Episode 117: Jonathan Rauch
- Links to this episode: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
- This transcript was generated with AI using PodcastTranscriptor.
- Unofficial AI-generated transcripts. These may contain mistakes. Please check against the actual podcast.
- Speakers are denoted as color names.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Blue: Hello out there. This week, on the Theory of Anything podcast, we have the absolute honor of interviewing Jonathan Rausch. Rausch is an extremely influential public intellectual who is also a papyrian. He wrote a book in the 90s when I think he was in his 20s called Kindly Inquisitors, which makes the epistemic case for free speech. When I first read that, I had the feeling of light bulb after light bulb going off. It is a stone cold classic that will be appreciated by humans for a very long time. In his 2021 sequel, The Constitution of Knowledge, he considers how society collectively produces knowledge and the dangers of misinformation. He has also written about the case for same -sex marriage, which he provided the intellectual framework for according to one source. And though he says on the podcast that he is a Jewish atheist, his latest book is a critical, yet reverential look at Christianity, making the provocative case that our society needs more and not less Christianity. Talking to him was a massive honor and I know Bruce feels the same way. I hope others enjoy this too. Welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast. Today, we have a very special guest. I just, I can’t believe this is happening. It’s an honor for me, Jonathan Rausch. How are you doing today, Jonathan?
[00:01:45] Red: I’m doing great. I’m battling a bit of a cough, so apologies to you and your listeners. Every now and then, you may hear a bit of that noise. Okay.
[00:01:54] Blue: Well, I can edit those out, of course. And how are you doing, Bruce? I’m doing well.
[00:02:00] Green: I’m very excited. Jonathan Rausch’s books are top of my list. I am very excited to get to ask him questions.
[00:02:07] Blue: Yes. Well, I have read, I think about, I don’t know, maybe five or 10 years ago, I read Kindly Inquisitors. I thought it was absolutely superb. It makes the epistemological case for free speech in a way that just resonated with me. I mean, it was like one of those books that just comes out of history. I say history, but, you know, 1993, you know, seems like a little while ago now, comes out of history and just speaks to our present age and maybe future ages too. And then Bruce has been telling me for a couple years now, Constitution of Knowledge. You got to read it. You got to read it. And it’s been on my list, and I finally did in preparation for this. And it really struck me as sort of a part two of Kindly Inquisitors. And I got a lot out of it, and I know Bruce is going to speak about it. But I thought I could first, John, first what I’m curious about, one of the things that really struck me about your books is how accurately they describe papyri and epistemology. Maybe Bruce has some complaints. I don’t know. To me, it seemed pretty darn accurate, your description of fallibilism. And it was just, it’s just common sense. And just everything rang true to me. You know, about 90 % of the people that I interact with have discovered Karl Popper through the work of David Deutsch. I think most younger people, relatively younger people, like all of us, came to Popper through David Deutsch. You know, I do interact with some older people who some of them actually knew Popper, but mostly through David Deutsch. But I know you, John.
[00:04:12] Blue: Well, you started, your book came out before I think David Deutsch had even published a book. So I’m guessing that your path went a different direction. And so in a world where it seems like most academic philosophers sort of dismiss Popper as a naive falsificationist or something like that, maybe he’s not considered that serious to a lot of people, how did you realize that papyrian epistemology and fallibilism might be our best description of how humans create knowledge?
[00:04:52] Red: Well, the simple answer to that is, I read him, if it’s really true that academic philosophers are snooty about Popper, that snooze to me and it would be bad news. Because I think he, to me, he is right up there with the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. The only reason I say he’s not the greatest is that there were broader areas that he just didn’t touch, you know, theory of justice and that kind of thing. But when I began doing the work to prepare for kindly inquisitors in the late 80s, in my late 20s, I understood that you can’t write about the open society without reading the open society and its enemies, which is a brilliant book. Now that book is tendentious, it hasn’t held up as well, I think, as the epistemology has. Nonetheless, it’s very powerful as a statement of the liberal aspirations in politics and the flaws of utopian thinking. And that led me to objective knowledge, its scope and limits, which is a book of essays by Popper. And no one ought to look down on it because it is a very deep collection. That led me to evolutionary epistemology, of which Popper is a principal proponent. And of course, man, it’s alluding me now of the structure of scientific thinking, is that what it’s called? The logic of scientific discovery. Thank you. The logic of scientific discovery. And the pieces slotted into place. I think Popper’s great contribution is to understand that you can systematize fallibilism into something that’s much greater than just an individual search for error. I think his commitment to evolutionary epistemology, this is, I think, a bit later in his career, but understanding that knowledge evolves. It’s an evolutionary system. A
[00:07:09] Red: decentralized, rule -based evolutionary system gives us a profound and true insight into science. And I think his general vision of the open society, what it means and how to defend it, is still the underpinning of modern liberal thinking. So it doesn’t get much more major than that.
[00:07:32] Green: Yeah,
[00:07:33] Blue: well put. Now, what about, I’m curious, what about open society do you feel doesn’t stand up as well as maybe some of his other work?
[00:07:46] Red: Well, a lot of very reputable classicists thinks that his reading of Plato was simply distorted. Yeah.
[00:07:56] Green: Common claim, yeah.
[00:07:58] Blue: Okay. He kind of portrays him as a totalitarian. Yeah. Which you touch on in your book too a little bit. Yeah, I think,
[00:08:06] Red: well, when I wrote Kindly Inquisitors, I was very much under this way of that view, but I still largely am.
[00:08:13] Blue: Yeah.
[00:08:13] Red: I think there are a lot of apologists for Plato who try not to take him at face value because if taken at face value, he’s suggesting the ideal society looks something like modern North Korea. Yeah. So Popper goes there, but a lot of people think that his portrayal of Plato is one -sided, leaves out a lot of nuance. Of course, the Straussians profoundly disagree. People argue with him about his translations, and he relies very heavily on the laws, which is Plato’s late work. It’s almost, it’s so weird, it’s almost outside the canon. Yeah. So his view of Plato hasn’t held up all that, well, I can’t speak to his view of Hegel, but people who know that, you know, Frank Fukuyama and people like that, say that Popper was just also very unfair to Hegel. Popper treated Hegel as basically a monarchist hack who was there to justify the royalist government of his time, and serious scholars say there’s a whole lot more to Plato than that. That said, I think the underlying insights of the open society and its enemies, which include the appeal of authoritarianism and totalitarianism and utopianism to a certain type of intellectual, that’s very true and very important.
[00:09:41] Blue: Yeah. It almost seems, how I read open society is not just about Plato, Marx and Hegel, but he kind of uses these thinkers as almost like a launching pad for his other ideas about politics. I mean, I don’t even like see it as necessarily about these thinkers, but of course, if he’s not accurate, he’s not accurate about them. I guess I’m a little bit ambivalent about that, but wow, thank you. Bruce, do you want to jump in here?
[00:10:22] Green: So yeah, so there’s a huge influence of Karl Popper in your works, starting with Kindly Inquisitors, but in the Constitution of Knowledge, you’re also clearly also heavily influenced by the work of Charles Sanders Purse, who was the founder of the Philosophical School of Pragmatism. And which you pronounce correctly. Yay. I learned to pronounce it by listening to your books. I was about to correct Bruce. So obviously, Popper was not a pragmatist and would disagree with the pragmatists. So you’re influenced by both these and Popper was heavily influenced by Charles Sanders Purse. Like he quotes them all the time. So how would you personally self label,
[00:11:08] Unknown: like
[00:11:08] Green: if you had to put yourself into a school of philosophy, would you A, refuse to do it, or which school would you most align yourself with?
[00:11:19] Red: I don’t know. I’m certainly in the orbit of liberalism, meaning not modern American progressivism, but classical liberalism, the great tradition of Burke and Kant and Madison and the others who built our world. I think a contribution of the Constitution of Knowledge is to take the ideas of James Madison and combine them with the ideas of Purse and Popper to create Madisonian epistemology. So that’s one way I categorize myself. In the world of philosophy, I am a staunch empiricist. I believe not only in the efficacy of empiricism, but in the morality of empiricism as a method. I think it helps us not only build accurate knowledge, but weave a coherent, peaceful society. So I follow Locke in that tradition. I am fallibilist like Purse and Popper. I believe we get smarter by looking for each other’s mistakes, like Purse, but not Popper. I think in many ways Purse was the more advanced thinker than Popper and almost anybody else to this day. But like Purse, I view science as a fundamentally social enterprise. It’s about people who internalize and follow certain rules and norms. And that’s a place where I think Purse in some ways departs from Popper. Popper is more interested in a crisp philosophical definition of science. So I’m a Pursean. I’m also a Popperian. I think, to me, what excited me about Popper when I first read him and still excites me is that more than, I think, anybody before him, he clear, well, maybe Mill, maybe, but I think Popper clearly understood the political dimensions of knowledge. That you can’t have a free political society if you don’t have an open intellectual society. That, of course, becomes one of the great insights of the 20th century.
[00:13:42] Red: We see that in Orwell and Hannah Arendt and many others. But Popper systematizes that. So I haven’t really answered your question. I’m just wandering all over the place, but those are some of my… Yeah,
[00:13:53] Unknown: you absolutely
[00:13:53] Green: answered my question.
