I had the opportunity today to engage in a long-awaited discussion, Dr. Richard Dawkins and Alex O'Connor, and we took the opportunity to explore things we agree about and things we disagree about in a manner that I think was very productive.
Join us for that. You said that you were a cultural Christian, but what did you mean by that?Virtually nothing.
Dr. Peterson, you're drunk on symbols.What I care about is the truth value.I see no truth value in the claims of Christianity, the virgin birth, the resurrection.Do you believe in any of those?
From a metaphorical perspective, any culture that doesn't hold the image of the woman and infant sacred dies.
Well, let's go back to what you said earlier, which I was very interested in.You implied there's no difference between whether the text is divinely inspired or whether it evolved.
Well, it's the same thing if it's fundamentally reflective of the logos or order.And I think it is.
I think that Jordan prioritizes myth and I prioritize fact.I'm not interested in dragons, I'm interested in reality.
But my sense is that those two pathways have to unify.Now, it's not like I know how to rectify that.
Do you think that that is something that is worth exploring further?
Yes!I think our first point of contact in the spirit of finding those overlapping circles of interest between you two will be the similarities, if there are any, between the concept of a meme and the concept of an archetype.
So, Professor Dawkins, perhaps you can begin by telling us, what is a meme?
A meme is a virus of the mind.So it's something that spreads because it spreads because it spreads.It's something that spreads by imitation.
As I understand it, an archetype is quite different from that because an archetype is something which all humans have as a virtue of being human, something that's built in.So it's not something that spreads as an epidemic.
It's something that we all have anyway.And I suppose that it could turn into a meme, but I would think it would be muddying the waters to even say that there's something very much in common between an archetype and a meme.
Memes are not embedded into the psychology of people as natural as an archetype.
No, they arise.They're things like the backwards baseball hat, which is not an archetype.I mean, it's something that becomes fashionable and spreads as an epidemic around the population.
which is very different from an archetype, which is sort of built in.
Yes, I've heard you in the past, Dr. Peterson, say that a meme is very similar, if not almost identical to an archetype, almost as if you kept pushing the idea of what a meme is, you might end up with an archetype, but perhaps not.
Well, I think maybe the appropriate way of tying the two ideas together, given what Dr. Dawkins just said, is to notice the fact that something spreads because it catches. Right?And so, things catch because they have an emotional resonance.
And so, they attract people's interest.And so, they attract them in an exploratory manner.That'd be one way of thinking about it.That would be attraction on the positive emotion side.Or they attract them on the negative emotion side.
And so that would loop the idea of the catchiness of an idea, a meme, let's say, with the more underlying motivational structures.And as the idea is more related to the action of underlying biological motivational structures,
it becomes more and more expression of something that's instinctual and archetypal.Jung defined an archetype essentially as something like the manifestation of an instinct in image and then also in behavior.
So the deepest level is something like the instinct, and that would be motivational or emotional drive.And then there's a manifestation of that in imagination and behavior, and it's more culturally constructed there.
And you could also imagine that there are depths of these ideas The baseball hat idea, for example, that would be something that's manifesting itself at a fairly shallow level, but there's a reason that the backwards baseball hat caught on.
You know, it speaks of the moment for whatever reason, and it's linked to the biology through the fact that it captures interest for some reason.
So perhaps something like The archetype being a more fundamental psychological concept that memes can then play upon.The backwards cap catches on.
Well, that seems implausible to me, but the idea that the archetype could be a reason why some memes spread, that seems to me to be plausible if you believe in archetypes at all.
But you prefer to think of memes, or you do think of memes as, you refer to them as a virus.
Yes.It doesn't have to have a negative connotation.It's the spreadability, which is the salient point.And if chiming in with an archetype is a reason why they might spread, then I could go with that.
Yeah, and presumably archetypes don't act in the same way.They don't spread through cultures.They don't sort of grow up and die in individual generations.They're much more foundational than that.
I think you have to think about it hierarchically.There's something in the structure that would make itself manifest as an archetype.
There's something that's foundational and deep that wouldn't change any faster in a sense than the species itself changes.
But then there would be efflorescences of that idea that would be less permanent as they were more attuned to the specifics of the time.
And that's not saying anything different, really, than saying that there are ideas that make themselves manifest at different levels of depth, which is also a complex thing.
It's not that easy to specify what makes an idea deep, which makes it more archetypal, and what makes it transient and trivial.There's a relationship between such ideas.
There's no idea so trivial that it doesn't touch the depths because no one would care about it. Right?So, but archetypal ideas do have that capacity to spread virally and to rise and fall.
You see that, I think you see that in the history of religious ideas. Now, that religious ideas are very, can be very catching because otherwise they wouldn't spread.
Now, they do, there's variation in them like there is in languages, but they also, there's also something that's core that makes them identifiable, let's say, as religious ideas rather than as any other sort of idea.
I mean, one of the things I was really interested about, I sent you an email at one time asking you if you had read Riche Eliade, especially The Sacred and the Profane, but he also has a three-book series called A History of Religious Ideas, and I really like A History of Religious Ideas.
It's a great book. And one of the things it does is analyze a particular widespread religious motif, which is the battle between the gods in heaven.
You see this idea in many, many cultures, and each god is the expression of a mode of perception or a mode of being.And what you see happening in multitude of cultures is that there are many, many ways of seeing the world and acting in it that are
metamorphose into something divine, and as cultures mingle and mix, their gods compete in the space of the imagination and something like a hierarchy forms.That's the emergence of something like monotheism.
So, we've been talking a little bit about the concept of a meme.
I think it would be strange to be suspicious of the idea that memes are a thing that do exist and transmit, but there might be more room for suspicion about this concept of the archetype.
I was wondering, Professor Dawkins, what you think about the concept of archetypes in general.
Well, for example, if we take the idea of the gods competing with each other, that, I take it, is a proper archetype because it's present in all cultures.
I presume you mean something that's built in genetically, ultimately, I suppose, that something about our brains makes different cultures invent the same kinds of religious symbols.Yes.Things like a battle between gods is one.That's one.
And there might be others.It's not that convincing.I mean, it's such an obvious thing because we have human battles, and therefore an idea of battles between gods would not be that implausible.
So it doesn't strike me as a very penetrating observation.
Well, I think the thing that's interesting about it, the thing that's been interesting to me about it is to start to understand the nature of the universal themes and how they're expressed in stories.
One of the things I wanted to explore with you, because I think this is an idea that's at the core of the cultural conflict, is the postmodern types seem to have stumbled onto something which I actually think is true.
And they're not the only discipline that's come to this realization, because you can see it emerging in neuroscience and in
in AI and in robotics as well, that we see the world of facts through something that Wynne described as a story, because we have to prioritize our perceptions, we have to prioritize facts.And as far as I can tell, a story is a verbal account of how
of how our perceptions and the facts that we encounter are prioritized.
So, for example, when you go see a movie, the movie has a hero, and what the writers do is they show you how the hero prioritizes his perceptions, what he attends to and how he acts, and you derive from that the story of his life and his ethic.
And the idea that we have a story, that we have to organize our perceptions in priority, and that the description of that organization is a story, that's a very revolutionary idea.And I think the postmodernists got that right.
And I think that's why we have a culture war going on, at least in part, is because the idea that we see the world through a story, or that a story is a description of the structure through which we see the world, I think that's accurate, because we have to prioritize our perceptions.
And that's a tricky problem.Well, I would prioritize my perceptions like this. The facts that I care about are the facts that are true and have evidence. going for them.I'm not that interested in symbols.
I think, Dr. Peterson, you're drunk on symbols.
Yes, you mentioned.I've heard that comment, yeah.
Yes.I mean, for example, I counted up in your book, We Who Wrestle with God, the number of references to Cain.There are 356 references to Cain in the book, and 20 references to the descendants of Cain.
you're obsessed with Cain, because Cain is symbolic of evil, all the evil in the world you more or less blame Cain for.And this is, Cain, I mean, you don't believe Cain actually existed, I presume.
