Transcription
Hello and welcome to Gatekeeper. This episode will be in English since my very special guest is the famous, and in some circles, the infamous Professor Gad Saad.
Hello, Gad. How are you? Nice to meet you. I've been following your work for ages because you are one of the few people who brought humor to the anti-woke movement. Most people on our side are very grave and very worried about the end of civilization.
Your book is now in English. The original title in Hebrew was "The Parasitic Mind." You can now get it at a sale by Salam. I'll post a link under this video for access to this book.
Gad, this is the first time I've read a biographical sketch of yours. You grew up in Lebanon in the 70s, in the midst of a civil war, as part of a Jewish family. I want to take you back to something that I found very striking. I was thinking about Jewish students on American campuses now being kept out of libraries by pro-Hamas individuals chanting "from the river to the sea" without knowing which river and which sea.
Your impression begins here when you were six years old, I believe, and Nasser died. Can you say a word about that?
So, I was not quite six; I think I was just before turning six. It was 1970, and Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian Pan-Arabist president, had just died. The reason I mention that he was a Pan-Arabist is that he was very much loved and revered as a popular figure because he was trying to unite all the Arabs under one platform.
When he passed away in 1970, as often happens in the Middle East, people took to the streets with fervor. By the way, for your viewers who don't know, "Hamas" means "fervor" or "zeal." So, if you go on the street with "Hamas," that means you're doing it with zeal; it doesn't necessarily refer to the terrorist group.
People were proceeding down our street. We lived on a street called "Shes," which means "the street of the army" if you translate it into English. There were the usual kinds of lamentations and incantations, and amongst them were chants of "death to Jews."
I'm sitting there as a little boy, looking over the balcony, hearing "death to Jews," and I turn to my mother and say, "Why are they chanting death to Jews?" She's like, "Shut up, put your head down, don't look out too much."
That was at least the first clear memory I had of experiencing Jew hatred in the Middle East. In the book, I talk about several other incidents. It struck a chord with me. I remember when I was about the same age, we had cartoons in the afternoon on the single Israeli channel, which only broadcasted until 5:30, I believe. Then we got Jordanian TV.
I remember the Arab announcers and my parents explaining to me that they wanted to kill us. I wondered, "Why is that? Why would they want to kill us?" It seems like a common Jewish experience. I think Jews in Europe are currently experiencing the same thing, but now it's under the influence of this pathogen, the mind virus, which has welcomed anti-Semites.
You refer to this as a kind of illness in your book. How is it similar to a parasite?
Let me step back to explain how I came up with this parasitic framework. As an evolutionist, I often look to other animal behavior to make an evolutionary argument. If you're trying to argue that toy preferences are sex-specific—little boys prefer certain toys and little girls prefer others—there is an evolutionary and biological reason for that. You might study other animals to see if they exhibit the same patterns.
It turns out that rhesus monkeys, vervet monkeys, and chimpanzees have the exact same sex-specific preferences when it comes to toys. The idea of looking at other animals to understand something about human phenomena is an inherent feature of what an evolutionary scientist would do.
As I was trying to come up with a framework to explain such departures from reason, from common sense, from reality, I started reading the literature on parasitology. Parasitology is the study of the dynamics between hosts and parasites, the co-evolutionary arms race.
Many parasites don't go to the brain. For example, a tapeworm tries to parasitize your intestinal tract. But a neuropathogen is a particular type of parasite that needs to end up in the host's brain, altering its neuronal circuitry and subsequently its behavior to suit its reproductive interest.
For example, a wood cricket, when parasitized by a hairworm, detests water. It doesn't want anything to do with water. But when it is parasitized by this hairworm, because the hairworm needs the wood cricket to jump into water to complete its reproductive cycle, the wood cricket, once it is parasitized, jumps merrily into the water and drowns.
So then I had my epiphany. I said, "Aha! I'm going to use the new neuropathological framework to argue that human beings could not only be parasitized by actual physical brain worms, but they could be parasitized by a second class of brain worms." I call these "parasitic ideas" or "idea pathogens."
In that sense, I'm drawing an analogy between physical brain worms and ideological brain worms. It's like a gene and a meme.
Exactly right. Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene," argued that yes, genes propagate, but human beings are both biological and cultural animals. Therefore, we also have memetic propagation. Hence, he came up with the concept of a meme.
The difference between a meme and a parasite, at least an ideological parasite the way I'm speaking, is that a meme doesn't have an inherent valence to it. It could be positive, neutral, or negative. If you start humming a song and I overhear it, and later I walk away humming it, you have mimetically transferred what you were singing to me. That has no parasitic quality to it. I'm not jumping into the water to commit suicide.
