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Conversations with Coleman
Approaching the Third Rail with Bret Weinstein (Ep.13)
01:43:41
For exclusive member-only content become a CwC subscriber via https://colemanhughes.org/ In this episode, Coleman interviews Bret Weinstein, an American evolutionary biologist and host of the Dark Horse Podcast - which he was on a few weeks ago. During this episode they talk about whether economics is the driving force behind ethnic conflict, the extent to which racial differences in average IQ are the result of nature or nurture, they spend a long time discussing cultural differences between groups that might account for racial disparity and the way in which history is used by social and political movements.
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Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can gain access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHughes.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q and A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Before I introduce today's guests, I have a few short announcements. First, I've been getting a lot of feedback from you all about my website, and I just wanted to let you know that I'm implementing many of the changes that have been suggested all at once, and that new website overhaul will be happening very soon. Secondly, I'm doing my second live Q&A on August 24th. I did a Q and A several weeks ago, and we've ironed out some of the kinks from that one, so I think this one is going to be better. So on August 24th, if you're a supporter of the podcast, you will be able to watch that Q and A live. If you're not a supporter, we'll release the full Q and A at a later time. And finally, the new email for all inquiries about this podcast or about my work in general is adminolemanhughes.org Today's guest is Brett Weinstein. Brett is an evolutionary biologist and host of the Dark Horse Podcast, which I went on several weeks ago. Brett and I talk about whether economics is is the driving force behind ethnic conflict. We talk about the extent to which racial differences in average IQ are the result of nature or nurture. We spend a long time discussing cultural differences between groups that might account for racial disparity. And we talk about the way in which history is used by social and political movements. This podcast deals with some controversial topics, and conversations like this one justify my decision to run this podcast ad free. It's because of the support you all give me that I'm able to have conversations like this one at all. And as always, you can support me@colemanhughes.org so without further ado, Brett Weinstein, Foreign okay, Brett, thanks for coming on my show.
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Thanks for having me.
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B
So we talked on your podcast about a week ago. Right now we're speaking on July 22, and we, you know as your, your fans know, and probably some of my listeners saw that episode. It was a mammoth episode with almost 10 people, I think, and there was a lot of topics. I think it was great because people got to see a little bit of a lot of different minds dealing with the same issues. But I think some people wanted us to go more in depth on certain issues. And I actually wanted to go more in depth on one issue in particular with you. And people might want to, if you have time, maybe listen to that episode on your Dark Horse podcast before listening to this one. But in that episode we spoke briefly about your thesis that. And hopefully you'll do a good job of just explaining it in as much detail as you want to now, which I think you didn't get to then, but locating many of the problems that I would think of in terms of ideas and beliefs, at bottom being caused by political corruption and rent seeking and opportunity hoarding. I don't know if you have a name for this theory, but it's, I think, something you've been thinking about for a while. So I want to start there and give me a. Give me as long as you want a kind of summary of what you think.
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Sure. So, first of all, I should say I, as an evolutionary theorist, am an absolute stickler about using the right terminology for proposed ideas. And so I wouldn't say it's a theory. A theory is something that has withstood rigorous test. I would say it is a hypothesis that is consistent with what we observe in the world. But the argument more or less is that human beings are built to seek opportunity. In that way, we are no different from any other creature. But the way we do it is quite different. We are in search of what I would call frontiers. Frontiers are places where we have positive sum dynamics, that is to say, what an economist would call growth. And that can emerge from various different places. In antiquity. You might discover a landmass that nobody else knew about. And that land mass constitutes an opportunity for a population to grow. So what we call economic growth manifests as population growth. There's obviously a limit to the amount of new territory to be discovered. And even when there is new territory to be discovered, you may not have a way to figure out where it is. The next kind of frontier is a technological frontier, that is to say, an innovation that allows you to do more with the same piece of territory. So, you know, a major one would be the innovation of farming. That happened in many different places around the world where people who had existed at low density as hunter gatherers became agriculturalists and were able to exist at much higher density. And then the problem is that the third type of frontier, when you don't have access to a technological change that can increase the number of individuals you can put on a piece of territory, is that there's another way to generate something that feels like growth from the point of view of your population, and that is effectively theft. What I call a transfer frontier. And the way this manifests in, I would say, the last 10,000 years since farming became widespread, is that populations intermingle. They can get along reasonably well when there is growth, because confronting other populations isn't necessarily a good investment, even in ruthless evolutionary terms. But when the growth runs out, populations that cannot defend their resources are often attacked by other populations. If this happens inside of a nation state, you will call it a genocide. If it happens across a border, you'll call it a war. But the principle is the same, which is when you can't engineer growth by some kind of discovery, you engineer growth through some kind of theft. And so we see a pattern where certain populations, and I have to say Jews, play an interesting role in this discussion because we often live as a small population inside of other nations, and when things turn, they often turn on us. But I think the black experience in the US has a lot to do with the fact that you've got a population that demographically is not in a position to defend its rights and access well, and that that leaves a. A dynamic that frequently turns bad for. For blacks, for American blacks. And so, anyway, we are watching an interesting new phase in this battle, I believe, But. But in some ways, it's a variation on. On an old theme. And I feel strongly that we who can navigate this with compassion and decency have to actually confront this puzzle rather than fight the battle over what's happening in traditional terms, because the traditional terms simply aren't rich enough to explain how we ended up here and what we might do about it.
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B
So there's a lot in there. And I guess one thing it reminds me of is one of my favorite Thomas Sowell essays, which is called Are Jews Generic? Kind of a strange title, but what he meant there is that the antisemitism that has characterized so much of Jewish history, especially in Europe, and, you know, the waves of Jewish immigrants that came to America fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe and Ukraine and Russia and whatnot, what all of those have had in common, or what many of them have had in common is that the Jews were playing a role in the. Role in the Economy as middlemen that was widely viewed as exploitative because it wasn't understood by laymen. The value a middleman provides is always something we want to cut out, but seem to not be able to because it actually does provide a function in economic terms. And so in this essay he just goes across all of the examples throughout history, not just with Jews, but with other groups in other countries. I think the Indians in East Africa and the Igbo in Nigeria and the Chinese in Southeast Asia, where very successful middleman minority groups were hated by the political majority and either killed or expelled, almost always to the detriment of the country itself, which then sometimes invites them back because the economy suffers as a result of their absence. It's a really stunning essay and the point is just that the Jews are just the most salient example in our minds of this phenomenon, but it's actually a more generic phenomenon, hence the title, and it's an example of economic circumstances creating what we tend to view as just ethnic conflict. But interestingly, in that essay, his point is not that inter ethnic conflict or genocide only or mainly happens in times when growth isn't happening. I think his point is more that even if growth is happening and the economy is, broadly speaking, a positive sum game between, you know, a successful minority and a relatively less successful majority, even if all boats are, you know, the tide is lifting. All boats. Even if not at the same rate, it's still possible to get to a genocide just because of the perception of certain people in the economy not understanding the value that other people are bringing. So what's your reaction to that as a, as another possibility?
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I don't think it is another possibility. I think it's a very cogent description of the same phenomenon, but viewed from a different level. So what I would say is Jews are special in the sense that they often live as this minority, the diaspora.
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Someone who's going to edit this podcast with just those three words.
