Dawkins vs Peterson: Memes & Archetypes | Alex O’Connor Moderates | EP 491

[Music] I had the opportunity today to engage in a long-awaited discussion with Dr. Richard Dawkins and Alex O'Conner, and we took the opportunity to explore things we agree about and things we disagree about in a manner that I think was very productive. Join us for [Music]. You said that you were a cultural Christian, but what did you mean by that? "Virtually nothing," Dr. Peterson replied. "You're drunk on symbols. What I care about is the truth value. I see no truth value in the claims of Christianity: the Virgin birth, the resurrection. Do you believe in

any of those from a metaphorical perspective?" "Any culture that doesn't hold the image of the woman and infant sacred dies." "Well, let's go back to what you said earlier, which I was very interested in. You implied there's no difference between whether the text is divinely inspired or whether it evolved." "Well, it's the same thing if it's fundamentally reflective of the logos or order, and I think it is. I think that Jordan prioritizes myth, and I prioritize fact. I'm not interested in dragons; I'm interested in reality. But my sense is that those two pathways have to

unify. Now, it's not like I know how to rectify that. Do you think that that is something worth exploring further? Is that very interesting?" [Music] "Yes, I think our first point of contact, in the spirit of finding those overlapping circles of interest between the two of you, will be the similarities—if there are any—between the concept of a meme and the concept of an archetype. So, Professor Dawkins, perhaps you can begin by telling us: what is a meme?" "A meme is a virus of the mind. So it's something that spreads because it spreads; it's something that

spreads by imitation, as I understand it. An archetype is quite different from that because an archetype is something which all humans have as a virtue of being human—something that’s built in. So it's not something that spreads as an epidemic; it's something that we all have. Anyway, now I suppose that it could turn into a meme, but I would think it would be muddying the waters to even say that there’s something very much in common between an archetype and a meme. Memes are not embedded into the psychology of people; no, they arise. They're things like the

backwards baseball hat, which is not an archetype. I mean, it's something that becomes fashionable and spreads as an epidemic around the population, which is very different from an archetype, which is sort of built in." "Yes, I've heard you in the past, Dr. Peterson, say that a meme is very similar, if not almost identical, to an archetype—almost as if you kept pushing the idea of what a meme is, you might end up with an archetype." "Well, I think maybe the appropriate way of tying the two ideas together, given what Dr. Dawkins just said, is to notice

the fact that something spreads because it catches, right? And so things catch because they have an emotional resonance, and so they attract people's interest in an exploratory manner. That'd be one way of thinking about it. That would be attraction on the positive emotion side, or they attract them on the negative emotion side. And so that would loop the idea of the catchiness of an idea—a meme, let's say—with the more underlying motivational structures. And as the idea is more related to the action of underlying biological motivational structures, it becomes more and more an expression of something

that's instinctual and archetypal. Like Jung defined an archetype essentially as something like the manifestation of an instinct in image and then also in behavior. So the deepest level is something like the instinct, and that would be motivational or emotional drive. Then there's a manifestation of that in imagination and behavior, and it's more culturally constructed there. And you could also imagine that there are depths of these ideas—the baseball cap idea, for example—that would be something that's manifesting itself at a fairly shallow level. But there's a reason that the backwards baseball hat caught on, you know? It

speaks of the moment for whatever reason, and it's linked to biology through the fact that it captures interest for some reason. So perhaps something like the archetype being a more fundamental psychological concept that memes can then play upon—the backwards cap hatches on." "Well, that seems implausible to me, but the idea that the archetype could be a reason why some memes spread—that seems to me to be plausible if you believe in archetypes at all." "Yeah, but you prefer to think of memes—or you do think of memes—as you refer to them as a virus." "Yes, it doesn't

have to have a negative spreadability, which is a salient point. And if chiming in with an archetype is something that’s a reason why they might spread, then I could go with that." "Yeah, and presumably archetypes don't act in the same way—they don't spread through cultures; they don't sort of grow up and die in individual generations. They're much more foundational than that." "I think you have to think about it hierarchically, know that there's something in the structure that would make it self-manifest as an archetype. There’s something that's foundational and deep that wouldn’t change any faster, in

a sense, than the species itself changes. But then there would be efflorescences of that idea that would be less permanent, as they were more attuned to the specifics of the time." "So, and that’s not saying anything..." Different really than saying that there are ideas that make themselves manifest at different levels of depth, which is also a complex thing. Like, it's not that easy to specify what makes an idea deep, which makes it more archetypal, and what makes it transient and trivial. There's a relationship between such ideas; there's no idea so trivial that it doesn't touch

the depths because no one would care about it, right? So, but archetypal ideas do have that capacity to spread virally and to rise and fall. You see that; I think you see that in the history of religious ideas. Now, religious ideas can be very catchy because otherwise they wouldn't spread. Now, there is variation in them, like there is in languages, but there is also something that's core that makes them identifiable, let's say, as religious ideas rather than as any other sort of idea. I mean, one of the things I was really interested about — I

sent you an email at one time asking you if you had read Mircea Eliade, especially *The Sacred and the Profane* — but he also has a three-book series called *A History of Religious Ideas*, and I really like *A History of Religious Ideas*. It's a great book, and one of the things it does is analyze a particular widespread religious motif, which is the battle between the gods in heaven. You see this idea in many cultures, and each god is the expression of a motive, perception, or a motive being. What you see happening in a multitude of

cultures is that there are many ways of seeing the world and acting in it that are metamorphosed into something divine. As cultures mingle and mix, their gods compete in the space of the imagination, and something like a hierarchy forms; that's the emergence of something like monotheism. So we've been talking a little bit about the concept of a meme. I think it would be strange to be suspicious of the idea that memes are a thing that do exist and transmit, but there might be more room for suspicion about this concept of the archetype. I was wondering,

Professor Dawkins, what you think about the concept of archetypes in general. Well, for example, if we take the idea of the gods competing with each other, I take it as a proper archetype because it's present in all cultures. I presume you mean it's something that's built in genetically; ultimately, I suppose that there's something about our brains that makes different cultures invent the same kinds of religious symbols. The battle between gods is one of them, and there might be others. It's not that convincing; I mean, such an obvious thing, because we have human battles, and therefore

an idea of battles between gods would not be that implausible. So it doesn't strike me as a very penetrating observation. Well, I think the thing that's interesting about it, the thing that's been interesting to me about it, is to start to understand the nature of the universal themes and how they're expressed in stories. I mean, one of the things I wanted to explore with you, because I think this is an idea that's at the core of the cultural conflict, is that the postmodern types seem to have stumbled onto something which I actually think is true.