What song?
Well, it depends. If it is the Beatles, then it is parasitic; we have to agree on that.
But anyway, that's why I did not use the memetic framework. I needed something more punchy, more zombified, and hence I went the neuropathological route.
I think the metaphor appeared early on. It's striking because computers were very rare and clumsy back then, but I think it was Clifford Geertz in "The Interpretation of Cultures" who said that human beings are like computers in the sense that they have hardware, but the hardware cannot work without software. The software is culture.
If you think of it in these terms, when the software goes wrong, when the software is infected, things seriously go wrong. We saw a culture derailed. If the goal is reproduction, what happened to Western culture with the parasitic minds is that it sort of lost its ability to preserve itself, hasn't it?
By the way, this might be the first time that I've been interviewed where someone makes a reference to Geertz. So, shout out to you, as we say. Well done! Clearly, you are an academic.
I mean, that is literally true what you said. Some of the parasitic ideas, never mind that they drive you off the abyss of infinite lunacy in a metaphorical sense, but they literally shut off your actual reproduction.
For example, in my next book, where I'm talking about suicidal empathy, the birther movement—"I am so empathetic, I am so kind, I am so compassionate that I'm unwilling to rape Mother Earth by doing the unthinkable, which is to reproduce and have my own children."
Because of my infinitely suicidal empathy, I will shut off the most fundamental impulse that I have in my life. There are two: the game of life is made up of two steps: survive and reproduce. If I survive all I want but never reproduce, the genes end with me.
So you are exactly right that many of these parasitic ideas are a true Darwinian dead end. They seem to erode the very idea of culture—not just a specific culture.
I'm thinking here of our Prime Minister's speech at the joint session of the two houses of Congress, where he said, "What is happening in Israel now with Hamas is not a clash between civilizations; it's a clash between civilization and barbarism."
It seems that the woke virus, like an autoimmune disease, is basically letting in barbarism into our own home, as if by some death instinct or impulse of self-hate.
Where does this motivation come from in Europe? When has the West lost its will to reproduce itself, not just its people?
Fantastic question. In "The Parasitic Mind," I discuss each of the parasitic ideas. For context for your viewers and listeners, postmodernism would be the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas because it purports that there are no objective truths other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths.
That framework allows me to argue that up is down, left is right, women can have penises, men can menstruate. That gives me the epistemological degrees of freedom to say anything I want.
But that's not the only parasitic idea. Cultural relativism—who are you to judge the beliefs and actions of other cultures? Don't be a cultural imperialist. Social constructivism—everything is a social construction; biology doesn't apply to human phenomena.
Each of these parasitic ideas was spawned on university campuses. It takes uniquely professors to come up with some of the dumbest ideas.
To answer your question, depending on which parasitic idea we're talking about, we can give it a different timestamp. Some of the idea pathogens started about a hundred years ago.
For example, you mentioned an anthropologist, a cultural anthropologist, Franz Boas, a Jewish cultural anthropologist, is the genesis of cultural relativism. He trained many of his students to argue that there's no such thing as a human universal, that there is no shared biological heritage.
That particular idea pathogen is almost 100 years old. Postmodernism is really 45, 50, 60 years ago, with all of the French postmodernists, if you don't mind me saying that—Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and all.
So it depends on which idea pathogen we're talking about, but we could certainly say that the festering we now have saw sort of explode has its roots about 50 to 100 years ago.
Now, one more point, and I'll hand the floor back to you. When I first started standing on top of the mountain and screaming, "Hey, we have a problem here," many people would respond to me, "Yeah, you're right that these are silly ideas, but they are reserved for some esoteric department in the humanities."
I would literally use the metaphor of an actual pathogen and say, "But you know the virus eventually breaks out of the lab." This was way before COVID.
So yes, you are Wuhan. You, American Department of Literature, you are Wuhan. They didn't have the capacity to play the slippery slope argument, to forecast, to extrapolate from where we are to where we would end up being.
I said to them, "Look, all of those people who are now being parasitized by this nonsense are going to become our leaders."
And it's called Justin Trudeau.
Let me insert a historical angle because Winston Churchill said that in perhaps in the two World Wars, Europe has spent its soul. Does that apply? Does that connect? Does that lead in some way to the 60s?
When I went to do my PhD, the original plan—which, as you know, when you do a PhD, you have a grand plan and then you narrow it down to one little segment of it—was to show that the rebellious youth of the 60s are the origin of all our troubles.
That started when I was very young because I was in love with this girl for too many years. Then came the idea of the 60s and free love, and I thought, "I'm not going to share her with anyone," not that she ever noticed me or anything, but already I didn't want to share her.