[00:13:54] Unknown: …and
[00:13:54] Green: North Stars.
[00:13:55] Red: I don’t know. What does that make me?
[00:13:57] Unknown: You
[00:13:57] Green: know, it’s an interesting question because I would probably place myself as a critical rationalist that would be a Popperian. But like I depart from Popper on all sorts of things, and we criticize him freely on this podcast and do whole episodes about things we think he got wrong and stuff like that, it is hard to place yourself into an easy category. I think that my answer to my question would have been very similar to the answer you just gave.
[00:14:24] Unknown: I
[00:14:24] Green: think I may have even read the same Popper books in the same order that you just listed, by the way. Now, I noticed, though, in the Constitution of Knowledge, in your book, The Constitution of Knowledge, you do seem to take issue with Popper on falsification, at least to a degree. So let me do an actual quote here from your book. In subsequent years, philosophers found many reasons to cavill with Popper who died in 1994. In the real world, scientists use verification as a strategy all the time. They very often pursue and present evidence which confirms hypotheses, probably just as commonly as they present and welcome evidence which disconfirms. And what exactly is falsification? Popper could never define it very precisely and seem to consist of whatever it is that convinces people that a proposition is false, not exactly a helpful definition. So here I think you’re maybe rightly, I did a whole episode criticizing Popper’s falsification myself. You wouldn’t know that, but I did. So that kind of caught my attention here. And yet, Popper did see falsification as kind of the central theme or the central idea of his epistemology. So I kind of wanted to ask you some questions around this. So like, what do you feel about is wrong with falsification? And maybe sometimes I wonder if the problem isn’t so much the concept as just the word itself, that it tends to mislead or lead people to see things that aren’t quite right. And I’ve made that argument on this show. But what do you feel might be wrong with falsification? You kind of gave a few examples here in the quote I just gave.
[00:16:02] Red: It’s not so much what’s wrong with falsification. It’s what’s incomplete about falsification. And it’s about taking falsification so seriously as a concept, pushing it beyond its sustainable limits, that it kind of falls apart. So when I cite people as criticizing Popper for example, not clearly defining what falsification means, I should add, I don’t see that as a big objection. I think it’s actually fine to say falsification is whatever people do to falsify something. It’s not a philosophically precise definition by any means, but it’s a true definition. And it leaves the door wide open to a vast range of things that people can do within the realm of science. And I think that people do do a vast range of things within the realm of science. I’m a bit of as a famous philosopher called Paul Feier -Aubin, who is kind of an epistemological anarchist who says, you know, science is whatever people do and call science. And to some extent, that’s true. The mistake, I think, maybe Popperians make this. I’m not sure I would say Popper did, but maybe he did. The mistake is trying to nail down the particular thing that science does that non -science does not do. This has been called the demarcation problem, the demarcation dilemma. What science and what isn’t, like everyone in his generation and the generation before and maybe before that, going back to, you know, Wittgenstein and the logical positivists and Bertrand Russell and all those people, they were obsessed with figuring out what is science and what is not science so that they could say, aha, that’s not science, don’t do that. And that was understandable at a time when there was a lot of garbage non -science going around, still is.
[00:18:15] Red: But there’s no way you can draw that kind of boundary without excluding some things that look very much like science, including just, for example, what I do for a living, which is journalism, which uses the same basic Popperian Percy and principles. We can talk about that, that’s the subject of the Constitution of Knowledge. It excludes a lot of what lawyers do, which is also about finding facts through use of rules. You don’t see laboratories in law offices, but you certainly see the rational contest of ideas, the search for error and so forth. There’s even something, I think this statement might give Popper hives, but in my travels for the book on Christianity, I became acquainted with the world of theologians in seminaries, and these guys do not pretend any scientific validity at all, yet they’re using many of the same methods that you would recognize in conventional academia, like they’ve got footnotes, they’ve got arguments, they’ve got reason presentations, they’ve got hypothesis, it just happens to be about stuff that’s not true. So you can even apply these methods to total non -science and make some progress in the discourse. So I think the right answer is that falsification is, in fact, whatever it is people do in a systematic, decentralized, rule -based way to convince each other that something is wrong. That can be a lab experiment, that of course is the classic case when we all think of science, that’s what we think about, but it can be a logical argument, it can be an empirical set of empirical observations, that’s just not what we see in the data, but it can also be aesthetic.
[00:20:12] Red: One of the things that scientists say and have said for years, Einstein among them, is that they rely on the elegance of a theory. When they don’t have other clear ways to choose, they’ll say this one is more economical and it’s more elegant, we’re going with that one. So beauty is actually part of falsification. So I think if you want to understand what falsification is actually about, it is a core concept, but you have to understand it as social behavior according to rules, not about a particular kind of procedure. Once you think about falsification, that way I think it’s still useful as a general sense of what distinguishes science as a way of thinking, looking for mistakes, but it allows you to say, yeah, scientists do all kinds of things every day.
[00:21:06] Blue: I love the way you put that. So you would link this search for scientific explanations with aesthetic progress too? Does science become more beautiful over time? That’s something I think about sometimes.
[00:21:27] Red: Oh, I wouldn’t want to generalize. I don’t know, if David Deutsch were on the show, I’d ask him if physics is more beautiful than it was in Newton’s day and I suspect the answer is no. It’s gotten pretty hairy, lots and lots of particles and there’s constants, I guess, that are kind of clutching to fill in gaps because nothing else works, but it’s very aesthetically motivated. Physicists are out there looking for a theory to unify, I guess it’s gravity and quantum theory, I may be getting this all wrong, but they’re looking for an elegant unifying theory that will get rid of some of all this mess of all these variables and clutches and stuff that they’ve had to add to equations to make them work.
[00:22:11] Blue: Yeah. Okay, fair enough.
[00:22:14] Red: It’s a driver of science. I don’t think anyone goes around and says science, physics or chemistry is getting more beautiful, but I think you can say that the human motivation toward beauty and elegance is a motivator of science and it actually is a guide. Okay, that’s a better way to
[00:22:33] Blue: put it. Okay, I get it. Thanks.
[00:22:36] Green: By the way, just to give a quote from your book that’s the other side of this, you also say, I probably should have included this, yet Popper’s core insight that science is an error -seeking system has held up. So just to maybe put that in perspective that you do say that in your book, what is the difference? Maybe you kind of already answered this, but what is the difference between falsification and seeking errors, if anything?
[00:23:03] Red: I don’t think there’s a difference. What am I missing? What’s in your mind when you ask the question?
[00:23:10] Green: Well, it’s just the way that it was worded, you say that there’s maybe falsification hasn’t held up, but then you say that the core insight that science is an error -seeking system has held up. So I was wondering if you saw those as maybe somewhat different or if you see them as more or less the same thing.
[00:23:26] Red: Oh, well, I think what I was saying is a lot of Popper’s critics think falsification hasn’t held up. I think as you just read me as correctly as saying, I think the big concept has held up very well. I think it’s become the linchpin of how we think about science, including how scientists think about science. It’s just that a lot of the details in particular people argue about and at that level, I think there’s been some spitballs thrown. And as I said, my answer to that is I don’t care. It’s the big concept really that matters.
[00:24:03] Green: You also mentioned that scientists do use verification as a strategy. How would we think about that in terms of this broader idea of falsification? Let me just say that the idea of science using verification that we lay critical rationalists have a really big problem with that idea, but I would tend to agree with you that something that at least appears on the surface like verification exists very much within science.
[00:24:32] Red: What would be your problem or issue with accepting verification into science? So typically argument
[00:24:40] Green: is something like this that it’s simply impossible to verify a theory. So yes, you might corroborate a theory. Popper talks about corroboration, but that’s not really, this so goes the argument, that’s not really verification per se. And that’s typically the way I’ve heard that argued.
[00:24:59] Red: Got it. So when I think about verification, I don’t mean final eternal truth. I think we have to take as a given as Popper did that Hume was right and that the fact that the universe has always been the way it was doesn’t mean it’ll be that way tomorrow. And what I mean by verification is simply scientists look not just for negative evidence that something is false, but positive evidence that something is true. And that’s so obvious and undeniable that I don’t know that any rational person would would say it’s not true that scientists look for positive evidence that something is true. You know, every every paper will say here’s here’s six reasons why I think this is right. Here’s six that you use the word corroboration, that’s fine verification, whatever you call it. So where my model in constitutional knowledge, which maybe we should talk about, where it moves kind of outside the realm of classical Popperistic fallibilism is that I think what we’re really talking about here in the big picture is structured social persuasion. That’s the big story. So I’ll back, do I have a minute to back up and sort of put a few big ideas of the Constitutional knowledge on the table? We’re kind of, we’re very in the weeds about fine point distinctions. But maybe we should talk about the big concepts that I’m that I’m working with and go for it in my books.
[00:26:45] Green: Yeah, maybe explain what you mean by the Constitution of knowledge. Maybe that would be good background. Okay.