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They probably are, and I will yet again be canceled, I suppose. But the. My basic point would be this. What's special is the relationship between populations. This is an evolutionary phenomenon. And whether or not you get a genocide or some precursor of it has a lot to do with the cost benefit analysis shifting in a direction. So one of the things, one of the preconditions would be a contraction, an economic contraction in which the hunger for growth causes people, causes people's suspicions and prejudices to turn violent. So I'm not saying the prejudices aren't there. Again, the thing that's special about Jews is the fact that diaspora is like an equilibrium state. Right? It's not abnormal. It's the standard case. And that means that there's a kind of regular exposure to the same pattern, whereas in other places it may be anomalous for a population. But, you know, I think. I think Seoul is exactly in the right place. And this is in some sense why I want to talk about the parallel for the black population in the new, what scientifically we call the New World for no particularly good reason. You know, it's the New World from the point of view of European discovery. But in any case, the Americas have had a particular story unfold, and certain populations have had a very different experience. They also have had a very different origin story about how they ended up here. And one of them is the black population, and the other are the population of American Indians. So I just think we need to talk about these things in. In order to be compassionate, we have to talk about them in dispassionate, analytical terms just to even understand why we see the patterns that we do. And hopefully that provides us an answer as to how to repair the damage that obviously at the moment is causing us to threaten our own civilization in a, I think, a bizarre attempt to correct the problem with remedies that obviously can't work.
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So let's talk a little bit about remedies. What does, if I accept your analysis of things, what direction does that point in terms of remedies that I wouldn't be pointing without.
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Well, so let's just be courageous here. I think, you know, you and I have. We don't know each other well, but we've broken bread together. I think we have a trust established and hopefully that will generalize to our audiences. So to put that another way, I think we have to tread into territory that is extremely fraught and dangerous, but we have to do it courageously and model how you. How you get there. Here is what I think as a biologist and an observer of people and somebody who has been fortunate enough to. To travel a good fraction of the world and interact with people, see how things are different in other places. We humans are the most extreme version of a pattern that exists in some creatures. The pattern is that our genomes have offloaded an awful lot of work to the software layer. That is to say, we have two paths for inheritance to pass between generations. One of them is genetic. That's the same as for every other creature. But the other one has to do with cognitive material that is passed on as culture. And the premise is that human beings are capable of running many different software programs. If you had grown up in Beijing, you would be speaking Mandarin and you would do so fluently. There would be no disadvantage to you. That would come from the fact that your ancestors didn't speak Mandarin or any related language because it's pure software. Right now. There are genes involved in creating the structures in your mind that would pick up Mandarin, but the software itself is where the language is housed. And we have had what I think is a very foolish battle over the software hardware interaction. We have initially had a. A belief in blank slatism. Turns out blank slatism is wrong. But the rebellion, the backlash against black blank slatism has been almost equally naive. And the real question, the thing that we are fighting over in not very clear terms in the US Is to what degree is the difference in success between different populations the result of something at the software level, that is to say, something that happens after you are born, and to what extent might it be housed in endogenous characteristics, that is to say, at the hardware level? And I, based on everything I've seen and everything I understand as a biologist, believe this is overwhelmingly, if not 100%, a software issue, which I think is very important. Because if it is a software issue, then there are remedies. They're available to us. Right. How you deploy them is not clear, but we can correct that disadvantage. Were it something in the genetic layer, we would be in a much more serious situation. And so I think we have a predictable train wreck on our hands where there's a lot of suspicion about where the differences in success reside and they are resulting in chaos because we can't confront them honestly.
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So that's interesting. I think, you know, many people don't even think about the hardware software issue like people who, for lack of a better word, normal people. It's not a conversation. I really. It's only a conversation I have with my friends from the intellectual space who've been to college and who even within that, you know, read certain books, and definitely there is disagreement there. And I think there's a lot of disagreement that only occurs in people's minds because almost everyone is too afraid to speak honestly about this issue or to speak openly, rather, and to say the wrong thing.
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Right.
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If you, if you're too interested in iq, it seems weird. If you're too interested in racial differences in iq, it's weird. And then beyond that, if you're, if after an honest reading of the evidence, you, like Charles Murray, come to a conclusion that it's at least something to do with genetics. Then you're. That just. You're a racist, you're considered a racist, full stop. And the truth is, I think there are a lot of racists that subscribe to that view. So we have a genuine problem, which is that if someone just enters my Twitter feed and says, I think black people are genetically inferior, where I think the, you know, the black white, IQ gap is largely to do with genetics, if someone says that, I immediately. There's no way to tell if they're a scholar who's come to a view like Charles Murray or just a white supremacist typing from their mother's basement. And it's very tempting even for me to just cordon that whole area of inquiry off. At the same time, I think if you're talking to a friend offline, where reputations aren't at stake, I think I could have a perfectly rational conversation about this. This controversy and not for a moment fear that I was speaking to a white supremacist. So it's very strange because I feel like there are two very distinct worlds. There's me talking to a friend I've had for five or 10 years over a drink after both having read a book on the subject and saying, to what extent are racial differences in IQ genetic or culturally determined? And I wouldn't feel any of the hair raising on my skin that I get when I feel I'm in the presence of an actual racist. But then online, it. That just seems impossible to do. So do you agree with that?
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Yeah. Which is. I mean, I'm glad we're having this conversation because I think we are in an intermediate space where you and I can have this conversation and others can hear it and maybe learn something. But here's. Here's where I sit. Okay? First of all, let me say the terrible stuff, okay? IQ differences housed in genes have to have been real. There is no question about this, okay? We know that because in order for human intelligence to have grown the way it clearly did, there have to have been differences between populations, and smarter populations have to have won out against less smart populations. So I am not arguing that you cannot have a genetic difference in IQ between populations. What I am arguing is that what we see presently does not add up in that way. And so it could be genetic. We could have a terrible answer. And frankly, if it's that answer, I don't know what we do about it. Right? It's a catastrophic failure if that's what we've got. But that's not what I expect we will find if we approach this courageously. So I do think we need to have Charles Murray's courage at looking at this. But I think he's wrong. I think he's arrived at the wrong conclusion because he's got half an analysis and it seems to point in a direction. So I hate to use this example because it's so frivolous, but do you ever have a children's book called the Monster at the End of this Book? It's a Sesame street book where Grover is told that there's a monster at the end of the book and he spends the entire book trying to get you not to turn the pages because of the terrifying thing that will happen if you get to the monster at the end of the book and then you get to the monster at the end of the book and it's him and it's not very frightening. Right. I have the sense that we are having that conversation, that there is a thing that people intuit and often do not say that causes or if I can put this another way, some of the people that you're describing who end up in this conversation do believe in racial differences in iq. I think they have it wrong. But it's not motivated out of racism. It's just a failure of analysis. And so partly what we need to do is exorcise the demon. We have to confront what might be there in order to discover what isn't there. So what else to say? So we're really having a battle over how much of human intelligence is housed in the software layer and how likely it is that differences in the capacity of one brain or another to upload top level software are resident in the genome. But I will say the genome is not in a great position to adjust the details of what a mind has in it. If we take the mind to be what the brain produces. Right? The mind is what the brain does. The mind is the product of the software. And what isn't demonstrated is the inability of a child, human child from any population to upload top level software given the right environmental circumstances to pass it on. Those limits are not there. So what I think is really happening is I think people, the honest, honorable people who do not want there to be genome based differences in cognitive capacity between populations who nonetheless suspect that they might be there. Those people, I think, are looking at the athletic landscape and they are imagining that there must be a direct analogy. And any fool can see that different sports favor different populations. Right. It is not a racial bias that has put Ethiopians and Kenyans at the head of long distance running. It's a population level difference. And so I think people look at that and even good folks look at it and they think, well, what are the chances that that's not manifest in cognitive capacity? The chances are very good that it's not manifest in cognitive capacity. It's a false analogy. But people don't know why they haven't had enough exposure to good evolutionary thinking. They haven't considered the difference between a physical set of parameters and cognition. And until you have those tools, you know, you will leap to the wrong conclusion. And so I think at some level society is just simply doing that. And anybody who attempts to confront the puzzle and say, look, actually let's just be brave and look at what's really likely is shut down, as if they are attempting to push us towards a racist answer. And you know, the monster at the end of the book is Grover, I suspect. And I think we should get there.