So I guess that grudge started there. But then you look at the 60s, and it all looks so inspiring—Woodstock, "Give peace a chance," and all that. But these students felt deep disappointment with the West.
They adopted French theory, which they did not completely understand, to express their disappointment with their own culture, and they became the teachers.
Is the context here a historical crisis that did not originate with academics but originated with the general experience of people after two World Wars?
No, in the sense that some of these parasitic ideas precede the 60s. The earliest ones are around the First World War. So I wouldn't say it's an either/or argument; there might be some validity to what you're saying.
By the way, as you were saying what you were saying, you said, "Oh, I didn't want to share her with anybody else." That reflex speaks to a fundamental insight from evolutionary theory.
The reason why men have evolved sexual territoriality is that men are very vested fathers within all of the animal kingdom. We are actually truly super dads compared to all other mammal species.
While we don't invest as much as women in the human context, we do invest heavily. We do much more than just have sex and reproduce. Therefore, it makes perfect evolutionary sense that if you're going to be a heavily invested father, you make sure that it's not the sexy Greek gardener who fathers your kids, and then you spend the next 18 years raising someone else's genes.
The cognitive system, the emotional system, the behavioral system that causes us to feel sexual territoriality is perfectly easily explainable from an evolutionary perspective.
So I'm here to tell you that it was perfectly natural for you.
Let me tell our viewers that this argument is made in detail in the book, and you also explain the difference between the kinds of things that make females of the human species jealous and the kinds of things that make males jealous.
You obviously, if you read between the lines of the question, already went head-on with the postmodern gender feminism. First of all, let me commend you for the courage because that is dangerous, is it not, in academia in Canada?
Oh my goodness! On any given day, there is a very long list of people coming after me. People have asked me, "What is the unique set of skills that you had that it had to be you?"
Of course, there are many elements to answering that question, one of which is, for better or worse, I'm genuinely a honey badger. In other words, I feel personally offended by nonsense.
I can't walk away from seeing someone espouse some lunatic thing on social media and just say, "Ah, forget it." Because if I do that, and maybe it's not good for my blood pressure, I would then feel at the end of the night, when I put my head on the pillow to sleep, that I was fraudulent.
I would know that there was an attack and a murder on truth that happened, and I looked away and pretended that I didn't hear the screams of truth when it was asking me to come and protect it.
I think one of the reasons why I literally go like this and I don't care about anybody coming after me is because I am my worst enemy. Meaning that I've got to live up to my own standards, and I'd rather make sure to sleep well at night.
I don't care about the feminists coming after me. It is sometimes fun, though, to get into these skirmishes of ideas— incredibly so.
But remember earlier you said, "You bring levity and humor into it." I do this for two reasons. It's a natural reflex for me; it's not a strategic thing.
But I do it really because it serves as a pressure relief for me. Otherwise, I would explode. If I don't make fun of some of this stupidity, then I would not be able to go on another day.
Secondly, and here's a bit more of the pragmatic element: dictators, as you know as a historian, are not afraid of the guys with the big muscles because those we can get rid of very quickly.
They're afraid of the guys with the sharp tongues because they are the ones who can really attack my standing. The pen is mightier than the sword is exactly referring to that.
So we need to get rid of the humorists because they're the ones who will cause the most havoc for us. I use satire and sarcasm for many reasons, one of which is that it's the perfect, as I explained in "The Parasitic Mind," it's like the surgeon's scalpel cutting through layers of warm butter.
And by the way, that's why I don't also get canceled. When I take one of my satirical positions, you don't know. Yes, the people who know me know that I am being satirical, but you can't cancel me because I will literally say, "I genuinely meant that. I really do believe that men can menstruate because I studied that at Oberlin College."
So I'm untouchable.
I found the singularity point.
That's wonderful! Also, you know, it's not just that the tongue is dangerous; humor is dangerous. As Kant observed, laughter undermines authority like nothing else.
They're so pompous. You know, there's an Israeli feminist group on Facebook, which I guess I'm not allowed on, but I can peek at, called "I Too Am a Feminist and I Don't Have a Sense of Humor." They are proud of it, and one wonders what kind of creed makes people proud of not having a sense of humor.
So, Gad, what has gone wrong with modern postmodern feminism?
Well, equity feminism is a great idea. It says, "Hey, there should be no institutional mechanisms by which men and women are not treated equally under the law, equally for hiring, and so on." By that definition of feminism, then probably you and I would put up our hands and say, "Hey, we're equity feminists; sign us up."
The problem then comes with radical feminists who argue, "In the service of pursuing that laudable goal, let us now promulgate the idea that there are no innate differences between men and women. It's all due to social construction."