They're not the only discipline that's come to this realization because you can see it emerging in neuroscience and in AI and in robotics as well—that we see the world of facts through something that, when described, is a story. Because we have to prioritize our perceptions, we have to prioritize facts, and as far as I can tell, a story is a verbal account of how our perceptions and the facts that we encounter are prioritized. So, for example, when you go see a movie, the movie has a hero, and what the writers do is show you how

the hero prioritizes his perceptions, what he attends to, and how he acts, and you derive from that the story of his life and his ethic. The idea that we have a story, that we have to organize our perceptions in priority, and that the description of that organization is a story—that's a very revolutionary idea. I think the postmodernists got that right, and I think that's why we have a culture war going on, at least in part, is because the idea that we see the world through a story, or that a story is a description of the

structure through which we see the world, I think that's accurate, because we have to prioritize our perceptions. So that's a tricky problem. Well, I would prioritize my perceptions like this: the facts that I care about are the facts that are true and have evidence going for them, and I'm not that interested in symbols. I think, Dr. Peterson, you're drunk on symbols. Yes, you mentioned it; I've heard your comment. Yes. I mean, for example, I've counted up in your book, *We Who Wrestle with God*, the number of references to Cain. There are 356 references to Cain

in the book and 20 references to the descendants of Cain. You're obsessed with Cain because Cain is symbolic of evil—all the evil in the world you more or less blame on Cain. This is Cain; I mean, you don't believe Cain actually existed, I presume. Since I joined forces with Daily Wire Plus, we've built a comprehensive collection of premium... Content: Get the entire collection of "Mastering Life." Strengthen your relationship with my series "Marriage," in the series on masculinity, discover your purpose, envision your destiny, and develop a vision for your own life. You need to do that!

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through time—"Foundations of the West." The work I'm doing with The Daily Wire brings the spirit of adventure forward. Join us on Daily Wire Plus today! Well, I think of Cain as well. Do you believe Cain existed? I think the pattern that Cain represents is an eternal pattern and so it's a higher level of existence that's different. I realize that there are types who exist, and they—well, yeah, they are Cain types. Cain himself, I mean, you give the game away when you say in your book that Cain and Abel were the first humans to be born

in the natural way. Now, that betrays you as, as it were, pretending. You think they really existed because you wouldn't have said they were born in a natural way unless you were muddling up facts with symbols there, because you don't think that Cain and Abel existed. Well, I don't. What do I think about Cain and Abel? I said I think the pattern that they represent always exists. Always exists. Different matter: a pattern that they represent—the conflict between brothers, the rivalry between brothers—this is a fundamental pattern. Yes, it's something that's there, but I care about facts.

I mean, did they exist or did they not exist? Well, I can imagine a situation where, when the story was originated, it referred to two actual brothers. But as the stories propagated across time, as they mutate, as they adapt, let's say to the structure of human memory, they deepen and they become broader. And so then they become emblematic not only of the pattern of conflict that might characterize the original two brothers that the story was about, but about the conflict between brothers as such and then the more fundamental levels of conflict that exist within human

beings, which is what you see in more sophisticated literature. It's like the biblical accounts speak of fact in a factual manner upon occasion, but the biblical accounts also speak poetically and metaphorically and allegorically. People who are sophisticated in biblical analysis have known this for centuries. The biblical literalists generally suffer from the problem that they don't even know what it means to be a literalist. There are lots of unsophisticated ways of approaching a text. Okay, let's see what Professor Dawkins thinks about that. Well, I suppose I'm a literalist. I mean, you give the game away when

you say Cain and Abel were the first humans to be born in a natural way. Well, I'm speaking allegorically there within the confines of the text. I mean, what I meant by that was that the way the story lays itself out is that Adam and Eve are created by God. And so they're not emblematic of the pattern of human beings that exist in fallen history. Within the confines of the text, the first two people who are genuine—who aren't creations of the Divine—are Cain and Abel. And so for me, they are emblematic of the patterns of

conflict that rip people apart in the world of history, in the world of normal history. Professor Dawkins, I know you take particular umbrage with that statement that Cain and Abel were the first normally born human beings, but I think if I understand Dr. Peterson correctly, there are things that can be sort of true within a story. It's true that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street, and as far as I understand, that's maybe what you mean by the truth in the matter of Cain and Abel being the first naturally born internal. Well, in the context

of the story, they're the first two spirits or patterns. You could think of patterns of perception and action that characterize human existence in the fallen world, right? So they're emblematic of what happens in history outside of the whatever is meant by the pre-existent paradise. At the same time, you must know—I know this comes up all of the time—when somebody says, "But did Cain and Abel really exist?" And I know that you want to say that the story—which I think is a silly question—it's not a trivial question because you can answer yes and you can answer

no. You can say, "Well, there was no such specific person as Raskolnikov," but it's not a helpful question because the reason that Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" is a masterpiece is that Raskolnikov was everywhere in Russia when Dostoevsky wrote "Crime and Punishment." And so Raskolnikov is hyperreal, not real. But to be clear, is that how you feel about Cain and Abel? That is to say, an identifiable hyperreal Homo sapiens called Cain? It's more, in a sense, it's irrelevant to me because even if they were real—like we don't know anything about them. "Weren't real, of course they

weren't real. Well, like I said, it could have been the case that when the story originated, way back when it originated, the first people that were described by the first person who generated the seeds of the Cain and Abel story were referring to actual people. But it doesn't matter because the text is being compressed and modified over a vast span of time, and it’s accrued all sorts of meanings that certainly weren't part and parcel of whatever the original story was. Take the point Alex was making. Within the confines of the story, Dosi was a great

writer. What makes you think the writers of Genesis were great writers? I mean, who were they? We don’t know anything about them. Well, I think they were great writers because I think I understand the patterning of the stories and what it points to. I think, for example, that Cain and Abel are emblematic of two opposed patterns of adaptation to the world, which is brilliant. It's almost brilliant beyond imagining, especially because the story is so insanely compressed. It’s certainly evident to me as a clinician that the patterns portrayed in the story of Cain and Abel play