Well, I think of Cain as, well... Do you believe Cain existed? I think the pattern that Cain represents is an eternal pattern, and so it's a higher level of existence.
That's different.I realize that.
Well, there are Cain types who exist, and they're very well known.
Yeah, yeah, there are Cain types, but Cain himself.I mean, you give the game away, where you say in your book, Cain and Abel were the first humans to be born in the natural way.
Now that betrays you as we're pretending you think they really existed, because you wouldn't have said they were born in a natural way unless you were muddling up facts with symbols there, because you don't think that Cain and Abel existed.
Well, I don't, what do I think about Cain and Abel?I said, I think the pattern that they represent always exists, always exists.You understand that that's a different thing?
A pattern that they represent, the conflict between brothers, the rivalry between brothers, this is a fundamental pattern, which yes, it's something that's there, but I care about facts.I mean, did they exist or did they not exist?
Well, I can imagine a situation where, when the story was originated, that it referred to two actual brothers.
But as the stories propagate across time, as they mutate, as they adapt, let's say, to the structure of human memory, they deepen and they become broader.
And so then they become emblematic, not only of the pattern of conflict that might characterize the original two brothers that the story was about, but about the conflict between
brothers as such, and then the more fundamental levels of conflict that exist within human beings, which is what you see in more sophisticated literature.
It's like the biblical accounts speak of fact in a factual manner upon occasion, but the biblical accounts also speak poetically and metaphorically and allegorically.And people who are sophisticated in biblical analysis have known this for centuries.
The biblical literates generally suffer from the problem that they don't even know what it means to be literalist.There's lots of unsophisticated ways of approaching a text.
Okay, let's see what Professor Dawkins thinks about that.
Well, I suppose I'm a literalist.I mean, and you give the game away when you say Cain and Abel were the first humans to be born in a natural way.
Well, I'm speaking allegorically there within the confines of the text.I mean, what I meant by that was that the way the story lays itself out is that Adam and Eve are created by God.
And so they're not emblematic of the pattern of human beings that exist in fallen history.Within the confines of the text, the first two people who are genuine, who aren't creations of the divine, arcane and able.
And so for me, they're emblematic of the patterns of conflict that rip people apart in the world of history, in the world of normal history.
Professor Dawkins, I know you take particular umbrage with that statement. Cain and Abel were the first normally born human beings.I think if I understand Dr. Peterson correctly, there are things that can be sort of true within a story.
It's true that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street and as far as I understand, that's maybe what you mean by the truth in the matter of Cain and Abel being the first naturally born humans, it's internal to our story.
Well, in the context of this story, they're the first two spirits or patterns you could think of, patterns of perception and action, that characterize human existence in the fallen world, right?
So, they're emblematic of what happens in history outside of the whatever is meant by the pre-existent paradise.
At the same time, You must know.I know this comes up all the time when somebody says, but did Cain and Abel really exist?And I know that you want to say that the story which they... I think it's a silly question.
I think it's like asking whether Raskolnikov existed in Crime and Punishment.Like, it's not a trivial question, because you can answer yes, and you can answer no.You can say, well, there was no such specific person as Raskolnikov.
But you... It's not a helpful question, because The reason that Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece is because Raskolnikov was everywhere in Russia when Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment.
And so Raskolnikov is hyper real, not not real.
But to be clear, is that how you feel about Cain and Abel? That is to say, an identifiable homo sapiens called Cain who murders his brother.
In a sense, it's irrelevant to me because even if they were real, we don't know anything about them as historical figures.
Even if they weren't real, of course they weren't real.
Well, like I said, it could have been the case that when the story originated,
way back when it originated, that the first people that were described by the first person who generated the seeds of the Cain and Abel story were referring to actual people.
But it doesn't matter, because the text is being compressed and modified over a vast span of time, and it's created all sorts of meanings that certainly weren't part and parcel of whatever the original story was.
I'll take the point Alex was certainly making. within the confines of the story.Dostoevsky was a great writer.What makes you think the writers of Genesis were a great writer?I mean, who were they?We know nothing about them.
Well, I think they were great writers because I think I understand the patterning of the stories and what it points to.I think the idea, for example, that Cain and Abel are emblematic of two opposed patterns of adaptation to the world is brilliant.
It's almost brilliant beyond imagining, especially because the story is so insanely compressed.
And it's certainly evident to me as a clinician that the patterns that are portrayed in the story of Cain and Abel play themselves out in the real world continually and terribly, terribly.
You think the author of that story in Genesis was a literary genius?
I think that there's a spirit of literary genius at work across millennia crafting that story so that it has almost an infinite depth.
How that relates to the original author or sequential authors, I don't know, because it's lost in the seeds of time.It's lost in history.
So the story evolved?You're saying the story... Like a meme.
Yes, it evolved.It evolved to match the contours of the human memory. That's exactly it, is that these stories, that's part of their archetypal nature.
So they have an emotional and motivational expression, but as they propagate across time, they also evolve so they're maximally memorable.And they're maximally memorable for a biological reason.
Well, that's very interesting.If they really did evolve over time, if you could actually trace successive manuscripts, you can't do that.I mean, there's presumably a couple of Hebrew manuscripts and a Greek one.
What do you mean when you say it evolved?
Well, I would say you can see that in the compilation of the biblical texts, because one of the things that you see evolve, you know, and you criticized the biblical texts at one point, correct me if I've got this wrong, because I don't want to get this wrong.
You said that there isn't anything in the biblical text that constitutes, let's say, a significant original discovery, which is something that you'd expect if it was of divine providence, let's say. divine provenance.
And so, and I think, you know, I was thinking about that objection, and I think that one of the discoveries that the text lays bare in an insanely brilliant manner is that the foundation of the community is sacrifice, that that's an appropriate conceptualization.
And you can see the concept of sacrifice evolve across the biblical texts as they're sequenced chronologically in the what in the overall story that makes up the biblical text.The idea of sacrifice becomes more and more sophisticated.
It's more and more elaborated.It's more and more specified.It's more and more embodied.There's an obvious progression in ideas.
The progression, where do you see that progression in successive Manuscripts?
It's in the successive stories as the story, as the text progresses.The way a novel progresses.So something like Sacrifice in the Old Testament.
Sacrifice in the Old Testament.
No, through the entire, well, the Old Testament text is a sacrificial story as well.The Passion story is a story of sacrifice.It is indeed.And the sacrificial motif recurs continually through the biblical text, and it's elaborated constantly.
Okay, so the criticism is the Bible as a text gives us nothing to indicate that it has divine origin.There's nothing that we can read in it where we think there's no way this idea could have evolved were it not divinely put into this text.
That's a criticism that perhaps Professor Dawkins made in the past.
Well, I think it's reflective of some order that's so profound and implicit that
There isn't a better way of describing it than divine, but I don't really care if we look at that from the bottom up, like as a biological phenomenon, or as from the top down.I don't think it makes any difference.
It doesn't make a difference whether it was divinely inspired or whether it evolved within humans.
I don't think fundamental, look, if, okay, so let me ask you this, like, I think that at bottom, truth is unified.
And what that's going to mean eventually is that the world of value and the world of fact coincide in some manner that we don't yet understand.And I think that that union, the fact of that union and the...
the fact of that union is equivalent to what's been described as divine order across millennia.There's no difference.
Now, and here's, this is a tricky business because you either believe that the world of truth is unified in the final analysis, or you don't.Those are the options.And if it's not unified, then it's, it's, there's a disunity.
There's a contradiction between value and fact, or there's a contradiction.Well, there's a contradiction between different sets of values and they can't be brought into unity.I don't believe that.
Well, let's go back to what you said earlier, which I was very interested in.You implied there's no difference between whether the text is divinely inspired or whether it evolved in progression during a series of manuscripts, presumably.
Now, I think that's genuinely interesting, but it's a huge difference.It's not the same thing.I mean, either it was divinely inspired or it wasn't.