[00:26:51] Red: So this will take a minute and feel free to interrupt. One of the most important and hardest things for any society to do, whether it’s a small tribe or a huge nation, is subtle disputes about reality. That’s not always hard to do if it’s a fairly straightforward proposition that is susceptible to immediate feedback, like is that a breeze in the bush or a tiger, or where is the next spot for water, or where is the next tribe camped? On those, they’ll be pretty reality based. But there are a lot of questions on which you don’t get immediate feedback, and sometimes you don’t get any at all, like questions like, which God do we pray to to make it rain? Now, human societies have over most of our 200 to 300,000 year history settle those kinds of questions using methods like sacred texts, oracles, priests, elders. Those work in small groups to some extent. They don’t work in big groups because then schisms form, people disagree over which is the right God to worship. Some people think the answer is wrong. They won’t tolerate it. So traditionally, these systems have led to epistemic breakdowns. Societies lose touch with reality. They go in circles asking questions, nonsense questions like, which God do I pray to to make it rain? And worse, they lead to war. Purse pointed this out. I won’t quote this accurately, but when other means of settling a social disagreement have failed, nothing works like a general massacre of part of the population. And that’s what they’ve done. The constitution of knowledge arises. It starts in the 17th century with the wars of religion.
[00:28:54] Red: When you see millions and millions of people all across Europe killed over disputes about the truth about religion, people think there must be a better way. This is the birth of the scientific method, as we now think about. It’s also the birth of John Locke and his successors who say there has to be a better way and they go with rational empiricism, what I guess you’ve called critical rationalism. And we don’t need to get into all of what that is, at least not if someone’s been listening to this podcast over the years. Okay, so what’s the constitution of knowledge? How do we settle disputes about reality today in a way that is first peaceful, that’s essential, non -coercive, so that we’re free, and this is also essential, it has to keep us in touch with actual reality. You won’t want it drifting out into another regions of falsehood. The constitution of knowledge is a systems of norms and institutions that allow us to do that. The constitution of knowledge, unlike say the marketplace of ideas, is not a metaphor, a simile, a figure of speech, a literary creation. It’s a real thing. It’s actual rules, many of them are written down in places like the American Association of University Professors, Red Book, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Journalistic Guidelines, and many, many other places. But these are the rules which require us to make knowledge by submitting our hypotheses to a system of structured, decentralized, impersonal persuasion. It’s a marketplace of persuasion. Persuasion can consist of falsification, and that’s a defining trait of science, that you’re always looking for mistakes, and until a hypothesis has been shot at and withstood a whole lot of criticism, it will not be accepted into the canon.
[00:31:08] Red: Furthermore, in the Constitution of Knowledge, as in the US Constitution, there’s no end to the process. There’s no last vote. There’s no final state of monarchy, for example, in which someone rules by divine right. There’s always another election. The same is true in science, broadly defined. There’s always another hypothesis. There’s always another question. These systems, both the US Constitution and the Constitution of Knowledge, are depersonalized. That is a critical trait of all liberal social systems, including free markets. It’s not supposed to matter who you are, or what your personal characteristics are, or where you live, or what language you speak. Any argument I make should be comprehensible to and rebuttable by someone speaking Swahili in Africa. It’s rules -based processes, and anyone can follow those rules. But if you’re not following those rules, you’re out. If you’re an anti -vaxxer who only looks at a handful of studies that confirm what you believe and rejects the rest, you’re not doing science. You’re out. You can’t be in charge, or at least you shouldn’t be in charge of the CDC or HHS. You can see where that conversation leads. Yes. So that’s the Constitution of Knowledge. It’s the norms and institutions that structure our public conversations toward a rational process of persuasion. That’s more like purse than popper. So
[00:32:39] Green: you’re picking the word constitution. I mean, this is an analogy of sorts to the American Constitution, I believe.
[00:32:45] Red: Yes, it’s more than an analogy. I argue that these two social systems are doing the same thing, but in two different realms. One is the realm of politics and government. The other is the world of knowledge and truth. But they are both about forcing people to resolve disagreements in ways that are rules -based and non -coercive.
[00:33:06] Green: All right. Thank you. That was an excellent introduction here to the Constitution of Knowledge. For this my next question here, let me give it just a little bit of my own background, just so you can kind of see where I’m coming from on this question. So I think I mentioned I used to be a Mormon blogger, and when I discovered Karl Popper through reading David Deutch’s books, I started to blog on Mormon blogs about popper’s epistemology a lot and kind of became known as the epistemology nerd on Mormon blogs. I only later discovered that there were these rationalist communities that existed, similar to the blogging community for Mormons, and they were centered around the one I have participated the most in was the one centered around popper’s epistemology. The critical rationalists are crit rats, as they sometimes are called. And then I’ve also had some association with like the Bayseans. Baysean epistemology is very big right now. A lot of the ideas from Baysean epistemology has spread widely throughout academia, and you hear it all the time just from even laypeople now. It’s interesting that these communities are dedicated to trying to be rational and trying to study epistemology in detail, which is the theory of knowledge. So I was surprised when I found that these rationalist communities weren’t really that much different in my experience from the more religiously oriented communities that I had participated in. Rationalist groups, despite the fact that they’re like studying epistemology all the time, they’re trying so hard to be rational, they still came across to me as being very biased and trying to use a lot of their rationality to justify beliefs that I was fairly certain they did not come across by some sort of rational means.
[00:34:51] Green: And there was like what we make today called confirmation bias often going on. And there was the other thing I noticed was that these networks of people that would exist in these communities that it tended to be the least plausible theories that would come to dominate those networks. And so if I can use some real life examples, if you were to go and you were to interact with a the crit rat critical rationalist community today, they would be highly, highly aligned with the idea that anarcho capitalism is an implication of poppers epistemology. Now I don’t think there’s any chance popper would agree with that statement. And I got no problem with libertarianism. I actually like libertarians a lot and as an idea I think it’s an interesting idea. But they’ve had to come to a line with this idea that doesn’t strike me as maybe that plausible. And yet that almost defines a lot of their identity today. Same thing happened with Bayseans where they became very aligned with fear mongering around AGI that if we create AGI, it’s going to wipe out humanity, which again isn’t maybe the most plausible of their theories. And yet that’s the one that came to dominate the network. I started to wonder about this. Why is it that these networks of people who are strongly studying rationality, really trying their best to be rational and to understand what it means to be rational, why is it that these theories that and let’s be honest, the theories I just explained, they have this moral element to them, right? They’ve got this meaning element to them where I can see how it’s a cause that you can dedicate yourself to and it gives you meaning in your life.
[00:36:30] Green: Why is it that those are the theories that came to be the identifying theories of these networks? Now, Popper does talk about this a little bit in open society and that was kind of a partial answer. But it was really when I discovered your book that I felt like I was finally getting a full answer to that question. I think the question I’m trying to ask you here is based on this idea of the Constitution of Knowledge and this idea that the scientific endeavor and not just the scientific endeavor but like journalism and these other areas that they’re a social thing, can you maybe help explain why it would come to be that it’s so natural for the least plausible theories to become the ones that spread through the network so easily?
[00:37:12] Red: I’m tempted with a twinkle in my eye to ask you that question since you say you found the answer in my book. I’m tempted to ask so much my answer.
[00:37:22] Green: Sure. Why don’t you take
[00:37:24] Red: a stab at it and then I’ll take a stab at it.
[00:37:26] Green: Okay. So it seems to me that the answer that you give in your book is that there’s valences, that you’ve got a network of people and that there are things that cause a meme to move through that network, right? And if you were to take just social media, maybe it does better today but social media maybe 10 years ago and you were to look at what are the valences that allow something to move through that network, it’s going to be primarily rooted in what gets people excited, which is usually anger or something like that, right? And this isn’t in your book but this is my own personal opinion. I think humans are meaning seeking, right? And so I think that a theory that produces meaning is going to excite people and they’re going to hold on to and become excited about anarcho -capitalism or AGI fearmongering first and foremost and that of the different theories that that network is producing, those are the ones people are going to want to align themselves to regardless of whether they’re actually true or not. Now, if I understand your version of the constitution of knowledge, the idea is that you change the network to have different properties based on this constitution of knowledge, based on certain rules, certain institutions that you put into place and the valences change and it makes it so that the network won’t take bad theories and let them move very far or at least it’s not likely that they will move very far and those tend to then die out and that the network becomes dominated by true theories instead or true earth theories. I don’t know the best way to say that. How’d I do?
[00:39:13] Green: Is that close or related to what you would have given as an answer?
[00:39:18] Red: A plus. You’re my star student. I’ll say a different version of the same thing but basically you nailed it. In order to function, the constitution of knowledge requires three things. By the way, they map very closely onto the three things required by the US Constitution. The constitution of knowledge requires freedom of inquiry. We know this from Peirce and Popper. You’ve got to be able to ask all sorts of questions, even unpleasant ones. Second, in addition to freedom, it requires discipline and this is really hard. The discipline of fact, empiricism, checking. You can make any claim you want but your claim shouldn’t be taken seriously by you or others unless it has gone through a very rigorous process of checking and you need to abide by the results. Maybe not in your personal beliefs but at least in your professional conduct. The third thing it needs is diversity of viewpoint. In a situation where everyone agrees on most things, learning will not take place because people will not see their errors. We’re all biased. It’s a fundamental of human cognition that we’re we can’t see our own biases. We think we’re the only unbiased person but you can see some of mine and I can see some of yours and Peter can see some of both of ours. If we have a supply of diverse viewpoints, it is much like that error will be spotted. The three analogies to that in the US Constitution that is in political liberalism are freedom of association and political freedom to vote and so forth. The discipline of lawfulness, you may win or lose but either way you have to follow the law and political pluralism. This is what Madison called enlarging the sphere.
