← Conversations with Coleman
Conversations with Coleman
The Death of Conversation with Jonathan Haidt (S3 Ep.21)
00:55:17
My guest today is Jonathan Haidt. I just had Jonathan on the show a few weeks ago with Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, but I wanted to get him back for a one-on-one. I'm glad I did because this turned out to be a really great conversation. It actually felt more like a private phone call than an interview, which I thought was really cool. I also thought it was really cool that John brought up the first email that I ever sent to him back when I was just a random Columbia undergraduate trying to understand why some of my professors seemed totally insane. In the episode, we talk about humor and offensive jokes. We discuss reasons why social media sucks so much as a forum for serious conversations. We also talk about the pros and cons of the internet, the progress America has made on issues like racism, and whether protest movements are still a useful practice. We also go to talk about Elon Musk potentially buying Twitter, and much more. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as ...
Loading summary
Transcript54 lines
- [00:00]
A
SA.
- [00:31]
B
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 get 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. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Jonathan Haidt. I just had Jonathan on a few weeks ago with Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlott, but I wanted to get him back for a one on one, and I'm glad I did because this turned out to be a really great conversation. It actually felt more like a private phone call than an interview, which I thought was really cool. John brought up the first email that I ever sent to him back when I was just a random Columbia undergraduate trying to understand why some of my professors seemed totally insane. So that was really cool. We also talked about humor and offensive jokes. We discussed reasons why social media sucks so much as a forum for serious conversations. We talk about the pros and cons of the Internet. We talk about the progress America has made on issues like racism, and we talk about whether protest movements are still a useful practice. We talk about Elon Musk potentially buying Twitter and much more. So, without further ado, Jonathan Haidt. All right, Jonathan Haidt, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [02:12]
A
Oh, Coleman, what a pleasure. What a pleasure to see you all grown up. Because I'm thinking, because just before this podcast I looked up the first email you ever sent me. May I read it to you?
- [02:23]
B
Yes. I am very. This is. Yes. I have no idea what to expect. I remember sending this email. I hope there are no typos. And this is how many years ago this was.
- [02:31]
A
Oh, actually, let me find the date on this. Here it is. It's December 7th, 2017.
- [02:36]
B
Wow. Okay, I'm ready.
- [02:38]
A
Okay. Headline a tale of two Columbia classes. Hi Professor Haidt. I'm a second year undergrad philosophy major at Columbia and a fan of your work on moral psychology. I've just finished watching your conversation with Jordan Peterson and couldn't help but share the following. Two of my courses this semester differ from none of the greatly. One is an intro philosophy course required by all philosophy majors in which we read classic papers in the philosophy of mind, identity and morality. The other is called Philosophy and Feminism, in which we learn the core principles of intersectional feminism and queer theory. Okay, standard opening two courses.
- [03:11]
B
I remember those courses.
- [03:12]
A
Yep. Now, leaving aside the differences in content, the course is different. How they're running. In the intro class, we'll read a philosopher, say Thomas Nagel, learn his arguments well enough, well enough to repeat them, and then spend the majority of the class exposing any weaknesses in Nagel's argument. We deem no philosopher's views sacred or even special. We even debate one another. I disagree with the professor all the time. It's lively, good natured and fun. Every Monday and Wednesday I leave that class and go straight to philosophy and Feminism where the social mood is very different. We read some thinker, say Foucault, and not a single person even asks a question, to say nothing of a critique. But few comments are made, invariably reify the ideas of the thinker. And if someone does make a critique, the professor has a hand waving way of answering without ever suggesting that the argument could have a weakness. Some highlights of the course. Okay. The professor once said that all students of color are victims of oppression. Then you say, I'm black and I view myself in no such way. But I didn't say that in the moment because it would have felt combative in that room. She once suggested that people not come to class so that they could attend a protest that was happening elsewhere on campus. She once compared privilege to sin and remarked about how nice it would be if we could cleanse ourselves of it. And then you say, of course I'm cherry picking the most bizarre example. Da da da. You say the class is church, like in two ways. One, it feels mean to disagree, even politely, so nobody does. And two, it's boring to sit through if you don't already agree with what's being taught. Anyway, I thought this was just so remarkable for a sophomore in just a sophomore or college student. And you had no typos. Everything was perfectly, you know. So I read this and I thought, oh my God, this should be. I think my first thought was, I need to use this example in my talks. My second example is, wait a second, everyone needs to read this. So that's why I invited you to just submit it for the Heterodox Academy blog.
- [05:04]
B
And that email became the first thing I ever wrote that was ever published anywhere. And you know, now I'm putting myself back in the mind space I was in when I Sent that. I think I must have been sitting on my futon that I was sleeping on with no mattress frame. I was sleeping on a futon on the ground in my apartment with. That was like my dirty, disgusting apartment with three other guys on 140th in Amsterdam, typing, probably late at night. And yet, you know, what was so interesting about that was I basically got to participate in an experiment of a course being run in two different ways, sometimes with the same material. So I remember at one point I was reading the same Foucault book in both of those classes at the same time, just by chance. So I would. Which was nice because I had to do less homework. But, you know, I could see just how it's possible to take an idea, no matter how radical, and treat it without any sacredness, and then go right to the next class where no one can talk about it. Right? It's like everyone. And I think listening back to what I wrote there, the part of it that's most interesting to me and a lot of university students will resonate with this. And, you know, ironically, now I get these emails. You know, it's like a. So it's a chain. Exactly. What's most interesting to me that I said there is that it feels mean to disagree in the one class, and it doesn't feel mean to disagree in the other class, which is such an interesting comment on how the same person an hour apart, like my own feeling of who I am to say something will change just depending on the feeling that's created in a room. I would have felt like an asshole to disagree in the one class versus the other.