Well, it's the same thing if it's fundamentally reflective of the, inaccurately reflective of the implicit logos or order.And I think it is.Like, let me explain that a moment.
Like, it took me a long time to understand the concept of sacrifice in the biblical text, because it seems so anachronistic and so primitive, you know, and primitive and not understandable.What are these people doing offering
you know, choice cuts of meat to a God that lives in the sky.
Something disgusting about it.
Well, it's very easy to satirize, but when you start to understand that perception itself is sacrificial in its nature, and you start to understand that there's no difference between work and sacrifice, that they're the same thing,
and you understand that community is predicated on sacrifice, then the emphasis in the text on sacrifice starts to become something quite marked and remarkable, especially because it's implicit.
It isn't obvious at all that the authors of the texts and the editors who sequenced them actually understood what it was that they were highlighting.So with regards to the community, why is the community predicated on sacrifice?
Because it's not about you, the community. Every step you take towards the communitarian means that you sacrifice something that's local to what you want here and now, right now.You have to give something up.
You're wandering onto something else now, which is something quite different.The notion of sacrifice, as you say, it goes right through the Old Testament and the New Testament.
The sacrifice of Isaac or Ishmael by Abraham and the sacrifice of Jesus, it's the same, I think it's a very unpleasant idea, by the way.But what are you actually saying?Are you saying that Abraham did or did not sacrifice Isaac?
Are you saying that Jesus really was, Jesus really did die for our sins?I mean, do you believe that?Do you believe that as a fact, that Jesus died for our sins?
There are elements of the, texts that I don't claim to understand.What my experience has been that the more deeply I look into these texts, the more I learned.
That doesn't mean that I can proclaim full knowledge of what the texts proclaim, but I don't think And I'm not trying to play a trick here.
You know, I watched an interview that you did recently where you were talking, I think it was with Piers Morgan, yeah, about the complexities of trying to understand this strange realm of quantum phenomena, right?
And we have a trouble with quantum phenomena because at the micro level, things don't act like things act at the macro level.So they escape our intuitions.And one of the things you said was that
Although it's perhaps even impossible for creatures embodied like us to get a grip on quantum phenomena, the strange wave-particle duality, for example, we have ample evidence that it works, and stellarly.
And I would say exactly the same thing about the biblical texts.They run into a mystery, like there's a horizon of mystery, which I do not claim to penetrate, but insofar as I've been able to understand the texts, every time I make a
improvement in understanding it reveals something to me that's just, like, shattering.
Quantum physics is deeply mysterious, and you're saying that biblical texts are deeply mysterious.The difference is quantum physics, the predictions you derive from quantum physics, are fulfilled to the umpteenth decimal place.
The umpteenth decimal place, I mean, I think it was Richard Feynman says, equivalent to predicting the width of North America to the nearest hair's breadth. That's impressive.No doubt.
The mystery there, as it were, gains its credentials by its predictions.The mysteries of the Bible don't have any credentials at all, as far as I can make out.
Well, I guess the credentials that I would put... You made a statement a couple of months ago that I found very interesting. and I don't claim to understand it, and I'm not trying to put you on the spot with it.
You said that you were a cultural Christian.Okay, and so that raised a number of questions in my mind.And the first question was- You are changing the subject.No, I'm not. No, I don't think so.
I may be leaping outside of the topic a bit to get back to it.
We can do cultural Christianity, but I think, because I have a list of questions that you wanted to ask, and that is one of them, but I think Professor Dawkins did ask you... You're referring to the predictive power and to the utility of the stories.
Okay, so that's actually what I was trying to say.Okay, fine.Go ahead.Okay, so that was the point.
it seemed to me that your proclamation that you were a cultural Christian was a recognition and a statement that you had found something in the culture that had been derived from Christianity that you had an affinity with, and that there's some reason for that.
And one of the things I wanted to ask you is, well, what do you think that Christianity got right that allows you to make a statement like that?I mean, I know that there's differences perhaps in what we both think about
the ultimate veracity of the biblical stories, maybe there isn't differences.It would take a lot of conversations to figure this out, but what did you mean by that?
What do you think that Christianity got right that would enable you to make a statement like that?
Virtually nothing.I meant by that no more than that I'm brought up in a Christian culture.I went to Christian schools.I therefore know my way around the Bible.I know my way around the Book of Common Prayer. I know the hymns.That's all.
I don't value Christianity as a truth system at all.
Okay, so let me ask you about that, because maybe that's true and perhaps it's not.
So the first question is, do you think that there are any marked differences between cultural traditions that would enable you to rank order them in terms of their ethical validity?Yes, I do.
Okay, so for example, we could contrast mainstream UK Christianity with Islamic fundamentals.Yes.Okay, so there's a hierarchy.
There is a hierarchy.A hierarchy that points to what? Well, in the case of Islam, I dislike any religion which punishes apostasy with death, that throws gay people off high buildings, that practices clitoridectomy.
That seems to me to place Islam on a lower level than Christianity, but that's not to say anything very positive about Christianity.
Well, it might be to say something positive about Christianity.
Like, I think that question is open because you might ask yourself, what did Christianity get right that led it away from those particular presumptions and towards something that you regard as more ethically appropriate?
Like, this isn't a trivial question.
It's a very modest claim.There's not very much, I mean, to be better than a religion that throws gay people off high buildings is not really a very virtuous achievement.
I don't know.I don't know if that's true.Because if you look at the barbarism that characterizes the human past, you might think that any progression whatsoever towards something approximating mercy and tolerance is nothing short of a bloody miracle.
Like, people are pretty, pretty ruthless, and so are our chimpanzee cousins.Yes, they are.Right, so we move forward into the light with great difficulty, and the fact that we can take that for granted now, and that it seems self-evident and...
deserving of faint praise, it's not so clear to me that that's a reasonable proposition.
Okay, let's grant the faint praise, but that has nothing to do with the truth value, and what I care about is the truth value.I see no truth value in the claims of Christianity, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the miracles.
Do you believe in any of those?Do you believe Jesus was born a virgin?
As I said before, there are elements of the text that I don't feel qualified to comment on.
My experience has been that the more, like I know from a metaphorical perspective and from a mythic perspective what the story of the virgin birth means, and I accept that.
I know, for example, that any culture that doesn't hold the image of the woman and infant sacred dies.And I don't know how that needs to be expressed in a form.Is it true, though?Do you mean that you don't know?
Let me let me ask you about that because truth this is something I talked with Sam Harris about to truth as we know is a tricky business Do you think there are differences in the truth claims between different writers of fiction?
Like, is Dostoevsky more profound than... Well, I wouldn't call fiction truth claims anyway.
Then on what grounds do we rank order the fiction in terms of quality?Like, Dostoevsky is a profound purveyor of fiction on the philosophical front.Unbelievably deep and profound.There's something true about what he's writing about.
It's nothing to do with the truth that science is concerned with.The truth of science is the truth that gets us to the moon.I mean, this is nothing to do with whether one writer of fiction has a sort of insight into human nature.
That goes without saying.I accept that.
Okay, so how do we deal with the notion that on the purely factual side, how do we deal with the idea, let's take the, you talked about clitoridectomy, let's talk about the oppression of women.We make a scientific case that that's inappropriate?
Or is it a case that we're making on some other grounds?Like I see in the Judeo-Christian tradition, one of the earliest pronouncements is that both men and women carry the image of God, both. And that sets a certain tone to everything that follows.
And it is a remarkable proclamation, given its radical age, that both men and women carry the image of God and are to be treated as something with intrinsic value outside of the domain of power and politics.
And it isn't obvious to me, having thought about this a lot, how we deal with that in the pure realm of fact.Because one of the facts is, if I can oppress you, why the hell shouldn't I?
My job is to keep things on track here.I think there are a number of questions which Professor Dawkins has asked quite directly that we still haven't really heard an answer to.Professor Dawkins is asking about the virgin birth.
You started talking about metaphor, you started talking about myth.I think anybody listening to this conversation will understand that maybe a society that doesn't believe in the virgin birth won't work.