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Yeah. So we should go into that a little more. So what, what would you say, you know, why aren't Ashkenazi Jews the Ethiopians of the mind, given that? I think the IQ gap between Ashkenazi Jews and, you know, American whites is something like 17 points last time I saw, which is huge, actually bigger than the gap between whites and blacks, but it favors Jews. So if someone thinks, well, this has to be at least partly genetic or wholly genetic, what is your answer to that?
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Yeah, the answer is that we have to confront some adult realities in order to get to the answer to your question. The adult reality is that the IQ differences are real. Right. And they're not the result of bias in the test. The question is where they are housed. And if I am correct that they are housed in the software layer, then they can be democratized. In other words, I think part of what has happened with Jews, Ashkenazi Jews in particular, is that the repeated ebb and flow of antisemitism has created an anti fragile population that has accumulated some mechanisms that actually increase the capacity to see what's true and to figure out what might be true. But that looks a lot like what things look like at the Seder table. Right. If you think about what Jews are like when they're dining together, they're confrontational, pointed, funny. Right. There's a mechanism for pushing each other around that is just simply in the water we swim in. Right. It's natural. It is not taken to be personal or maybe, but differently. It's very personal, but it is not taken to be negative. And what does that do? Well, it's like mind training. So I think the answer is, and you know, I've said this elsewhere, part of what I was doing as a college professor before the Evergreen meltdown occurred was I was teaching people how to do it. Didn't matter who they were. The point was there's a game to be played, and it's more like volleying on a tennis court than it is like, you know, memorizing important stuff and things like that. It's, it's, it's a back and forth. So to sum up, the differences between populations are real, but they have a lot to do and maybe everything to do with what those populations expose their children to, what they are capable of exposing their children to by virtue of just simply having access. And so if we can accept that different developmental environments produce different levels of capacity for different things. Right. You can be highly intelligent and never pick up explicit math. Right. And then that ship will sail at some point. So we know that development plays an important role in what problems you can solve, but the general problem solving is teachable.
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B
Yeah. I think it's strange because either one of you kind of pick your poison here. If you think it's genes, that's taboo, and if you think it's culture, that's taboo. So several years ago, I wrote a very long essay called Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap, in which I pointed out cultural features like cultural behavior patterns that were not identical between black Americans and white Americans and Asians that have consequences in terms of wealth accumulation. And I showed some data from, you know, Nielsen has some, has some data that rarely gets cited, but, you know, they just count the number of hours spent watching TV by race, because that's what we trust Nielsen to do. And they do consumer market research. So they ask you, have you bought jewelry in the past year? Have you bought jewelry worth more than $500 in the past year? And on all of these questions, you find black Americans more likely, often significantly more likely to say they've purchased jewelry in the past year, purchased expensive jewelry in the past year, more likely than white Americans, and that's not holding income constant. So you're, you're comparing a poorer population to a wealthier population, not holding anything constant, and finding the poor population much more likely to buy luxury items. And so I, I just made the straightforward point. You know, this is, this is a feature of the, this is a cultural feature of the black community. And just like the trademark argumentativeness around the dinner table that I think many certainly Ashkenazi Jews would recognize as a cultural feature. And certainly I do, having grown up in a heavily Jewish area. It's not shared by all people of that culture and may not even be shared by most, but it's shared to a degree that is recognizable if you're a person who pays attention. And, you know, there are lots of, you know, it's strange because the same point made in the context of a comedy show goes over very differently relative to an essay or podcast I found. So when, like, Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock makes, you know, makes a joke about black men loving expensive rims on their cars and a black audience laughs in recognition, or, you know, Dave Chappelle's old reparation skit where, you know, you get the reparation check one day and everyone spent it on a gold chain the next day. When you have black audiences laughing at this, they're laughing because it's, they understand the comedian is not coming from a place of hatred. And it's very fun to poke fun at one's own community over recognizable cultural elements. But then if you take that point seriously, if we are going to endlessly point to the 10 to 1 racial wealth gap between, say, whites and blacks, are we actually serious about that or are we just doing it in order to tug the strings of white guilt? Because if it's the first one, how could we not be interested in the fact that black people, as a poorer population, are routinely spending more money on luxury goods? So I think I made the mistake there of assuming that people actually took the racial wealth gap and solving it seriously. In many cases, they don't. I think it's, it's really just a way of, as Glenn Lowry once put it, waving the bloody shirt of racism in the face of white Americans for eternity. At the end of the day, though, I am much more interested in bringing up the people at the bottom than in closing gaps, whether that gap is an IQ gap or a wealth gap or what have you. Ultimately, you know, we could, we could get rid of those gaps just by knocking the top people down. But there's been, you know, some philosophical work on this too. It actually doesn't necessarily make sense to care about gaps in themselves unless your whole picture of human happiness is dependent on everyone being equal. And there is something to be said for equality in terms of how groups perceive their own well being. However, ultimately what we should care about is poverty in absolute terms. Not just because that's a more feasible project than closing gaps, but because it's more directly connected to lessening human suffering in this world as I see it. So if anything I said, there provoked thoughts in you.
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Oh, yeah. No, first of all. Right on. But I want to go a little bit deeper on a couple things. First of all, I totally agree with you about the ability for Dave Chappelle to say lots of things that if you try to say them the wrong context, you'll be skewered. And, you know, this is why we have humor. And thank God for Dave Chappelle. So, years ago, when I was a grad student, I was working with a professor, very famous evolutionary biologist named Bob Trivers. He's one of the greats. And Bob, for reasons that come from his own past, is actually a white guy who identifies as a black guy.
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B
He's just happier around black people involved with the Black Panthers.
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Yeah, he was a Black Panther. Yeah, he was.
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He knew all the. The heavy hitters. Right.
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A
He was best buddies with Huey P. Newton. He was Huey P. Newton's PhD advisor, got Huey P. Newton degree in evolutionary biology because he felt it was the key to black liberation, among other things. Anyway, Bob's a very interesting character, and I spent a bunch of time with him in the field, and so we talked about race and what he thought. And, you know, at one point, I remember, I think I had just traveled to Jamaica to start my work there, and I had noticed a pattern. The pattern was that, you know, I go to get on an airplane and I dress down. I dress to be comfortable because airplanes suck, right? And the black people that I was traveling with did the opposite. And I thought, why is that? And I asked him, and he told me, he said, look, it's harder. And for black people, the ability to dress yourself in some way that suggests something that advertises some achievement is more readily doable than just, let's say, get a house that sends the same message. And so there's something about the confinedness of the individual that causes display to happen more locally to it. And there's sort of a sense you get on an airplane, you're on display. And so, anyway, I thought that was a very interesting answer. And I must say, I even notice, you know, aspects of this in myself. Right. Heather and I have truck that we use for utility stuff, and we have a car. And there's something about the car that I try to keep pristine because it's like the one thing in my life that can be perfectly organized and, you know, doesn't have major defects. And so there's some sort of, like, it's a Limited enough thing that I can. Can keep it in some condition that doesn't send the same message as my crazy cluttered desk and all of that. And I guess I would put one other. One other observation here. When I was a kid, most of my friends, just because of the schools I went to, I guess, were Jewish or white of some other variety. But I had a couple of black friends, and their homes were very different than the homes of my white and Jewish friends. The homes of the black kids were absolutely exquisitely maintained. Right. The taste was very different, but it was like inside, the home was almost museum like, right. There was like things were kept in their place and there were very fine objects. And it was just like it was a home that sent a very different message. And I had the sense that there, too, there was something about, if you have reached a level of achievement and you're sending this message about what that level of achievement is, it's broadcast in the signals that we put out. And so now, as an evolutionary biologist, this is much more straightforward. Human beings are constantly advertising stuff. It's not a dishonest phenomenon. It's just a normal part of life. What we advertise has everything to do with what kind of opportunities and hazards exist around us. And so I don't know exactly what the reason is for what Thorsten Veblen would have called conspicuous consumption with respect to jewelry in the black community. But I guess my point would be, if you drill down there, it may not be a wise investment of resources. On the other hand, if you're buying gold, it's not like it loses its value. So it may be a way of establishing some level of achievement in some way that is measurable by others. And we ought to at least recognize that the advertisements that we ourselves make are largely invisible to us, right? We wouldn't register them as advertisements. We'd have rationalizations for why we do this and that. But when we look at other cultures, even within our nation, right, we may see things that are conspicuous to us because they wouldn't work in our circle. And so they're obvious. But that's to say there's undoubtedly a deep story in terms of how each population has come to broadcast the things that it broadcasts. And of course, that's fodder for humor because any population that doesn't have the same standards will see these things and note them in one way or another.