- [06:48]
A
That's right, because what you put your finger on there is that we play different games in different spaces, and the professor defines the game and the norms and the rules. And one of the games is like tennis, where I hit the ball. This is the way it's always felt to me. And I should point out, I was a philosophy major, too. As an undergrad, I majored in philosophy and wrote my senior essay on free will and determinism. And then from that went on to study moral psychology. But in my entire time in the academy, I started graduate School in 1987. I've always loved the game, and the game is sort of like tennis. Like someone hits a ball, someone says, or a philosopher or a book asserts something. They hit it to you, and then you hit it back. And either you say yes or you say no, and here's why, or what about this? Then they hit it back, and you go back and forth. And it's a game and I guess you kind of want to win, but it doesn't really matter. You really want to. It's just fun to play the game. That's one kind of game. And that's what you had in your more traditional philosophy course. And no one's views were sacred. The professor knows more than you. But you could catch the professor in a mistake or point something out that he hadn't seen. So that's the game that we know. And a different game had been nurtured in certain departments of the university all along, certainly since the 1990s. And that was more the activist game, which has as many people as John McWhorter has been arguing. He was one of the first, first to say that wokeness is a religion. So there's kind of an activist game. We're here to fight evil and we have certain key thinkers who are our gods and we treat them with reverence and respect and we worship their words and we are on a noble mission. And philosophy doesn't do that. Well, if you take that into the philosophy classroom, it's just bizarre. But you put your finger on exactly what it was. It was more of a church like atmosphere. It was more of a. Well, you tell me, looking back on it now that you know everything you know, would you add anything to that analysis?
- [08:31]
B
Yeah, well, I guess I was paying attention to people like yourself at the time that were blowing the whistle about this culture of censoriousness and cancellation and call out culture. But what I think my firsthand experience taught me on top of all those critiques was that it was a boring environment. It was actually there was. It's like all these kids who. I was actually very curious what they were thinking. And the reason I was curious is because no one raised their hands to say what they were thinking. There would sometimes be 2 to 3 comments towards the end of an hour and a half lecture class and they would be very timid and just, you know, sort of cautiously agreeing. And I was so curious what people thought because we were discussing fascinating ideas, right. Like if Foucault is right, that is a radical. It's the kind of idea someone has when they're on LSD or mushrooms. And it's. It would be super fun to bounce it around, but there was no bouncing. And that's really what struck me most, is that why aren't the kids complaining that this culture makes it more boring?
- [09:39]
A
Tell me about humor. Was there looking back on your education, were there jokes? Were there professors who Made jokes where there was laughter in the classroom, or was that not part of college for you?
- [09:50]
B
That's a good question. I would say there was not that much humor that I can recall occasionally. You would have it from the first professor that I discussed. She could be funny sometimes.
- [10:02]
A
Okay. Because this is a new thing I'm thinking about. You know, how I should go back and look at this. Was it that birds were disappearing and DDT was the culprit? Or there's a. Or so. Yeah. Silent Spring. Of course, that's the Rachel Carson book Silent Spring. Because I've been realizing, I think there's just. Humor is gone from academic life. Like when I got in in 1987, like, there were a lot of jokes, classrooms, academic conferences. It's just sort of normal. Like, you'd find humor. Somebody would tell a joke that has a punchline. I mean, academics was fun and funny because everyone is so smart. People have high IQs. They know a lot. They got quick minds. And so there was a lot of humor. And I'm just realizing I haven't really heard many jokes since about 2014, 2015. It's like this new way of being now. We call it the Great Awokening. The Great Awokening came in. It was like, oh, no more jokes. The Committee on Morality has ruled against jokes, so no more.
- [10:53]
B
Yeah, it did feel like that there were occasional bright spots. I remember one intro philosophy class, I had a professor that would make some funny puns and some kind of philosophy jokes. But it really does not encourage pushing boundaries, that kind of a culture. Because jokes by nature are often transgressive. I just did a public event at the Comedy Cellar with Glenn Lowry, Roland Fryer, and four comics.
- [11:20]
A
Oh, my God. How did I miss this? That sounds amazing.
- [11:23]
B
You check it out on YouTube. There's Andrew Schultz. Great comic, was there. Shane Gillis, Sam Jay. And the comics ended up dominating the conversation, as is their trademark. But the point of the conversation was to ask the question, are there certain topics now that are more adequately addressed in a comedic setting than in an academic setting, on a podcast, in a paper, at a conference? And that was sort of the launching point in the conversation.
- [11:48]
A
Cool. I will definitely check that out. I hope you can put it in the show notes. That sounds like an amazing conversation. And that fits with something I've been thinking about, something I started thinking about when all this stuff started coming in. Is that what we should do at orientation here at nyu? You know, we have an incredibly tolerant university. It's always been very, very progressive, very concerned with identity issues and inclusion. And yet I'm told that many students feel that they're in danger, that there's verbal violence. And it just. It seemed to me that if part of our freshman orientation was you have to spend nine hours in a comedy club, and the reason why is because you will see comedians who are black, white, male, female, gay, and straight telling jokes about blacks and whites, men and women, gays and straights. And if you just get this up, like, you know what? We're all different, and there are foibles, and you can take offense or not, but if you did that and then you come into a class at nyu, if somebody uses a. A word that isn't the exact right word, like, you're not going to freak out about it. So, yes, we need more comedy in our lives, and we certainly need it in our undergraduate students.
- [12:56]
B
No doubt. And I think part of my background that ended up clashing with the culture at Columbia was that I grew up in my memory of my childhood in suburban New Jersey. Very diverse town. I had black friends, white friends, Jewish friends. And my experience growing up was that I would often make black jokes with my black friends. Like jokes that maybe if they came out of the mouth of a white comic, out of context, might seem offensive. I learned Jewish jokes from my Jewish friends. I learned Asian jokes from my Asian friends. And there was a. There was a kind of good faith to the whole thing because we were friends to begin with.
- [13:35]
A
Yeah.