Maybe that's the predictive power that you're talking about.But I think you must understand that when Professor Dawkins is asking you, do you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin?He means something like a biological fact.
And by the way, saying, I don't know, or saying, I'm not qualified to comment, is an answer to that question.But is that your answer, that you don't know?
I said earlier, and I would hold to this, is that there are elements of the text that I don't know how to that I'm incapable of fully accounting for.
I can't account for what the fundamental reality and significance of the notion of the resurrection is.My knowledge just ends.I know that whatever happened
whatever happened as a consequence of the origination and the promotion of the Christian story was powerful enough to bring Rome to its knees and demolish the pagan enterprise.So there's some power in that story that's remarkable.
Let's stick to the virgin birth.
Well, the virgin birth results from a mistranslation of Isaiah, you know that.
Like these sorts of questions, what would you say?They don't strike me as They're not getting to the point as a purpose.Well, look, I understand that there's perfect reasons to debate this.I know that.
And I know that your question is more than valid, but it's beside the issue as far as I'm concerned.
And it's partly because, well, when we started this conversation, I said, for example, that it appears to be the case that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story.We see the world through a story.
And so that's a remarkable thing.That's a remarkable discovery and it's emerged probably in the last 60 years in multiple disciplines.Because we have to prioritize our facts.And so we prioritize them according to a particular pattern.
And there are patterns that seem to work and to propagate themselves properly and to orient cultures towards life abundant.And there are other patterns, the pattern of Cain, for example, that lead to absolute bloody devastation.
And I don't know exactly how to construe that sort of truth.But we talked about the oppression of women, for example.It's like, how do you make a case on purely factual grounds that women should be treated as equals?
It's a moral question, and I was dealing with a factual question, which is, did Jesus have a father?And you won't answer it.It's a different kind of question.
Well, Jesus had an earthly father and a heavenly father, like almost all mythological heroes.
So he wasn't born of a virgin, then?So you're saying that Jesus was not born of a virgin?
I said, first of all, that I don't know how to mediate the fact-value dichotomy in that case.I said the same thing about the resurrection.
It's not a value, it's a simple fact.Did a man have intercourse with Mary and produce Jesus?That's a factual question.It's not a value question.
You must understand what you're being asked here, that even if you think that, say, the author of the biblical texts intended much more significance than a simple scientific analysis of events, Professor Dawkins is interested in scientific truth.
That's the kind of truth that he's interested in.And even if you think it's irrelevant to the point of what the gospel authors were getting at, That first needs to be clarified before you can then begin actually uncovering what the stories are about.
So I think Professor Dawkins is asking from a scientific perspective, and maybe you think that that scientific approach is wrong, but if you just take it for a moment, maybe this is how we find out that it is wrong.
Let's take a scientific approach, ask the question, did this occur?
I think that it's inappropriate to use a question like that to attempt to undermine the validity of the entire, what would you say, deep mythological enterprise.I think it's foolish.
Suppose we weren't doing that.Suppose we were asking out of interest.
Suppose that we were all here devout Christians, maybe even Jungian Christians, and we thought, this is interesting, over dinner, do you think it really happened, like scientifically?Would your answer just be, I don't know?Yes.
And you wouldn't consider it, I mean, it's not an inappropriate question to ask just on a point of interest.Did this really occur?
And I think so often people are asking you that, and especially given the context of this conversation, we've heard everything that you're saying about metaphor and myths, but because the question is still then being asked, did it really happen?
You know that that's what you're being asked.And the way you just so easily said yes, I wonder why you struggle to do that in so many other circumstances.
I think because I don't look at the situation the same, the way that Dr. Dawkins and I look at the situation are really quite different and at many, many, many levels.You know, so even on the meme question, for example, you know, like I know the,
literature on the history of religious ideas.I see how these ideas have battled across millennia in a manner that is very reminiscent to me of the same sort of claim that Dr. Dawkins is putting forward with regards to meme.I know that literature.
Dr. Dawkins doesn't know that literature.And it's very difficult for me to communicate from within the confines of that literature because it's extensive and deep.And we're dealing with things
that we don't understand the relationship between metaphoric truth and value predicated truth and factual truth.We don't understand that.It's a big problem.
We cannot, there's no evidence whatsoever from the scientific perspective that we can orient ourself in the world merely in consequence of the facts.And that's a fact.
And it's a fact that's been detailed out in great detail in the last 60 years by people from a variety of different disciplines.We have to prioritize the facts.That's a value hierarchy.
there may be true and false ways of prioritizing facts, but you can't determine the truth or falsehood of the way that you prioritize facts by making reference to the facts.That's a big problem.
Okay, let's talk about that as perhaps a slight detour here, because I think we do need to come back to this Christ's resurrection thing.
But, Professor Dawkins, would you say that underlying the scientific enterprise is a fundamentally unscientific assumption? You can make scientific investigations in the world, but in order to do so, you need to choose what to prioritize.
You need to choose what to investigate.You also need to value the truth.You need to have a value and a motivation for doing it in the first place.Those kinds of things cannot themselves be scientifically justified.
And so does the scientific enterprise have an unscientific assumption at its base?
I suppose it does.I think that Jordan prioritizes myth and I prioritize fact. I think myth is kind of vaguely interesting, but it's not the be-all and end-all of my life.
I think it's somewhat secondary to scientific facts, the sort of facts that tell us how old the universe is, how old the world is. history of life, the engineering achievements of landing a spacecraft on a comet.
These are the things that science can do.And as I said, the predictions of quantum theory, to come back to that, the predictions of quantum theory which are verified
to a sufficient number of decimal places that it's equivalent to predicting the width of North America to one hair's breadth.Now, that is, however difficult quantum theory is to understand, that is what you can get from quantum theory.
Now, the mysteries of the Bible, if they are mysteries, aren't in the same league.I mean, they just don't cut it.
See that, well, okay, so let me respond to that.So one of the things that I've tried to study is the preconditions for the scientific enterprise itself.
you appeared to agree with Alex that there might be presumptions, axioms, that need to be accepted.I don't want to put words in your mouth, because I want to get this right, before the scientific enterprise can begin.
So, I've tried to think those through.Let me lay out a couple of them.This is partly what I've done while trying to make the case, for example, that you're more of a Christian than you think you are.
So, for example, I think that the scientific enterprises motivated by the axiomatic presumption that truth tends towards a unity.
I think that it's predicated on the notion that there is a logical order that's intrinsic to the cosmos, that that fundamental order is good, that it's intelligible to human beings, and that
Discovering that order and aligning ourselves with it makes for life more abundant.I think that the scientific enterprise is also predicated on the idea that the truth will set you free.
And I think all of those axioms are religious and derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
And if you don't believe that, you have to account for why science emerged in Europe and nowhere else in the entire history of humanity, for example, and why it's
also why it's under assault from all quarters now as that underlying metaphysics disappears.You haven't had to be concerned with the mythological substrate in your lifetime in some sense because it was intact.
And so the universities could flourish and you had your freedom, remarkable freedom, to pursue your scientific enterprise wherever you wanted.And people lauded you for it.Like that time is threatened and seriously so.
And I think it's partly because these metaphysical assumptions have now become questionable.And that's part of the reason that I'm attending to them.
It's not because I don't admire the accuracy of quantum prediction, for example, or celebrate what Musk is doing with his capability of sending rockets to Mars.It's like more power to the technological enterprise.
But you know what's happening in the universities? It's awful, and that's not a scientific problem.
I agree about that.Okay, okay.I think it's an interesting question why science emerged in Europe.I mean, and I'm not enough of a historian to know.
It is even possible that Christianity did have something to do with that, and I wouldn't categorically deny that, but that doesn't in any way
increase my trust in the validity of Christian propositions like the resurrection, the virgin birth and miracles, and Jesus is the Son of God.
Christianity may have had some kind of historical facilitating effect that led to the Renaissance, that led to the scientific revolution, and that would be a very interesting historical analysis.But it doesn't bear upon the truth of the
propositions of the Christian religion.