That makes the ultimate goal of eradicating toxic masculinity and the patriarchy more palatable. If we promulgate that argument, it becomes easier for us to fight the patriarchy.
There are no biological differences. That's why in "The Parasitic Mind," I argue that each of these parasitic ideas begins from a noble place. It starts off with a noble reflex to solve some valuable objective.
But in the service of that objective, if I have to murder and rape truth, so be it. Whereas I argue, "No, I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I could pursue noble goals without ever ceding a millimeter of the truth in that service."
It was most striking to a lot of Israeli feminists who I think had a rude awakening in the aftermath of October 7 when feminists sided with Hamas rapists against the Israeli raped women.
Suddenly, I believe you turned into, "Wait, we need more evidence." Because being a Palestinian trumps being a woman.
Exactly! That's why all of those feminists are the wood cricket that jumps into the water. It can't be a more apt metaphor.
I'm going to use an example from Israel to demonstrate this point. Once I say the name of the person, you might even shake your head. Do you know where I'm going with this story?
Tal Nitan?
Do you know who that is?
I think I do.
Tal Nitan is a Jewish woman, probably part of the Facebook feminist group that you are not allowed to go into. I'm sure she is.
She was pursuing some doctoral work, I think she was at Hebrew University, if I'm not mistaken. You can check the reference in "The Parasitic Mind."
She wanted to do some research to demonstrate that the IDF engages in massive rampant rape of Palestinian women.
She's progressive because she knows how to engage in self-loathing. The only road to repentance is to suicidally hate yourself as much as possible.
Okay, great. So then she goes out and conducts the research, and she can't identify a single instance of documented rape by IDF soldiers on Palestinian women.
Now, you have a PhD; I have a PhD. We are taught that you go where the evidence leads you. If your hypothesis is falsified, then so be it.
But in the world of the parasitized monsters, your ideology could never be falsified. It doesn't adhere to Popper's falsification principle.
So when we found out that the IDF didn't rape anyone, did she alter her position that they are monsters? No, she just pivoted a bit.
Yeah, they are so horrifying in their othering of Palestinian women that the Palestinian women are no longer valid women worthy of being raped.
So they are so evil, the IDF, that they wouldn't rape the women. If she had uncovered rape, it would prove that the IDF is disastrous. If she uncovers no rapes, it in no way affects the fact that the IDF are terrible monsters.
This is not a feminist at Oberlin College who learned that Hamas is freedom fighters. This is Tal Nitan, a Jewish woman at Hebrew University.
The parasites know no bounds.
Yes, but a professor or a PhD candidate at Hebrew University needs a recommendation from Oberlin College or somewhere else in America.
So they write to produce. When I was a young professor and I was very passionate about my anti-postmodernism, I came to an older professor and said, "This is horrible. A whole department is infested with this, and they're all so ideological."
He said, "They're not ideological at all; they just have to publish and know that this is the mood."
We are completely subservient to the American Academy. Even if you are a professor of Hebrew literature, believe it or not, you need to publish in English in America in order to be promoted.
What happened in America is unbelievable. I was there at what I think was the very last moment where you could still speak some of the truth.
I had to leave class and take independent studies because I was... because professors were... one professor walked out in the middle of what I was saying, and he just walked out of the room.
Do you remember what you were saying?
Yeah, I was... I'll say for my department at Rutgers University, the history department, that he got reprimanded because, you know, I'm a teacher; you're a teacher. You don't label a student as a persona non grata.
You just don't, even if something they said is outrageous. You do not just turn your back and go. I was stunned.
It's a foreign country, but I learned my lesson, and then I did independent studies, and that went very well.
But I experienced the same thing as you because when I started doing this, they thought this is the margin of some godforsaken departments of literature and Israeli history, and it became so incredibly influential.
Now I want to get to some... I've argued with you many times in my head, Gad, so now I'm going to let you enter into my internal dialogue with you and see if you know your lines.
So sit tight. It's not just you because my argument, I guess, with the critics of wokeness in there are many generations, they label this as cultural Marxism.
The logic is obvious because Marxism taught you that there are oppressors and the oppressed, and the terms were economic. This was then shifted to identity, and now the same model applies to women, to blacks, to invented categories from the American census, such as Hispanic Americans and others.
What I think is missing in all this is that the American left has also radical individualistic roots.
Because I studied classic American ideas in my PhD, I then read Judith Butler. "Read" is not a good word; I struggled through the ointment of Judith Butler's horrible, arrogant prose because she says simple things.
If you blow them up behind this impenetrable jargon, then you seem very deep. It's not deep, but it's also not really Marxist.
You read this and you say, "I've seen this in a John Wayne movie." That's the self-made man, now the self-made transgendered individual.