[00:41:31] Red: Having a big enough republic so there are lots of different factions in interest competing and no one faction can dominate. Very same concept. I don’t know the particular networks that you’re frequenting and it sounds like maybe I’m glad I don’t but it sounds like they’re falling prey to exactly the same problem that you see in sociology, communications, education, anthropology, departments in colleges across the country which is that when you get social networks that are self -selecting when they’re promoting people like themselves when people who don’t agree with fundamentals are selecting themselves out of the system. So you get widespread agreement on almost everything. In other words when you get a sociology department that does not have a single conservative or republican and would never hire one, there are now entire disciplines where that is pretty much the case. You won’t have sufficient diversity of opinion to really test your views and when that happens we know the results because it’s always the same through 200,000 years of human history and that’s you begin to go down rabbit holes of unreality. You spin off these weird memes and narratives and you begin to believe stuff that other people are saying and then you hear what you say and you believe that too and you start going, you know, you get into conspiracy theories and wild stuff because no one is telling you, hell wait a minute, this doesn’t comport with reality and here’s why. So this is a common social phenomenon and the whole point of the constitution of knowledge is to make it harder for that to happen.
[00:43:21] Green: Okay, thank you. Let me ask a few questions related to what you just said. So sorry, this is going to be a little bit, I’ll pull it together I think but there may be kind of a spattering of questions here. So first of all this idea that you call it the reality -based community. Am I understanding you correctly that you see this as a generalization of poppers epistemology or maybe we could call it a generalization of science since science predates popper, right? That what we’re doing here, when you refer to the reality -based community, what you’re talking about are these networks that may be science in terms of the scientific community but it may be journalism, it may be lawyers, it may be a number of different disciplines and but that all of them are still doing some form of this Persean, Paparian epistemology and that’s what makes them quote -unquote the reality -based community. Do I have that right I guess first of all?
[00:44:18] Red: Correct, in their professional lives these are all communities of people who are following the rules of the constitution of knowledge.
[00:44:27] Green: So now you emphasize the word professional lives. One of the things that comes out in your book is that it does seem like you see this constitution of knowledge as in some sense incomplete and you even at times use the word impoverished, particularly when you’re talking about yourself. You’ve sometimes used the word impoverished. What do you really mean by that and can you explain to me in what sense it might be considered incomplete?
[00:45:00] Red: So this is the key characteristic of liberalism, again the small elkine in the European sense, the founding fathers and US constitution and so forth. The opposite of liberalism is not conservatism. It’s total, totalism. This is what Popper’s all about. Liberalism deliberately says look we’re going to create some rules like the US constitution and the constitution of knowledge and for that matter we’re going to have economic rules about buying and selling. But liberalism is only going to be the controlling rules in part of your life. One of its big goals is to leave you free to decide on the goals of your life, your sources of fulfillment, your view of meaning in life. Liberalism on purpose says we’re not going to prescribe that. It’s unlike any other philosophy in that way, any of the theologies or the totalitarian views or nowadays integralism and common good conservatism. They all want to fill private space as well as public space and tell you what the good thing is that you need to do. Liberalism says within its own boundaries, within its own sovereignty of making knowledge and making public laws and for that matter trading on markets, yeah you have to follow these rules. There’s no other way to do it. But we’re not telling you what to do in church. We’re not telling you that you have to use the scientific method at the Thanksgiving table. There are lots of other things people do in society and that’s a feature, not a bug of liberal systems and what I call liberal science, the constitution of knowledge.
[00:46:58] Red: That’s a good thing and it’s a unique thing but it means that if people are walking around looking to, I don’t know, science to give the meaning in life they’re going to feel like something is missing. And that’s why liberal societies like America right now, this is my latest book called Cross Purposes Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, this is why liberal societies rely on value making institutions and cultures like Christianity and Judaism, for example, why they depend on those things to fill those other parts of life. So that’s the sense in which the constitution of knowledge is incomplete and means to be complete. Problem is when those other institutions stop doing their job for whatever reason, which to a large extent has happened, it puts way too much burden on market capitalism and on the scientific project but especially on democracy on political liberalism and they begin to collapse under the weight of that excessive expectation.
[00:48:16] Green: Yeah, okay. Let me go back to the examples that I just used. So we have these rationalist communities, one of them came to be strongly associated with anarcho -capitalism, this is the critical rationalist community, and the Bayesian community they became to be strongly associated with AGI -dumism. In fact, I actually met a guy who was taking bets that you pay him $1,000 now and in five years he pays you $2,000 if humanity’s still around, like that was the degree to which he had bought into AGI -dumerism. It seems to me that I can’t accept these theories as actual good theory. I guess I can’t say they’re false theories, maybe we will all be dead in five years, but surely there’s not a strong rational basis for accepting these theories today. This has got to almost come across to me more like religion than it does as something that came out of the reality -based rational community. But I have to admit that I don’t think it’s all bad. There is something about it that annoys me, I’d have to admit, but like libertarians are full of interesting creative ideas, right? Even if they’re being driven by something that I’m not sure I agree with. And I would even dare say, like I’m a conservative Republican and maybe we can talk about that next, okay? But like my own tribe of conservative Republicans, I honestly think right now they’ve gone insane compared to say my anarcho -capitalist friends. There’s this, some of what they’re doing, where they’re trying to pull meaning into their life out of these ideas. It seems like a lot of it turns out to be okay.
[00:50:00] Green: AI -dumerism is not probably true in my opinion, but it has led to a big open discussion about AI alignment, which is something we need to actually be talking about. And I just have very little to complain about most libertarians, even if I don’t agree with their politics ultimately. Help me out here, maybe. I don’t know if I can phrase this as a great question. On the one hand, I have a concern, which is maybe they’re leaning too much on their economics and their politics for meaning. On the other hand, it does seem like in general it’s maybe not so bad that this is something that they’ve chosen to make meaning in their life. And we live in an open society, the filters in place, the better ideas get through. To what degree is that okay? To what degree is that concerning?
[00:50:54] Red: Well, that depends, of course, to a large extent on what kind of influence and power they have. I think, now we’re going back to John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, and one of his big concerns in Victorian England, he thought the biggest threat to freedom was not the government, it was conformity. He said every society needs a healthy amount of eccentricity so the genius can blossom. And he’s not wrong about that. And I think what you’re saying is that there’s value in, can we call it, to use a term of art, weird. Yes, that’d be fine. And one of the great things about the Constitution of Knowledge is it does not use coercion to silence people with weird unorthodox views, and that includes some destructive and harmful weird unorthodox views. People are perfectly free to be an anti -vaxxer. Now, a set of side laws about actual vaccinating, you can believe about that and say about that what you want. And that’s because, as Mill said and as Popper said, although these people may have some screwball ideas, the questions they’re asking may turn out to be fruitful, or maybe they’re even partly right. Maybe they will drive us to questions and assumptions and will learn stuff. So you don’t coercively silence them. So how do you, how do you deal with weird in the Constitution of Knowledge? The standard thing you usually do is you just marginalize it. You just ignore it. It’s out there. It goes along. It does its thing. Every so often, people start noticing, hey, this is an interesting idea out here. Maybe we should look at this, and those ideas can then enter into the larger discourse. And sometimes they can be revolutionary and important and good.
[00:52:53] Red: There was a time in the United States in my lifetime when Milton Friedman was considered a nut almost. Well, guess what? So if these people are just out there doing their weird stuff, and then that’s fine. That’s great. As long as they’re not in a position to do things like use the force of law to force their ideas into, I don’t know, the textbooks in universities. As long as they’re not in a position to silence people who disagree with them, and especially if they’re not in a position to impose their ideas through force of law and government coercion. We’re in a situation right now in America where some people who just a few years ago were on the fringes, the far, far fringes of intellectual life. We’re talking now here about anti -vaxxers and conspiracy theorists and so forth, have managed to seize control of our governing institutions and are imposing those ideas, firing people en masse at places like the CDC who don’t agree with them, institutionalizing bad science. People will die as a result of what they’re doing. So that’s the point at which we get really alarmed. When the power of coercion, social coercion, but especially governmental coercion is deployed on behalf of these fringe ideas.
[00:54:29] Blue: One thing that I think about sometimes is politics as theater. And sometimes I wonder, it’s just, this is just something I wrestle with. How much should we care about what’s going on politically? How much is it healthy? And how much does it really matter? I hope you’re not
[00:54:56] Red: a civics teacher. Well,
[00:54:59] Blue: here’s a quote from David Deutsch from one of his podcasts. He says, people seem to like the idea that they are living in a time of momentous challenge, where the stakes are exactly like or analogous to what the stakes were in the Second World War, where it was good against evil, where if evil wins, it is the end of civilization. And therefore fighting against that is glorious and it is worthwhile. It gives life, it gives meaning to life. And so the more you can talk in terms of these hyperboles, the more life seems worthwhile. It’s as if making rapid, quiet, peaceful progress, which is exactly what’s going on all the time right now is not exciting enough for people when they’re in political mode. I’m guessing you would kind of disagree with the gist of that.
