts), superficially it makes sense to label bees and ants as extremely greedy (in human terms), given their approaches to resource acquisition and defense.@@rustyosgood5667
@@maxungar516 I generally agree and if you read my point, I used the terms in the appropriate context, I would not draw axiomatic lines between self and community etc...either. If individuals were asked to contribute some significant amount of resources to save the community, some would do so willingly and others may not...or have to be forced etc... My point is that although progress along the social evolutionary continuum is slow, it is obvious when you zoom out to the 30,000 foot level. Measuring topography in discontinuous square acre blocks doesn't inform us about the region on the whole. Sam pointed to slavery as an obvious cumulative progression and John still remained on his hilltop. At a wider angle, the view favors Sam's position. Progress has clearly been made...albeit slowly.
@@maxungar516 P.S. I don't agree that Bees behave in any "extreme" way. Relative to what? They are not selfish in the context of this conversation and in the context of human behavior. What is best for humans as a whole, is a recent emergence, informed by science and technology, I might add.
You're smart asf, dude. You deserve a medal
People are powerless without a constitution and the Bill of Rights. With all due respect doctor, approximately 24 minutes into the conversation.
Somewhat, but they manage over in britbongistan decently so far.
For 5000 years of human civilisation there was no constitution or bill of rights. Was everyone powerless?
@@keithhunt5328To be very fair, the vast majority of people were fairly powerless in a power heirarchy.
This one was tough to listen to. John consistently interrupts and says yes and uh huh way too much while sam was talking.
I have an armchair theory, that in the last hundred or so years, the selection pressures for survival have drastically changed. There is far less need to be violent or cruel, or even just tough, to survive. There is a much larger diversity of genetics & memetics going around, and this diversity is self-compounding. This bubbles up in a way that on the surface we see increasingly different moral beliefs and frameworks within populations.. there is less of a single moral attractor, so we have competing moralities, and this creates conflict.
Literally all the big social issues in the last few years are caused by this.
I'm always jumpy when biological evolution and social/moral evolution are spoken about as if they are the same. Darwin and Mother Nature would disagree. Darwinian evolution is only about biological fitness for the current biosphere. It impact all species, animal and plant life. Social/moral evolution is a uniquely human domain concept. And quite recent.
@@valvlog4665 You're probably right, for the reasons you've said, and since I posted that I've thought of many counterexamples which show its not a good idea. Cheers
Look at this lovely liberal exchange of ideas! Warmed my heart 🥰
Rebecca Tuvel case is nuts
This John Gray is awesome!
He sucks, actually.
@@davidmanckeu and ur mother suck.........each other
@@davidmancke"MMMMMM? Uh-huh, Hmmm"
The commentary on law and rights not solving this issue is spot on.
Solzhenitsyn in his Harvard speech “I have spent my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure.”
Thanks for you patience Sam, I am currently taking a break, at 56 min, because his audible intrusions while you speak were (are) nearly intolerable; was that an involuntary dissident(al) tourette's murmer? I am an ass, an impatient ass, but if he would inform me of his challenge, I would find more compassion. Again, I am the ass here, but it is nearly insufferable and listening to JFK Jr; though at least JFK Jr. is communicating directly and not distracting from another persons speech. Sorry I had to write it; the ass that I am!
Thank you for being the first brave one. You've given me the courage to also come forth and admit that I, too, am an ass, an impatient, uncompassionate ass, who can suffer w/grace neither the audible intrusions, nor the rambling monologs, of your first guest/podcast ever to actually NOT stimulate me one way or the other but rather bore me through and through and through....and through, until I'm no longer interested whatsoever in what's being said (my AUDACITY and HUBRIS and OCD are shameless and are to be despised and shunned).
That was very useful for sam, for the guest to describe the hamas attack as a pogrom and that dispossessed ,occupied people have no right to fight . Further that passed sins against a group ,allows that group to act in the same way against others . There is no ethical way one can argue for this carnage.Every aspect of it would be condemned if it involved any other country. Cognitive dissonance use to be a favourite term of Sam's.
Gaza was not occupied. Stop talking shit. This is Orwellian language. Gaza is a shithole with people who dance in the streets and cheer for the death of people openly. Stop acting like these people are like you and me. They are not. They like death more than life. And not even other Muslims want anything to do with them.
Any moral framework that doesn’t boil down to the wellbeing of conscious creatures is ultimately worthless, even if more correct in a pedantic way.
Why? You just posit it has to be like that and that's it? No argument for your statement? What is a conscious creature? Is an ant a conscious creature?
@@Alnivol666 I am not yet sure about insect consciousness. At the moment I don’t believe they are conscious. Note that this would’t mean we can never harm ants, same as it doesn’t mean we can never harm humans.
The argument for my post is that all moral questions are fundamentally about wellbeing. This is not my idea. Wellbeing has been in the center of several moral frameworks such as utilitarianism and consecuentialism. I didn’t invent this I simply see it as logically coherent. If questions about morals aren’t about maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering, what’s their point?
@@domsnow6418 I guess you would have to read a lot of moral philosophy to understand things. Harris tried to reduce things to well being. Obviously, it does not work. Why? I don't know exactly.
I myself think consciouseness as a measure is not all that's cracked up to be.
@@Alnivol666 reducing the question to wellbeing is the most consistent way I know currently.
Also assuming people haven’t done their reading doesn’t leave a good look. Makes you look kind of arrogant.
I agree. It's a crude but extremely useful thing to keep in mind when morality is discussed and debated.
There's a lot of hairs to split about what "well being" means of course.