The whole logic is only, "I will decide who I am." If you are trained in American thought, then you read Emerson and you say, "Emerson said that the self is always a work in progress."
This is what these people are repeating. Then you say, "Wait a minute," and you go back to France. Foucault is also not a Marxist. Foucault is a Nietzschean.
What Foucault is striving for is not class solidarity in any form. When you take this back to identity politics, one of my first brilliant insights—Christina Hoff Sommers—she's absolutely brilliant in her book "Who Stole Feminism?"
That was in the 90s. She said, "When I came to a conference of the National Association of Gender Studies professors in the 80s, we had an agenda. We were supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and other things. When I came back in the 90s, the groups kept fragmenting."
I'm improvising, but it's very close to what she said: "The group of overweight Jewish women whose sexual identity was in transit split into the allergic and the non-allergic, and the allergic demanded that no one come to the conference with dry-cleaned clothes because it makes them sneeze."
So you're saying it's a misnomer to use the term cultural Marxism, which is a collectivist term, on these fragmentations into unitary identities?
Did I summarize this properly?
Close. I'm less belligerent, and I would say that cultural Marxism is half the story. The other story is when it meets American individualism.
Why are these groups fragmenting? They are fragmenting because no one will define me from the outside. This is why the melting pot is wrong.
This is why feminism is white, and we now need black feminism. This is why black feminism is going to split into straight and gay.
So, Gad, the floor is yours.
That was a very nice leading. By the way, just to set the record straight, I don't use the term. I would challenge you to find a writing where I use the term cultural Marxism. I don't use it.
In a sense, I'm supporting your position, although I do believe that Marxism is a parasitic idea. So I'm not saying that wokeism is just a manifestation of cultural Marxism.
In that sense, I agree with you. But it is certainly the case that Marxism is completely parasitic. As a matter of fact, in my forthcoming book on suicidal empathy, I have a chapter—it's still in flux, so it might change the organization—but I have a whole chapter on parasitic taxation, which comes with the social welfare state.
It really is rooted in empathy. Because we are so empathetic, us, the benevolent, magnanimous government, it only makes sense that we take from the super productive and rich and redistribute that because we should all be equal.
There is a parasitic element because I am sucking off all of your labor and talent to redistribute it as I see fit.
By the way, remember earlier I was saying that your reflex about feeling sexually territorial was perfectly evolutionary? I want to link what we said earlier to the sociopolitical economic system and human nature.
E.O. Wilson—are you familiar with E.O. Wilson?
No.
E.O. Wilson just recently passed away, and I regret that we never got a chance to know each other. He was arguably one of the most famous evolutionary scientists in the 20th century. By training, he's an entomologist, an insect scientist, specifically specializing in social ants.
He wrote a very influential book that was kind of a precursor to evolutionary psychology called "Sociobiology," where you apply biology to study social behavior across animals, including humans.
He was part of the early culture wars because his colleagues at Harvard, who were themselves completely evolutionist, did not accept the fact that you could apply evolutionary theory to explain human behavior because that would be contrary to their Marxist philosophy.
They were already parasitized. The reason I'm saying this long-winded story is that when E.O. Wilson was asked, "Professor Wilson, what are your views on socialism and communism?" he paused and said, "Great idea, wrong species."
It's one of the most beautiful quotes I've ever heard with very few words. Social ants are communistic. There is a reproductive queen, a class of warrior ants, and a class of worker ants that are completely and utterly indistinguishable from each other.
Some species have a phylogenetic history whereby they genuinely have evolved communism as the optimal pathway. Humans are not communistic. Some of us are taller, shorter, smarter, harder working, more ambitious, less ambitious, better looking, less better looking.
To impose a sociopolitical economic model that is perfectly incongruent with human nature doesn't take fancy professors to tell you that it will always fail, as history has shown repeatedly in every culture where it's been tried.
How does nationalism fit into that discussion? Because there is a communal social side to human beings, which I think radical individualism fails to explain.
If you follow the path of Hobbes and Freud, you cannot explain why people would sacrifice their lives for something larger than themselves.
Why do ants do?
Yes, great question. There are two ways to answer that. In terms of the reflex for in-group/out-group thinking, nationalism will be one example. We are the nation, and there's the outside enemy. That coalitional psychology is an indelible part of the architecture of the human mind.
Seeing the world as blue team and red team is a fundamental feature of our psychology. As a matter of fact, there are many studies that demonstrate that very early, we start attributing people as being part of our in-group or out-group.
So there is an evolutionary argument to be made for why we have that reflex to create a delineation between us and them. Regarding your question of why I would jump into a river to save my co-religionist or friend, there are two different mechanisms.