[00:55:50] Red: I don’t know if I agree or disagree. There’s certainly some truth in it. Okay. This is a point that goes back to Nietzsche and Marx that in advanced capitalism, people take progress for granted and they get bored and they get lazy and they get soft and they have no heroic mission in life. They have no grand narrative about why they’re here. And so they become both desolate and they begin to engage in what would be the word not degenerate behavior, but maybe transgressive behavior. They’re looking for ways to show they’re great and they don’t have a big war to fight.
[00:56:42] Blue: They’re looking for meaning, maybe.
[00:56:45] Red: Well, more than that, we’re all searching for meaning, but that they’re trying to create a grand narrative and do stupid things as a result of that. And Nietzsche’s idea was that in sort of late stage modernity, what would happen is that most people would just be bored and anesthetized playing video games all the time, just going to work and coming home, but they’d become like a herd. Except for a few big thinkers, creative thinkers. He had himself, I think in mind as the model, who would kind of have the big bold ideas and go off on their own and create values for themselves and others. This turns out to be a really terrible solution, but he and Marx and today we’ve got post -liberals who are making this case. It’s a very standard case. It’s not just David Deutsch. They’re not wrong about the challenge of living in a prosperous, peaceful world where there’s lots and lots of imperfections and you wish your income were growing faster than it has and maybe you wish that the coal mine in your town hadn’t left the downtown hollowed out. So there’s lots of things that are wrong, but nothing that galvanizes you into having a heroic story of your life. And so here we are, right? The classical liberal answer to that is, look, it’s not our job to give you a historic narrative of your life. You need to go out and find that and you need to do that in a way that’s good, not bad, but Christians have a heroic narrative of life. Give your life to Christ. Give your life to good works. Focus on the next world. Be Christ -like.
[00:58:31] Red: That’s about as heroic and hard as any mission could possibly be if you read the Gospel of Jesus. You understand what a revolutionary figure he is. So liberals say to Christians, look, don’t blame us. This is your department and that’s the case I make in my book Cross -Purposes. So I agree with Professor Deutsch about lots of people agree, this is a problem. David Brooks writes about it every day that you’ve got a whole generation that doesn’t believe in institutions and doesn’t really, they have ideals, but they don’t really believe in any particular politics or process. There’s no political candidate or agenda they support. They’re almost nihilistic and that is a big problem.
[00:59:19] Green: Let’s talk about actual political challenges at this time, particularly with my own tribe, conservative Republicans today, and I’m going to willingly let you criticize this as much as you care to. I would note that you are fairly harsh on both sides. I couldn’t find this in your books, but it seems like somewhere you refer to the left is cancer and the right is a heart attack. Am I misquoting you there or am I misremembering? But it seems like you did say something like that at some point.
[00:59:53] Red: Yeah, that’s from a New York Times article I wrote with Pete Wehner.
[00:59:56] Green: Okay. I thought I had heard you say that. There is in saying that you’re being harsh to both sides, but if I’m getting you correctly, you see the right, you see my tribe, conservative Republicans, as a more urgent problem because a heart attack is a more urgent problem than cancer. Is that the analogy here?
[01:00:20] Red: Yes.
[01:00:21] Green: Okay. Can you explain to me your views on why you think the problems on the right are a more urgent problem?
[01:00:33] Red: Because of the timescale that they’re working on. My first book, Kindly Inquisitors, was written in 1993. What’s that? 32 years ago. And 32 years ago, you could see what the left was up to on campuses and you could map out what would happen. People now read that book and say, wow, this was prescient, but it was all there to see. And it played out over a period of decades as the left took over various academic departments and as postmodernism spread and then as other radical ideologies moved into higher education. But this works through the culture and it took a while. It did burst out very quickly in 2020 when you saw that sudden leap into the culture of aspects of what became known as wokeness. But that was the exception. So that’s why I liken that to cancer. It’s toxic. It is really bad for liberalism to have these ideas slowly take over or even medium speed take over institutions so that young people believe, for example, that America is the worst thing that’s ever happened. Nothing good came out of the Constitution. Think in terms of hierarchies of oppression and think of not of individuals as individuals, but as members of groups and then, you know, all the stuff that goes on, right? So I was there three plus decades ago warning about that. However, the postmodern right, which we can talk about this so -called woke right, it exists. It has succeeded in taking over a political party in a way the left didn’t. I will grant you that there were, the Democratic Party has certain sympathies and constituencies that were pretty woke and on trans issues and stuff like that they were doing some of that stuff.
[01:02:46] Red: However, on the whole, the Democrats were still nominating and electing mainstream politicians. There’s nothing mainstream about Donald Trump. There’s nothing mainstream about his authoritarian populist MAGA movement. These have their roots in Europe, in blood and soil, right -wing philosophies of Europe. They are hostile to the American constitutional liberal tradition. But once they took over the Republican Party and once the Republican Party was able to take over the whole government, they have moved with astounding speed to undermine and demolish core liberal democratic norms and institutions. And that’s why I say that’s like a heart attack. That’s the thing you worry about first.
[01:03:33] Green: So how did they successfully do that? I mean, we have a number of institutions and safeguards in place that are supposed to make that very difficult to do, right? Sometimes I will just refer to this as Trump or Trumpism, but maybe that’s even not an accurate term because in many ways this movement existed prior to Trump. But what is it that took place that allowed this sudden takeover of non -mainstream ideas to happen at all?
[01:04:07] Red: So how many days do we have? The question of how this happened will be studied for generations. It’s a huge and momentous question. I don’t think the answer is fully known. I think it may be the subject of my next book. It’ll be the subject of a lot of books. But I’ll take, you know, with trying to do this short form is really hard, but I’ll just throw some things, excuse me, out there. One thing we know is that some stuff happened domestically in the United States that made it much easier for an authoritarian movement to get a foothold. It has been the case forever that something like, you know, roughly 25 % of the population have been people who, of both the left and the right, who favor a kind of authoritarian style of politics, don’t like compromise, want to see a lot of a fight and want to win, don’t really care how. But they were spread around between the parties and they didn’t really have candidates to vote for because both parties weeded out candidates who talk that way. A lot of people don’t know this, but in the mid -1920s Henry Ford was a figure very much like Donald Trump, an authoritarian, in his case, Ford’s case, he was viciously anti -Semitic and racist at that stage. Decided to run for president and a lot of people wanted him to because he would knock heads together and fix things. He talked like an authoritarian. He said, I’m just going to get stuff done. So Ford went to the Republican party and said, I want to run for president and they said no dice. He went to the Democratic party or whoever and said, I want to run for president.
[01:06:04] Red: They said, no dice. So he couldn’t run for president because the party’s controlled who could run. They had a whole system for that. Well, that broke down in the United States. There are a whole lot of reforms that cost that. We don’t need to get into it. So you began to have the appearance, especially in this century, of authoritarian candidates. But you had one in 1968, 1972. You had George Wallace. He got a huge number of votes. So second thing that happened is that the parties sorted ideologically. They used to be coalitions that were geographic. The Democrats famously had the, had right -wing Dixie Crats and progressive New Yorkers. Republicans famously had Rockefeller Republicans and Goldwater Republicans. The parties were incoherent, but they had the benefit that they had a lot of cross in pollination internally. That changes. Republicans become, people sort into the different parties. So all the conservatives are in one party and all the progressives are in the other party.
[01:07:19] Green: Can I interrupt and just ask a question about that? Did abortion play a big role? The abortion issue play a big role in the sorting or is that overblown?
[01:07:29] Red: That’s a thing, but there’s so many things that drove that. Culture and geography and just natural assortative positioning. People want to be with people like themselves. That was a long -term trend, but the result of that was that authoritarian populists who had been both left -wing and right -wing, these are people who really would only come out to the polls for a protest vote of whichever party was running that type of candidate. If it was Pap, you can and or whoever. But now those people concentrate in the Republican Party. Well, 25 % of the country can’t take over the government, but 25 % of a party in a divided country can take over the party, which it does in 2016. And then that party can get itself elected. And so suddenly you can have 25 % of the country in charge of the government. So that’s a big part of what happens. Another very important thing that happens, often overlooked, but it’s right at the center of this is the breakdown of Congress as an institution. That’s been going on for 30 years, pretty much since the speakership of Newt Gingrich and lots of things that have happened. But that has meant the deterioration of a counterpoint to a super strong presidency. And presidents not just Trump have taken advantage of that. So all of that put us in a position to have an authoritarian government that was much more difficult until those developments. But I’m not done yet. I’m sorry. I have to continue. I hope you don’t hate this. Here’s something else we know, which is it didn’t just happen here. This is happening in liberal democracies all across the world.
[01:09:37] Red: Right now it looks like the far right AFD party is within reach of power in Germany. If the election were held today, the far right populist reform party in Britain would be the winners. France has just another government has been toppled, I think the fourth in four years. Something is happening all over the world that has made liberal democracies vulnerable to this kind of takeover and democratic electorates very restive and unhappy. So you also have to look at global things. And there I think you have to look at stuff like we talked about the decline of Christianity as a source of meaning. There are no really good substitutes for that it turns out, at least not at present. You’ve got the media crisis that comes from social media and algorithms and the demolition of traditional gate kept media and the rise of media insurgencies and so forth. All of that. You’ve got the diploma divide, which is driven probably by the economy, which is people with college degrees are doing great. People without college degrees are doing worse and worse and they’re not happy about it. But that’s happening all over the world. And we’ve got a global migration crisis. It used to be really hard to move from one country to another. Now if you can cross the border, you’ve got your cell phone and then you can have money wired and tell your relatives, I made it so send my brother. So no one knows how to handle the global migration crisis. And those things are global. So those are some of the factors. We know a lot of things had to change at once to create these developments. Sorry about the filibuster.