In the age of social media and cell phone addiction in general, add generative AI and its capacity to undermine trust in just about everything- I'm bearish on moral progress. Things can change though, who knows what the future holds
It's a dull, unoriginal prediction, but imho the future holds nothing but ever more humiliating forms of obsolescence for the vast majority of us.
@@joejohnson6327 now that's an exciting prediction!!
@@joejohnson6327 Lots of historians point out a pattern where people's lives actually get worse for a while whenever there's some revolutionary new technology. The society can't adapt and lots of bad lessons are learned quite painfully. I've thought that way about the internet for a long time, but they just invented an even more revolutionary technology before we're even done with this one.
what still buffles me is how semi-spontaneously "DEI movement" gained its strengt/pushes its agenda; how on earth companies (of which main goal is profit) adopted such policies? I mean i guess it gives them "good PR" versus relatively little loss, when maybe slightly less (i hope) qualified person is hired instead little more qualified one...but how is such process possible at academia (where it directly violates merit of its spirit) is beyond me; namely, how is possible, that we normalized taking ideological oath (effectively blocking whole liniages of study) as requirement to perform education? whats driving power behind it? I mean, is this really product of media that catch up on "viewers attention-atractivity" of certain fringe-ish issues, gradualy amplify it and so it became real, animous thing? crazy
I think it is a result of academic proffessionals seeking their perceived self-interest in a landscape of diminishing career opportunities where the only remaining competitive advantage one can have is to claim moral superirority on one's competitors. So the status-seeking behavior manifests itself mostly in the form of bettering one's image.
This episode is infuriating. Why didn't you question his flawed thinking? Was it the endless refences to other thinkers? He has obviously cherry-picked through all of the great thinkers to find the ones that fit his already held beliefs.
I can't understand how he could ever think that the current liberal west is as terrible as he says. Where are the actual reasons? The statistics on societies? This is just a hysteria in my eyes necessary for him to justify his outdated thinking. Mental gymnastics to not be forced to change his mind. I'll give him that he is incredibly good at convincing himself.
I was hoping for a conversation, not a monologue from John Gray (which at times seemed more like a lecture), with only the occasional interjection from the ever-polite Sam Harris.
And a dumb lecture at that.
@@JulesJunk😂😂😂
@@JulesJunk Actually, a fair bit of what he said was downright moronic.
He specifically said he couldn't imagine Hayek could foresee the cancel culture of today, and he equivocates this with the downfall of liberalism.
Hayek was around for the McCarthy hearings. He was around for the Lavender scare. And in case you don't know, lives were ruined by these events on a greater scale than the cancel culture of today, often for unjustified suspicion and mere innuendo. Those pilloried often got their unjust desserts in public at the hand of government actors.
However bad modern 'wokeness' might be, these harms in the name of anti-communism, which Gray proudly identified himself with, are far worse and more egregious than cancel culture today.
So Gray seems to think Hayek had a shit memory and no imagination. Gray seems to very much share these faults he inadvertently projects into Hayek.
Dumbest guest ever. Sam's still great though.
This guy is completely insufferable. He just drones on and on and on. A point should be made in a couple short sentences not infinite run on sentences.
@davidmancke "on a greater scale"? Hmm, idk about that. Cancel culture still isn't quite over.
It depends what morality means
Criticizing new atheism is like criticizing Inverness because their is an extra monster
my favorite quote from this episode: "'Homer is lacking certain values that we take for granted". uhhhh yes 😂
Sorry, but I gave up listening after 15 minutes. I'm in my eighties and have lived in the same world as John, my view of this era is significantly different than his. Most of the lost freedoms are a response to the incredible developments and spread of technology to all of us. Liberalism is prone to provide a logical basis for extremists who are promoting social Darwinism, very dangerous in the era of social media, artificial intelligence, drones and denial of global warming.
Anyone know what the painting in the video is??
darude, sandstorm, 1642
'The Death of Julius Caesar' by Vincenzo Camuccini, c. 1805.
It's absurd in this context. Getting fired for bad manners may be overkill, but it is far from literal, "kill."
This guy's hyperbole is absurd and less-then-historical, but that it's also didactic is fucking insulting.
I believe it's the Last Supper by Leonardo DiCaprio
@@iainshanky6492😂😂
WOW Sam! You continue to expose me to incredible intellectuals. I'm in awe of the rational thought and outstanding communication talent exhibited by your guests and your own self, of course. Sam, Sammy, Samuel, Samson! You got bright light shining into our world and I thank you for it.
Sam is a World Champion Pseudo intellectual.
Sammy The Pseudo Harris.
@@CP-nl2zbwhat makes you use the qualifier “pseudo”?
@@ericgraham8150
They say this verbatim comment on multiple episodes' comment sections.
I suspect they're subscribed simply to spam this comment each new release and then fly away until the next notification lol
@@tomwolfe7782 Ah okay, fair enough. :)
*John Grey was like an alternate universe AC Greyling suffering from depression.*
Oh my GOD. can the guest stop saying "hm" "yeah" "hm" and interrupting Sam every 8 seconds? Good Lord it is annoying to listen to. It grates against my sensibilities.
This guest is very boring, and he interrupts Sam too much.
Gray -- best I've heard for a long while.
This John Gray is worth the listen.
Wow, do I wish I had a bill of rights and constitution wrapped around me like my American cousins. Approximately 23 minutes into the conversation
It does nothing
It is puerile for Gray to claim that "constitutions/bill of rights by themselves do nothing to prevent abuses."