- [13:36]
B
And we knew these differences were not. We didn't feel these differences mattered deeply to begin with. So there was a harmlessness about it. And then to import that attitude into Colombia, I just felt like people are afraid to make any kind of joke because people now assume the worst.
- [13:51]
A
That's right. Yeah. So we spend so much time thinking about inclusion, how to make people feel included, and if we could just foster an attitude of playfulness, assuming good intention or assuming the best about people, and something about a willingness to make mistakes or forgiveness. There's a small set of interlocked concepts that would humanize relationships and that would automatically reduce racism, fear, any overt or covert acts of exclusion. So, yeah, there are ways we could solve these problems. And so many times it just seems we're doing the opposite of what we should be doing.
- [14:25]
B
One thing I notice a lot is my conversations, even about controversial topics. They always go well when it's one on one and face to face. Even after I published that blog post at Heterodox Academy, I started writing for Colette, and I was viewed as a Contrarian on issues of race and racism. I don't think everything is all about racism, which was a contrarian take for many. But what I noticed is that even once I was known as this guy on campus that thinks the wrong things. My conversations, one on one with quote, unquote, social justice warriors, were always really good. If there's no one else around, right, no one to perform for, no reputation at stake, people suddenly became quite reasonable. And so I never had a problem with that. The problems came with social media, with a group conversation, with a classroom conversation, which is a kind of stage. And there's something to be learned from that as well.
- [15:21]
A
So to the extent that we're going to talk about my Atlantic article, my article published in The Atlantic on April 11 called why the Last 10 Years of American Life have Become Uniquely Stupid. At least there's the illustration for the print edition. That's awesome. That's the key. What you just said is the key idea. Now, you put it as people suddenly became reasonable in person, implying that the normal state is on social media, but if you can take them off of social media and talk to them, they'll become reasonable. Now, of course, for the last million, 2 million years, or whenever we got language, we've been having conversations not on social media. And people are mostly pretty reasonable. And it's only this weird innovation of saying, here's a way that you can talk. Now, there's already 500 ways you can talk. There's already telephones and the postal service and texting and Skype and FaceTime and Zoom. There's a thousand ways you can talk, but here's a new way that you can talk in front of others. And it's not really that you're talking in front of others. You're actually just emitting stuff. You emit stuff. Others can respond to your stuff. It's all done on a stage. And so Facebook comes out in 2004, and around them was MySpace and Friendster and all those other platforms. And you just. You post stuff on your wall or your room or whatever it is, and people come and they look at. That's all perfectly nice. No problem there. It's performative, but it's just like, you know, here's me, here are my photos. And once Facebook makes it much more about the news feed, which it gets from Twitter, once, it's much more about, like, not here's what I'm doing, but like, can you believe this? And look at this outrageous thing? And then once you get the like and the retweet. Buttons. Now it's about everyone's reactions to it. And then something I learned only after I published the article was threaded Comments comes out in 2013. Threaded comments is not only do you get to say nasty, snarky things to any person who posts something, but now it says, after each snarky comment, respond to Joe Smith. And so now you can have, like, Barack Obama will post something. And lots of people say nasty things, but after each one is, do you want to fight with Joe Smith? And then, yes, you do. And then before you know it, you've got a bunch of people with seven followers are now visible to anybody who sees Obama's post that happened in 2013. And there's a lot of things closing in on how 2014 is really the year that everything kind of really blew up. Things really went insane beginning in 2014. But to go back to your point, the metaphor that I'm using I didn't put in the piece, but I'm thinking about it, is it's like, imagine if we wanted to communicate more. We wanted new ways to talk, and someone said, I've got a new way for you to talk. It's free. It's fun. Come start talking, start posting, start performing. You do that, and then you realize, wait a second, wait a second. There's like, we're in the Roman Coliseum here, and there's 100,000 people around us cheering for blood, and they want us to fight to the death. And if someone stabs someone, they cheer. And so we start stabbing each other more. Like, this is what. This is the situation we're in. So it's not that, you know, what if people, if you talk to them, they become normal. It's like, most people are pretty reasonable, always have been, but you put them in front of the Roman Colosseum and you give them weapons. Yeah, some people become complete assholes.
- [18:21]
B
Yeah. This is an enormous problem. I mean, when Facebook started out, it was. I'm just old enough to remember Facebook when it was, I just want to post something random so that my friends at school know what I'm up to on a Saturday afternoon. Like, really innocent. And like the proverbial frog boiling in water, we just inched into this totally different situation, and it was like each one of these things you're noting was a part of that story. The ability to reply, the ability to like. Each of which seemed totally innocent on its own defense. Yeah. And increased engagement, no doubt. But then altogether, we're now in this situation where I'm arguing with people I barely know in 200 word volleys about political issues that people have been debating for thousands of years at, in 500 page books and couldn't possibly be sorted out at such a length. It's amazing where it started and where it ended up. And the fact that we didn't realize no one really made a conscious choice to say, actually, let's make Facebook way more vitriolic. There were just market incentives that slowly pushed it that way.