themselves out in the real world continually and terribly. You think the author of that story in Genesis was a literary genius? I think that there's a spirit of literary genius at work across millennia, crafting that story so that it has almost an infinite depth. How that relates to the original author or sequential authors, I don't know, because it's lost in the seeds of time; it's lost in history. So the story evolved, you’re saying? The story, like a meme? Yes, interesting. It evolved to match the contours of human memory. That’s exactly it. These stories have part

of their archetypal nature, so they have an emotional and motivational expression, but as they propagate across time, they also evolve so they're maximally memorable. And they're maximally memorable for a biological reason. Well, that's very interesting. If they really did evolve over time—if you could actually trace successive manuscripts—you can’t do that. I mean, there are presumably a couple of Hebrew manuscripts and the Greek one. And what do you mean when you say—? Well, I would say you can see that in the compilation of the biblical texts because one of the things that you see evolve, you

know, you criticized the biblical text at one point. Correct me if I’ve got this wrong, because I don't want to get this wrong. You said that there isn't anything in the biblical text that constitutes, let's say, a significant original discovery, which is something that you’d expect if it was of divine providence, let’s say divine providence. And I think, you know, I was thinking about that objection and I think that one of the discoveries that the text lays bare in an insanely brilliant manner is that the foundation of the community is sacrifice. That’s an appropriate conceptualization,

and you can see the concept of sacrifice evolve across the biblical texts as they’re sequenced chronologically in the overall story that makes up the biblical text. The idea of sacrifice becomes more and more sophisticated; it's more and more elaborated; it's more and more specified; it's more and more embodied. There’s an obvious progression in ideas. Where do you see that progression in successive manuscripts? Or I don’t—? In the successive stories as the text progresses, the way a novel progresses; something like sacrifice. The Old Testament sacrifice through the entire New Testament text is a sacrificial story as

well. The passion story is a story of sacrifice; it is a sacrificial motif that recurs continually through the biblical text, and it’s elaborated constantly. Okay, so the criticism is that the Bible as a text gives us nothing to indicate that it has divine—there’s nothing that we can read in it where we think, 'There’s no way this idea could have evolved were it not divinely put into this text.' That’s a criticism that’s perhaps made in the past. Well, I think it’s reflective of some order that’s so profound and implicit that there isn’t a better way of

describing it than 'divine.' But I don’t really care if we look at that from the bottom up, like as a biological phenomenon, or from the top down. I don’t think it makes any difference. It doesn’t make a difference whether it was divinely inspired or whether it evolved within humanity. I don't think—look, if—okay, so let me ask you this. I think that at bottom, truth is unified, and what that’s going to mean eventually is that the world of value and the world of fact coincide in some manner that we don’t yet understand. I think that that

union, the fact of that union, is equivalent to what’s being described as divine order across millennia. There’s no difference. Now, here’s—this is tricky business because you either believe that the world of truth is unified in the final analysis, or you don’t; those are the options. And if it’s not unified, then there’s disunity; there’s a contradiction between value and fact or there’s a contradiction—well, there’s a contradiction between different sets of values, and they can’t be brought into unity. I don’t believe that. Well, let’s go back to what you said earlier, which I was very..." Interested in,

um, you implied there's no difference between whether the text is divinely inspired or whether it evolved in progression during a series of, uh, manuscripts. Presumably, now I think that's genuinely interesting, but it's a huge difference; it's not the same thing. I mean, it was divinely inspired or it wasn't. Well, it's the same thing if it's fundamentally reflective of and accurately reflective of the implicit logos or order, and I think it is. Let me explain that a moment: it took me a long time to understand the concept of sacrifice in the biblical text because it seems

so anachronistic and so primitive, you know, and primitive and not understandable. What are these people doing offering, you know, choice cuts of meat to a god that lives in the sky? Something disgusting about it. Well, it's very easy to say, but when you start to understand that perception itself is sacrificial in its nature, and you start to understand that there's no difference between work and sacrifice—that they're the same thing—and you understand that community is predicated on sacrifice, then the emphasis in the text on sacrifice starts to become something quite marked and remarkable, especially because it's

implicit. It isn't obvious at all that the authors of the texts and the editors who sequenced them actually understood what it was that they were highlighting. So, with regards to the community, why is the community predicated on sacrifice? Because it's not about you; the community—every step you take towards the community means that you sacrifice something that's local to what you want here and now. Right now, you have to give something up. You're wandering onto something else now, which is something quite different. The notion of sacrifice, as you say, goes right through the Old Testament and

the New Testament. The sacrifice of Isaac, Ishmael by Abraham, and the sacrifice of Jesus is the same idea. I think it's a very unpleasant idea, by the way. But what are you actually saying? Are you saying that Abraham did or did not sacrifice Isaac? Are you saying that Jesus really did die for our sins? I mean, do you believe that? Do you believe that as a fact—that Jesus died for our sins? We have a big election coming up, and there's a lot at stake. But here's something to consider: regardless of who's sitting in the White

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Gold will help you convert an IRA or 401(k) into an IRA in physical gold. And the best news is, it doesn't cost you a penny out of pocket. Think about this: in the past four years, the buying power of the U.S. dollar has declined while the price of gold has increased 40%. Coincidence? I think not. Here's what you need to do: text "Jordan" to 989898 for your free info kit today. That's "Jordan" to the number 989898. There are elements of the texts that I don't claim to understand, but my experience has been that the more

deeply I look into these texts, the more I learn. That doesn't mean that I can proclaim full knowledge of what the texts proclaim, but I don't think—and I'm not trying to play a trick here—you know, I watched an interview that you did recently where you were talking, I think it was with Pierce Morgan, about the complexities of trying to understand this strange realm of quantum phenomena. Right? And we have trouble with quantum phenomena because at the micro level, things don't act like things act at the macro level, so they escape our intuitions. One of the

things you said was that although it's perhaps even impossible for creatures embodied like us to get a grip on quantum phenomena, the strange wave-particle duality, for example, we have ample evidence that it works. And [Music] is deeply mysterious. And you're saying that biblical texts are deeply mysterious. The difference is quantum physics—the predictions you derive from quantum physics are fulfilled to the tenth decimal place. The tenth decimal place! I mean, I think it was Richard Feynman who says it's equivalent to predicting the width of North America to the nearest hair's breadth. That's impressive! That’s no doubt—the