No shit Sherlock. Good people make laws. Good people enforce these laws. Good laws do not make good people.
@@jraelien5798 Jefferson was an early hero of mine, partly because of his scientific interests (which very much helped to mould his political philosophy), but mostly because he, almost more than anyone else, was responsible for the spread of democracy throughout the world. The idea - breathtaking, radical and revolutionary at the time (in many places in the world, it still is) is that not kings, not priests, not big city bosses, not dictators, not a military cabal, not a de facto conspiracy of the wealthy, but ordinary people, working together, are to rule the nations. Not only was Jefferson a leading theoretician of this cause; he was also involved in the most practical way, helping to bring about the great American political experiment that has, all over the world, been admired and emulated since.
He died at Monticello on 4 July 1826, fifty years to the day after the colonies issued that stirring document, written by Jefferson, called the Declaration of Independence. It was denounced by conservatives worldwide. Monarchy, aristocracy and state-supported religion - that's what conservatives were defending then. In a letter composed a few days before his death, he wrote that it was the 'light of science' that had demonstrated that 'the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs', nor were a favoured few born 'booted and spurred'. He had written in the Declaration of Independence that we all must have the same opportunities, the same 'unalienable' rights. And if the definition of 'all' was disgracefully incomplete in 1776, the spirit of the Declaration was generous enough that today 'all' is far more inclusive.
Jefferson was a student of history - not just the compliant and safe history that praises our own time or country or ethnic group, but the real history of real humans, our weaknesses as well as our strengths. History taught him that the rich and powerful will steal and oppress if given half a chance. He described the governments of Europe, which he saw at first hand as the American ambassador to France. Under the pretence of government, he said, they had divided their nations into two classes: wolves and sheep. Jefferson taught that every government degenerates when it is left to the rulers alone, because rulers - by the very act of ruling - misuse the public trust. The people themselves, he said, are the only prudent repository of power.
But he worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. So he advocated safeguards, insurance policies. One was the constitutional separation of powers; accordingly, various groups, some pursuing their own selfish interests, balance one another, preventing any one of them from running away with the country: the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches; the House and the Senate; the States and the Federal Government. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to involve themselves in the political process. Without that, he said, the wolves will take over. Here's how he put it in Notes on Virginia, stressing how the powerful and unscrupulous find zones of vulnerability they can exploit:
"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved . . ."
Jefferson had little to do with the actual writing of the US Constitution; as it was being formulated, he was serving as American minister to France. When he read its provisions, he was pleased, but with two reservations. One deficiency: no limit was provided on the number of terms the President could serve. This, Jefferson feared, was a way for a President to become a king, in fact if not in law. The other major deficiency was the absence of a bill of rights. The citizen, the average person, was insufficiently protected, Jefferson thought, from the inevitable abuses of those in power.
He advocated freedom of speech, in part so that even wildly unpopular views could be expressed, so that deviations from the conventional wisdom could be offered for consideration. Personally he was an extremely amiable man, reluctant to criticize even his sworn enemies. He displayed a bust of his arch-adversary Alexander Hamilton in the vestibule at Monticello. Nevertheless, he believed that the habit of scepticism is an essential prerequisite for responsible citizenship. He argued that the cost of education is trivial compared to the cost of ignorance, of leaving the government to the wolves. He taught that the country is safe only when the people rule.
Whatever the problem, the quick fix is to shave a little freedom off the Bill of Rights. Yes, in 1942, Japanese-Americans were protected by the Bill of Rights, but we locked them up anyway - after all, there was a war on. Yes, there are Constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure, but we have a war on drugs and violent crime is racing out of control. Yes, there's freedom of speech, but we don't want foreign authors here, spouting alien ideologies, do we? The pretexts change from year to year, but the result remains the same: concentrating more power in fewer hands and suppressing diversity of opinion - even though experience plainly shows the danger of such a course of action.
One reason the Constitution is a daring and courageous document is that it allows for continuing change, even of the form of government itself, if the people so wish. Because no one is wise enough to foresee which ideas may answer urgent societal needs - even if they're counterintuitive and have been troubling in the past - this document tries to guarantee the fullest and freest expression of views. There is, of course, a price. Most of us are for freedom of expression when there's a danger that our own views will be suppressed. We're not all that upset, though, when views we despise encounter a little censorship here and there. But within certain narrowly circumscribed limits - Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous example was causing panic by falsely crying 'fire' in a crowded theatre - great liberties are permitted in America:
• Gun collectors are free to use portraits of the Chief Justice, the Speaker of the House, or the Director of the FBI for target practice; outraged civic-minded citizens are free to burn in effigy the President of the United States.
• Even if they mock Judaeo-Christian-Islamic values, even if they ridicule everything most of us hold dear, devil-worshippers (if there are any) are entitled to practice their religion, so long as they break no constitutionally valid law.
• A purported scientific article or popular book asserting the 'superiority' of one race over another may not be censored by the government, no matter how pernicious it is; the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
• Individuals may, if they wish, praise the lives and politics of such undisputed mass murderers as Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. Even detestable opinions have a right to be heard.
• Individuals or groups are free to argue that a Jewish or Masonic conspiracy is taking over the world, or that the Federal government is in league with the Devil.
The system founded by Jefferson, Madison and their colleagues offers means of expression to those who do not understand its origins and wish to replace it by something very different. For example, Tom Clark, Attorney General and therefore chief law enforcement officer of the United States, in 1948 offered this suggestion: 'Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States shall not be allowed to stay in the United States.' But if there is one key and characteristic US ideology, it is that there are no mandatory and no forbidden ideologies.