- [19:30]
A
That's right. Facebook literally gave bonuses to engineers who would increase engagement. You could think of a way to keep people on longer, then you got a bigger bonus and they did all this. This is one of my big. It's an incredible time to be a social scientist, especially a sociologist or social psychologist. I look back on those years and the story that I tell in the article that I'm writing up in the book is really trying to get the sense of the long human arc of coming together, cooperating more, finding ways to communicate, building larger societies, building nations, building transnational institutions like the EU and the un. You know, cooperation goes on and on, as many, like Robert Wright many have pointed out. But we're doing it. It's now going so fast and being driven by people who have no knowledge or concern for emergent properties of this complex dynamical system. And so, yeah, I'm sure that Mark Zuckerberg didn't intend to bring about what he's brought about. And many of these people were techno utopians. They really thought if we just, you know, information wants to be free, put people together, good things will happen. But had there been some social conservatives in the mix? This is the interesting thing to me. If you read a lot of the writing of the techno utopians, they're almost all libertarian or progressive. They share what Thomas Sowell calls the unconstrained vision of human nature. This is the John Lennon vision. Imagine there's no countries, imagine no gods, no possessions, just all the people living life in peace. It'll be amazing. Knock down all the walls, just put people together, It'll be great. That's the unconstrained vision which guided the French revolutionaries, Russian revolutionaries, the. And then the opposite vision, Sowell says, is the constrained vision of human nature, which is more Sigmund Freud, it's more Edmund Burke. It's just the idea that actually we do need constraints. We need structure and constraints, and if we don't have them, what comes out is our sexual aggressive nature. So it's actually civilization. It doesn't repress us and make us bad. It actually gives us Structure and constrains us and actually makes us good, makes us do our duty, makes us be law abiding good to people. So the Internet, I don't think there was any social conservative involved anywhere in the creation of the Internet. It was a dream of progressives and libertarians, God bless them. Many of my friends are progressives and libertarians. And what I've learned is it's really helpful to listen to all three of those groups, progressives, libertarians, and social conservatives. But if you take any one of them out of the mix, what the other two would build is not really fit for human habitation. And that's the Internet that we have.
- [21:49]
B
So one part of the Internet that I've often felt is a good thing is, I guess, the flip side of the fragmentation problem. So you use this analogy of the Tower of Babel and it comes down and everyone's speaking a different language, no one can understand each other. Which is a great analogy for what social media feels like. Just like everyone is in these tiny echo chambers and bubbles. Even my podcast audience that sees my tweets and sees follows related podcasts is part of a much smaller world than most people realize, right? So like on the rare occasion I meet someone who knows me, recognizes me, doesn't happen that often. Usually they think that I'm getting recognized all the time, you know, because they.
- [22:37]
A
Care about, you're so famous. Everyone I know knows you.
- [22:40]
B
Right? I'm really not at all. And so the insight there is people think the bubble that they're in is much larger and more representative than it is. And everyone's in a bub and the bubbles have multiplied and the bubbles get smaller every day. The news you consume gets more linked to your sub sub subculture and all the other sub sub subcultures make no sense to you because it would have required so much buy in and years of context understanding that you can't possibly have had. So that's the fragmentation problem. But it seems like there's a flip side to that, which is the more subcultures there are, the more the easier it is to find a subculture where you really fit, right? It's like if the only way of measuring whether you're a cool person is like whether you're good at baseball or sports, like a monoculture of the 1950s and you're good at sports, you're cool, you're not, you suck, that leaves a lot of people out. Whereas nowadays someone who sucks at sports, they can go on Reddit and like get into playing the accordion and get really good. And now that's their world. So how do you think about the pros and cons of the fracturing of culture?
- [23:56]
A
That's a great. That is a great observation. And this. Okay, I'd love to answer this, to address this, because I've got notes in my Evernote. I have all kinds of ideas for essays I want to write someday. And one of them is called something like the moral progress essay, or, you know, what we lost when we, you know, the moral progress we lost in the 21st century. So first, let's imagine two worlds, one of which there's a single story. Everybody shares it, and that's all there is. There's one big community. We all share the same narrative, and it's all one community. This sounds kind of like a fascist dream. Like, this is like not a human society. Let's imagine another where it's just fragments. Everything is small groups. You can find a small group. You can move from group to group, but, you know, it's just lots of small groups. And that's what we have now, fragmentation. This is the post Babel world that we have now. And I think what. What I think is the most humane world, which was actually the liberal fantasy. And by liberal, I don't mean left. I mean the, like John Stuart Mill, you know, experiments in living. We want. A liberal society is one in which we use minimum force on people, and people can live the way they want, but we still have a sense of community. We have shared meaning, we have shared facts. So in other words, imagine that there was some sort of overarching understanding of what was going on, but underneath that, there were also lots of pockets of meaning. And to me, this is actually. This is the great moral progress of the 20th century, is a world in which there is a dominant culture. And the world that you and I were born into was the one in which it was. The WASP culture was the dominant culture, but it sort of ruled with a very light hand. That is, there was plenty of room for minority groups to live the ways they wanted. My grandparents all came from Russia and Belarus and Poland and Jewish immigration around 1907. And the Jews could live the way they wanted and have their rituals and their synagogues and Jews did incredibly well in this country. And my wife's family is from Korea. Same thing, very similar. Her dad came over in 1954, 55, right after the war. And so you have. There was a sense of being an American, and there was an assimilationist ethos that is, everyone's welcome in America. But we're not a country of blood and soil. We are a country of shared belief in a certain set of ideas and holy objects. So you have to have some reverence for the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. Those are holy documents. You ideally should feel something when you see the American flag and Purple Mountain's majesty. So if you have some shared sense of being American, that leaves plenty of room for differences. And now you could have versions of it that say, america is great, we're the greatest, and don't you dare talk about our flaws. And there were people who said that. But the America I was raised in was one in which, like, you'd always say, like, whenever you say America's great, you always also say, now, of course, we had the abomination of slavery and we did a lot of things wrong. So you always say, you know, warts and all. We are not, you know, no country is perfect. We're far from perfect. But there's a recognition that America played a role in the world. Of course, yes, we fom. You can see me doing it. You always say, yes, of course, we overthrew governments in central. You know, we did a lot of bad things, but, you know, we beat the Nazis and the Soviets and we invented, you know, so anyway, you see, I'm getting all enthusiastic because I think the late 20th century was actually a time of incredible moral progress. And on point after point, it's reversing. So here I just have. Here's my list of the eight things. Let me see if they work. They still make sense. These things are all moral progress. Let's see whether they still apply today in 2022, or whether we've lost them. One, do process. No rush to judgment. We don't lynch people. We have process. I think we're losing that. Two, equality before the law, not equality of outcome. So something about equality of process. Again, due process. We don't guarantee equality of outcome. We guarantee you'll be treated fairly. Three, it's intent that matters, not impact in human relationships. So if you bump into me accidentally, I say, oh, okay, you know, you apologize, we're done. But now, of course, we have its impact, not intent. Four is the Constitution of knowledge. This is Jonathan Rauch's work that we had these incredible epistemic institutions like universities, the New York Times. We had other things that really had professional standards by getting to the truth. Five is we treat people as individuals who have rights, not as members of a group to be praised, damned, or fined as members of that group. Six, no magic words or Spells in our daily life, Muslims don't get to say you can't say Allah, and Jews don't get to say you can't say Yahweh. You know, there's no magic words. But now, increasingly, words that are seen as offensive by some are taboo even to discuss the word itself. Not, of course, to use it. 7. Overcoming purity. A lot of traditional societies have purity laws and we were overcoming them. And then last I have on my list data over anecdote. That is what mattered was like, are we getting more or less racist? Well, let's look at the surveys, let's look at the overall numbers. Oh, we're getting less racist on every criteria, less sexist, less homophobic, everything. So the numbers are going down. But in the 2010s, what matters? That doesn't matter anymore. What matters is the anecdote. And if you've seen a video of racism or homophobia, well, look, it's all over the place. That's terrible. We need a complete tear down. So I guess I should write this up as a paper. My point is, my point is, I think the late 20th century was a time of incredible moral progress. From the time I was born in 1963, when black people couldn't vote, couldn't use the same bathrooms in much of the country, to 2012 when Obama was reelected and a lot of gay marriage proposals passed, that 50 year run was an incredible sprint of progress and a lot of it is reversing since 2012. What do you think?