mystery there, as it were, gains its credentials by its predictions. The Bible don’t have any credentials at all, as far as I can make out. Well, I guess the credentials that I would put—you made a statement a couple of months ago that I found very interesting, and I don't claim to understand it and I'm not trying to put you on the spot with it. You said that you were a cultural Christian, okay? And so that raised a number of questions in my mind, you know. And the first question was—are you changing the subject? No, I'm

no I'm not. No, I don't think so. I may be leaping outside of the topic a bit to talk about cultural Christianity, but I think I have a list of questions that you wanted. To ask, and that is one of them. But I think, Professor, you are referring to the predictive power and to the utility of stories. Okay, so that's actually what I was trying to zero in on. Okay, so that was the point. Well, it seemed to me that your proclamation that you were a cultural Christian was a recognition, um, and a statement that

you had found something in the culture that had been derived from Christianity that you had an affinity with, and that there's some reason for that. One of the things I wanted to ask you is: well, what do you think that Christianity got right that allows you to make a statement like that? I mean, I know that there are differences, perhaps, in what we both think about the ultimate veracity of the biblical stories. Maybe there aren't differences; it would take a lot of conversation to figure this out. But what did you mean by that? Like, what

do you think that Christianity got right that would enable you to make a statement like that? Virtually nothing. Um, I meant by that no more than that I was brought up in a Christian culture. I went to Christian schools; I therefore know my way around the Bible. I know my way around the Book of Common Prayer. I know the hymns. Um, that's all. I don't value Christianity as a truth system at all. Okay, so let me ask you about that, because maybe that's true and perhaps it's not. So the first question is: do you think

that there are any marked differences between cultural traditions that would enable you to rank-order them in terms of their ethical validity? Okay, so for example, we could contrast mainstream UK Christianity with Islamic fundamentalism. Okay, so there's a hierarchy. There is a hierarchy. Hierarchy that points to what? Well, in the case of Islam, I dislike any religion which punishes apostasy with death, that throws gay people off high buildings, that practices clitoridectomy. Um, that seems to me to place Islam on a lower level than Christianity. But that's not to say anything very positive about Christianity. Well, it

might. It might be to say something positive about Christianity. Like, I think that question is open, because you might ask yourself: what did Christianity get right that led it away from those particular presumptions and towards something that you regard as more ethically appropriate? Like, this isn't a trivial question; it's a very modest claim. Uh, there's not very much. I mean, to be better than a religion that throws gay people off high buildings is not really a very virtuous achievement. I don't know if that's true, because if you look at the barbarism that characterizes the human

past, you might think that any progression whatsoever towards something approximating mercy and tolerance is nothing short of a bloody miracle. Well, people are pretty ruthless, and so are our chimpanzee cousins. Yes, they are. Right, so we move forward into the light with great difficulty, and the fact that we can take that for granted now, and that it seems self-evident and deserving of faint praise, it's not so clear to me that that's a reasonable proposition. Okay, let's grant the faint praise, but that has nothing to do with the truth value, and what I care about is

the truth value. I see no truth value in the claims of Christianity: the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the miracles. Do you believe in any of those? Do you believe Jesus was born a virgin? As I said before, there are elements of the text that I don't feel qualified to comment on. My experience has been that the more I know from a metaphorical perspective and from a mythic perspective what the story of the Virgin Birth means, and I accept that. I know, for example, that any culture that doesn't hold the image of the woman and infant

sacred dies. And I don't know how that needs to be expressed in a form, though. Do you mean that you don't know? Well, let me ask you about that, because truth—this is something I talked with Sam Harris about too—truth, as we know, is a tricky business. Do you think there are differences in the truth claims between different writers of fiction? Like, is Dostoevsky more profound than, no, well I wouldn't call fiction truth claims anyway. I mean, he's a— Then on what grounds do we rank-order the fiction in terms of quality? Like, Dostoevsky is a profound

purveyor of fiction on the philosophical front: unbelievably deep and profound. There’s something true about what he's writing about. It's nothing to do with the truth, the truth that science is concerned with. The truth of science is the truth that gets us to the Moon. I mean, this has nothing to do with, um, whether one writer of fiction has a sort of insight into human nature; that goes without saying. I accept that. Okay, so how do we deal with the notion that, on the purely factual side, how do we deal with the idea? Let's take the—no,

you talked about clitoridectomy. Let's talk about the oppression of women. Yes, we make a scientific case that that's inappropriate, or is it a case that we're making on some other grounds? Like, I see in the Judeo-Christian tradition one of the earliest pronouncements is that both men and women carry the image of God—both. And that sets a certain tone to everything that follows. It is a remarkable proclamation, given its radical age, that both men and women carry the image of God and are to be... "Treated as something with intrinsic value outside of the domain of power

and politics, and it isn't obvious to me—having thought about this a lot—how we deal with that in the pure realm of fact. Because one of the facts is, if I can oppress you, why the hell shouldn't I? Yeah, my job is to keep things on track here. I think there are a number of questions, questions which Professor Dawkins has asked quite directly, that we still haven't really heard an answer for. Okay, okay. And Professor Dawkins, asking about the Virgin birth, you started talking about metaphor; you started talking about myth. I think anybody listening to this

conversation will understand that maybe a society that doesn't believe in the virgin birth won't work. Maybe that's the predictive power that you're talking about. But I think you must understand that when Professor Dawkins is asking you, "Do you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin?" he means something like a biological fact. And, by the way, saying "I don't know" or saying "I'm not qualified to comment" is an answer to that question. But is that your answer, that you don't know? I said earlier—and I would hold to this—that there are elements of the text that