Okay, let's concentrate on the resurrection for a moment.Now, unfortunately, you see, this is part of the problem.Part of the problem with discussions like this is that the mode of approach that's taken by the mythological tends to circle and wander.
Like it doesn't, because you have to shine light on the problem from multiple perspectives.That's why it's often encoded in image, for example, or in drama.It's not the same
hack as a purely propositional and logical argument, so it's more difficult to make.But let me tell you a story that I believe bears on the resurrection.You tell me what you think about it, because this is a very difficult story to account for.
It's going to take me about five minutes, because it's complicated.But there's no way around it, I don't think.
There's a strange scene in the gospels where Christ tells his followers that unless he's lifted up like the bronze serpent, there can be no hope for the redemption of mankind unless he's lifted up like the bronze serpent in the desert.
Okay, this is a very strange thing for someone to say.So you need to know what the story of the bronze serpent in the desert was and what it signifies.And I think we can understand it psychologically.I really do believe this.
And the concordance of that story, which was generated millennia before with Christ's utterance, is something I just cannot imagine how anyone put those two things together, especially given the lack of explicit understanding about the relationship.
So let me detail it.So there's a scene in Exodus, in the Exodus story, where the Israelites are
doing their usual fractious foolishness and whining about the fact that they're lost and bemoaning the loss of their privileges under the Pharaoh and complaining about the power dynamics of their leadership and just generally being followers of Cain, let's say.
And God, The cruel God that you refer to decides to send among his suffering subjects poisonous snakes to bite them, which seems a little over the top, you might say.
But in response to that, I would say there's no situation so terrible that some damn fool can't make it infinitely worse.And so that's what happens to the Israelites.
They're being bitten by these poisonous snakes, and the leaders of the people who've wandered from God go to Moses, and they say, look, we know you've got a pipeline to God.
And, you know, there's a lot of snakes, and they're doing a lot of biting, and maybe you could just ask him to, you know, call off the serpents.And so Moses, who's not very happy with the Israelites either, decides that he'll go talk to God.
And God says something very strange. He doesn't say, to hell with the Israelites, more snakes is what they need.And he doesn't say, well, I produced a snake, so I'll get rid of them.He says something very, very peculiar.
He says, have the Israelites gathered together all their bronze and make a giant stake and put a serpent on it, a bronze serpent, which is the symbol of healing, by the way, that even the Greeks use, that symbol of Asclepius.
It's a very old symbol, very widespread.It's still used by physicians today. And then he says, put it up where the Israelites can see it.And if they go look at it, then the serpent's poison won't harm them.
And I read that and I thought, that's exactly what psychotherapists discovered, as they all converged in the 20th century on the utility of exposure therapy as curative.And that's the pharmacon, a little of the poison that hurts you, cures you.
It's the same principle that's used for vaccines, by the way.So what we saw in psychotherapy is that if you get people to voluntarily confront the things that are poisoning them, so to speak, that hurt their life, that frighten them and disgust them,
they become braver and more well-adapted.It isn't that they become less afraid, because that's been very carefully tested.
It's that they learn by watching themselves expose themselves to the things that they once fleed from, that there's more to them than they think, and that that generalizes across situations.
And it's the same mechanism that underlies learning as such, because children, when they learn, put themselves on the edge of ragged disaster, and that's where they advance.
And so what God tells the Israelites, essentially, in this dramatic endeavor, is that it's better for them to face the terrors that confront them than to be shielded from the terrors, or for them to hide from them.
That there'll be better people if they face what's right in front of them, even if it's poisonous. And so it's like, okay, that's pretty damn interesting and quite remarkable.
And then that symbol is used, for example, by the Greeks to symbolize medicine as such.But then there's this additional weird twist, which is Christ identifies with that bronze serpent.You think, okay, that's a very peculiar thing for anyone to do.
What exactly does that mean?Well, so then you might say, well, what's the most poisonous thing that you could possibly face if you
If you dramatize the idea of poison itself, if you wanted people to face what was worst so that they could become strongest, then the answer to that is the most unjust possible painful death and the ultimate confrontation with malevolence.
And that's what's dramatized in the passion story.Now, does that redeem everyone?Maybe.
Maybe, maybe the idea is that if we were courageous enough to look death in the face, unflinchingly, and if we spent our time putting our finger on the source of evil itself, it would revitalize ourselves to a degree that would be unimaginable.
Now, as a biologist, you know, you could think about this too, because I don't remember the philosopher said it, I think it was Whitehead, but that might be wrong.We let our ideas die instead of us, right?
So human beings have evolved so that we can undergo these deaths of our own ideas and the rejuvenation that emerges in consequence of that.That seems to be something like evolution towards what?
towards the process of sacrificial logos as the thing that redeems human beings.And that makes us biologically unique too, because we can die in ideation and imagination instead of dying in actuality.Does that fundamentally redeem us?
Does that deliver us from death and evil?Maybe. Like the job isn't done, obviously.
Richard, the story that we've just heard, the Old Testament bronze serpent, it's rhyming with the New Testament Christ depicting himself as that bronze serpent.I think from Jordan, if I may, as Richard suggests,
from what I've heard you say before on this same story, there's something about that harmony between that New Testament Jesus and that Old Testament story, which is so profound and so impressive that it's difficult to imagine it having sort of naive human authorship.
What do you make of that story and of that assertion?
Well, it doesn't impress me.I mean, I don't understand why you would say that has... I don't think John actually said it had a divine... Maybe he did.
Not divine inspiration, necessarily, but more than just, as I say, naive human authorship.Not like someone just sat down and wrote a story.
At minimum, it's a staggeringly brilliant literary move, especially given the fact that that relationship hasn't been explicated before.
Do you think, for example, if you were looking in scripture for something which would identify this as a God-given text, maybe you as a scientist would look for some scientific information.
It might have told you the shape of DNA or something like that, but do you think... Which Jordan actually thinks... Yeah, we can perhaps get on to that, but do you think that a literary brilliance of a similar kind or a similar intensity that
if the Bible is not a scientific text, you might be looking for some scientific fact which you couldn't have otherwise known.
Is it possible that some kind of genius moral move or literary move could also indicate that this is something more impressive?
You more or less asked me what would impress me, and I'm a naive literalist, and so I would say if any prophet had said something like, the world is just one object rotating around the sun, something like that.They never do.
I mean, it's always some kind of moral lesson which leaves me cold.
Well, why is it that there is no... I mean, they say that God meets you where you're at, right?And there are some people who just care about scientific truth.That's what they know, that's their profession.
Why is there not anything in the Bible for them?
Oh, I think the idea that sacrifice is the basis of the community is a remarkable and scientifically valid hypothesis.I think that it's precisely akin to the, what would you say, to the process of cortical maturation.I think they're the same thing.
Because as we mature, we move farther away from the immediate gratification of our self-centered emotional and motivational needs to an ethos of care that brings our future self into the picture and a wider and wider array of other people.
And I think that's associated with cortical maturation.In fact, I think the purpose of the cortex the purpose.
A purpose of the cortex is to bring the dynamics of the short-sighted underlying motivational and emotional systems into the kind of harmony that allows for communal existence and the protection of the future at the same time that the present is
what would you say, cared for and attended to, that there's a kind of harmony there.There's also a pattern there.It's not arbitrary at all.
And I think we know this biologically is that the number of ways, and I think we already alluded to this, the number of ways that a society can organize itself so that each individual can harmonize their own future with the present and do that simultaneously with many other people, there's a very limited universe of possibilities there.
Richard asked you before about the difference between a story or an idea naturally evolving over the course of numerous manuscripts and throughout human history, and the idea of it being divinely inspired, and you were seeming to imply that these are almost interchangeable concepts.