- [29:23]
B
I mean, that's a great way of provoking the thought in me. Well, I think that span is pretty much exactly the span between my grandfather's life and mine. And so I was born in 96 and I, you know, whenever I visit my grandfather, he tells me stories of growing up in Jim Crow, right? And he was in the army. He was born in the 30s or maybe even the late 20s. So he, you know, he would tell stories about the actual challenges of segregation, like the practical challenges of segregation. He got invited to a dance party as part of the army on the base he was in, but he couldn't possibly ask a white girl to dance, so he had to drive my grandma in from hours away to be his date so that he did not have a date. You know, like these kinds of things. Story gives me chills, actually. Just to remember how deeply unrecognizable those stories are to me is a mark of how quickly we made progress in the second half of the 20th century, economic progress to the post World War II boom. And just cultural progress. And I look at all of the eight things you just listed, and I think definitely six or seven of them seem to be backsliding, at least in the elite parts of the culture.
- [30:36]
A
Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Do you think it's not? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So maybe it's not in the non elite parts.
- [30:42]
B
Well, yeah, I'm always hesitant to. I mean, obviously what elites do often trickles into the rest of society, but like, certainly at Columbia University, at Harvard University, at Yale University, at conferences, at journalistic institutions, everything you're talking about is backsliding. There's no doubt about that.
- [31:01]
A
Yeah. Hey, you mentioned your grandfather and what his life was like. That actually helps. The way I was thinking of framing this essay was like this. So I was born in 1963, in October of 1963, which is two months. Two months after Martin Luther King gave his famous I have a Dream speech. And that speech, of course, was on the hundredth anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. So I was born 100 years and two months after the Emancipation Proclamation. And if we ask how much progress did we make on racial justice, racial equality, on rights for African Americans, how much progress do we make in that hundred years? I think the answer would be Jim Crow is better than slavery, but not nearly as much progress as people would have hoped back then. And not a lot of progress in a lot of ways. So that hundred years, not a lot happened. I mean, there was material progress, but in terms of rights and dignity, very disappointing. Then we go decade by decade in my life, and we look at the progress on civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, animal rights, environmentalism, on almost anything you would care about. If you're progressive, if you care about rights and the reduction of racism and sexism. If you go follow this out to. As I said, the year 2012 is a key year to look at because Obama is reelected. We have a black president who's reelected, who's popular, and there's a wave of even a bunch of gay marriage proposals that failed in 2008. A lot of them passed in 2012. And of course, two or three years later, we get a Supreme Court ruling saying, this is the law of the land. So again, in 2012, December 2012, if you're progressive, you should be jumping up and down, celebrating. You should say, yay, America. Whatever it is we were doing, let's keep doing it, because that was working. Like, wow. You know, there's never been. I don't think there's ever been a history, a period, a 50 year period in history, of any country, in human history that had as much moral progress, as much progress on these issues that progressives would care about, that everyone should care about as those 50 years, my first 50 years of life. And then since 2012. And as I say in the essay, that's really when everything turned around. 2011. 2012 is the high point of techno democratic optimism. And at that point that social media begins to fragment everything. And there's a lot more to the backstory. It's not just social media, cable news. It plays a big role in polarization. There are a lot of other factors, but the technology really begins turning us all against each other and allowing room for these, these sort of bizarre, not bizarre, but these, what's the word? Sort of moral ideas that are corrosive, that are incompatible with liberalism, incompatible with progress. They come in and then everything reverses. That's leading me to the thought and this, I suppose, the first time I'll air this. I think talking to you is a good place. My hypothesis is that gay marriage was the last, will be the last successful rights revolution. And the reason I say that is because it's the last rights revolution that was fought by persuasion. That is, you know, when Jonathan, when Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Rauch, the 1990s, began talking about this and arguing for it, they advocated for it, they gave reasons. Now, there was some intimidation in some social circles. If you were against gay marriage, you'd be fired. So it's not that there was zero intimidation, but the movement really tried to win people over, make the case that why shouldn't I be able to marry the person I love? And it went through, not just on state ballots, but it then went through in the Supreme Court. And amazingly it wasn't resisted, or rather I should say it was very quickly accepted. Republicans now, as far as I know, are generally very much in favor of gay marriage. They certainly are not fighting it. It was widely accepted. And my concern is that some of the current stuff around gender, especially the trans movement, because they're not making the case with persuasion. You know what we see happens if we know. If you write a book critical of it, your book will be banned by Amazon. If you say, as J.K. rowling did, if you say the. You support trans rights, but yet you think that a woman and a trans woman are not exactly the same, whatever it is. The point is if you diverge from the orthodox line, you will not be persuaded, you will be destroyed. And what that means is that rights movements nowadays, the Post Babel world that is after about 2012, in the post Babel world, they may have victories, but I think they'll be Pyrrhic victories. That is a victory in which you win the battle, but you win it at such a cost that you lose the war. And so if you get bills passed, you're not persuading people. So if you get your company or your school to change its policies heavy handedly and you destroy anyone who criticizes you, what you might find that is that you're pushing so many people to vote Republican that they are going to reverse whatever gains you make. So I could be wrong about this, but that's something I'm thinking about. Whether this incredible period, this 50 year period of social transformation, all in the good direction, whether that might be over now and it might not be repeated, that's fascinating.