The expression of such views is protected, and properly so, under the Bill of Rights, even if those protected would abolish the Bill of Rights if they got the chance. The protection for the rest of us is to use that same Bill of Rights to get across to every citizen the indispensability of the Bill of Rights.
What means to protect themselves against human fallibility, what error-protection machinery do these alternative doctrines and institutions offer? An infallible leader? Race? Nationalism? Wholesale disengagement from civilization, except for explosives and automatic weapons? How can they be sure?
In his celebrated little book, On Liberty, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is 'a peculiar evil'. If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the 'opportunity of exchanging error for truth'; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in 'its collision with error'. If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.
Mill also wrote, 'If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up as mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame.' Jefferson made the same point even more strongly: 'If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.' In a letter to Madison, he continued the thought: 'A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.'
The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many cases indistinguishable. Science and democracy began - in their civilized incarnations - in the same time and place, Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. Science confers power on anyone who takes the trouble to learn it (although too many have been systematically prevented from doing so). Science thrives on, indeed requires, the free exchange of ideas; its values are antithetical to secrecy. Science holds to no special vantage points or privileged positions. Both science and democracy encourage unconventional opinions and vigorous debate. Both demand adequate reason, coherent argument, rigorous standards of evidence and honesty. Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being. If we're true to its values, it can tell us when we're being lied to. It provides a mid-course correction to our mistakes. The more widespread its language, rules and methods, the better chance we have of preserving what Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues had in mind. But democracy can also be subverted more thoroughly through the products of science than any pre-industrial demagogue ever dreamed.
In matters of criminal justice, the Bill of Rights recognizes the temptation that may be felt by police, prosecutors and the judiciary to intimidate witnesses and expedite punishment. The criminal-justice system is fallible: innocent people might be punished for crimes they did not commit; governments are perfectly capable of framing those who, for reasons unconnected with the purported crime, they do not like. So the Bill of Rights protects defendants. A kind of cost-benefit analysis is made. The guilty may on occasion be set free so that the innocent will not be punished. This is not only a moral virtue; it also inhibits the misuse of the criminal-justice system to suppress unpopular opinions or despised minorities. It is part of the error-correction machinery.
New ideas, invention and creativity in general, always spearhead a kind of freedom, a breaking out from hobbling constraints. Freedom is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of science which is one reason the Soviet Union could not remain a totalitarian state and be technologically competitive. At the same time, science - or rather its delicate mix of openness and scepticism, and its encouragement of diversity and debate - is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of freedom in an industrial and highly technological society.
Once you questioned the religious insistence on the prevailing view that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe, why should you accept the repeated and confident assertions by religious leaders that God sent kings to rule over us? In the seventeenth century, it was easy to whip English and Colonial juries into a frenzy over this impiety or that heresy. They were willing to torture people to death for their beliefs. By the late eighteenth century, they weren't so sure.
The Bill of Rights uncoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind, each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others. Often, the leaders and practitioners of absolutist religions were unable to perceive any middle ground or recognize that the truth might draw upon and embrace apparently contradictory doctrines. The framers of the Bill of Rights had before them the example of England, where the ecclesiastical crime of heresy and the secular crime of treason had become nearly indistinguishable. Many of the early colonists had come to America fleeing religious persecution, although some of them were perfectly happy to persecute other people for their beliefs. The founders of our nation recognized that a close relation between the government and any of the quarrelsome religions would be fatal to freedom - and injurious to religion. Justice Black (in the Supreme Court decision Engel v. Vitale, 1962) described the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment this way: "Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion."
Clinton Rossiter (from Seedtime of the Republic, 1953): Under the pressure of the American environment, Christianity grew more humanistic and temperate - more tolerant with the struggle of the sects, more liberal with the growth of optimism and rationalism, more experimental with the rise of science, more individualistic with the advent of democracy. Equally important, increasing numbers of colonists, as a legion of preachers loudly lamented, were turning secular in curiosity and skeptical in attitude. Moreover, here too the separation of powers works. Each sect and cult, as Walter Savage Landor once noted, is a moral check on the others: 'Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.' But the price is high: This competition is an impediment to religious bodies acting in concert to address the common good.
Rossiter concludes: the twin doctrines of separation of church and state and liberty of individual conscience are the marrow of our democracy, if not indeed America's most magnificent contribution to the freeing of Western man.
Now, it's no good to have such rights if they're not used - a right of free speech when no one contradicts the government, freedom of the press when no one is willing to ask the tough questions, a right of assembly when there are no protests, universal suffrage when less than half the electorate votes, separation of church and state when the wall of separation is not regularly repaired. Through disuse they can become no more than votive objects, patriotic lip-service. Rights and freedoms: use 'em or lose 'em.
Due to the foresight of the framers of the Bill of Rights - and even more so to all those who, at considerable personal risk, insisted on exercising those rights - it's hard now to bottle up free speech. School library committees, the immigration service, the police, the FBI or the ambitious politician looking to score cheap votes, may attempt it from time to time, but sooner or later the cork pops. The Constitution is, after all, the law of the land, public officials are sworn to uphold it, and activists and the courts episodically hold their feet to the fire.
However, through lowered educational standards, declining intellectual competence, diminished zest for substantive debate, and social sanctions against scepticism, our liberties can be slowly eroded and our rights subverted. The founders understood this well: 'The time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united,' said Thomas Jefferson. "From the conclusion of this [Revolutionary] war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, 'til our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."
Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen - or the citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit.