Now, if that's the case, when you say that
this divine spirit behind the Bible is actually just the way that it has evolved throughout the human history, throughout the different manuscripts that we've had, then saying that that is what divinity is, I think for you may drag the mundane up into the realm of divinity, but I think for people like Richard and for many people listening, what it does instead is drags the divine down to the realm of the mundane.
Well, I don't know why it would drag the divine down into the realm of the mundane if we're speaking of something like the straight narrow path of harmony between multiple
multiple modes of being, I don't think it doesn't make any difference to me whether it's the material reaching upward or the divine descending downward.I don't think there's any difference between those two things.
You don't.That's exactly right.That's the problem.
You don't see the difference.Well, look at it this way.So, for example, in this conversation, you know this to be the case.Like, there's various ways that this conversation could go sideways, right?Seriously.Like, we could
But either of us could try to win.Either of us could try to demonstrate our intellectual superiority, right?Each of us could misrepresent the other.
Or we could both try, and I do think we are in fact trying that, and I think Alex is helping along with that just fine.We could try to follow the thread of the exploratory truth and see if we could get somewhere.
Now, I don't think there is any difference between that, by the way, and what's expressed in the biblical texts as the spirit of the Logos.That's why we have dialogue.
I'm very interested in the possibility that truths emerge through evolving manuscripts.Now, that's a very interesting idea. And it's totally different from divine inspiration.
And I want to pursue it because I don't believe in divine inspiration, but I would be prepared to believe in evolving manuscripts.
Well, I would say... This is why I had set forward the possibility of taking a look, particularly at Michio Eliade, because that's where you'd find the best work.He's brilliant.
I believe that if you studied the history of religious ideas, it's a three-volume manuscript, or the Sacred and the Profane, which is probably his single best work, that you'd see profound analogies between the manner in which you've been construing the world biologically, including the
trains of thought that led you to the development of the idea of the meme.I really believe that.
Analogies is one thing, but is it the same thing?
I think it's the same.I do.I think, look, I don't know.That's why I'd like your opinion on it.You know, seriously, like, it's a complicated question.I've talked to It's a complicated question.Most people don't know both literatures.
There's not a lot of people to discuss this sort of thing with.Camille Pellier, I talked to Camille Pellier about this.She studied the work of a man named Eric Neumann.
Neumann wrote a book called the History, Origins and History of Consciousness, which is a work of genius.And also another book called The Great Mother, which is a study of the symbolism of the feminine.It's a great book.
Pellier told me that she believed that if the academy
would have turned to Eric Neumann, who's a student of Jung, although the greatest student of Jung, and maybe one who surpassed him, that the entire culture war that's torn the universities apart wouldn't have happened.
People don't know this literature.Let me give you an example of this.You tell me what you think about this. I spent a fair bit of time studying the psychophysiology of the hypothalamus.
Okay, so the hypothalamus is set up, it's got two halves, basically.One half deals with fundamental motivated states, hunger, thirst, defensive aggression, sexuality, and so forth.And when those areas are dominated,
the biologically relevant goal is activated and perceptions are oriented towards that goal.Okay, so now then you might ask yourself, well, what happens if all those biologically motivated states are satiated?
And the answer seems to be is that the other half of the hypothalamus kicks in and it mediates exploratory behavior.And so the default structure of the mammalian nervous system is, if satiated or in doubt, explore. and gather new information.
There's no difference between that and hero mythology.They are the same thing.They're the same thing.The dragon fight, for example, it's the oldest story we have.It's coded in the Mesopotamian mythology.
The dragon fight story is explore the dangerous unknown, discover the treasure that revitalizes the community.There's no difference between that and the science that you practice.They're the same thing.
Same story. I don't know what to make of that.I mean, you say they're the same story.You've analogized the dragon fight to fighting Satan.
Well, how many dragons have you overcome in your life?
I'm not interested in dragons.I'm interested in reality.
Okay, so let's... Okay, so I read a book a while back that described the... described the... the biological reality of the dragon.Say, well, there's no such thing as a dragon.It's like, okay, is there such a thing as a predator?
Well, that's a meta category.What's the category of predator?Bear, eagle, if you're a primate.Fire, is fire a predator?No.Well, it's complicated because a fire kills you.
Okay, so is there a worse predator than serpentine, flying, fire-breathing reptile? Is that not the imagistic equivalent of predator?So in what way, if predator is real, in what way isn't dragon real?
It doesn't take that much imagination to see the identity.And then wouldn't the fundamental task of edible primates be to figure out how to overcome the dragon forever?
I don't know why you say dragon.I mean, we have lions, we have tigers, we have saber-toothed, we have...
Tyrannosaurs out there.Right, but why not abstract?Because it's for the same reason that we have the term predator.We have the term bear, lion, Komodo dragon.Well, you make an amalgamation, you say, well, the relevant set of features is an image.
Well, what's the image?Predator as such.What's the image of that?The dragon that never disappears.And then there's a twist on that, which is so cool.
It's so interesting because you can imagine rabbit mythology, which would be something like predator appears, freeze.But that's not the human story.The human story is predator appears, there's a treasure somewhere.
Right, that's a completely different pathway of evolutionary significance.Like the way that we construe the world isn't phrased like predator.It's like, oh, there's a predator.Maybe there's something valuable lurking in our conflict with it.
You know, our sticks and our spears that enable our fragile bodies to stand up against the dragons of the world.
So a dragon is a pictorial representation of the abstracted concept of a predator. Yes.As you say, we already have the term predator, and so it might be useful in art, in narrative, to... I mean, you can't paint an abstraction.
We had the image way before we had the word.Sure, okay.
No, but that's a seriously important thing to understand.
But now we have the word.We have the word predator.And maybe if we were doing art, maybe if we were all going to sort of draw a picture or tell a story, and we wanted to invent a story to give our children a good moral message, we might invent this
We do it continually.We do it with Harry Potter.We do it with the Lord of the Rings.We do it with the Avengers.There's no escaping from it.
But when you say the biology of a dragon,
You must understand how that can be misleading as to the enterprise that you're engaging in, because we're talking here about narrative, we're talking here about art, we're talking here about representations in literature.
I don't think the category of dragon is any less valid than the category of lion.
Well, it depends on your level of analysis.We have the term predator, which implies that all predators have something in common, because otherwise we wouldn't have the term.
It's like there's no reason to assume ontological priority for the category of lion over the category of predator.
It depends on... All that would determine which of those terms should be used is the purpose towards which the conceptualization is being directed.If you want to identify a particular class of predator, well, then lion is a good term.
You would say that lions are an instantiation of this bracket term of predator.Well, I would also say... Would you therefore say that a lion is an instantiation of the bracket term of dragon?
Yes. Yes, because, see, because we're not only fact-oriented creatures, right?It actually matters to us whether we get eaten.
Like, it's one thing to lay out the nomenclature of the animal kingdom, but it's another thing to remember that predators can eat you.And then it's another thing, and this is very interesting, and it's relevant to that story of the bronze serpent.
It's like, what do we want to teach our children?Well, to identify predators, obviously. Well, what do we want to teach them more profoundly?What attitudes they should take towards the eternal fact of the predator.
And the attitude they should take is something like the courage to voluntarily confront, and not to run away, and not to hide, and not to freeze.
and not to casually demonize, but to assume that in the combat with the eternal predator, an eternal treasure might be found.And that's exactly what you do, whether you know it or not, when you teach a child to be courageous.
And we know from the psychological literature that generalizes.And I do think it's identical with the mechanism of learning in human beings, because kids, us, we always learn on the edge.
You know, in your own life, and I don't want to be presumptuous, but no doubt there have been situations where you've been battling.
to have your ideas distributed, even to modify your own conceptions when you had something new to learn, that's a sacrifice.You have to kill your stupidity so that you can move forward.
That's what happens in the story of Abraham, by the way, when he makes sequential sacrifices.So in the story of Abraham, you tell me what you think about this, because it staggered me when I understood it. Abraham is a protected person.
He doesn't have to lift a finger.He lives in the socialist utopia.He's got everything delivered hand to mouth.He's at home till he's 70.And God comes to him as the voice of adventure, which is something remarkable to see.