- [41:29]
B
Yeah, I agree with all of that, but I also, I worry that it can make behavior that is deleterious seem inevitable, an inevitable result of evolutionary psychology. And perhaps it is. But then we come to the question. So we started out talking about these two alternative genes and culture. Genes are by definition unchangeable. So there is a tendency, which I think definitely converge on confirmation bias, to not want anything to be genetic because there is something deeply disempowering about knowing that we can't do much about some problem that we've decided to care about. Okay, this goes back to why I think gaps shouldn't be where we locate the problem to begin with. But tabling that for now, if we're now talking about culture, a cultural feature like heightened conspicuous consumption, to use the academic term, buying gold chains, if we're speaking of that as also kind of an inevitable result of the interaction between evolutionary psychology and how we signal. And we're social beings and so on and so forth and social conditions, which is that black people are poor. They have a very particular history in this country, which means that you can signal your wealth with a gold chain if you come from a poor black community in a way that a gold chain actually doesn't signal anything if you were to start wearing them now, apart from maybe a midlife crisis. Yeah, so. So, so then we get. It seems like we're in a place where genes are not. It's not possible to correct genes, and it's not possible to correct culture because it's, you know, inevitable. It's not a result of any. Anything we can really intervene in. And then it seems like, well, in that case, why. Why not just swing all the way to the left and say the only things we can change are public policy and, And. And things that discriminate against certain populations. And, you know, in a way, it seems to kind of point in that direction.
- [43:52]
A
Well, okay, so first of all, we can do things about the culture, and we must. I just want to be fair about it. So here's the thing. If I see a black guy wearing a lot of jewelry, the temptation is to think, why is he doing that? But why am I not having that same thought when I see a white guy with $150 bottle of wine, Right? So this is. I think the difficult part of it is the wine thing is absurd when you get to it. I'm not saying there's no difference in taste between the $150 bottle of wine and the $8 bottle of wine. There is, and you can learn to detect it. But it's the learning to detect it that is curious the closer you look at it. For one thing, many people who claim to be able to detect it can't. Right? So there's something about why do we have wine? Right? Wine is a mechanism for preserving calories, right? It's shelf stable. It allows you to maintain some calories. Now, we've got a kind of art around how we produce wine that makes a product that is arguably pleasurable to drink. But the idea that the $150 bottle of wine contains vastly more pleasure in it, no, no, no. It only contains vastly more pleasure if you've trained yourself to detect the subtle differences. What does it say? If you've trained yourself to detect the subtle differences? It says that you've had access to a lot of very expensive bottles of wine. You can't fake that. Right? So if somebody is capable of evaluating how good you are at detecting the differences between bottles of wine, they are establishing that you must have at least access to a strata that has a lot of wealth in it. So I guess my point is the gold chain and the fetishizing of wine are actually equivalent behaviors. Now, we can compare them to the people who are engaged in them, and we can say, which one of these is, you know, is one of these foolish, right? Is it a waste? Is it an investment in something? Does it get you through the, you know, does the wine thing get you through the door of certain places where you'll be able to network and, you know, it's a good investment, arguably. So. But we just need to apply the same standard, right? If we're going to call out conspicuous consumption, if we are going to claim that it is actually wasteful and that we should look askance at it, then let's just do it across the board. And if we're not going to, then what we're in danger of is picking out a population that faces some sort of obstacle to success and calling out its conspicuous consumption and drawing a parallel that isn't fair because basically it would be controlled for if we did it, to all populations. So the answer to your question is if it is in the cultural layer, which I strongly suspect it is mostly or entirely in the cultural layer, there is a lot that can be done, and there is a lot that should be done, because actually we are in a position to increase quality of life. We are in a position to increase the strength of us collectively. And by avoiding confronting the question, we are leaving a deep wound open rather than allowing it to scar over and to move on. So my plea to those who are listening to this is if we don't confront this, it will never stop. Haunting us. If we do confront it, it is possible we will discover a bad answer, but I think it is highly unlikely. The good answer is the differences are cultural. And the question is, what do we do to democratize the patterns that work no matter where they came from? I mean, you know, as I said, I think on the black Intellectual roundtable on Dark Horse, the Enlightenment was not a Jewish project. But having the tools that came from the Enlightenment is something I would advise everyone to have. And though I am Jewish and therefore that's not my ancestors project at somebody else's ancestors project, those are my tools and I'm going to wield them like a broadsword because they are so useful. And anyway, I think that's just the model. It doesn't matter where these things were discovered. Let's get them to everybody.
- [48:28]
B
Yeah, but so a few things the people don't want to hear the good answer either. The good answer that is culture people don't want to hear. Let's forget about conspicuous consumption for the moment. And I think, you know, everyone that I know, if they could press a button and get rid of the test score gap, college enrollment gap, general achievement gap in schools between black kids and white kids, everyone I know, I think would do it. Practically everyone I know in my life.
- [49:04]
A
Yep, me too.
- [49:06]
B
So then the, you know, it's not a question of goals, it's just a question of how do we get there. And I am interested in public policy interventions. How can we make public schools better? I'm not really sure how. I tend to be a supporter of charter schools, especially when they're in the same neighborhoods as failing public schools and seem to do better with plenty of caveats that we can go into at a different time. But then I also feel I have to confront the fact in order to be a person that is in touch with reality and who realizes a great sounding public policy can be terrible when put into practice. Because you haven't thought of things that the average Joe off the street could have told you if you had sort of been more on the ground. There's this Nielsen data that black families spend several hours more per day watching television than white families, at minimum with the television on. Whether that translates into watching or not, I suppose is anyone's guess, but it's a pretty good proxy. And if we look at how the data on how many, how many hours per day kids study is exactly what the stereotypes would tell you it is, which is to say black kids study much less than white kids who study much less than Asian Kids. And so I'm thinking people, especially people on the left, seem to be convinced that these gaps can be closed without underlying cultural behavior patterns changing. And by that, let me be really clear. People seem to imagine that the entire gap can be closed by public policy interventions without. And more than that, they seem to either just disagree with me that there are cultural patterns at play, or believe that all of the cultural patterns are downstream of circumstances that can be remedied by public policy. And the common sense module of my brain objects, and it yells at me because I don't think there is any public policy intervention. First of all, what public policy intervention got Asian Americans to have the particular culture attribute cultural attributes that they. That they have. Again, not all that should be. That should be a disclaimer that's too obvious to be said. But I remember in high school during Hurricane Sandy, which I lived in New Jersey, so it was hit very hard. I didn't have power for two weeks. I left and lived with one of my best friends, who is a. He was, I suppose, first generation. He was born in America. His parents were both born in China, heavily accented, moved in adulthood, and his mother was over his shoulder every single night ensuring that he did his homework. Not just that he did it, but she knew specifics about his homework assignment. This is, you know, 17 years old, ensuring that he didn't do anything besides his homework. It was actually, I found it a kind of disturbing style of parenting.