In my earlier books, my evolutionary psychology books, I argue that there are four fundamental Darwinian modules that drive much of our purposeful behavior.
There is stuff related to survival. For example, we've evolved gustatory preferences to prefer fatty foods because that was an adaptation to caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty.
So that's survival. The second one is related to reproduction. Remember earlier I said there are two steps in the game of life: survive and then reproduce.
In all cultures, men are outlandishly more likely to be Ferrari owners, even though there are many billionaire women who could afford Ferraris. The Ferrari becomes a modern instantiation of peacocking, of sexual signaling that is desired by women.
That's why men buy that; they know they are responding to a preference that women have. So number one is survival, number two is reproduction.
The next two are going to answer your question. Kin selection is the mechanism that explains why I would jump into a river to save three of my children.
Darwin had argued that selection operates at the level of the organism. But if that were true, then there would never be the evolutionary pressures for me to sacrifice my life to save three of my children.
If I recognize that I simply am a vehicle of my genes, then from an evolutionary calculus of the gene, that makes perfect evolutionary sense.
Each of my children, on average, shares 50% of their genes with me. Therefore, even if I were to cease to exist, if I save the packet, which would amount to more than three children, then there would be evolutionary pressures for kin altruism to arise.
So that's another explanation. But then that doesn't explain why I would jump into the river to save Gadi. Gadi is not my child; Gadi is not my father.
There is no kin relationship between Gad and me, unless we say the Jewish people, right? But I mean literally, in a strict genetic relatedness context.
The reason why I do that is because of the fourth module, which is reciprocal altruism or reciprocity. In a social species, you have to evolve the mechanisms of tit for tat.
Some have argued that that originated as a solution to caloric uncertainty. We are all going around in the African savannah; we are all likely to die of starvation.
Why don't we strike a deal? So that when we bring down the 3,000 game, I will share it with your family on the condition that when we are in lean times, you will reciprocate and share it with me, even though we're not biologically linked.
That's why I argue many rituals of friendship, from a strict economic perspective, we don't have to pursue them.
If I invite you for your birthday and pay $50, and then you reciprocate and pay me $50 when it's my birthday, why don't we, from a classical economics University of Chicago model, stop the charade?
We both don't invite each other, and we'll be at the same final endpoint. No, the reason why we do it is that ritual oils our affiliation; it oils our bonds of reciprocity.
So that would explain why we would jump into the river to save our co-nationalists and so on.
Very interesting.
Let me ask you a follow-up question on that about empathy. Empathy is a strange thing, and it's not even limited to human beings. We feel empathy for a puppy in distress.
This is how I learned. I used to think that I liked nature documentaries because I saw National Geographic and not National Geographic Wild.
When I saw National Geographic Wild, I remember seeing a few lions tear apart a baby elephant. It took an awful lot of time. I kept switching to other channels until it was over.
I was wondering, "Why am I so distressed by this? It's not even a person." I don't know; it's an elephant in Africa that is being torn apart by lions.
Why do I feel this empathy? I feel distress, not just empathy.
Earlier this morning, I was working on a section where I was working on exactly what you just asked. I could literally pull it out.
I was working on a section, and you're going to find this interesting. Peter Singer, the philosopher, wrote a book in the early 80s about increasing the circle of whom you include in that circle so that you feel affiliation for them.
His point being, as an animal activist, we should incorporate, to your question, animals within that circle.
Does he mention the Scottish Enlightenment?
I'm not sure if he does in that particular book.
Yeah, I'll put an asterisk and add after, but please go on.
So, by the way, many years ago, he came on my show, and we had a really interesting conversation about all sorts of things related to philosophy, but specifically...
I set myself up. I asked him, "Given the fact that I am an incredible animal lover, am I hypocritical that I eat meat?"
Now, I actually don't think it's hypocritical, but I wanted to ask him, and he sort of paused. If I remember correctly, his answer was, "Yes."
That's it.
But anyway, the reason I'm telling you that I was writing about it today is that as I was thinking about exactly the types of scenarios of, you know, why do we... why can't I also not see the zebra being eaten alive and so on?
I had this hypothesis. I said, "You know what? I bet you that my empathy changes as a function of how far removed an animal is from me in the evolutionary tree of life."
Meaning that I will feel more empathy towards an ape than I will towards a turtle because the turtle, the common ancestor with the turtle, diverged from us way earlier in the tree of life.
I thought, "You know what? I should probably conduct a study to test this."
Then I go on to check, and just like two years ago, the exact same study was published in a nature journal.
On the one hand, you get pissed, but that's how science works. People come up earlier than you with the great idea that you thought you had.