[01:11:39] Green: That’s okay. Now good answer. Okay, I’m going to filibuster back just for a second and set up my next topic question related to this. So I find myself in a strange circumstance. I’m a lifelong conservative Republican. I used to always vote Republican. And honestly, I feel like my conservative Republican views are pretty mainstream, right? And yet I suddenly find myself, I’m a never -trumper, you can probably tell from the way I’m talking, where I’m looked at differently now, even though I haven’t actually changed. And I’ve got two groups that I’ve interacted with on this that are pro -Trump. So I’ve got my Mormon friends and family. I live in Utah. It’s a state that did go for Trump, although I would argue somewhat tepidly. And then I’ve got my critical nationalist friends on the internet who are often extremely pro -Trump, way more so than my Mormon friends, by the way, friends and family, by the way. And I find it like, I don’t know how to communicate to them why I’m so concerned about Trump. And part of the reason why is that they almost always just counter with, but look how bad the other side is. And there’s almost always a great deal of truth to when they’re saying that, right? Because the other side has done some really pretty awful things. And they’re usually plugged into like Fox News. I don’t watch Fox News. They’re getting a constant stream of every single bad thing that the other side has done. And I even have to admit that even in the cases like, as strongly as I am against Trump, I’ve got a problem with the way even sometimes the mainstream media has portrayed some things that I think are lies about him.
[01:13:33] Green: And I feel like they spend their credibility. And then when we really need them to tell the truth about Trump, their credibility has been spent. Maybe I’m being unfair there. You can tell me if you disagree with me. It makes for a really difficult case, or even just the lawsuits against Trump, the fact that most of them were legitimate, but there was one that was pretty illegitimate, and that was the one that came first. It puts me in a really difficult circumstance to do a good job of explaining why I find Trump a thoroughly unacceptable candidate to the point where I will never vote for him. And I do not care what the other side is doing. And how can I even really communicate that? It seems like your book had some really good ideas, and I’ll let you talk about that maybe. But how would I even explain why I’m more concerned about my own side than I am about the other side, even though I’m admitting the other side has done a lot of bad things? Does that make sense? What my question is?
[01:14:34] Red: Yeah, I’d say I don’t know the answer to how you best communicate with your friends and acquaintances and family, but you probably do, and that it’s very important that you do that because you have credibility with them. One thing that we know, there’s science behind this, but also a lot of everyday evidence, is it does not work to hammer people with facts. No, it does not. You’re wrong about ABC. That typically makes people dig in deeper. A better way to approach someone is with the question, tell me what it is in your life experience that led me to that, that led you to that opinion. This expresses curiosity and care, and it moves the conversation to the realm of storytelling. We’re storytelling animals, we’re not really fact -based animals. That can introduce a conversation where you can start to let people’s guard down and start communicating about why you feel that not just Trump, but maybe the MAGO movement and what they represent are such a problem.
[01:15:59] Green: That’s probably
[01:16:00] Red: I think you’ve earned some credibility, as you told me. You are someone who’s sensitive to, I think the word would be illiberalism on both sides, as am I, and we’re a hearty but besieged tribe right now, where people on the right and the left, the center right and center left especially, who have ideas and values about right and wrong and politics, but who most of the time will subordinate our particular views in order to share the country. I’m guessing that’s where you come from. It’s certainly where your church, well, where the, not your church, I don’t know where you are right now, but where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints is coming from.
[01:16:48] Green: That is my church. You’re fine saying that.
[01:16:53] Red: That’s an overriding value, and it means even if you lose on abortion, what you may think is infanticide on an industrial scale or you may think is the state takeover of people’s bodies, even on that scale you say, you know what, we’re going to have to work this out politically and share the country. If you believe that, and if you believe that that is at bottom more important than getting your way on everything, then you’re a member of the liberal democracy tribe, and we have that in common, and I think that’s what’s the distinguishing characteristic that we’re fighting for. If someone is justifying their authoritarianism, their illiberalism, their cruelty, or their corruption by saying the other side is just as bad, well, Christianity has an answer to that. I’m not a Christian, but I gather, you know, a lot of people are, and the answer is, so wait, are we supposed to be like Satan or like Christ? That’s supposed to be an easy question, and the answer to the extreme on the other side and also on my side is not more of the extreme. They feed each other. This is exactly what they do. The left says, well, we’ve got to do this terrible stuff because look at the right, look what they’re doing, and vice versa. The answer is to shore up the center, the vital center, the place where it’s possible for us to disagree in a rational and civic way. So that’s how I approach it. I don’t know if it’ll work for you though. I deeply admire the work that your church is doing because I think it really, it gets that.
[01:18:38] Green: I agree. I agree. Go ahead. Can I ask
[01:18:42] Blue: you both a question about Trump?
[01:18:44] Green: Yes.
[01:18:45] Blue: One of the things that Carl Popper, I think, distills in open society, he says the value of democracy is not that you get the best rulers, but that we have this historically unprecedented, it seems to me, way to get rid of rulers without thousands of, without bloodshed, without people dying. He says the fundamental problem of political theory is not the problem of establishing who should rule. It is the problem of how to avoid tyranny, and we can only hope to solve it if we realize that the question who should rule is wrongly put. It should be rather, it should rather be how can we organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage. The great merit of the democratic system is that it makes possible the removal of rulers without bloodshed. Do you, I’m curious to this fundamental idea that we won’t be able to get rid of rulers without bloodshed?
[01:20:08] Green: Jonathan, if it’s okay, I’ll answer that question first, and then you can use what I say to agree or disagree and give your own answer. Is that okay? Sure. Of course. Okay. I’ve thought about this a lot, particularly in my conversations with critical rationalists. These are people who study Popper and they understand open society and its enemies and things like that. And yet for some reason they’re extremely pro -Trump. The main thing that I’ve concentrated on when I’ve tried to talk with them is what happened with January 6th, where Trump tried to stay in office even though he knew, we know he knew he lost the election, right? And he tried to stay in office anyhow, which to me seems like a violation of that entire paparian principle. And I guess I would have expected that to be a better argument in their eyes than it seems to have actually turned out to be. The counter argument they make to me is, well, he was just using the courts. It was perfectly legal. He didn’t expect January 6th to happen. It’s not his fault. And ultimately, he did step down without bloodshed. So actually, he is following this paparian principle and you’re just blowing it out of proportion. And yet I cannot see that as a valid answer from a critical rationalist perspective. Trump tried to stay in office when he lost an election. And if nothing else, he seriously undermined confidence in the electoral system as the president of the United States, right? To a large number of people. Now, I had problems with Trump before that. Now, I did not vote for Trump prior to January 6th either.
[01:21:46] Green: Let me say that if Trump had come into office and he had really changed, he’d kind of stepped up to the job, I might have voted for him the next election. So that didn’t happen in my opinion. But I wasn’t completely against voting for Trump. Never would I ever do it after just the first election. But I was after January 6th. After January 6th, he will never get my vote ever. I mean, there isn’t going to be another election with him. So I’m hyperboleizing to some degree. But there’s so many other things I could point to. But January 6th is so stark that I feel like I should have only needed to point to that. And yet it hasn’t convinced anybody that I can see. And so I guess my answer to Peter’s question is, yeah, I absolutely do see Trump as a threat to that very deep paparian principle about what makes a good government. And that’s exactly why I’m so concerned about him. I could point to a whole bunch of other things. But like that one alone, absolutely just turns me white, and I’m just terrified of what he tried to do there. And I don’t think anybody, I mean, Trump’s a weird case because he was a celebrity first. He was already known to be kind of a rascally personality. I have some faith that we won’t see that happen again, at least not effectively in the future once Trump finally does leave office for good. But even just the fact that he made that a norm is just horrifying to me. I should probably note that I’ve never really talked about politics on this podcast, John.
[01:23:24] Green: So a lot of I’ve mentioned I’m a Never -Trumper, so that won’t surprise people. But some people may be surprised just how anti -Trump I actually am as a conservative Republican. So I guess my answer to Peter would be, yeah, I actually do think Trump’s a threat to that. But I would probably say that I had a guest on this podcast say that he thought that we were seeing the end of the American experiment. I think that that might be catastrophizing. I don’t think Trump’s that dangerous. I think that the system’s very likely going to hold, that Trump will eventually leave office at the end of this term, and that he will, the amount of damage he will do will be bad, but it won’t be something that kills the nation. And so I think it is possible - Will it kill the rule of law? I don’t think it’ll kill the rule. Within the next three and a half years, I don’t think he will kill the rule of law.
[01:24:19] Red: Will it damage the rule of law?
[01:24:21] Green: Yes. And there will be a long healing period. That is my guess.
[01:24:25] Red: Like how long is long? Generations?