And says, you leave your zone of comfort and go out into the world.Have your terrible adventure.And Abraham says, yes.And then a series of cataclysms occurs. around him, just like it does in every adventurous life.
And every time an episode concludes, he makes a sacrifice.Why?To get rid of what's stupid and old about him, so that he can progress and transform.
And that happens to such a degree that he gets a new name, which means he's changed so dramatically, he's not even the person he used to be.And that's a consequence of following that adventurous pathway.And that's all coded in the story.
I think we just have to agree that we have different kinds of minds and you're interested in symbols and I'm interested in facts.I mean, let's take predators.I mean, predators, I'm fascinated by predators.
Predators are, the relationship between predators and prey is an arms race, an evolutionary arms race.
And whenever you see a really complicated, beautifully designed piece of biology, what Hume, I think, one of Hume's characters called things that ravish into admiration all who contemplate them, this is almost certainly the result of an arms race, probably between predators and prey, could be between parasites and hosts.
And so if we are talking about adaptations to just the climate.Woolly rhinoceroses grow hair because it's getting cold.That's relatively boring.But when it's an adaptation to a predator,
then you get an escalation of adaptations by prey, which are countered by predators, which are countered by prey.So you get a gradual escalation.Now, that's interesting.
That explains why you have animals that run fast, why they have keen sense organs, why they have teeth, why they have sharp teeth, why they have behavior patterns that either protect them from predators or if their predators help them to catch prey.
The idea of the arms race is the thing that grabs me.The arms race between nothing to do with dragons and mythology.
Okay, so fair enough, right?And I share your appreciation for that remarkable... What?The remarkable phenomena that emerge in consequence of that.Okay, so let's take the idea of arms race.All right, so...
We, here's how I would construe what I said in what I think might be your terms.All right, we transformed the battle with the predator into a meme battle.
We abstracted it so that we could figure out how to deal not with a predator, but with the class of all possible predators.Right, exactly.And the appropriate way to deal with the class of all possible predators is something like a meta-ethic.
It's a stance that, let me give an example of this.We actually know something about this psychophysiologically, and you can look at it spiritually or physically, and it doesn't matter.So for example,
If you take people in psychotherapy, and they're accidentally exposed to something they're afraid of, they have a stress response that's damaging if it's sustained, and they become more frightened.
But if you expose them to exactly the same stressor, and they do it voluntarily, they manifest an entirely different pattern of psychophysiological activation.And it's a stance of challenge, and not of fear.
One of the things that you're doing in psychotherapy when you get people to expose themselves to, you could say predators, because that's an accurate way of dealing with it, is that you get them to shift into a mode of voluntary confrontation instead of prey-like apprehension and retreat.
And what they learn from that is that they can embody that pattern, which I would call a spirit metaphysically, they can embody that, they can practice it.It's also the case, there's some evidence, that there's epigenetic consequences of that.
If you practice that process of voluntary confrontation with the terrible unknown, it can catalyze transformations that reach all the way down into the cellular. And so we abstracted the fight with the predator into the imaginal space.
We play out various tactics.Some of them are conserved and transmitted.They adapt themselves to the structure of human memory and they make the foundation for our most fundamental narratives.
You know, the reference I made to Harry Potter, the reference I made to the Lord of the Rings and to the Avengers, these aren't casual references.
You know, we spend most of our computational, high-end computational power generating fictional worlds where we can portray meme battles so that everyone can observe them.
Yes, so lion as genetic, dragon as mimetic.
Richard, this concept of the dragon as the abstracted predator as a whole, can we talk meaningfully about the truth in these stories where instead of talking about a predator or this predator or that predator, we're talking about the concept of predators as a whole?
Well, it doesn't get me, it doesn't impress me.I mean, I like reality.It obviously impresses Jordan, and that's fine.It's just we have a different kind of mind, I think.
Well, I had a comment about that too, you know, because I actually think that's true.So, there's a psychological trait, openness, and openness fractionates into two types. One type of mind is associated with deep interest in ideas.
People like that tend to prefer nonfiction.A variant of that is openness proper, and it's associated with a much deeper orientation towards the fictional and metaphorical.I do think we have different kinds of minds, but
But if we accept the presumption that there is a unity of knowledge, and I don't know if that's a presumption that you entertain or presume or share, because we could discuss the alternative, my sense is that those two pathways have to unify.
I don't think we know how to unify them in the West.That's why there is this conflict between the scientific and the religious.It's not like I know how to rectify that.The best I can say is, this is what I've learned from studying those stories.
But I would also say, because I've studied your work, I do believe that that idea that you formulated of meme is exactly the same thing that Mircea Eliade is detailing out in his work.
And I think the reason that he's not attended to by the universities, because he's passe in the history of religious ideas, is because everything he says demolishes the postmodern Marxists.
Demolishes them, which is something that seriously needs to be done.
And so I keep thinking, I keep hoping, I think, God, it would be such a remarkable thing for Dr. Dawkins to know, especially Iliad, his work, although Eric Neumann would be a close second, because it takes the notion of meme, which is,
what was the recreation of the world in imaginal space and the transmission of those recreations and their potential battles.That's what you specified.And it expands it out into something that extends across millennia.
It's the logical extension of your idea.And it's not like people know this because there aren't people who know both literatures.
So this idea of lion as gene dragon as meme, I think, in so many words, it sounds like that's sort of a summary of what you're getting at.
And I get the impression, Richard, that you might agree with the idea that the dragon is an effective mimetic abstraction of the concept of individual predators, but it's just not that impressive.Yes.
It's just not that it's true, but it's not an impressive truth.
I couldn't see how it could not be impressive at the same time that you are compelled and interested by the idea of meme.I mean, let me ask you a psychological question, if you don't mind.
You're obviously welcome not to answer it, but there's a reason that the idea of meme gripped you, and there's a reason it spread.It's because you put your finger on something.So, can I ask you how that idea emerged and why it attracted you?
As a Darwinian, I'm interested in the process of natural selection.Natural selection is the differential survival of replicating entities.
DNA is a very excellent replicating entity whose replication and selection has given rise to the whole of life on Earth.I wanted to make the point that DNA is not the only possible replicator you could imagine.Right.
There might be on other, and there probably is on other planets, a different kind of replicator, not DNA.And then I thought, maybe we don't have to go to other planets.
Maybe there's another replicator staring us in the face, the virus of the mind, something that spreads not by DNA replication, but by imitation from mind to mind.
So it could be a fashion in clothes, it could be a musical style, it could be an accent, a speech accent, it could be a children's game that spreads through school.All these things are replicators which spread by a non-genetic means
and might therefore potentially be the basis for a form of Darwinian selection.Yep.Darwinian selection would be popularity, the spreadability of an idea.
The longevity of an idea?
Yes, longevity of an idea, the spreadability, the fidelity of the idea.
How about the grip of motivation by the idea?
Yes, that's a possibility.And I would even concede that an archetype might be a one way in which certain memes might spread more than others.It might be compatible with a... with a Jungian archetype.So that's my answer to the question.
It was coming at it as a Darwinian and wanting to make the point that DNA probably, having spent the whole rest of the book stressing the gene as a unit of selection, I wanted to make the point that it may not be the only one.
Okay, okay, so that's what I understood from your work.So it is on that grounds that I saw the concordance between what you were doing and what Eliot was doing in his investigation into the spread of religious ideas.
What you described is what I understood.Okay, so let me ask you another question about that.Okay, so could you imagine a scenario where a meme
had sufficient functional adaptive significance so that the individuals who acted it out gained a reproductive edge.Yes.
Okay, so then you could imagine a situation where there was, I think I've got this right, a Baldwin effect between the meme and the genome.Yes.Okay, so then could you imagine an effect where the
heroic hunters of the past who decided to cease acting like prey animals, maybe when they got rocks or sticks. were acting under the impulse that facing down the predator was the appropriate strategy.Because I was thinking about this reproductively.