- [52:37]
A
It is.
- [52:39]
B
It actually felt to me unhealthy. And, you know, I could see it causing him mental suffering. But there was also absolutely no sign that he would ever push back against it or could. That is simply not how most black kids grow up. And I can say that from experience. You know, I was a straight A student. And if I went to my family reunion and I was a straight A student, everyone knew about it. It was a big deal. Coleman's the straight A student. He does so well in school. We're so proud of him. If you come from an Asian American culture and you get straight A's, it's like, yeah, of course you should be getting straight A's. Really, the conversation is about the student that gets B's. And you should be more like your brother. That's a cultural difference. That. And I can never stress this enough. I'm never talking about all people of a particular culture. I'm just talking about averages and patterns. And I'm also not making a comment on any groups being better or worse in any deep terms than others. I'm Just using my eyes and my experience to add to a discussion that people seem very interested in having. People seem very interested in the fact that the outputs of this group are not identical to the outputs of this group. And you can't be interested in that and not ask whether the inputs are the same and they're not the same. Why would they be the same, given that groups have completely different historical legacies and cultural legacies. So again, this gets to my position. My position on this is.
- [54:34]
A
A little.
- [54:34]
B
Bit different than it would seem based on the past five minutes of me speaking. Because ultimately I'm not sure that culture is a lever that people like you and me can pull. The only time I've seen cultural change work from the top down, so to speak, is when it happens locally in a community where all people are recognized as in the respective community. So like your local church does something with the kids in the neighborhood. Everyone knows everyone. They are trying to get kids after school instead of going out and playing on the streets to come and do something more constructive. That kind of thing can work because everyone has credibility. Everyone's from the same place. There's no faceless government bureaucrats saying, we're coming here to help you. On a podcast. I think you can reach particular people that have an inclination to look to the wider world for inspiration and for role models, but that set of people is probably pretty small. So what I tend to think is useful is to a just to be honest about the inputs being different, to be curious about what public policy solutions can help mitigate the problem of poverty and lack of opportunity, but also to reorient people from an attitude of looking to close gaps to an attitude of making the highest impact interventions for the poorest and least advantaged Americans in a race blind manner. That tends to be where I land.
- [56:21]
A
Well, I think you and I are confronting this at different levels. I think what you're talking about is the right approach to triage. And I must say I have. You know, I was born into very liberal circumstances and I have grown concerned, maybe even frightened about the tendency of liberals to think that their best intentions will manifest as positive changes, which is sometimes true. But liberals very frequently miss the unintended consequences of the policies that they advocate. And then they're not honest about it. When the things fail, they tend to rationalize why it didn't work. So I'm not advocating that. And I think really, if there's a bitter pill here, it's that if this is in the cultural layer, as I suspect it is, there's no quick fix. We can start making things better, but it's going to take generations to repair the damage. And you know, your point about why are Asians so successful at everything in a certain class of skills, even though they are immigrants and even though they face a certain amount of racism? And I think the point is this goes back to the question of the different origin story. So there's a lot of brutality in early Chinese slaves building railroads and things like that in North America. But there's also a lot of immigration in which people from the Far east came and they lived in Chinatowns, for example, that preserved culture. And so the parents basically erected a model of the world they had come from. And their children grew up effectively bilingual, in many cases literally bilingual, and became naturalized. And I'm using that in the biological sense of naturalized. With blacks, it's a different story because culture was systematically disrupted for slaves on arrival. Right. It was systematically done in order to. To keep the black population compliant. And my point would be we never undid that fully. And until you undo that fully, you're not even in a position to answer the question about where the root cause is. So, anyway, to just finish this out, I've spent a lot of time in the last three and a half years with black conservatives. And at first I found their focus on personal responsibility paradoxical because I was a liberal and I understood that the system was flawed and it had biases and echoes of biases and that these had important implications and it seemed like it missed our collective responsibility to address those things. But I came around pretty quickly once I heard what they were actually saying. And the message I got loud and clear was that the individual has a tremendous amount of power to adjust where they land and adjust how impacted they are by those historical patterns. And so they were sending a very important message to people who needed it, and they were changing lives dramatically for the better. That said, I see it as a two part puzzle. Yes, when you're talking to an individual or even to a community, personal responsibility is where it's at. On the other hand, it's half of a puzzle. Society has to meet its obligation to deliver opportunity as evenly as possible, and individuals have to ante up and increase the likelihood that they can take advantage of opportunities that arise. And that's really what I'm saying, is that let's own up to what hasn't worked. Let's not kid ourselves about how simple the problem is to solve, but let's address both parts of it, right? The fact of persistent dysfunction which has a lot to do with an inability to access the opportunities that exist theoretically in society. That. That has to be addressed. And that is going to be addressed at the level of families and communities. It can't be top down. Right. We can inform it with things that we've learned, I suppose, or we can do a better job of learning so that what we deliver is clearer and more accurate. But at some level it has to be through the building of structures that teach lessons that are productive, which is possible. But I would just point out it runs exactly contrary to the received wisdom from Critical race Theory, which has now been infused into Black Lives Matter, that, you know, the nuclear family is somehow a kind of white oppression that's being imposed on people. And the sooner we get rid of it, the sooner black people can be liberated, which is utter nonsense. But somehow we are. We are embracing the poison rather than seeking the solution. And I really hope we can divert our course because that will end in further disaster, which we cannot afford.
- [62:03]
B
Yeah, one thing there. I noticed at the beginning you used a word that I now have a tripwire in my brain for this word, and that word is undo. You said something like, if we can't figure out how to undo the disintegration of culture that was systematically enforced when African slaves were brought over, then we won't be able to tease out what is the system being unfair to black people and what is cultural traits that are unhealthy because the former can cause the latter. That I agree with. At some level, system plus time becomes culture. And if you tell the story of any cultural feature, if you go back far enough, you'll find some kind of feature of the environment that produced that cultural trait which may then outlive the environment in which it was bred. So there's that, and I think there's a. There's a lot of that with black Americans. But I do see that there is a very particular focus right now on undoing bad things that happened in the past. And that word gets used a lot. And it triggers me, frankly. It triggers me because I don't think it's possible to undo anything. Sometimes you can make something right. If it happens, if you do something horrible to me, I can sue you. And you can't undo the fact that you drove over my arm with a whatever, with your bike, say, but you can pay me some sum of money that theoretically equals the amount of suffering you caused me. Even then, you actually can't undo the thing itself, no matter how much I both want to. Now we're encountering that problem, plus hundreds of years of time in between the action and the people claiming the direct sort of damage caused by that action. And I just don't, I don't see how it's possible. And I think there's sort of two kinds of people when thinking about politics. There's someone who asks what do I want to happen? What would be good to happen? And then figures out how it's possible. And I find often with this conversation I'm the opposite. I ask first, what is possible? What are the set of options that we can do, given what I know about how the world works and how causation works. And then let's choose among that set. So, and this gets into, you know, reparations, of course, but there is a deep focus on undoing the horrible wrongs that have been committed by the government and by people in general against black people. And that whole style of thinking is something I think is deeply, deeply unhealthy, deeply misguided. I think I was on a recent, on someone else's podcast recently and I asked rhetorically in order to make this point, let's forget about America and black people and white people for a moment and think about a completely different case because I think that helps people think about this. Let's undo Genghis Khan's conquest of Asia and all its currently we are.