I don't know how to—I'm incapable of fully accounting for. I can't account for what the fundamental reality and significance of the notion of the Resurrection is; my knowledge just ends. Sure, but I know that whatever happened, whatever happened as a consequence of the origination and the promotion of the Christian story, was powerful enough to bring Rome to its knees and demolish the Pagan Enterprise. So there's some power in that story; that's remarkable. Let's stick to the Virgin birth. Well, the Virgin birth results from a mistranslation of Isaiah; you know that. I'm—like, these sorts of questions—they

don't strike me as getting to the point; they have a purpose. Well, and look, I understand that there are perfect reasons to debate this. I know that, and I know that your question is more than valid, but it's beside the issue as far as I'm concerned. And it’s partly because, when we started this conversation, I said for example that it appears to be the case that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story. We see the world through a story, and so that's a remarkable thing—that's a remarkable discovery. And

it's emerged probably in the last 60 years in multiple disciplines because we have to prioritize our facts, and so we prioritize them according to a particular pattern. There are patterns that seem to work and to propagate themselves properly and to orient cultures towards life abundant, and there are other patterns—the pattern of Cain, for example—that lead to absolute bloody devastation. I don't know exactly how to construe that sort of truth, but we talked about the oppression of women, for example. It's like, how do you make a case on purely factual grounds that women should be treated

as equals? It's a moral question. And I know that's exactly—I was dealing with a factual question, which is, did Jesus have a father? And you won't answer it. Jesus had a Heavenly Father like almost all mythological heroes. So he wasn't born of a virgin then? So you're saying that Jesus was not born of a virgin? I said, first of all, that I don't know how to mediate the fact-value dichotomy in that case. I said the same thing about the resurrection: it's not a value; it's a simple fact. I mean, did a man have intercourse with

Mary and produce Jesus? That's a factual question; it's not a value question. You must understand what we're being asked here, that even if you think that, say, the author of the biblical texts intended much more significance than a simple scientific analysis of events, Professor Dawkins is interested in scientific truth—that's the kind of truth that he's interested in. And even if you think it's irrelevant to the point of what the gospel authors were getting at, that first needs to be clarified before you can then begin actually uncovering what the stories are about. So I think Professor

Dawkins is asking from a scientific perspective, and maybe you think that that scientific approach is wrong. But if you just take it for a moment, maybe this is how we find out that it is wrong. Let's take a scientific approach: ask the question, did this occur? I think that it's inappropriate to use a question like that to attempt to undermine the validity of the entire—what would you say?—deep mythological enterprise we weren't doing. Suppose we were asking out of interest: suppose that we were all here devout Christians, maybe even young Christians, and we thought this was

interesting over dinner. Do you think it really happened, like scientifically? Would your answer just be, "I don't know"? Yes, and you wouldn't consider it— I mean, it's not an inappropriate question to ask just on a point of interest, right? Did this really occur? And I think so often people are asking you that, and especially given the context of this conversation. We've heard everything that you're saying about metaphor and myths, but because the question is still then being asked, 'Did it really happen?' You know that's what you're being asked. And the way you just so easily

said 'yes,' I wonder why you struggle to do that in so many other circumstances." I think, because I don't look at the situation the same way that Dr. Dawkins does, our perspectives on the situation are really quite different at many, many levels. You know, even on the meme question, for example, I know the literature on the history of religious ideas. I see how these ideas have battled across millennia in a manner that is very reminiscent to me of the same sort of claim that Dr. Dawkins is putting forward with regards to memes. I know that

literature; Dr. Dawkins doesn't know that literature, and it's very difficult for me to communicate from within the confines of that literature because it's extensive and deep. We're dealing with things that we don't understand, such as the relationship between metaphoric truth, value-predicated truth, and factual truth. We don't understand that; it's a big problem. There is no evidence whatsoever from the scientific perspective that we can orient ourselves in the world merely by consequence of the facts. Sure, and that's a fact. It's a fact that's been detailed out in great detail in the last 60 years by people

from a variety of different disciplines. We have to prioritize the facts. That's a value hierarchy. There may be true and false ways of prioritizing facts, but you can't determine the truth or falsehood of the way that you prioritize facts by making reference to the facts. That's a big problem. Okay, let's talk about that as perhaps a slight detour here, because I think we do need to come back to this Christ Resurrection thing. But, Professor Dawkins, would you say that underlying the scientific enterprise is a fundamentally unscientific assumption? You can make scientific investigations in the world,

but in order to do so, you need to choose what to prioritize. You need to choose what to investigate. You also need to value the truth; you need to have a value and a motivation for doing it in the first place. Those kinds of things cannot themselves be scientifically justified. So does the scientific enterprise have an unscientific assumption at its base? I suppose it does. I mean, I think that maybe—just me, Jordan, and Richard—but, by the way, I think that I prioritize myth, and I prioritize fact. I think myth is kind of vaguely interesting but

is not the be-all and end-all of my life. I think it's somewhat secondary to scientific facts, sorts of facts that tell us how old the universe is, how old the world is, the history of life, the engineering achievements of landing a spacecraft on a comet. These are the things that science can do. As I said, the predictions of quantum theory—now, to come back to that—the predictions of quantum theory, which are verified to a sufficient number of decimal places that it's equivalent to predicting the width of North America to one hair's breadth. Now, that is, however

difficult quantum theory is to understand, that is what you can get from quantum theory. Now, the mysteries of the Bible, if they are mysteries, aren't in the same league; I mean, they just don't cut it. Attention, men who still believe in the American dream in a world gone mad: the Precision 5 from Jeremy's Razor stands as a beacon of sanity. Five blades, superior engineering, offer a shave as unshakable as your faith that the nation's best days still lie ahead. Experience an exceptionally smooth, remarkably close shave and a testament to the fact that merit still matters.

Stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you; get Jeremy's Razor Precision 5 instead, available now at JeremyRazor.us. Axioms that need to be accepted—I don't want to put words in your mouth because I want to get this right. Before the scientific enterprise can begin, so I've tried to think through those TRS. Let me lay out a couple of them. This is partly what I've done while trying to make the case, for example, that you're more of a Christian than you think you are. For example, I think that the scientific enterprise is motivated by the

a priori assumption that truth tends towards a unity. I think that it's predicated on the notion that there is a logical order that's intrinsic to the cosmos, that that fundamental order is good, that it's intelligible to human beings, and that discovering that order and aligning ourselves with it makes for life more abundant. I think that the scientific enterprise is also predicated on the idea that "the truth will set you free," and I think all of those axioms are religious and derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition. If you don't believe that, you have to account for why

science emerged in Europe and nowhere else in the entire history of humanity, for example, and why it's also under assault from all quarters now as that underlying metaphysic disappears. It's like you haven't had to be concerned with the mythological substrate in your lifetime, in some sense, because it was intact, and so the universities could flourish, and you had your remarkable freedom to pursue your scientific enterprise wherever you wanted, and people lauded you for it. That time is threatened, and seriously so. I think it's partly because these metaphysical assumptions have now become questionable, and that's part

of the reason that I'm attending to them. It's not because I don't admire the accuracy of quantum prediction, for example, or celebrate what Musk is doing with his capability of sending rockets to Mars—it's more power to the technological enterprise. But, you know, what's happening in the... Universities, it's awful, and that's not a scientific problem. It's under—okay, I agree that—okay, um, I think it's an interesting question why science emerged in Europe. I mean, and I'm not enough of a historian to know if it is even possible that Christianity did have something to do with that, and