But it still felt good that, you know, independently, I feel vindicated because you feel vindicated that that brilliant insight that you had.
By the way, I also had that insight—not insight, but that realization when I was working on my latest book, the previous book on happiness.
You know, of course, you can't not talk about the ancient Greeks when you're talking about how to live the good life and so on.
I would get some brilliant insight and be sort of looking at myself in the mirror, "My goodness, are you a brilliant guy?"
Then I go to check, and I go, "Goddammit, Epictetus already said this 2,000 years ago. I'm an idiot."
Just slightly late.
Slightly.
You know, academia has a nice way to keep you grounded in that. Yes, of course, you come up at times with your own insights, but there are a lot of very people that have traversed the intellectual landscape before you.
So you really have to be careful before you think that you came up with an original thought.
But to answer your question of why we feel that, there are several arguments for that.
There’s a distinction in evolutionary theory between something called an adaptation. An adaptation is something that confers survival or mating advantage to you.
An exaptation is a byproduct of an evolutionary process. Our skeletal system is the color that it is not because it is advantageous for it to be that color, but it was just a path-dependent engineering reality because of other things that happened.
That's the color that the... so it's a byproduct; it piggybacks.
One argument would be that you're directing the empathy toward the hapless baby elephant is just the byproduct of the empathy system that evolved to keep us well-regulated within human sociality.
That's why empathy evolves; that's the adaptive argument. But then it is exapted to the baby elephant in the way that you felt it.
I'll just add one more bit of doubt to the theory that both you and someone in the science journal developed about animals having more empathy for animals the more similar they are to us.
Because abused children, I would argue, based on other... it interested me very much for a long time because it changed psychoanalytic theory.
The study of children who had horrible childhoods, many of them love animals because they are not like human beings.
Because they are distant from them, so they can find empathy and a sense of communality with something outside the species because they were traumatized within the species.
Very interesting.
So, and some of what we now know... I wish I knew more medicine or more of the science of medicine because now we know that the restructuring of the brain—abused children have the part of the brain where empathy resides is smaller and less developed.
We should have another conversation, Gad, one day because the meeting of the study of ideas and evolutionary theory is, I think, one of the most fruitful and hopeful developments in science.
Because I think that... I don't know; academia is... I'm not sure it could be reformed anymore because of the tenure track system and all the rest of it.
Because it produces, also speaking of evolution, bad character. What happens in academia is that the reward for conformism is just so huge that when an Einstein comes along, he has to do it outside the university.
When a Freud comes along, he has to do it outside the university or he will be crushed.
Then Freud became a dictator in his own little cult, which you just flattened, by the way, with "The Egotistic Gene."
Because Freud's whole psychology says that we are pleasure-seeking, and we are not. If you seek survival, then pleasure is... I mean, this is what makes me more hopeful.
Egotism is just a false description of human motivation.
What's your view on that? Are we altruistic, or are we egotistic, or is it just the genes and not us?
Yeah, very amazing question. First, if I can give you a hint of optimism because you said, "I think that academia is dead."
I think that there are institutions, many of which are contacting me, that are trying to solve that problem. So I wouldn't... to use the old term, I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I think that there are problems in academia, but there is now a growing movement—it's still small, but there's a growing movement of either existing institutions that are trying to autocorrect or new institutions.
Believe me, I'm at the forefront of that because they're all reaching out to me for obvious reasons. So please don't give up hope on academia. We still need you.
Regarding the issue of, you know, are we inherently egotistic or altruistic? Here, I'm speaking to a fellow Jew and an Israeli. You'll be happy to hear me quote Maimonides.
In my first book, this is almost 20 years ago now, in "The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption," I talk about altruism and philanthropy—really grand, pious generosity.
I talk about Maimonides discussing the eight levels of tzedakah. Now, Maimonides did not call himself an evolutionary psychologist, but he was an evolutionary psychologist because he was a product of evolution.
He's a Darwinian being, so he has access to those evolutionary insights. What he basically said—you'll see in a second how I'm going to link it back to your question—is that one of the highest levels of tzedakah, of piety and so on, is when the recipient of the altruistic act and the altruist don't know of each other's identity.
That is very pure because then, I mean, he didn't use these words, but I'm using it in my language because then you can't get the social signaling rewards associated.
Even when you say at Hebrew University, "You don't write; it's the anonymous cancer center." It's the Rubenstein Cancer Center; it's the Gadi Cancer Center.
Even though you are a philanthropist, boy, are you still getting a lot of social rewards for that, you know, pure philanthropy.
So, you know, it's a philosophical discussion whether there is absolute pure altruism that is fully detached from any ulterior motives.