- [35:49]
B
I mean, I've had a similar version of this thought, which is that the way that young Americans, I would say both of our generations, come up is with this deep, almost unconscious reverence for the style of the civil rights movement, right? Like the protest that is noble in its aims, that eventually wins. And we don't even realize how much that paradigm has an effect on us until you speak to someone from China, right? It's like that deep psychological imprint culturally is not a default, right? That's a particular paradigm we have that what it means to be a good person, or a lot of what it means to be a good person is to band together with people, fight the oppression of a vulnerable group of people, and win in the way that Martin Luther King did, or perhaps even go further and be more radical, however you want to do it. But there are not an infinite number of issues on which that exact paradigm makes sense. And gay marriage, it made a lot of sense. Like go out and do a peaceful protest and persuade people and then you want, you win. With the issue of trans, we are running up against a more complicated issue with trade offs. It's like where we're witnessing Western European countries like Finland, which we hardly see as backwards or bigoted places. In fact, we usually praise their approach to healthcare. We're seeing them phase out puberty blockers for kids under 18, which at the very least one has to acknowledge this is not as morally clear cut as an issue like gay marriage or voting rights for all races. And obviously those didn't seem clear cut at the time. But really the arguments for them are very straightforward. They don't involve these trade offs. And I think you're possibly right. I mean, it's quite Possible that we have reached the end of the issues on which that deeply conditioned hero's quest makes sense.
- [37:45]
A
That's right. And that would be a direct consequence of the post Babel era. The idea of once the Tower of Babel fell, we should just point out for listeners who don't remember the key line. The key line of the Tower of Babel story is after the people build this tower city in a tower and God is offended by the hubris. God says, let us go down and confess. Confuse their language so that they may not understand one another. So that's the metaphor I used in my article, is that it's like social media did this to us. It destroyed the tower. No possibility of shared meetings anymore. All these micro communities of strangers, temporary strangers, little bubbles in the ocean. No overarching, no possibility of a shared story, shared meaning, shared understanding, shared facts, and never will be again. I mean, maybe in a hundred years, but not in the next 10 or 20s. We're not going to have shared facts and shared understanding next 20 years. And so if that's the case, then there is no possibility of a successful rights revolution anymore because you can't possibly persuade 80% of the people, you can persuade 20%. And if you're very aggressive about it, you're just going to then create enemies. So the harder you push in a post babble world, in a country defined by negative partisanship, but we don't vote for the person we want, we vote against the other side because we hate them so much. The harder you push on a rights movement. Here you can get 20 or 30%, but that's just going to cause the other side to be dead set against you. And I think that might be the future of rights movements in this country.
- [39:04]
B
Yeah. So I want to consider my grandkids. Right. If I have them, when I talk to my grandfather, he can list five to 10 things that are materially different now in my lifetime when it comes to rights, things I'm able to do that he was not able to do when he was my age. I'm curious what that conversation will look like when I'm 80 and I'm talking to my grandkids that will be born in say like the 2000s or something. What are the things I'm going to be able to say in their lifetime that have really changed for the better in these unambiguous ways that my grandfather could point to?
- [39:48]
A
Okay, well, first, what are the things that you cannot do today as a black man? What are the things that are not Open to you because you are black.
- [39:54]
B
There are none that I'm aware of. Yeah, I have encountered no serious obstacles to my success on account of my race. You know, if I've experienced racism, it's been one off incidents, very rare and they've never represented a serious obstacle.
- [40:14]
A
So the right. So the rights revolution has succeeded. Now there certainly has not been a quality of outcome. There are all kinds of disparities. But as you know, and as you've said, you can't just assume they're caused by racism. It's a harder challenge. We have to now do the hard work to figure out, okay, society is complicated. How do we help black kids, how do we help Hispanic kids? Whatever it is, whenever there's a disparity, we have to look for a solution. But we can't blame the easy thing, which is, well, someone is keeping them down or some law is keeping them down. That's the way I think of that. How about you?
- [40:49]
B
It's like we need a new paradigm. The whole civil rights movement paradigm, which was then copied successfully by many other groups. It's possible that is fading in relevance. That paradigm for how to move the world forward is fading in relevance. Or to put it another way, that strategy has reached the point of diminishing returns, but yet it's deeply ingrained in us. So we need a paradigm shift like what are the issues we're really facing right now as a country and how do so, for example, you know, poverty in high crime neighborhoods. There are disproportionately black and people of color, but white as well. There are neighborhoods that are intergenerational poverty, lots of crime, chaos. Where it's a huge disadvantage to be born into is solving that problem. Can we use the same techniques of protest movements and agitation to solve that problem? I would argue no, we can't. So the problems we're left with are precisely the ones that can't be solved using this paradigm that is very popular.