- [65:48]
A
We all evaporate.
- [65:49]
B
Yeah, well, that definitely that. But also just like that, that's something that had really bad first order consequences. Lots of innocent people were raped and died. And no doubt if I wanted to do the Ta Nehisi Coates style investigation of the long run consequences of the, of Genghis Khan's conquest of all of Asia, I would find that it had very deep, it cast a long shadow, to use a word that is often used of slavery and Jim Crow and that its effects persist into the present phrase that is also also used, that doesn't imply that we can undo any of that. All we could do if you know, to solve or to mitigate the problems facing the continent of Asia right now is to start now and pull the levers that we can going into the future. And we're not even tempted to think about the distant past or even the medium term past. So that gives you a sense of where I'm coming from. I know you probably didn't imply all of that in the word undo, but it triggered me to say that, well.
- [67:01]
A
I think this is important. So I want to push back a little bit and I want to embrace Much of what she said. So undo is one of the greatest inventions in the last hundred years. You may be too young to know what a world before undo looked like, but that little undo up in the edit menu, man, that thing is beautiful. So anyway, try not to be too triggered by the term undo. But you're absolutely right about it in the historical context. I couldn't agree with you more. In fact, and you know, I think, again, this is a place where there's some wisdom to be picked up from Jews. Right? The fact is, there's a lot of concern when you talk to Jews. There's a lot of concern about it happening again. We know that it can happen again. We know that it will happen again. And that's a very disturbing reality to live with. There is not a huge focus on undoing it or getting compensated. There's a focus on being. Positioning ourselves so we are not vulnerable to it going forward. So I agree with you, undo is a. It's a childish approach to wrong. The question is, and you know, we say this in our household a lot to our children, there's often a concern about making sure that the interpretation of something that went wrong isn't incorrect. A child will feel that they've, you know, they've been blamed for something, that there's an explanation. And we always explain to them it's only about what happens in the future. Right. The past cannot be changed. It is only about going forward, which sometimes means that you have to sort out what did take place because it has impacts in the future. For example, if somebody wronged you and they don't acknowledge it, they're likely to do it again. So figuring out what happened is important, which is why human beings focus on it. But they don't focus on it. They should not focus on it because the undo button up in the Edit menu is somehow ours to access. Historically, it isn't. So anyway, it may even be. I don't, you know, who knows? But it may even be that a generation that has grown up with the possibility to undo things has an error in its intuitive model of how things work, that it seeks to undo in a way that those of us who grew up before the invention of the process of undo wouldn't imagine it. So anyway, yeah, I will be sensitive about that word going forward because you may not be the only person who finds himself triggered, but your instinct about how we should view it is exactly right. There's no point in trying to undo. What we need to do is fix going forward so that the patterns don't just continue to echo through history.
- [69:54]
B
It occurs to me, as you mentioned.
- [69:56]
A
The.
- [69:58]
B
Never again mantra with regard to the Holocaust that there does seem to be an unfolding genocide Xinjiang of the Uyghurs in China that probably mentioned I was been mostly made aware of it by Majid Nawaz and his hunger strike. But it does seem like this might just be my perception. But I think global human rights issues occupy less space than I feel they did when I was younger. When I was younger I felt like if there was a genocide in the world, I would hear about it pretty quickly and pretty often and pretty steadily. Now it seems like maybe six months or a year ago I was hearing often about the treatment of Uyghurs and the rounding up of about a million of them in China in re education camps and forced sort of cultural goes back to what we were talking about with American slaves. It kind of forced cultural forgetting or cultural re education that's being perpetrated on them. But it seems like I don't know if you share this perception or not. Maybe it's just completely idiosyncratic. But it seems like there's less interest in those issues in the media today. And it seems like could just be that Trump takes up so much space in people's minds that anything that's not Trump gets gets down regulated. Or it could be something more like as America is increasingly seen as the enemy, anything that is not America that is bad also gets down regulated. Or it just could be a sober understanding of what we can and can't do in other countries. A kind of post Iraq perhaps like well calibrated lack of confidence in our ability to help other other parts of the world. Do you notice that trend and do you if so, do you attribute it to anything I mentioned?
- [72:10]
A
I think there are a couple of things going on. I do want to say something interesting happened with the I don't want to call it a genocide because I don't think we know that that's what it is yet. But I do think it's headed that way. The the situation of the Uyghurs is dire and does have a lot of elements that look flat out Nazi, frankly. Something fascinating about Majid's hunger strike. So I should say I first became aware of the issue of the Uyghurs a couple of years ago. People started contacting me and saying are you aware of what is going on? And their descriptions were so extreme that I actually found myself caught in a bind which was I don't know if I'm Being dragged into something and being fed a false story. And I'm going to come out against this because of course I would be against this and I would want to shout it from the rooftops. But I'm going to say something and then I'm going to discover that's not happening. You've been misled by somebody. I don't want to wade into a battle that I don't understand. But then it became clear that actually this was taking place and it was very real, and I was trying to figure out how to address it. And then Maajid, of course, cut the Gordian knot. But what I saw downstream of Maajid's hunger strike was a lot of people who were sort of in the top level of informed about world events had not understood that this was taking place at all. And Majid's hunger strike actually called their attention to it. And there was this very interesting wave of people speaking out against this who I hadn't seen speak out about it before. And some of them acknowledged that they hadn't even known that it was happening. I saw Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Barry Weiss, Heather had not been aware of it. So anyway, the. The amount of good that Maajid did with his hunger strike was spectacular. Not only is he getting the Parliament to debate it by having gotten 100,000 signatures, but he has called a whole level of people who have an input into the global conversation. He's called their attention to it. So anyway, good on him for managing that. And obviously, the level of dedication it takes to engage in a hunger strike to bring attention to something is extreme. So it does say something very positive about him, which I think those of us who know him can't be too surprised. But there's a question about why this has not called more of the public attention. And I think a couple things are going on. One, the world that I was born into seemed very far from the Holocaust. The Holocaust seemed very distant and historical. But of course it wasn't. I was born in 1969, and that was really in the shadow of World War II, more than I understood growing up. And so the level of discussion surrounding what had taken place was very high. I mean, probably much more so in Jewish homes than elsewhere. But the world had seen something after it had gone through a period where it had ignored it. So there was lots of evidence of what was going on in Eastern Europe, and other parts of the world had systematically ignored it until they could not ignore it any longer for various reasons. So there's something about the fact that we are much farther away from that event that has caused people to be less sensitive to what it is that took place and what its meaning might be. I also think there's probably something to the idea that in the west, for various reasons, the Chinese and the Uyghurs both seem very distant. And so I suspect there's something about the difficulty of getting people's empathic circuitry engaged when something seems very remote, which is unfortunate. I mean, it's absolutely our obligation as humans to put aside any distance that might exist and simply say, this is absolutely abhorrent and must stop, and the world has to come to grips with how it's going to stop. This.
- [76:42]
B
I also think one more thing at play here, and this is speculative, but I think we have been trained so deeply in America and probably Western Europe, Canada, maybe Australia as well, to think of oppression as an inherently racial thing. So that when, you know, the Han Chinese and the Uyghurs are different ethnic groups, but to an untrained eye, you might not notice huge differences. Although I'm sure grow up there, you can tell the difference. I think if the Uyghurs were black or dark skinned and everything else about the situation were identical, I have to imagine that the world would be paying a hell of a lot more attention. I could be wrong about that, but I think that's true. And if so, it says something unflattering about how our reactions are buffeted by skin color or how our reactions fail to be invoked when the skin color of a group that is oppressing a minority group happen to be similar. If so, that's a kind of a hidden cost of a racialized way of thinking about oppression. It's a kind of cost you would never think of unless. Unless someone like me posed that thought experiment. But I do see it as a cost nonetheless.