My feeling would be, along with Maimonides, that that level of piety is very rare. Even when I am jumping into the river to save my children, ultimately, I'm doing it for very clear evolutionary reasons.
So now, let me, in closing, take the ultimate risk with you, Gad, and ask about evolution.
I've always had doubts about the mathematical validity in terms of chance and combinations. I don't know the term in Hebrew, combinatorics—the science of combinatorics.
If the short time that human beings have evolved was enough to account for all the coincidences of gene mutations filtered through all the changes in the environment to produce this unbelievably sophisticated structure.
I kept these doubts to myself because, you know, in civilized circles, you don't say these things.
But then something came to my aid when it was discovered—I know too little about it—two things, basically. One is that the brain is a self-structuring organism.
The way that we are made is also... there is intention—not necessarily ours. We may not have access to this intention in structuring our own neural structure.
Then that trauma gets written into the genes somehow. I don't know enough about that. You probably know more than me, and maybe what I said is complete rubbish.
If so, please correct me.
So let me first mention the trauma part. That comes... So before Darwin, the standing accepted evolutionary theory was called Lamarckism.
After Lamarck, it was called the theory of acquired traits. The reason why giraffes have long necks is that they have to reach further and further up, so that within they stretch.
The very easy counter-argument against that is if it is the case that within the lifespan of the organism, changes in its life are passed down, then Jewish children should be born already circumcised.
That's not how genetic transfer happens. But recently, there is some revival of Lamarckian theory to your point about trauma.
This is called the Dutch famine studies—the most famous one—where you have children in World War II or, sorry, grandparents who had gone through severe famine in World War II.
Somehow, the trauma that they experienced—not psychological trauma, I mean literal famine, physiological trauma—has been passed down epigenetically to their ancestors.
So there is some new hint that it's not only through direct genetic transference that some of these mechanisms happen.
So that's just answering that. To your earlier question about mathematically, it is impossible. We could get into all the technical details.
The answer is absolutely. That's not a very compelling argument, with all due respect, because the time scale that it takes for these things to happen can fully capture that.
Now, any alternative that people present usually when from this side of the mouth they say combinatorially it is impossible, then from this side of the mouth, the next one—and I'm not saying that's what you're saying—is, "That's why, therefore, it must be an intelligent designer who is somewhere in the sky."
Oh, I see him; he's right there by the cloud.
It is very, very difficult to take seriously the argument that a theory that has now been validated across 30 trillion ways since Darwin—I mean, literally, there is less evidence for gravity than there is evidence for the theory of evolution.
That theory is on shaky grounds, but there is a guy that looks like Moses that is an exquisite designer of the 300,000 species of beetles.
That's a more compelling argument.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with it, but doubts about one argument do not mean that you adopt another one.
I personally am not religious, but my... but there is the strand of evolution that is completely materialistic—Steven Pinker style.
I think is seriously missing something. I had this argument with my dentist, who said that we have these tubes in our teeth, and when they're hot or cold, we experience that as pain.
I said, "What do you mean, it is pain?" He said, "No, you just experience it as pain."
Then I asked, "Well, who is experiencing it?" You know where that one goes.
All the way back to...
You have a lot more... you have a much more interesting dentist than I do. I need to go to your dentist.
My dentist has retired because he's so smart that he invented something in dentistry which enabled him to stop working and just receive passive income from here to eternity.
Wow! You should meet him if you're interested in dentistry.
Mostly.
And so, to conclude, let me, for the enjoyment of our listeners, because you mentioned Lamarckian evolution, I don't teach biology, but I do teach in the history of ideas Spencerian evolution, which, unlike Darwin, is theological because it leads to more and more sophisticated beings.
William James, you probably know this, used to mock Herbert Spencer to his students, and he described Herbert Spencer's whole theory in one sentence.
I'll read it now: "Evolution is a change from a nowish to a somehowish and in general talkable, not all alike, by continuous stick-together-rations and something else-ifications."
Once you study that description, it's actually true because the whole view of Spencer is that things become more specific and need to cooperate.
So you go from one amoeba to the whole of the economy; there's only one principle, and it was once compelling.
It's striking in my profession that no one now remembers Herbert Spencer except antiquarians.
Gad, this conversation was everything I expected it to be and more. As you now know, I've been speaking to you for a while; you just didn't hear it.
It's a pleasure to have a more reciprocal dialogue with you than I'm generally used to.
In conclusion, this is Gad's new book in Hebrew. This is an important cultural war, and it's very good for your genetic survival.
So let your egotistic genes get a copy of this book in Hebrew.
Thanks very much; it was a pleasure.
Thank you, Gadi. Cheers!