~CS
Love John Gray, just as I love Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh. I read all of his popular works. Although I cautiously disagree with his basic philosophical outlook, I read his books because they provoke thought. They are full of intriguing and challenging exerts from history and the history of ideas. You always learn something new and maybe unexpected with Gray - at least you do if you’re an interested lay person like me….I don’t think you have to agree with him, to be interested in what he has to say
What’s moral? It’s certainly not whatever crap was spoken in this conversation. Comparing apples to oranges and then making a moral measurement of which is better doesn’t progress the conversation. It only speaks to the irrelevance of this train of thought to modern society
Morals don't exist. Only physical world exists and what happens there is always 100%.
Homo sapiens apes really do think too much of themselves
Moral progress is not EVEN a fantasy.
It's nonsense.
we got rid of slavery seems like progress
@@radscorpion8it's been reinstated in many parts of the world. And what about wage slavery
Sam, your work is fabulous. I am a big admirer. This particular guest, however, was embarrassingly foolish. I am obsessed with learning about moral values and what humans call ethics, but Gray had nothing of any value for anyone.
Here here!
Did you even bother to read his books?
@@keithhunt5328 Nope. And I won't be wasting my time.
@@keithhunt5328 The guy says Hayek could not have imaged the cancel culture of today, despite that Hayek lived through two red scares, a lavender scare, Oliver Wendell Holmes and any other number of actual instances of actual state censorship destroying people's lives over mere innuendo and suspicion.
This guest is a fucking moron.
Thanks Sam.
What it seems to me (and in saying this I hope to start a dialogue) is that the recent decriers of anti semitism are using the term as a misnomer for opposition to the assault on Gaza and to antizionism at large. While The West has more in common ideologically, culturally, and philosophically with the Israeli state than the authoritarian/theocratic Islamic states, this should not be an excuse to fall into the booby trap of tribalism that purveys throughout history. Israel has committed acts of violence and barbarism in Palestine on a scale rarely seen in the 21st century and that rivals and exceeds the acts committed against them by their enemies in scope and scale. In an irony that seems to be lost of them, the very same people “defending” free speech are now using the term “antisemitism” as a cudgel against those who are fairly criticizing our governments’ contributions to the suffering of millions. The only way to stop the cycle of violence is to be willing to recognize the faults of your own “tribe”. If The West was so morally superior compared to its enemies, there wouldn’t be 12,000 murdered children in Gaza.
12,000 lol citation needed. Sorry but you can't go by Hamas' figures and that is all we have.
Islam since its inception has murdered its way across the globe
to rob the lands of Christians Jews Zoroastrians Buddhists Hindus from Morocco to India
5,000 miles across!
The Islamic goal of land acquisition propelled the Arabs to acquire as much land as possible to the present day. One instance of this Imperialism is the will and attempt to annihilate the few Jews that live in a sliver of land 600 times smaller than the Lands of Islam !
When will Islam stop murdering for land- It already has more land than it knows what to do with . Will Islam always remain land hungry- How much of the world has to be brought into the Caliphate
for Islam to finally be land satisfied?
Read “ Islamic Imperialism “ and
“ The Legacy of Jihad”
other scholarly books about the Islamic program
@@samuelgoldring9691yes islam is a genocidal cult
I am afraid that even technological progress is not an illusion but finite.
Is progress just different or „better“?
It maybe finite sure. But I think we still have a long way to go before we reach its limit.
@@infidelheretic923 You do, I don't. Someone needs to discuss this.
I’m retired from a large corporation. What the hell is DEI? Man oh man, I’m so glad I don’t have to take classes and implement whatever it is. It was hard enough to find and hire competent people as it was. As a side note, dei as in Opus Dei? Nasty.
Diversity Equity inclusion
In his 2004 book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, the British journalist, writer and broadcaster, Francis Wheen, wrote:
"Conservatives, Marxists, post-modernists and pre-modernists have queued up to take a kick at the bruised ideas of the eighteenth century. The most vicious of these boot-boys is John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, who has published dozens of increasingly apocalyptic books and articles on the need to end the Enlightenment project forthwith. Whereas MacIntyre seeks sanctuary in twelfth-century monasteries, for Gray our only hope of salvation is to embrace Eastern mysticism ... Taoism seems to be his favoured creed but it is hard to interpret Gray's prescriptions with any certainty, partly because of his scattergun style but mostly because he changes his mind so often. A line on the dust-jacket of Enlightenment's Wake (1995), which says that the book 'stakes out the elements of John Gray's new position' could just as well be appended to everything he writes."
Glad i’m not the only one who think that Gray guy sounds a little off his rocking chair
Honestly gives off strong „Old man yelling at clouds“ vibes
I am trying to find something useful in his babbling. Nothing yet.
Gray can't shut up
He was the guest speaker so what's your problem?
@@valvlog4665These commentators are insufferable
For the most part yes. We have made what you might call social progress (better ways to organize ourselves) which is real. But most people believe that moral progress is what allows for peace and cooperation etc. when in reality it is an abundance of energy from the ground that allows for this. Food, material and energetic abundance can allow for temporary times of relative peace and expansion of rights etc. but it is always temporary. Once we reach the limits of our environment, violent competition, slavery and cruelty reign once again. This is how all living systems work. Morality is a delusion.
“Let us all eat first, then we talk morality.”
Who is the author that Kessler is referring to? Sounds like Arthur Kessler, but I couldn’t find that name anywhere
Koestler
I love all the new content but I think more than me waiting for an opinion about the recent "transformation" of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Or if I missed something then please point me to the direction
She talked about it on UnHerd
@@rodblues6832 and what was HER opinion about sudden changes of HERS is SHE agre with HER?