[01:24:28] Green: A generation, 20 years. I think that, I mean, you’re asking me to prophesy, which I’m not supposed to do here, but like I suspect that the Democrats will reform first, that you’ll start to see mainstream Democratic, I mean, they never entirely went away from mainstream. But I think you will see even more mainstream Democratic candidates in the future, that they will dominate the Republicans eventually just because the system eventually does that. And I think that it will take a while for the Republican party to fully come to grips with how bad they were. And by that point, it’ll be a whole new generation. And the older ones will maybe never admit to it, to what they did. But I think it will take a while to really come to grips with what happened.
[01:25:13] Red: What do you think are the odds that the 2028 election will not be free and fair?
[01:25:19] Green: I would put a very low probability that they would not be free and fair. I think that they will probably be free and fair.
[01:25:27] Red: Like low probability, are we talking 1 % or are we talking 30 % because there’s a big difference?
[01:25:34] Green: 1%. That would be my answer. I would actually, really, John, I would really like to know what you disagree with me over. Am I not concerned enough about Trump? I’d like to get your opinion on that if you think that I am downplaying the actual danger level.
[01:25:51] Red: I think you probably are downplaying the potential danger level. I don’t like you. I don’t have a crystal ball. I think we’re in one of those situations where things could get better or they could get a whole lot worse. And we’re not going to know for a few years which path we’re actually on. I completely agree with you that January 6, not just that day, but the campaign of disinformation that led to it, the false claim that the election was stolen and that Trump actually won, the legal campaign that led to it in which 61 completely fallacious and frivolous lawsuits were filed as a way to create a propaganda machine, the fake -electors scheme, which if Trump were not in office, some people would be going to jail for that. What actually happened on January 6, I think your friends are just not paying attention if they think Trump didn’t endorse violence. There was violence! Hello! It was severe violence and Trump sat there for three hours. That’s not something that’s supposed to happen. And then he pardoned the cop beaters. He pardoned them all. He said, that’s okay. So your friends are saying some stuff that’s not, I think, in contact with reality and may not be in good faith. But yes, that’s a game changer. We’d be in a different world if the day after the election Trump had said, I lost. Good luck, Mr. Biden, but we’re not in that world. Moreover, I am pretty darn confident that the Republican Party will not voluntarily cede power to the Democrats should the Democrats win the 2028 election and should the election be free and fair, which I by no means assume.
[01:27:53] Red: I think it’ll be free in the sense that people will be able to vote. But it may not be fair in the sense that it wouldn’t surprise me if you see National Guard and ICE people posted, for example, near polling places, passling people with brown skin who come to vote and so forth and so on. But if the Republicans lose that election, I think they are very well aware that all of the tools which the Trump administration has now invented and honed and deployed to harass and prosecute its political enemies can be used by Democrats. And I think they’re also aware that they’re doing a lot of stuff that’s going to turn out to have been illegal and that they’re liable for prosecution. Trump isn’t because of the Supreme Court, but the rest of them are. That means that I think the odds, given that they already tried to overturn an election to stay in power in a disorganized way, I think in 2028 and 2029, they do it again in an organized way. Whether the country can stand up, whether the system survives that, I frankly don’t know. So how alarmed does that make me? I would guess you’re pretty alarmed. Am I more alarmed than you are? I guess I think so.
[01:29:18] Green: I think so. I definitely agree it’s very alarming what’s happening. I suspect the system will hold better than a lot of people are guessing. But even if the only thing that changes is the change of norms and the breakdown of some of the institutions, that’s pretty bad. We’re definitely going to see this style of politics at least attempted for quite a while. It’s not going to just disappear overnight. Yeah.
[01:29:52] Red: So here are some things we’ve seen in the past, I don’t know, week to two weeks. You have seen a television show canceled because the chairman of the federal communications commission said, you’re going to be hassled by the government if you allow that show to go on. The actual quote is we can do this the easy way or we got to go. Jimmy Kimmel is gone. That is corruption. That’s gross abuse of government power. We haven’t seen anything quite like it, but it’s stuck and it’s not just Jimmy Kimmel. Colbert is gone. We’re seeing massive lawsuits against media corporations that fall in disfavor with the Trump government, the Trump regime and their caving. In the past couple, just in the past week, we have seen something that as far as I know is without precedent, which is for the second time, the illegal summary killing execution of civilians on the high seat by the U.S. military. In other words, the White House said, kill those people and the military did it. This is not in a state of war. This is not with a legal finding or a congressional finding that we’re in a state of conflict. There was no trial and no legal process to determine the innocent or guilt. We simply saw the government say, kill those civilians and it did. We can talk about what’s happening with ICE, citizens, not just non -citizens, but citizens being hassled, often physically abused. We could go on and on. We are, I believe, right now, if nothing else happens, we’re about halfway to Hungary. We’re not halfway to Putin’s Russia, but I think we’re about halfway to Hungary. I grant,
[01:32:12] Red: we may not get to Hungary, we may not even be halfway to Hungary, depending what happens with the courts in the next election and so forth.
[01:32:20] Green: We’ll see. Let’s talk about the courts for a second. I think it was Sarah Isger who is writing a book called The Last Branch Standing or something to that effect. She’s as an institution that they have not become corrupted and that they’re holding very well. Do you agree or disagree with that point of view?
[01:32:43] Red: I agree. There are, of course, three branches of government, well, really four if you count the states, which are sovereign entities. The courts have held. I don’t agree with every decision and I’m concerned that the Supreme Court will wave through stuff that maybe it shouldn’t, but the courts have held. Congress has collapsed. The bad news is that of the two, Congress is the more important. Right now, Congress should be telling the president you cannot abuse emergency powers to raise and lower tariffs at will. That’s not illegal. It’s not what the law says you can do. It’s not the intent of the law. Congress should be saying no to that and it could. Congress should be saying, sorry, you can’t spend a billion dollars taking personal gifts for gifts for your library, same thing. From the government of Qatar, Congress should be saying, sorry, you can’t. The president of the United States cannot be president and sue civilians. Right down the line, Congress should be saying no. You can’t withhold money that we say is spent. No, you can’t obliterate entire departments and government functions like USAID that Congress has said must exist in law and has funded. Congress should put a stop to the abusive recisions. It should be doing all kinds of things. And in my lifetime, it did. In the 70s, Congress did all kinds of things to say to President Nixon, no, no, no, wait a minute. You’re not a king. You’re a president. Congress hasn’t done any of those things, not one. And that leaves a howling, sucking vacuum in the middle of the Constitution because Madison and the others designed the system with Congress being the preeminent branch.
[01:34:38] Red: And so that, to me, the most worrisome thing that’s happening is not anything that Trump is doing. It’s what Congress is not doing.
[01:34:45] Green: So, David French, you quote a number of times. He’s made a case very similar to what you just made, that they’re not supposed to be co -equal branches and that it’s really the collapse of Congress that’s been the big problem here. It seems like there’s a theory around this that the problem might be the primary system. Agree or disagree? To what degree do you agree
[01:35:11] Red: Oh, it’s not the problem, but it’s clearly a problem. I mean, these days, there’s not many people who don’t think it’s a problem. The intention of primaries was noble, which is that the people should choose political candidates. The problem is, in primaries, the people don’t choose political candidates. Small numbers of self -selected often extreme voters choose the candidates. It turns out that when political party hacks and machine politicians and legislators and so forth chose candidates, they tended to choose people who were more mainstream and were able to build and support broad coalitions and were oriented towards solving problems in office and had a longer term view of politics. Primaries, especially in these safe districts, which is almost all of it now, where only the primary really matters because it’s a safe seat, primaries seem to favor the most extreme candidates and the people who can, well, there’s a quotation I’ve seen attributed to Representative Tom Massey, though I’ve not been able to nail this down, but he was speaking of his primary contests. He’s a conservative Republican and what was attributed to him was the statement, I used to think I won my primaries because I was a principal tea party conservative, and then I realized I’m winning my primaries because I’m the craziest mother in the room.
[01:36:42] Green: I did want to ask you some question around your latest book, cross purposes, how everything we’re talking about ties into the secularization of Christianity and how there might be. I was trying to initially concentrate there on failures of the primary system and failures of the political system, failures of the party, but you actually make a fairly compelling case that part of the problem here is the secularization and failure of Christianity. Could you maybe speak to that, what your feelings are about that? Maybe speak to both of those, failures of the political system and failures of Christianity that put undue pressure on the political system.
[01:37:27] Red: Well, as your question implies, they’re two sides of the same coin, and they’re two of the most important things that have happened. America has rapidly desecularized as have the other advanced democracies, and we touched earlier on why I think that’s a contributing factor to the problem these democracies are having, and I used to celebrate that. I thought I was one of those atheists. I’m still an atheist, but I used to be the type of atheist that thought, well, less superstition, that’s good. Well, I was very wrong about that. Christianity teaches a lot of very important values that are core to running a liberal democracy, things like don’t be afraid and imitate Jesus and forgive each other. Those are also the core principles of constitutional government. Sometimes the other side wins, don’t be afraid, allow the process to play out and be decent and civil to people, even people who are your antagonists, and compromise. People will do bad things to you, but you’ve got to share the country. Christianity played a, it was, by being Christian, by teaching those principles, it was a sustaining part of our system. We’ve seen something like a collapse of Christianity in the last 40 years, accelerating in the last 20, and it turns out the substitutes are worse, and one of the substitutes is politics. So we see increasingly that the people who remain as Christians, many of them, are there to do politics and wage culture wars. They’re bringing that to church. In some cases, they’re dragging unwilling pastors along with them. They’re saying, we’ve got to fight, fight, fight, we’re losing our country, we’re losing Jesus. So they’re bringing politics to church. Meanwhile, in their search for meaning, people are investing partisan politics with religious seal.