- [41:52]
A
That's right. I think a lot of people don't understand the degree to which our current political environment and a lot of the strategy and the concepts used by progressives come out of the civil rights movement and made perfect sense. In the Jim Crow South. They really made sense, but they don't make sense now. So I was very fortunate. I was invited along Congressman John Lewis at the Faith in Something Policy Center. He would lead us a civil rights pilgrimage of Congress people to the sites in Alabama, the museums and the lynching memorial, these really powerful sites. And I was invited to join along As I studied political psychology and polarization. And this was the last one that he did. This was in 2019. The 2020 was canceled by Covid. And then he passed away. And I'll never forget, like in the museum, there's this incredible museum in Montgomery, I believe it is Birmingham. Shoot, which one? And, you know, exhibits on the life of enslaved people from the beginning, all the way through the Civil War. And in one of them, this was in, like, the 1920s, it was a headline in a newspaper and it said, like, joe Fergus, Joe Smith to be lynched tonight. Meaning here's an article in the newspaper. Here's a black man who is going to be lynched tonight at five o'. Clock. Little headline down at the bottom, Governor says he's powerless to intervene. I mean, this was unbelievable. This was like the 1920s or 30s. It was not 1840. And the idea that there is that everything, everyone is either black or white, because there was hardly anyone else. Everyone's black or white. And the law tells you what you can do if you're black or white. And the law is designed to keep black people down. And if you want to talk about structural racism, that's it. It's everywhere. It's in the law, and it's enforced in the state capitol, at the legislature. And so it's like this was the situation. And what is the way to change that? Apply pressure to the legislators to change the law. And if they won't do it, then apply pressure in Washington to get the federal government or the. Whatever branches it took, the Justice Department primarily apply pressure to get them to change the law, to remove the structural obstacles, the structural rate, like, it all made perfect sense. You take these ideas that were honed in the most successful civil rights movement of our history. You take these ideas and you apply them at Yale University in 2015, and you say, what, we're going to have protests to what, remove which law to end racism? Or you say we're going to protest about police killings and this is going to what, stop police killings. Like, so we need to understand the concepts and the tactics that work based on the problem. And I think a lot of the concepts and tactics being used in universities today and other progressive institutions, which are mostly around social media, are just not. I mean, they often misdiagnose the problem. They then misdiagnosed the means to change the problem. And they are generally very low cost, sorts of, you know, clicktivism or whatever it's called. So, yeah, I think we are in an era that is in which There are still rights movements, but they're nothing like the older ones. And I don't know, I don't think they're going to be very successful.
- [44:48]
B
Yeah, I worry that you're right and I worry that people are going to be very slow to realize that. So I guess to get a little bit back to this social media topic before I have to let you go. Are you. How optimistic or pessimistic are you about an Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter? Do you think he is going. Going to successfully address all the issues that you've been pointing out with the virality of information and the fracturing of the media ecosystem and clickbait outrage? Do you think he's going to be good for this problem or neutral or bad?
- [45:19]
A
Well, first, it sounds like he's not actually going to buy it. I listened to my colleague Scott Galloway, who I think is incredibly insightful on all things about business and society and technology, and it sounds like, of course he made a bid, it was too high. Maybe he'd like to get a lower price. But the Twitter board is unlikely to say, okay, you screwed us once. Sure, you can have it left, so it's probably not even going to buy it. But as a thought exercise. So the way that I look at it is there are two things. There's content moderation and then there's everything else. Content moderation is. I mean, you have to do it. The question is, do you do a little more or a little less? And if Elon were to take over, he would do it less. You have to do some. Otherwise everything becomes porn and Nazis. And you can't, as a lot of early 1990s web platforms found, yet you can't have no moderation. You have to have some. So the only question is people on the left are horrified because Elon's going to do less content moderation. This is going to be horrible. He's going to lower it. People on the right like, yay, Elon's going to lower it. So that's half of. That's 90% of the discussion. It's 10% of the reality. Content moderation is actually not very important. The problem with the web, with the Internet, especially with social media, is not that there is bad stuff. It's not that someone can say that Biden and Pelosi are eating babies. The problem is that someone can say that and we don't have a government agency that will stop them. The problem is someone can say that and it can get out to millions of people within A day or two. Because right now, the incentives are the more of an asshole you are, and the more extreme what you say is, the more successful you are. And those incentives are insane. It's insane that this is our public square with these horrible, horrible incentives. So let's leave content moderation, because that's hopeless. Republicans and Democrats will never, ever agree. So unless One party gets 60 votes and 60 senators, nothing will go through Congress. Now let's move over. Let's look at everything that matters, which is the architecture, the dynamics. It's all about the architecture. That's what pushed us over the cliff. That's why everything is going haywire. It's the architecture. And there are a bunch of things about the architecture. One really important one, which I talked about in my essay, was verify user. You can't just walk up to a bank with a paper bag full of money and say, please open an account for John Q. Smith. You can't do that. Banks have duties to know their customers. And while I'm not saying the Internet should do that, I do think that giant platforms that affect our society, that have a huge impact on our politics. So if you have, I don't know, 10 million people on your platform, whatever, you have some number of people, you now are a systemically important platform that affects our democracy. And you can't just let a Russian agent open 1,000 accounts a day. Like, we're not going, you know, on a tiny platform. We're not going to stop you. Russian agents can do what they want on small platform, but if you're Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, you can't just let Russian agents open a thousand accounts. You have to actually say, not give me your driver's license. But you say, okay, you've opened an account, and that allows you to see what's going on. You can do that with a fake name. Do whatever you want. But if you want to post, if you want to be able to put things out there to get amplified, possibly to the moon, possibly to millions of people, if you want that privilege, then you have to go out and get verified. So we're going to kick you over to either a private company or a nonprofit, or maybe there's a network, because there's lots of different ways to verify identity. You could show driver's license. You could get networks of other people to vouch for you. There's a scheme right here at nyu. I'll find the name. An NYU grad student developed a scheme about how you can identify people and then you can erase the information so it's not held, but you've authenticated them and you pass that back to say Facebook to say, yep, he's been verified, he's old enough to use the platform. Because we got to keep 11 year olds off Instagram. This is insane that they can just get, they can do anything they want if they lie about their age. So user authentication and age verification, those are incredibly important. Elon might do that. He tweeted. He tweeted or whatever he said authenticate all humans. So that just means at least make sure there are no bots. But I think if you go a step further and say at some point in the process you have to show that you're a real person and that you're old enough to use the platform. If you just do that now, you can still use a fake name. You don't have to use your real identity. That solves a huge number of problems, gets rid of almost all the bots and it reduces some of the troll like behavior. So would Elon do that? Maybe. And that would be a huge, huge benefit. Then there's a lot of other stuff about reducing virality, which I don't think Elon Musk would do. I think he would use a very light touch. He would get rid of bots and he would do less content moderation. He would allow Trump back on. I think those are the three big things that he would do.