What is SAM HARROIS OPINIOIN...lol
I almost stopped listening because he couldn't stop saying "hm, yeah, hm"
A possible simplified perspective on moral progress could be ….. 3 steps forward followed by 2 steps back…. considering at least a multi century time frame. I see still progress in the big picture of human history
In the big picture there is nothing but violence and genocide.
Good episode. These days, I'd have to consider myself a centrist Conservatarian.
@@VideoGamer132-i4z Because they are useful, short descriptions of our beliefs :)
I.dont know what a centrist conservatarian is, but i do know that conservatism is in the extreme right.
When did `conversation` become an intellectual mindfuck monologue?
Guys like Gray (what a perfect name) need to step out of their ivory towers once in a while.
Nassim Taleb called John Gray the wisest living intellectual. That's how much of an influential of a person he is.
What is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular.
Don't conflate influence with accuracy, it's stupid. Thanks!
@@davidmancke We can't always agree on what's right and I didn't say that. But based on the respect Nassim earned as an intellectual, we can safely listen when he says someone is an real intellectual and then go see for ourselves. And I read John's two books: straw dogs & false dawn. He really is an intellect worth his salt. You should check his works before you jump and scream with no background about what you're talking about.
@@ephi124 On the A point, you completely ignored my point above, and really just repeated the notion that because this guy has prestige what he says should carry weight; that notion remains illogical.
On the B point, being an intellectual of any rank does not in itself mean that person has anything of value to contribute, it certainly doesn't insulate them from errors. The guest makes some serious errors and the cancel culture he derides is neither new, or as bad as instances of the past.
In fact, the anti-communism he claims to have championed years ago is linked to many cases of depriving people of careers and ruining lives far more than the woke culture of today, and included the application of state power to those destructive ends. Even if wokeness is bad, McCarthyism was far worse.
That he conveniently forgets all this to grind an axe is peek intellectual dishonesty, especially from such a decorated "intellectual"
The number one problem is our nature. We are driven so much by our genetics. Also, every so many years theres a new generation to teach how to be decent human beings, from scratch. It's only growth in personal comfort and met needs that cause people tp not be terrible to each other. Then again, widespread human comfort results (so far) in environmental devastation. Its a pickle alright.
Human nature is unchangeable lol
What makes the US Constitution unique is the matter of individual liberty. The US Constitution and it's amendments are uniquely libertarian. In England, you can be convicted for expressing disagreeable ideas. This is not the case in the US. I agree with Gray's point about the value of any paper but the US Constitution is structurally sound. No paper has power in and of itself but the IDEA is what Sam was arguing for here. The structural advantage of the US Constitution is the elucidation of individual liberty above that of the government. It asserts that liberty is granted, in perpetuity, by the government (through the declaration) and NOT by God or subsequent governments. Unfortunately, people who enjoy this liberty freely, tend to be willing to surrender the same in favor of things like political motivations and security. Gray's perspective is informed by history but I would argue, he fails to stich it together rationally.
Humans just climbed down from the trees an hour ago on the evolutionary scale of Earth and the industrial revolution is not even a second old. That our primal emotional brain has not kept up with our collective intellect is likely the proximal cause of our social failures (setbacks) and intellectual immaturity. Unlike the prime directive of "do no harm to humans" that we would imbue in an artificial intelligence, the constitution relies on humans. Humans have not evolved sufficiently to detach from emotion. The obvious remedy is a combination of intellect and awareness. A world full of Sam Harris's would be lightyears ahead of a world full of Trump supporters (for example). The closest archetype today might be the Netherlands....maybe Denmark...where there are more Sam Harris types and fewer Trump fans, more Atheist actually. Rational thought is our only hope to overcome our emotional brains.
I am wondering: Would you consider the last sentence of the Declaration of Independence, with its invoking divine providence and sacred honor, libertarian? I ask because I find libertarianism whether economic or social very troubling and would move you
@@jkg7661 I don't understand your point here. The structure of the US Constitution is pretty well understood historically, to grant liberty to its citizens. It is a foundation. "Libertarianism" means different things to different people but in the context of my point and in the context of the Constitution, it means that I am free to do pretty-much, whatever I want as long as it doesn't interfere with your liberty (freedom). I hope you don't have a problem with this. If you do, maybe there are other places that you prefer over the US, in terms of rights etc... "Rights" are not granted or defended by "God" or any divinity. They are protected by the people who agree with the program...the government, in the case of the US.
@@rustyosgood5667My point would be to read Gray. Oh well, I accept the mutual misunderstanding in our exchange
@@jkg7661 I think that Gray takes a purely "Historical" view of history but misses the data contained therein. That societies rise and fall is historical but not factual...if that makes sense. We have evolved morally and while there may be ups and downs, the trajectory is up and to the right if you scale appropriately. Pinker does a great job of making this point and Harris only had to point to slavery to drive this home in this discussion. That Gray failed to acknowledge this point and just tried to Gish Gallop around it, says all I need to hear from him. He does have an extensive knowledge of history and some unique perspectives but I think he is wrong. So why would I read him? In my mind, he failed the Harris logic stress test in this discussion. Failing a logic test is lethal in my mind. Either he is intellectually dishonest or limited. I am uninterested in either. If I thought there was a chance that I am missing something that might be revealed in his writings, I would seek them out with vigor. Unfortunately, I remain unconvinced that I am missing any key points. Please feel free to take a shot because, as Harris says, "You could change my mind with the next sentence"!