- [78:30]
A
So the interesting test case is the Rwandan genocide because the Hutu Tutsi distinction, as I understand it, was artificially imposed. And it's not to say that there was nothing ancestral about it, because it was imposed based on phenotypic characteristics which might have indicated different lineages, but nonetheless, it was arbitrary to an extent. And, well, I guess I would ask how. How do you think we reacted to the Rwandan genocide? As you would expect, not as intensely because the skin color was the same on both sides.
- [79:09]
B
That's a good question. I was born in 96, so I didn't view it in real time. But my sense is that we reacted more than we are currently to this situation of The Uyghurs, we didn't intervene to the extent we could have, but that at minimum elicited criticism and you know, a very dramatization of the event in the movie with Don Cheadle, a level of interest and attention that I think is unlikely to about even 10 years from now and grant that the situations are not identical. So far I haven't heard about the Chinese killing whole villages with machetes. And I just want to say I'm not super informed about this issue. I just know what I've read in New York Times and a few other sources. I've heard disagreements about whether and to what extent there's organ, forced organ harvesting happening. I've heard that there is, there are Uyghur men that are taken to re education camps and their wives are forced to sleep with, are raped by Chinese soldiers. And I don't know what of this is true and what is not and what's exaggerated and what's the harms I haven't even heard of that are going on. So I just want to issue a broad caveat there, but that could be one reason we're not hearing more about it. But I do think in that case it would suggest that we're sort of uninterested in harm. We're sort of only interested in harms that, that affect darker skinned people. For some reason, something that, you know, a lighter skinned group does to another lighter skinned group doesn't elicit the same emotional reaction as something a lighter skinned group does to a darker skinned group or a darker skinned group does to a darker skinned group. In which case I'm not sure what to make of that.
- [81:22]
A
Well, I do see this actually there's a revisionist aspect to this where up until, I don't know, it feels like five years ago, maybe more, there was just universal agreement that everybody was horrified by the Holocaust. And I now am. To my amazement. I suppose I shouldn't be shocked, but to my amazement I'm watching people deaden themselves to that horror. Right. I saw, I don't know, attacks on Anne Frank on Twitter. I was like, what, in what universe are you attacking this child? You know, I mean, it makes no sense. But there is something, I think, to the fact that in the, in the current context, the, the Holocaust somehow matches your thesis where there's just much less interest in paying attention to what it says about what human beings will do to each other. Because I don't know, for some reason this bizarre movement with its odd view of the universe views that as I don't know, white on white violence and therefore of no consequence.
- [82:39]
B
Yeah, I do think there's kind of an inherent. So history gets used by social and intellectual movements. It's, it's useful. It's not to say I'm not being a subjectivist about history. There, there are, there is a, there are facts of the matter about what's happened and they can be investigated neutrally. But in practice, social movements have nuggets of history that are useful to them in the present and nuggets of history that aren't useful. And invariably they promote the history that's useful and they ignore the history that's not. So slavery, for example, the enslavement of black Africans by white European, extremely useful historical fact for something like the Black Lives Matter movement. What's not useful is enslavement of black Africans by other Africans, the enslavement of Europeans by other Europeans, the enslavement of Europeans by Arabs. All of these things are just as interesting historically. Some of them are just as consequential, some of them are as large in terms of how many people were affected, but they're not useful. So it's an open question, how useful is the Holocaust to modern men seeking to make sweeping changes to society? Actually, not very. Because, you know, if you are thinking about. So first of all, what is the position of Jews in the intersectional matrix? This has been a, I think a point of tension since the beginning because Jews are doing extremely well on average in America, especially Ashkenazi Jews. You know, any, any attack on straight white males with too much power is almost by definition. Also talking about Jews, even though it will never use the word, because there are going to be a lot of Jews in America within the group of straight white males. Because at minimum you may not be able to tell who, who is white and who is Jewish. And if you're looking at the top 1% of the country just based on income distribution, you're going to find Jews there. But at the same time, Jews have been massively and uniquely oppressed throughout history, including with the Holocaust. So you would think they would occupy the position of noble victim in the intersectional framework. But they, they operate, they're kind of in this limbo space where the, you know, you can never say anything explicitly anti Semitic because we, we've all been too educated about the Holocaust and lose all of your anti racist credentials if you're seen to in any way invalidate the concern about the Holocaust because that is the paradigm case of racist oppression in history. But at the same time, if you're seeking to overturn power relations and point the finger at the 1% and whatnot, by definition, you're going to be pointing your finger at a lot of people who happen to be Jewish. And in that context, it's unclear what role the Holocaust plays. Is it helping Jews occupy the position of noble victim, or should we downplay it so that it's less awkward when we talk about burning the system down?
- [86:28]
A
Yeah, I think, first of all, the agreement that you describe is evaporating. Right. The ability to say openly anti Semitic things is returning. And I think it's a very shocking fact of history for those of us who have lived long enough to see the trajectory turn like this.
- [86:52]
B
We should mention Nick Cannon here recently. I don't know if you saw this.
- [86:57]
A
Not yet, I don't.
- [86:58]
B
Oh, yeah. I mean.
- [86:59]
A
Oh, wait, wait, wait. No, I did see it. I did see it. Go ahead. You want to describe it?
- [87:02]
B
Nick Cannon was expressing his admiration for kind of. Was it Farrakhan? I don't forget all the details, but he was getting a very Nation of Islam take on Jews, which I think more than flirted with antisemitism.
- [87:23]
A
Yes, it did more than flirt with it. I must say, I did not dig the de platforming. I thought it was what we used to call a teachable moment and that we should have dealt with it differently, because as it is, it may even reinforce the pattern rather than break it. But, yeah, we are at a turning point with respect to antisemitism. And in part, there's just this simple, obvious paradox with the fact that for Ashkenazi Jews, the persecution is, as you put it, unique and long standing. It's also extremely intense in recent history. And while it didn't take place in North America, it did take place at the hands of white Europe Europeans. And so it really ought to count in the. The question of oppression. I mean, you know, slavery in the middle of the 20th century in the heart of Europe. Right. And not only slavery, but slavery to the point of death. Right. There was genocide and there was also working people to death. So to the extent that slavery is on our minds, it's a highly relevant example. And so is the fact of it not being. You know, it's a very important historical fact. But there isn't a question of reparations on the table, nor do I think there should be. As you point out, the focus is going forward. Right.
- [88:59]
B
Well, but reparations were paid in some forms to the state of Israel and to some survivors as well, well, you're right.
- [89:07]
A
And the state of Israel itself is in some sense the globe's reparation, and it has. Its very existence is, of course, controversial to this day. But what I would say is we. There is a lot to be said about the difference in the various patterns. Our willingness, you know, exactly, as you point out, to edit some inconvenient examples of oppression out of the history to highlight others. And so we have a kind of crisis of viewpoint. Editing. Right. I noticed this, actually. I was in. I passed through the protests in Portland last night on my bike and I decided to go. And I had been before, but I hadn't seen what went on after dark. I had, in fact, been warned not to go, that I would be very unsafe, but I decided to chance it. And it was very interesting. There was a kind of energy that had to be there, but you kind of can't get it until you're there. And anyway, my takeaway from it was that I've been seeing two versions of the protest presented, both of which are wrong. One version is.