Like, you know that women are hypergamous.They like men cross-culturally about four years older than they are.The most fundamental female pornographic fantasy involves vampires, werewolves, pirates, surgeons, and billionaires.Dominant men,
who are capable of standing up to predators, who can be brought into an individual relationship.Okay, so that's the fundamental reproductive story meme that seems to drive women.It's allied with the hero myth.
They're the different variants of the same story, the different sexual variants of the same story.And it seems to me it's not unreasonable to note that that's the fundamental story of humanity.
And so I don't understand why you're not impressed by that.
He started talking about the Baldwin effect and suddenly we got into women, what women like, I mean... Well, the men who act out the heroic meme are much more likely to reproduce.
It's an example, but perhaps we need to explain what the Baldwin... I was going to say, that would probably help.
Yes, that would be useful.
Okay.It was suggested by Baldwin, I think in the late 19th century.It's a kind of genetic assimilation of a cultural or a learned idea.So, the idea is that Certain animals learn things, they learn a clever trick.
It might be nut cracking by chimpanzees, for example, or potato washing by Japanese macaques, or opening milk bottles by English tits.
And it perhaps spread mimetically as an epidemic of copying, and that's known to have happened with the blue tits and great tits in Britain.Now,
certain individuals are likely to learn it faster than others, and there may be genetic variation in the speed with which they learn it.And as the generations go by, natural selection would have favored speed of learning the new trick.
and eventually they would have learned the new trick so fast they didn't need to learn it at all.It becomes genetically assimilated into the genome.That's the Baldwin effect.
I would say that that's essentially the same pattern of archetype evolution that's implicit in the Jungian theoretical model.
Well, that's very interesting because that suggests that Jungian archetypes might be genetically assimilated via the Baldwin effect.That's a fascinating idea.
Yes, yes, yes. I know we're coming to the end of our time soon anyway.It's nice to end on a shared point of interest, which is the Baldwin effect and the archetype's potential origin in the Baldwin effect.
Do you think that that is something that is worth exploring further?Is that something that we can...
It's crucial to this because it speaks of the potential relationship between the spread of memes and the alteration of the genetic process.I would say it probably happens fastest by sexual selection.So imagine that a meme develops a representation
imaginal, and the people who embody it are more effective in dealing with predators.And then imagine that there's a concordance between that and the attractiveness of those males to women, which seems highly probable.
Well, then you can see that, because sexual selection is a pretty rapid mechanism, that that Baldwin effect could get spinning very rapidly.
I totally agree with that.I've even suggested, actually, a slightly way-out suggestion, that the human habit of standing on our hind legs might have been sexually selected and then genetically assimilated via the Baldwin effect.
Chimpanzees do sometimes walk on their hind legs.Now if, for memetic reasons, that was sexually attractive in our ancestors,
so that it spread as an epidemic of sexual display, then natural selection could have favoured those individuals who were best at standing on their hind legs, genetically speaking, and then it would become genetically assimilated.
This sexually selected mimetic effect could have been genetically assimilated and given rise to the genetic tendency to walk on our hind legs.
So I remember what I was going to ask you about this.So imagine You have a situation in the biblical narratives where the idea of sacrifice is dramatized and ritualized.So it's acted out.It's not exactly understood.It's dramatized and acted out.
Well, I believe there's a concordance between the probability that that sacrifice would be offered and the ability of someone to forego gratification or to work towards a future end.They're the same thing.
And the ability to forego gratification, which is associated with cortical development, is a great predictor of future success.
Let's say future, because we know, for example, that trait conscientiousness, which is something like the ability to delay gratification, is the best predictor that isn't cognitive of long-term future success.
The ability to sacrifice the present for the future is a hallmark of a strategy of adaptation that's going to propagate down the generation.
That's interesting.As a Canadian, you probably know about the potlatch phenomenon.Yes.Where a great sacrifice is a social display, destruction of one's own property, which is a form of sacrifice.
Destruction of one's own property is a mark of prestige.
Well, it indicates that they know those communities.
It indicates two things, your willingness to distribute generously to the community, because you're a big man if you can do that, but also your faith in the process by which that wealth was generated.I'm so good at it.
See, I think women use wealth as a marker of sexual attractiveness, not because they're interested in wealth, but because wealth is the best single predictor of the ability to generate wealth. and the potlatch is that kind of manifestation.
It's like, yes, I have all this stuff.I can give it away and burn it, and I can make it again, because it isn't the wealth, it's the capacity to generate the wealth, right?
It's a process or a spirit, you could say, if you wanted to get metaphorical about it.So there's this remarkable concordance between your work and these works that I've been investigating.Like I said, no one knows the two literatures.
And so it's very frustrating in a sense, because I understood your concept of meme, I would say, in exactly the way that you just laid it out.And I thought, this is exactly what I've been studying.
There's these fundamental narratives, and the people who embody them, look, the heroes in the theater. They're actors of a narrative meme.They're obviously attractive.People flock to watch them.
You know that if you take vervets and you show them pictures of the other vervets in their troops, they spontaneously gaze longer at the higher status vervets. Right, it's exact.So imagine this.
In the human society, you have people who act out the appropriate meme, let's say, which is something like a meta-strategy for dealing with predation.It's something like that.You can approximate that to a greater or lesser degree.
The more you approximate that, the higher you are on the sexual selection. in the sexual selection hierarchy.And I think that's clear.
Like it's a bit more complicated than that because women seem to be, the pornographic literature that women prefer is both the capacity to stand up against predation and maybe even to be a predator, but that has to be brought into alliance with the ability to make a intimate relationship and share.
So it's like half monster, half, cooperative distributors, cooperative generous distributors, something like that.You can see that's a real knife's edge evolutionarily because you want someone who can keep the real monsters at bay.
But if there's such a monster that they don't share and aren't generous and can't take care of their children, they're just another bloody predator.
So Richard, the Baldwin effect applied not so much just to the memetic preference for people who stand up, for example, but something like a dragon, the abstracted predator.Is there any kind of Baldwin effect implication of this kind of meme?
I think there could be.I mean, I think it's an interesting idea that Jungian archetypes could be Baldwinized memes.
And perhaps the dragon could be one of those somehow.
Well, Jung didn't have that terminology, even the Baldwin effect terminology.But that notion is implicit in his writings.Like he was struggling.He also didn't precisely understand sexual selection, let's say.So the idea lurks implicitly in his work.
There's never a statement like that.But you can see clear indications of his struggling towards something like a Baldwin effect explanation.
I'm afraid that we are just about out of time, but we will be having a secondary conversation on Daily Wire Plus, which we'll be doing in just a moment.So people listening, if they're interested in more, can go and find more there.
But for at least this part of the conversation, hopefully we've landed on a point of somewhat agreement between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, which I think is a pretty significant success, I would say, in many ways.
Well, I think we also established part of the reason that there's a difference.Like, I do think that your temperamental tack and my temperamental tack are different.They're generally different.
Are you more interested in things or people, would you say?Because that's a fundamental dimension of difference, say, in terms of interest. I don't think I admit the question, really.Okay, okay.
Well, the reason I asked is because the proclivity to prefer nonfiction, which is more of a masculine proclivity, is associated with a tilt of interest towards the domain of things rather than the domain of people.So I was curious about that.
I'm interested in eternal things.I'm interested in things that were true before there were any humans and will be true long after humans are extinct. which sort of kind of lets out all symbolism and metaphor and stuff like that.
Maybe.Depends on the Baldwin effect.Thank you, sir.I'm very happy that I had the opportunity to talk to you today.Thank you very much, Alex, for hosting this.
And for everybody who is watching and listening, as Alex pointed out, we're going to turn to the Daily Wire side right away.And if you want to join us for another 30 minutes of this conversation, then you'd be more than welcome to do that.
And so thank you. one way or another for your time and attention today.Thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale for spending the time and energy necessary to make this, I hope, a raving success.I certainly was interested in the conversation.
And so thanks to you guys as well.