- [49:46]
B
Okay, so I have to let you go just final question on that. How do we get that? Because these companies always have an incentive to boost engagement because that's on the ad model. They're not going to self regulate. Are we going to have a heavy hand with the law and make them do these things? Are we going to get out in the streets and protest until they feel culturally pressured to?
- [50:08]
A
So when people think regulation, it's amazing what everybody thinks is a government agency that's going to look at what's posted, they decide, is this true? Ministry of Truth, like, no, no. What we mean by what I think, what I argue for is that there needs to be a regulator right now. There is no regulator. There is no government agency that has the purview here. There's the ftc, which can rule on antitrust issues, but antitrust issues is a very small piece of what's going on here. There's nothing, nobody that can really look at what's happening and say what you're doing is really damaging. Kids in the uk, they have that, it's called ofcom. I forget what that stands for. But in the UK there is a regulatory agency. And so Senator Bennett of Colorado has proposed a bill. First, we need a regulatory agency that has enough specialization, enough knowledge that they can actually look at the overall view and be the regulatory body. Now they have very severe limits by the First Amendment that they can't ever say yes, no, yes, no about posting. They're not going to make decisions about who gets to say what. Everything has to be viewpoint neutral. But there are certain things about the architecture that make us vulnerable on national security because it's an open book for Russian agents and anyone else who wants to make us hate each other. There's no age verification, which is, we didn't even talk about what's happening to teens in this conversation because there is no oversight body in the government that can make them do anything. So I think we need a government regulator that can look at it, decide what needs to be done and also what do we need to do before we even know what can be done? And so there are two bills. One is the Platform Accountability Transparency act written by Nate Priscilli at Stanford, that simply says there has to be a mechanism by which these companies share their data. It would go through the National Science Foundation. They would designate the process by which de identified data will come from the platforms through NSF or NSF certified researchers so that at least researchers can know what's going on. We have no idea what's happening. So our kids, the depression, suicide rates are doubling and we have no idea what they're doing. We have to rely on self report studies like how many hours of social media did you watch? We had these big studies that are with terrible data, but Instagram has the data. They know exactly what my daughter watched and then how she doesn't have Instagram, but they know exactly what a kid does and then they know how the kid's mood is in the minutes afterwards. They have that information. So we need platform accountability. We need to raise the age of, the age of Internet adulthood. It's now 13 and there's no enforcement. You can just lie. We need to raise it to 16 or 18 and have enforcement. So that's what we need to do. At the federal level, we probably will never get it because Congress is so dysfunctional and it's dysfunctional in part because social media has made it even more dysfunctional than it used to be. But the UK Parliament is actually doing some really good work. They have actually already passed an age appropriate design code. So that's going to force the platforms not to age verify. Unfortunately, but it is going to force them to just take account of the fact that you've got kids in your platform. So don't be paying them at midnight, don't be sending them alerts at midnight to check, oh, somebody liked your photo. So there'd be some little tweaks to make it more humane for kids. The state of California is considering passing almost the exact same UK code. So if UK and California pass it, the platforms are going to have to do it globally. They're not going to be able to have different platforms in Colorado and California. So there is a lot we can do to pressure the platforms. I think that there are a lot of lawsuits going ahead. A lot of girls in particular, they were not depressed and anxious before they got on Instagram, and then within a year they killed themselves. So there are a lot of lawsuits going on. Of parents. I know. I've spoken to some of the lawyers. Parents were suing Facebook Meta because of what. It's not because of what they. The key is, it's not because of what they saw. Because section 230 protects the platforms. It's section 230 has been very broadly construed by the courts to give them. You can't sue Facebook because your kids saw something on Facebook, but I think you can. Or Instagram. But I'm hopeful that these suits will succeed because it's not the thing they saw, it's the design. The design is unsafe at any speed for children. So there are a lot of ways to put pressure on the platforms through lawsuits, through state attorneys general, federal legislation, state legislation. And at some point, what we want is that the company will actually think, should we do this thing? Or if we're going to mess up kids even more, are we going to get caught? Are we going to get in trouble for it? Until now, the answer is always been who's going to catch us? What are they going to do to us, tell us to stop? So I am hopeful that it'll take a variety of kinds of pressure and eventually there will be pressure on the platforms and also for the employees. Hope the employees will start standing up saying, we shouldn't be doing this.
- [54:25]
B
I hope so, too. This is a big problem and we're going to be talking about this more on my podcast. Thank you so much, Jonathan Haidt. I will link to the article in the description and it's always a pleasure to talk to you.
- [54:36]
A
Thank you, Coleman. And be sure to link to your article, the thing you published in the Heterodox Academy.
- [54:40]
B
Yes.
- [54:41]
A
And if there are any listeners out there who are professors, please join Heterodox Academy. If there are any philanthropists out there who watch this, please consider supporting Heterodox Academy And Coleman. What a joy it is to see the waves you're making in the world. And you're growing up to be such a fine young man.
- [54:56]
B
Thank you, John.
- [54:57]
A
Take care.
- [55:01]
B
If you appreciate the work I do, the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website, colemanhughes. Org, and to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you'll never miss my new content. As always, thanks for your support.