I wouldn't categorically deny that. But that doesn't in any way increase my trust in the validity of Christian propositions like the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth, and miracles, and Jesus as the Son of God. Um, Christianity may have had some kind of historical facilitating effect that led to the Renaissance, that led to the Scientific Revolution, and that would be a very interesting historical analysis, but it doesn't bear upon the truth of the propositions of the Christian religion. Okay, let's concentrate on the Resurrection for a moment. Now, unfortunately—see, this is part of the problem. Part of the

problem with discussions like this is that the mode of approach that's taken by the mythological tends to circle and wander. It doesn't... because you have to shine light on the problem from multiple perspectives. That's why it's often encoded in image, for example, or in drama. It's not the same tack as a purely propositional and logical argument, so it's more difficult to make. But let me tell you a story that I believe bears on the Resurrection. You tell me what you think about it because I don't—this is a very difficult story to account for. It's going

to take me about five minutes because it's complicated, but there's no way around it, I don't think. So, there's a strange scene in the Gospels where Christ tells his followers that unless he's lifted up like the bronze serpent in the desert, there can be no hope for the redemption of mankind. Okay, this is a very strange thing for someone to say, so you need to know what the story of the bronze serpent in the desert was and what it signifies, and I think we can understand it psychologically. I really do believe this, and so the

concordance of that story—which was generated millennia before—with Christ's utterance is something I just cannot imagine how anyone put those two things together, especially given the lack of explicit understanding about the relationship. So, let me detail it. There's a scene in Exodus in the Exodus story where the Israelites are doing their usual fractious foolishness and whining about the fact that they're lost and bemoaning the loss of their privileges under the Pharaoh, and complaining about the power dynamics of their leadership, and just generally being followers of Cain, let's say. And God, the cruel God that you refer

to, decides to send among His suffering subjects poisonous snakes to bite them, which seems a little over the top, you might say. But in response to that, I would say there's no situation so terrible that some damn fool can't make it infinitely worse, and so that's what happens to the Israelites. So, they're being bitten by these poisonous snakes, and the leaders of the people who've wandered from God go to Moses and they say, "We know you've got a pipeline to God, and you know there's a lot of snakes, and they're doing a lot of biting,

and maybe you could just ask Him to, you know, call off the serpents." And so, Moses, who's not very happy with the Israelites either, decides that he'll go talk to God. And God says something very strange. He doesn't say, "To hell with the Israelites; more snakes is what they need." And he doesn't say, "Well, I produced the snakes, so I'll get rid of them." He says something very, very peculiar. He says, "Have the Israelites gather together all their bronze and make a giant stake and put a serpent on it—a bronze serpent—which is the symbol of

healing, by the way, that even the Greeks use as the symbol of Asclepius. It's a very old symbol, very widespread; it's still used by physicians today." And then He says, "Put it up where the Israelites can see it, and if they go look at it, then the serpent's poison won't harm them." And I read that and I thought, "That's exactly what psychotherapists discovered as they all converged in the 20th century on the utility of exposure therapy as curative." And that's the pharmacon: a little of the poison that hurts you cures you. It's the same principle

that's used for vaccines, by the way. So what we saw in psychotherapy is that if you get people to voluntarily confront the things that are poisoning them, so to speak, that hurt their life, that disgust them, they become braver and more well-adapted. It isn't that they become less afraid, because that's been very carefully tested; it's that they learn, by watching themselves expose themselves to the things that they once fled from, that there's more to them than they think, and that generalizes across situations. And it's the same mechanism that underlies learning as such because children, when

they learn, put themselves on the edge of ragged disaster, and that's where they advance. And so what God tells the Israelites, essentially, in this dramatic endeavor, is that it's better for them to face the terrors that confront them than to be shielded from the terrors or for them to hide from them—that they'll be better people if they face what's right in front of them, even if it's poisonous. And so it's like, "Okay, that's pretty damn interesting and quite remarkable." And then that symbol is used, for example, by the Greeks to symbolize medicine as such. But

then there's this additional weird twist, which is Christ. "Identifies with that bronze serpent? You think, okay, that's a very peculiar thing for anyone to do. What exactly does that mean? Well, so then you might say, 'Well, what's the most poisonous thing that you could possibly face?' If you dramatized the idea of poison itself, if you wanted people to face what was worst so that they could become strongest, the answer to that is the most unjust possible painful death and the ultimate confrontation with malevolence. And that's what's dramatized in the passion story. Now, does that redeem

everyone? Maybe, maybe, maybe. The idea is that if we were courageous enough to look death in the face unflinchingly and if we spent our time putting our finger on the source of evil itself, it would revitalize ourselves to a degree that would be unimaginable. Now, as a biologist, you know, you think about this too because I don't remember the philosopher who said it; I think it was Whitehead, but that might be wrong. We let our ideas die instead of us, right? So human beings have evolved so that we can undergo these deaths of our own

ideas, and the rejuvenation that emerges as a consequence of that seems to be something like evolution towards what? Towards the process of sacrificial logos as the thing that redeems human beings. And that makes us biologically unique too, because we can die in ideation and imagination instead of dying in actuality. Does that fundamentally redeem us? Does that deliver us from death and evil? Maybe, like the job isn't done, obviously. Richard, the story that we've just heard, the Old Testament bronze serpent... it's rhyming with the New Testament Christ depicting himself as that bronze serpent. I think, from

Jordan, if I may, as Richard suggests, from what I've heard you say before on this same story, there's something about that harmony between that New Testament Jesus and that Old Testament story which is so profound and so impressive that it's difficult to imagine it having sort of naive human authorship. What do you make of that story and of that assertion? Well, it doesn't impress me. I mean, I don't understand why you would say that. I don't think Jordan actually said it had divine inspiration; maybe he did. Not divine inspiration necessarily, but more than just, as