[01:39:40] Red: So what used to be the campaign to save the world by feeding people, or clothing people, or having missions to convert people, are now missions to save the world in politics by making everyone woke, by having radical environmentalism, or by having authoritarian populism, which you claim is necessary to save the country from an apocalyptic woke movement. Well, politics is supposed to be about compromise, negotiation, living together, working stuff out. It’s really, really hard to do. And religion is supposed to be about ultimate meaning and purpose in life. And when religion tries to do politics, and politics tries to do ultimate meaning, the result is the big mess that we’re in. And it’s a big mess.
[01:40:33] Blue: Do you agree with Tom Holland that we are all swimming in a sea of Christianity, that the history of the Enlightenment and a lot of these values that you’re talking about, and say the Constitution of Knowledge are intertwined with Christian
[01:40:51] Red: values? Oh, sure. And also Jewish values. Remember how much Christianity comes from Judaism.
[01:40:58] Green: He did actually say, yeah, DJO Christian, but yeah.
[01:41:01] Red: Sure, absolutely. I don’t even think these days that’s a controversial statement. It doesn’t mean we’re a Christian nation, or that you have to be a Christian to be a good American, or that politicians, you shouldn’t have a non -Christian president, or I’m an atheist, atheist homosexual Jew, so believe me, I’m not for having a Christian nation. But yeah, the development of those core liberal principles and the development come right out of many ways, come right out of Christianity.
[01:41:37] Green: I heard you once say that you felt that Jesus was an orthogonal thinker, not like anyone before or after him. But I don’t think I ever heard why you felt that way. Could you maybe describe what you meant by that?
[01:41:53] Red: Well, that’s partly the result of reading the Gospels in my 20s, coming to it fresh in a good secular translation, and just feeling clobbered. Jesus doesn’t sound like any philosopher who came before, and despite his influence, he doesn’t sound like any philosopher who came after. He is so radical, unconcerned in many ways with this life, so demanding, the standards that he sets are so high, so pure in his teaching that it’s just really hard to place him in a straight line with anyone else. In that sense, I think even Paul, who of course follows him, is a lot more conventional. St. Augustine, who follows Paul, is a lot more conventional. So I’m not sure that’s a complete answer, but to this day, I think Christians are at their best still struggling to comprehend and emulate Jesus’ radicalism. I think, actually, a lot of Christians, you can tell me if you agree with this, but a lot of Christians don’t even really try to emulate Jesus or his radicalism. I agree. I think they’re just there to go out about their lives and they cite the Bible in convenient ways. But to this day, even the best Christians I know, and they’re very good Christians, struggle to get their minds around the teachings of Jesus in a way that they don’t struggle to get their minds around the teachings of, I don’t know, St. Augustine. So I guess that’s what I mean. I’m not sure if that really answers the question. Thank you. Do you think that’s true, by the way, that there’s that kind of difference? Yes, I do.
[01:44:07] Green: So Peter and I, I’m obviously a Christian. A Mormon is a Christian, for some people would disagree with that statement, but we’re actually relatively mainstream, if I’m being honest. Not always, but in many ways we are. And Peter’s an agnostic, and I really started this show to talk about the philosophy of Karl Popper and artificial intelligence. So I didn’t initially intend to bring religion into the show. But I found that a lot of, strangely enough, a lot of the critical rationalist community, who are almost all atheists, are religiously curious. And Peter seems to have fallen into that category. The atheists
[01:44:50] Blue: charged.
[01:44:51] Green: Yeah. More and more, he would come up with topics. Peter picks a lot of the topics. And he would pick religious ones. He would want to talk about who was the one we first did. It was the, with the fence.
[01:45:04] Blue: Oh, Chesterton. Chesterton.
[01:45:06] Unknown: Thank you.
[01:45:06] Green: I think that was the first one that you picked that was very strongly religious. And more and more, we found ourselves starting to address that subject. And I remember Peter actually asked me about reading the Gospels. And I said, you should absolutely read the Gospels. I think you will find Jesus absolutely remarkable, even as an agnostic, you will find him remarkable. And I think that’s just a fact. And so I completely agree with you. It is a kind of knock you on, knock you back, rock on your heels when you read the Gospels, and you actually read what Jesus actually said. And you’re right. He is very radical.
[01:45:42] Blue: No, I absolutely agree that it’s like, as I think John put it, it just seems historically unprecedented that such an unlikely character became the most famous human being on earth, maybe arguably, but I think that’s probably true.
[01:46:04] Green: That’s, yeah, I think that’s true.
[01:46:05] Unknown: Yeah.
[01:46:05] Blue: Yeah. I mean, first saying that we should forgive other people and love our enemies. And, you know, it’s just especially, given the time period he was operating in, which was a much more brutal world, I think. Yeah.
[01:46:24] Red: Did you, Peter, did you in fact read the Gospels?
[01:46:28] Blue: Bits and pieces, but I’ve got some work to do there.
[01:46:32] Unknown: Yeah.
[01:46:32] Red: So they’re very short. So here’s what I did, which I recommend. Yeah. And go get the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles in the translation by Richmond Latimore, L -A -T -T -I -M -O -R -E. He’s one of the great Greek translators, probably the greatest translator of the modern translator of the Iliad.
[01:46:56] Blue: Okay.
[01:46:56] Red: And he’s secular and he does a good job of recreating in English the feel of the Greek. And reading that in the 80s, was what blew me away. One of the things I learned that’s funny, by the way, that interesting, I should say, is that the Acts of the Apostles is very funny. It’s the funniest book of the Bible. It’s very different from the four Gospels, which is where Jesus appears. And that’s, those are, of course, the key documents. But in the Acts, the Apostles are running around just proving every day sort of Keystone cop style that they really don’t get it. And to me, that shows you that the problems of the Church begin very, very early, that Jesus is teaching a doctrine, that ordinary mortals just really have a lot of trouble understanding.
[01:47:51] Green: I agree with that statement. And you’re right that it is the funniest book of the Bible.
[01:47:57] Red: So, in cross purposes and in this conversation, I’m very hard on Christians who seem to have forgotten the principles of Jesus and substituted the principles of, I don’t know, MAGA or what have you. And I’m critical of Christians who blame liberalism for not providing a sense of value in life and a sense of purpose when I think that’s the Christian’s job, not our job. I’m hard on them in all kinds of ways, mostly because I’m quoting people like David French, who are Christians who feel that way. But it’s very important to say that we, on my side of the equation, the secular liberal side, we let our side of the bargain down too. We fail to understand the important role of Christianity, all religion, but really Christianity, our founding faith, our biggest faith. We fail to understand the importance of that to appreciate it. We allowed our urge to secularize society to sometimes bleed into outright hostility to public expressions of faith. We were unnecessarily doctrinaire in trying to cleanse the public square of that. And we need to become more welcoming, Christianity, and more understanding and respectful of Christianity. We need to, we’ve got all kinds of DEI programs and affirmative action programs in universities. Where’s the program to make sure that people of faith, students and professors feel comfortable? Many workplaces, and believe me, I have firsthand experience of this, people who are faithful stay in the closet about that, not because they think they’ll be fired, but they think, you know, my coworkers will think it’s weird if I come to work and just say that I’m a charismatic Christian and here’s what I believe, or for that matter that they’re a Latter -day Saint. That should never happen.
[01:50:08] Red: We should take an attitude of openness and curiosity and respect. We should cherish the faithful in our midst. And we have, I specifically, did a bad job of that, and we generally have done an inadequate job of that. So I had to say that. Thank you. Okay. Amen.
[01:50:30] Blue: I think that’s the first time I’ve ever said that. Okay. John, it’s been just absolutely wonderful listening to you, and I’ll remember this for the rest of my life. It’s like, it’s very, very cool. I really, really appreciate it, and I hope you feel better soon.
[01:50:52] Red: Yeah. I hope so too. I have four weeks of travel and speaking coming up. I’m on the show because I like what you guys are doing, and I love having these conversations, so I hope you keep it up.
[01:51:04] Green: All right. Excellent. And by the way, I just have to say what a treat this has been for me. I have been running around to all my friends and family, talking about how excited I was that I got to interview you. I have to say most of them who aren’t into this sort of thing, didn’t know who you were. But I would get all geeky and nerdy and say, I’m going to interview Jonathan Roush. He’s the best. They’re like, that’s nice for you. You’re my peeps. You’re my audience, so I’m here for you. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
[01:51:36] Red: Thank you for having me. Thank you, sir.
[01:51:46] Blue: Hello again. If you’ve made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch theory of knowledge. We believe David Deutsch’s four strands tie everything together, so we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at B Nielsen 01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group, the mini worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting. Thank you.
Links to this episode: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Generated with AI using PodcastTranscriptor. Unofficial AI-generated transcripts. These may contain mistakes; please verify against the actual podcast.