- [90:34]
B
Sorry, are you talking specifically about the Portland protests happening now?
- [90:38]
A
Yeah.
- [90:38]
B
Okay, yeah. Maybe just briefly describe what that is.
- [90:42]
A
Well, okay, so we have downtown, there are two important federal buildings. There's actually another one that is somehow not subject to this, but got two important federal buildings that for the last 55 nights in a row have been under attack. Right. There's been protests that devolve into riots almost every night. The buildings have physically been under attack. People have broken in, they've lit fires. The local police are largely hamstrung by our mayor, who is also the police commissioner. And so these federal buildings, because they are federal, are being defended by federal agents. And anyway, there's a nightly predictable confrontation that involves quite a bit of violence, lots of vandalism, reliable use of tear gas by the feds, less lethal rounds and things. And anyway, it's a very interesting dynamic. It's not entirely clear what is to be accomplished by attacking the federal buildings other than precipitating a federal crackdown, which will then be claimed to be oppressive. But anyway, the feeling on the ground was not what I have seen represented because it was a combination of two things. It was a combination of something authentic something and something synthetic. And the. The point I'm making is that which feed you are paying attention to decides which wrong version you're going to imagine is right and that you actually have to seek aspects of the two versions in order to understand what's really going on in downtown Portland. Right. So anyway, we were talking about facts that are highlighted in history, facts that are being obscured. And point is, the edit is convenient, really. Our obligation should be to include everything and say, well, what does that tell us about what's actually taking place and what remedies might work and where we are, but instead what we're doing is we're having a battle overpower in which each side pretends that the facts are limited to the ones that lean in their direction.
- [93:13]
B
Yeah, absolutely. That's a great way of putting it. And it occurred to me, as you said, that really the reason the Holocaust is an inconvenient fact is this. The success of descendants of that Jewish population that was worked to death and killed, the success of those descendants is an embarrassment to the idea that all of our problems and inequalities stem from historical injustice. It is a sort of glaring exception to the tendency to locate poverty in the present as being a direct result of oppression in the past. I think that's what it comes down to.
- [94:14]
A
I think you're right that that's why people are reading it this way. But I actually take a very different message from it. So I think there is something to the idea that what has happened to Jews repeatedly has made us antifragile and that that antifragility has wisdom in it, wisdom that can be described and passed on. And what I would say about the comparison to the black population in North America, it's a very different story, right? The process involved in slavery is a different process. And what it suggests is that just the disruption of the passage of functional culture and then at the end of slavery, the failure to bring the fully functional software package equally to everyone is, I believe, what we are living downstream of. That's not what happened with Jews that escaped Europe and ended up in North America. It's a very different pattern. So I think the lesson of Jewish success is one about what capacities allow a population to endure a massive trauma like that and to move forward productively. And I have yet to see anything that suggests it cannot be learned.
- [95:47]
B
It's interesting to observe that as not all of this stuff is a function of time. So, like, it does seem like the Holocaust is maybe slowly fading as the relevant historical sort of example that people point to. But interest in American slavery only seems to be increasing as it gets more and more distant. I don't know what my question is there. It's really just more of an observation for myself.
- [96:18]
A
Well, I think there's a reason for it, and I think what it has to do with is a diminishing returns problem. So there was widespread recognition in the 60s, for example, that there was a problem of unequal access that needed to be addressed. And we got to all of the low hanging fruit. Right. All of the relatively straightforward problems were addressed, which leaves the subtle ones. Right. And so there was a, I think a hope that we had gotten it, that we were almost there and then it didn't work. And the question was, what happened? And I think people are reaching for a simple answer. And the simple answer is, it's slavery, stupid. And the answer is, well, yes and no. I think it's echoes of slavery, it's patterns that reproduce themselves through time. But the leaping to the conclusion that basically the same racism that accounted for slavery and accounted for Jim Crow persists in a subtle form is just simply inaccurate. And so it's resulting in a deafening of the minds of people who would otherwise be sympathetic to addressing the question. Because when you're accused of racism and you know that it isn't there, it just, it raises the possibility that this is just all an error. But really what it is is that the processes that account for the current lack of access are subtle and they would require careful study to understand them fully. And in order to find the solutions, many of which are counterintuitive, it would require a courageous and complete analysis. And we're in fact headed in the opposite direction. You know, not only does BLM stand against the nuclear family, but it stands against the idea that, you know, analytical thought is everybody's to participate in. So the most troubling thing about this is that all of the right remedies are being taken off the table by a false story of what has taken place and how it is affecting people in the present.
- [98:50]
B
So I'm going to let you go. Thank you so much for this. But before I do, just one more question. When I went out for questions on Twitter, I got a lot that basically just asked, what can an individual do if they more or less see the problems that you see in society and more or less agree with your analysis of what is causing those problems? What can a normal person without a platform do in his or her lives to mitigate some of these issues?
- [99:34]
A
Yeah, I think there are two levels of answer. One of them has to do with figuring out how to talk to people who have ears to hear. And you know, so the conversation that you and I have had here I think is very productive. I'm sure we don't exactly agree on what we've discussed, but I think we've both gotten something out of it, and we've demonstrated how you do it in the spirit of generosity and decency. And the fact is, that's reproducible everywhere. It's getting harder, I have to say. I never used to have fear about sparking up a conversation with a stranger and exploring courageously. And now that's become kind of a fraught landscape. But nonetheless, everywhere there are people who want to have discussions that are reasonable rather than polarizing. So that's one thing.
- [100:26]
B
You know, strangely, I feel like. I feel like a younger generation that doesn't remember a time when you could just talk to a stranger about, you know, the latest piece of news and not feel like your whole reputation was at stake. If they never learn that, then they might just acclimate to a new normal. If you're raised in cancel culture and, you know, nothing else, nothing, there's not going to seem to be anything wrong about cancel culture.
- [100:55]
A
I totally agree with this. And it is all too. The agreement that we used to have is all too fragile, it turns out, and we would be wise to resurrect it before it's gone, because you're right, A generation will never discover that that was possible. And I don't know how we fix this if it's lost. Right? So I think we have to be courageous at the moment. And that means that when it goes wrong, when somebody is courageous about having a discussion and they do get canceled, we have to figure out how to protect them. Right? There's a difference between being terrible and making an error. I mean, even. Even an error that reveals prejudice, if you're willing to own up to the fact that that's what it was, that shouldn't result in you being canceled. But the other thing I would say is at a different level, not the political level, we have another problem. And as you point out, so many people at the moment are so focused on the fact that Trump is the explanation for every ill that we have that we are losing the ability to navigate with any sort of precision. And in fact, many people are steering us into a desperately dangerous situation by imagining that things will simply be better if we elect Joe Biden, which they won't be, because in some sense, Joe Biden, if you start to read into the proposals he is embracing the Black Lives Matter movement's perspective on various things. Not overtly in every case, but if you read in and you see who he's consulting, it's quite clear that this set of beliefs is going to be empowered by a Biden administration, which is going to be a disaster for us racially and every other way. So I would say if you haven't encountered Unity 2020, it's time to encounter it. It's apolitical, it's non ideological and in some sense it is the only plausible plan on the table for us. Confronting the duopoly and its corruption and eliminating corruption from our political discourse about what remedies we should be considering is the only way forward. It's the corruption that results in bad policy going forward. You eliminate the corruption, many things become possible, including on the topic you and I have been discussing.
- [103:24]
B
So I would love to have you back on the podcast maybe closer to November to discuss that. That's a very interesting proposal and one I've thought about a little bit. But I think there's a lot more to say about it. But for now, thank you so much, Brett. This has been really fun and I'd love to.