I say, naive human authorship. Not like someone just sat down... it's a staggeringly brilliant literary move, especially given the fact that that relationship hasn't been explicated before. Do you think, for example, if you were looking in scripture for something which would identify this as a god-given text, maybe you, as a scientist, would look for some scientific information; it might have told you the shape of DNA or something like that. But do you think Jordan actually thinks... yeah, we can perhaps get onto that, but do you think that a literary brilliance of a similar kind or

a similar intensity? If the Bible is not a scientific text, you might be looking for something—some scientific fact—which it couldn't have otherwise known. Is it possible that some kind of genius moral move or literary move could also indicate that this is something more impressive? You more or less ask me what would impress me, and I'm a naive literalist. So I would say, if any prophet had said something like, 'The world is just one object rotating around the Sun,' something like that, they never do. I mean, there's always some kind of moral lesson which leaves me

cold. Well, why is it that there is no... I mean, they say that God meets you where you're at, right? And there are some people who just care about scientific truth; that's what they know, that's their profession. Why is there not anything in the Bible for them? Oh, I think the idea that sacrifice is the basis of the community is a remarkable and scientifically valid hypothesis. I think that it's precisely akin to the... what would you say... to the process of cortical maturation. I think they're the same thing because, as we mature, we move farther

away from the immediate gratification of our self-centered emotional and motivational needs to an ethos of care that brings our future self into the picture and a wider and wider array of other people. And I think that's associated with cortical maturation. In fact, I think the purpose of the cortex—the purpose of the cortex—is to bring the dynamics of the shortsighted underlying motivational and emotional systems into the kind of harmony that allows for communal existence and the protection of the future at the same time that the present is, what would you say, cared for and attended to.

There's a kind of harmony there; there's also a pattern there. It's not arbitrary at all, and I think we know this biologically: the number of ways... and I think we already alluded to this... the number of ways that a society can organize itself so that each individual can harmonize their own future with the present and do that simultaneously with many other people. That's a very... there's a very limited universe of possibilities there—a very limited universe. Richard asked you before about the difference between a story or an idea naturally evolving over the course of numerous manuscripts

and throughout human history and the idea of it being divinely inspired. You were seeming to imply that these are almost interchangeable concepts. Now, if that's the case, when you say that this divine spirit behind the Bible is actually just the way that it has evolved..." Throughout human history, throughout the different manuscripts that we've had, saying that this is what Divinity is, I think for you may drag the mundane up into the realm of divinity. But I think, for people like Richard and for many people listening, what it does instead is drag the Divine down to

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would drag the Divine down into the realm of the mundane. If we're speaking of something like the straight, narrow path of harmony between multiple modes of being, I don’t think it makes any difference to me whether it's the material reaching upward or the Divine descending downward. I don't think there's any difference between those two things. You don't? That's exactly right, that's the problem! I don't see the difference. Look at it this way: in this conversation, you know this to be the case—there are various ways that this conversation could go sideways, right? Seriously, either of us

could try to win, either of us could try to demonstrate our intellectual superiority, each of us could misrepresent the other, or we could both try, and I do think we are in fact trying. I think Alex is helping along with that just fine. We could try to follow the thread of the exploratory truth and see if we could get somewhere. Now, I don't think there is any difference between that, by the way, and what’s expressed in the biblical text as the spirit of the logos. That’s why we have dialogue. I’m very interested in the possibility

that truths emerge through evolving manuscripts. Now, that’s a very interesting idea, and it's totally different from divine inspiration. I want to pursue it because I don’t believe in divine inspiration, but I would be prepared to believe in evolving manuscripts. Well, I would say this is why I had set forward the possibility of taking a look particularly at Mircea Eliade, because that's where you'd find the best work. He’s brilliant. The history of, I believe, if you study the history of religious ideas, it’s a three-volume manuscript, or "The Sacred and the Profane," which is probably his single

best work. You’d see profound analogies between the manner in which you’ve been construing the world biologically, including the trains of thought that led you to the development of the idea of the meme. I really believe that. Well, analogies are one thing, but is it the same thing? I think it's the same. I do. I think, look, I don’t know. That’s why I’d like your opinion on it. You know, seriously, it's a complicated question. I’ve talked to... it’s a complicated question. Most people don’t know both literatures. There aren’t a lot of people to discuss this sort

of thing with. I talked to Camille Paglia about this; she studied the work of a man named Eric Neumann. Neumann wrote a book called "The Origins and History of Consciousness," which is a work of genius, and also another book called "The Great Mother," which is a study of the symbolism of the feminine. It's a great book. Pia told me that she believed if the academy would have turned to Eric Neumann, who’s a student of Jung—although the greatest student of Jung and maybe one who surpassed him—that the entire culture war that's torn the universities apart wouldn’t

have happened. People don’t know this literature. Let me give you an example; you tell me what you think about this. Okay, so I spent a fair bit of time studying the psychophysiology of the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is set up; it’s got two halves, basically. One half deals with fundamental motivated states: hunger, thirst, defensive aggression, sexuality, and so forth. When those areas are dominated, the biologically relevant goal is activated, and perceptions are oriented towards that goal. Now then, you might ask yourself: what happens if all those biologically motivated states are satiated? The answer seems to be

that the other half of the hypothalamus kicks in, and it mediates exploratory behavior. So the default structure of the mammalian nervous system is: if satiated or in doubt, explore and gather new information. There’s no difference between that and hero mythology. They are the same thing. They’re the same thing. The dragon fight, for example, which is the oldest story we have, it’s coded in Mesopotamian mythology. The dragon fight story is to explore the dangerous unknown. Discover the treasure that revitalizes the community. There's no difference between that and the science that you practice; they're the same thing.