@@rustyosgood5667"Whatever role it may have had in the past, belief in progress has become a mechanism of self-deception that serves only to block perception of the evils that come with the growth of knowledge."
Leave his books alone
Love the content, but I gotta say the opening music is beginning to wear on me 😊
Mmm, interesting.
🤔 things are indeed not going as you would expect with technology….maybe it’s like Alan Watts once proclaimed “ thinking that by solving a problem you do good, only creates new problems “ ..
Drones can be used for surveillance on forest fires 🔥, and can be used to start them..
Where do we start?
Solving the problem of right wing extremism against left extremism is also just a guide to another problem?
I think the best answer and approach is just to shrug my shoulders and say “ I don’t care “ …..very powerful! 😊
I basically agree with the ol chap on everything 100%. Sam is behind the curve in terms of understanding that liberal society is basically gone, perhaps forever in the US.
That is fucking stupid, and dogs know it.
Let me know when you get arrested for broadcasting your opinions on TH-cam or anywhere else.
I gave up before it got halfway through. John Gray cannot be silent for even 5 seconds without making some sort of sound into the mike.
Liberalism means different things
This is one of the most interesting conversation i have heard. Being myself a critic of religion but still liking some traditions cultures i dont know where to stand.
Not sure how that qualified as a conversation. Conversations involve an exchange of information/ideas and what happened here is a monologue by Gray. He wouldn't let Sam get a word in edgewise.
@@bowowski936agreed. Sam asked an introductory question, literally 15 mins later, the guy was still talking. A conversation this wasn’t 😂
An ongoing persistent topic. Where does one stand!?!
If the 'simple' idea "Care how we treat one other" can't move the needle on moral progress, then all the blah blah blah and endless opinions from opinion factories about the vast randomness in humans doesn't have a prayer.
Fair
Hi sam. Long time no...
Interesting, but John interrupts Sam too much.
Even if God was dead, his Spirit is alive: at least inside of those who get not lost to thoughtlessness, irrationality and imbecility. 🍷🔥
Spoiler: yes
Believe me I have wondered…
"..until she was outed by her all-too-white parents."
Speaking of moral progress while having been a supporter of Thatcher?
Morals don't exist.
The best you can say "in my understanding of morals, being a supporter of Thatcher is not moral progress"
Any other homo sapiens can say the same and in case of a conflict, physical power will decide who's concept prevails
Yes.
This was very hard to listen to with the constant interruption and even non-linguistic agreement
Israel isn't a Western state, and antisemitism isn't the same as the anti-European and anti-masculine thing; the antisemitism is newer and coalesced in part with woke thereafter. Before that, wokeness was quite a Jewish-academic project.
Critical race theory was not a Jewish academic project.
Wokeness is not a Jewish project, unless you would also say the same about banking and capitalism?
Israel is a western state. It’s certainly more western than turkey
@@davegold It was completely inspired by the Frankfurt school marxism (all jews). Wokism can be seen a a golem made by jews that now is going against them with Israel. I find it funny how cancelling / insulting people was ok for jews when it was about them/the holocaust but now they're doing a 180. Just shows Jews only care about their tribe...
Israel isn't in the west geographically, but it's aligned with Western countries and is a democracy with Western values. Antisemitism has definitely been present in wokeness the whole time and there's tonnes of literature on that.
@michaeljames8410 No it hasn't and academic wokeness is thoroughly Jewish in origin. From the concoction of race Marxism to Ben & Jerry's. Zionist Jews simply lost the plot, and the black and browns as they call themselves, take Jews now to be "white", which is an infamous trick of theirs. They masquerade as westerners to garner support e.g. Netanyahu saying the Mufti told Hitler to burn the Jews; it wasn't "we westerners"-we Europeans-but the Zionists say it themselves, they would deport all Arabs to Europe who occupy the land they want. Whatever ones they don't exterminate.
I understand some unfortunate generalizations are implicit in what I'm saying but it's just for want of space; I understand things are complicated, especially as regards Jews and their history-which, to be sure is not our history, except insofar as they've contributed and assimilated over the centuries, and have had a lasting and useful impact on West. E.g. Einstein, Bohm, Spinoza, among the greatest of men. But wokeness, that is to say _Ressentiment_ is quintessentially Jewish, I think. Wokeness includes pornography and feminism for me.
Moral "progression" only exists relative to moral "regression."
Typically, "morals" are slowly and intricately woven into the fabric a society and are suited to the particular cultural climate of their time.
Therefore, what a "moral" person might look like in one particular group or culture at some given time will likely look at least somewhat different from a person in that "same" nation or culture at an earlier or later time.
The meta question of which moral framework is superior may be harder to answer than is typically assumed. We must remember we color our perceptions of the past, present, and future based on whatever moral (again, not ethical) cultural climate we find ourselves in. That being said, we can and still probably should attempt to evaluate our frameworks but we just need to take stock of all variables that may influence our evaluation.
My opinion is that the moral climate that cultures and societies develop in times of hardship are the best. People need adversity to feel challenged and powerful in their lives; shared adversity binds people together like nothing else. The higher and more dire the stakes, the more one takes life less for granted and makes use of the time given to them. We take seriously the responsibility that comes with freedom because our own lives and those of our loved ones may depend on our ability to handle ourselves with responsibility. In times of strife, water tastes all the sweeter, fire the warmer, food the tastier, and love all the stronger.
In the past, peoples would go through times of war and/or hardship, and then times of peace and/or prosperity. I think it can be reasonably argued that generations that live through hardship have superior "morals" than those generations that know only prosperity because why would it be any other way? Why ought the generations that know only peace and leisure be more tightly bound morally? What incentives and/or pressures exist to make that the case. I don't think there are any - at least in any real sense that has the ability to knock people out of a state of moral malaise and degradation.
As the adage goes: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times."
Industrial societies have made it difficult for people to be in such dire straights. People in our societies are lacking true, meaningful challenge and instead replace it with surrogate pass-times and tertiary goals that are empty and meaningless at the end of their lives.
Moral regression like the kind we've been seeing is only inevitable unless we are forced upon a period of great hardship and suffering.
Your thesis up top is vacuous.
Western atheism and liberalism are a gift to competing strong cultures and ideologies. You don't believe me? Go have a look at major European cities.
Can you please elaborate?
Western atheist and liberal cities are a gift to Christian cultures and ideologies. No?
@@swayp5715 Promotion of Atheism and western liberalism leads to large scale individualistic materialism and no strong uniting principals. On a long enough time frame they will be overtaken by community driven cultures with strong principals.
@@zacka9438 ahhhh I see where you're coming from. The UK being overrun by mosques etc. Thank you very much.
Sam finally found an interlocutor that answers with monologs even longer than his own 😂
John is an ocean of knowledge.
Morality is just a social construct it's just a survival mechanism...
Easily. Try your morals on any other animal but human, or even humans who reject your morals and have their own.
If you don't have enough physical ability to stand your ground, I bet your morals is gonna be irrelevant.
@annoyingcommentator1582 no
So?
@@domsnow6418 So "moral progress" doesn't even make sense because it's just a tool to be used to ignored based on self interest. There's no true right or wrong if it's just a survival mechanism. Just whatever is the most personally advantageous choice.
@@Laocoon283 so why is there altruism? Why do people behave good when no one is watching? What you write makes sense if all people are psychopaths, which I do agree to some extent but not fully.
Uh the US Constitution can be changed though and has.
What a boring lecture. I prefer conversations to lectures.
There is no good or bad, moral or immoral etc. these are just concepts inside our heads and can literally be anything.
In the end the only thing that matters is the ability to command dominant physical power to enforce any set of rules.
You gringos are fucking amazing, as well as you do with the metric system, the Billions instead of Millards, Americans instead of Unitedstatetians and the Liberalism instead of coorperativism. You guys are like the self made aliens for the rest of the world.
There hasn’t been a single news story about navelny on the main stream channels in America?
16 hours later .. only bbc and channel 4 in the uk
Because Navalny was a nobody; just another expendable CIA asset.
Who is that?
Jeeeeeesuuusssss. Listening to him is absolute fatiguing. He just never shuts up. I stopped caring almost immediately. I don’t enjoy listening to people monologue…just jumping from one topic as if practicing a speech.
mmmm, mmmm, mmm , mmmm
They both were mmmm, mmmm'ing at one point. Jesus
He's just saying what we're all thinking! :P
@@carnivalminds its kind of funny in retrospect :)
Hmm...mmh...mhh...hmm.. mmhh...mhh...hmm.. mmh..mmh
Mmmmm.... Yes .. MMMMMM... hmmm, uh-huh, mmmmmmm
A Hayek fan on Sam's podcast? Wow. What next? An Ayn Rand fan? One could only dream.
An anti communist as well, which is always a major plus. Fuck communism.
Note how Sam specifically condemns Ayn Rand writ large as he is framing the first question.
But yeah, "fuck communism" there's a cogent philosophy. If only you had been there in the mid 1800's
@@davidmancke who cares what someone who has never read ayn rand thinks of her work?
And fuck communism is quite appropriate for a TH-cam comment field.
Any moral philosopher who continues to turn a blind eye to Gaza can no longer be taken seriously. Sam you can stay onside with your friends like Douglas Murray and the powerful Jewish network in social and other media but one day you will have to look back and squarely face the facts of what's gone on there. Hiding behind your main argument of moral relativism and irrelevance of proportionality in war only holds water to a certain point. Christopher Hitchens must be turning in his grave.
Lmfao
@@saganworshipper6062
What would you do if you could dictate what Sam would do? What would you prescribe for the Israel Palestine conflict?
So there'd be agreement that there are degrees of moral good and bad, but moral progress doesn't exist because it doesn't survive the test of time..(?) shouldn't it be distinguished on what level we're denying moral progress, on an individual human level or a societal level, individually speaking it'd be an easy to accept assessment because, simplified, we're unstable animals, on a societal level naturally it'd be all up to the robustness of the system, in this day and age all power lies in the system so that is all that matters, if there are objective criterias that are good than all you'd have to do to create a permanent moral superior system would be to increase the robustness so far that regression is impossible in which case moral progress would exist
Just when you think his sentence is coming to an end, he finds more breath to continue down a different track
This guy is a propagandist has been for years and is proud of it
Lol you're paranoid
That much is clearly true, is as much as you are saying it about Gray.
☀️
Although this was a nice conversation, next time you have him on the podcast please mute his microphone while you are talking. The constant “hmmm” on top of you was distracting.
Is the censoring today as bad as it was when the whole social justice warrior thing started??.
Also is this only happening as strong as it is in the USA or also in the other countries?
I've had to start saying things like "is rae l" in youtube comments because they're using AI to shadow ban wrongthink.
Sam, I know you’ll never see this, but i think you should talk to Tom Holland about the moral seedbed of Western Civilization.
This guy goes mmm one more time I will puke.
so did you