What do you think? The same story? I don't know what to make of that. I mean, um, you say they're the same story; you analogized the dragon fight to how many dragons have you overcome in your life. I'm not interested in dragons; I'm interested in real, in reality. Okay, so let's—let's—okay, so I read a book a while back that described the biological reality of the dragon. Say, well, there's no such thing as a dragon. It's like, okay, is there such a thing as a predator? Of course! Well, that's a meta category. What's the category of

predator? Bear? Eagle? If you're a primate, fire—is fire a predator? Well, it's complicated because a fire kills you. Okay, so is there a worse predator than a serpentine, flying, fire-breathing reptile? Is that not the imagistic equivalent of a predator? So, in what way, if predator is real, in what way isn't dragon real? It doesn’t take that much imagination to see the identity, and then wouldn't the fundamental task of edible primates be to figure out how to overcome the dragon forever? I don't know why you say dragon. I mean, we have elephants, we have tigers, we

have saber-tooths—we have why not out there, right? But why not abstract? Because it's for the same reason that we have the term predator. Like, we have the term bear, lion, komodo dragon. Well, you make an amalgamation; you say, well, the relevant set of features is an image. Well, what's the image? Predator as such. What's the image of that? The dragon that never disappears. And then there's a twist on that, which is so cool, it's so interesting, because you can imagine rabbit mythology, which would be something like predator appears, freeze. But that's not the human story.

The human story is predator appears; there's a treasure somewhere, right? That's completely—that's a completely different pathway of evolutionary significance. Like, the way that we construe the world isn't freeze like predator; it's like, oh, there's a predator, maybe there's something valuable lurking in our conflict with it, you know? Our sticks and our spears that enable our fragile bodies to stand up against the dragons of the world. So a dragon is a pictorial representation of the abstracted concept of a predator? Yes, as you say, we already have the term predator, and so it would be useful in

art, in narrative. I mean, you can't paint an abstraction; we had the image way before we had the word. Sure. Okay, no, but that's a seriously important thing to understand. But now we have the word—we have the word predator—and maybe if we were doing art, maybe if we were all going to sort of draw a picture or tell a story—we wanted to invent a story to give our children a good moral message—we might invent this dragon or use this dragon as well. We do always— we do it continually. We do it with Harry Potter; we

do it with The Lord of the Rings; we do it with The Avengers. When you say escaping from... but when you say the biology of a dragon, you must understand how that can be misleading as to the enterprise that you're engaging in, because we're talking here about narrative; we're talking here about art; we're talking here about representations in literature. I don't think the category of dragon is any less valid than the category of lion—any less biological. Well, it depends on your level of analysis. We have the term predator, which implies that all predators have something

in common, because otherwise we wouldn't have the term. It's like there's no reason to assume ontological priority for the category of lion over the category of predator. Like, it depends on you. All that would determine which of those terms should be used is the purpose towards which the conceptualization is being directed. If you want to identify a particular class of predator, well then lion is a good term—you would say that lions are an instantiation of this bracket term of predator. Well, I would also say, would you therefore say that a lion is an instantiation of

the bracket term of dragon? Yes. Yes, because see, we're not only fact-oriented creatures, right? It actually matters to us whether we get eaten. Like, it's one thing to lay out the nomenclature of the animal kingdom; it's another thing to remember that predators can eat you. And then it's another thing—and this is very interesting and it's relevant to that story of the Bronze Serpent—it's like, what do we want to teach our children? Well, to identify predators, obviously. Well, what do we want to teach them more profoundly? What attitude they should take towards the eternal fact of

the predator? And the attitude they should take is something like the courage to voluntarily confront and not to run away and not to hide and not to freeze and not to casually demonize, but to assume that in the combat with the eternal predator, an eternal treasure might be found. That's exactly what you do, whether you know it or not, when you teach a child to be courageous. And we know from the psychological literature that generalizes, and I do think it's identical with the mechanism of learning in human beings, because kids, us, we always learn on

the edge, you know? And in your own life, I know—and I don't want to be presumptuous—but no doubt there have been situations where you've been battling to have your ideas distributed, even to modify your own conceptions. When you had something new to learn, that’s a sacrifice; you have to kill your stupidity so that you can move forward. That’s what happens in the story of Abraham, by the way, when he makes sequential sacrifices. So, in the story of Abraham, you tell me what you think about this because it staggered me when I understood it. Abraham is

a protected person; he doesn’t have to lift a finger. He lives in a socialist utopia; he’s got everything delivered hand-to-mouth. He’s at home until he’s 70, and God comes to him as the voice of adventure, which is something remarkable to see, and says, “You leave your zone of comfort and go out into the world; have your terrible adventure.” Abraham says yes, and then a series of cataclysms occurs around him, just like it does in every adventurous life. Every time an episode concludes, he makes a sacrifice. Why? To get rid of what’s stupid and old about

him so that he can progress and transform. That happens to such a degree that he gets a new name, which means he’s changed so dramatically that he’s not even the person he used to be. That’s a consequence of following that adventurous pathway, and that’s all coded in the story. I think we just have to agree that we have different kinds of minds. You’re interested in symbols, and I’m interested in facts. I mean, let’s take predators—I’m fascinated by predators. The relationship between predators and prey is an arms race, an evolutionary arms race. Whenever you see a

really complicated, beautifully designed piece of biology, what Hume, I think, one of Hume’s characters called “things that ravish into admiration all who contemplate them,” this is almost certainly the result of an arms race, probably between predators and prey. It could be between parasites and hosts. If we are talking about adaptations to just the climate, W rhinoceri grow hair because it’s getting cold; that’s relatively boring. But when it’s an adaptation to a predator, then you get an escalation of adaptations by prey, which are countered by predators, which are countered by prey. So you get a gradual

escalation. Now, that’s interesting. That explains why you have animals that run fast, why they have keen sense organs, why they have sharp teeth, why they have behavior patterns that either protect them from predators or, if they’re predators, help them to catch prey. The idea of the arms race is the thing that grabs me—the arms race has nothing to do with dragons. Okay, so fair enough. I share your appreciation for the remarkable phenomena that emerge as a consequence of that. So, let’s take the idea of arms race. Here’s how I would construe what I said in

what I think might be your terms. Okay? All right, we transformed the battle with the predator into a meme battle. We abstracted it so that we could figure out how to deal not with a predator but with the class of all possible predators. Right? Exactly. And the appropriate way to deal with the class of all possible predators is something like a meta-ethic; it’s a stance. Let me give you an example of this. We actually know something about this psychophysiologically, and you can look at it spiritually or physically, and it doesn’t matter. For example, if you

take people in psychotherapy and they’re accidentally exposed to something they’re afraid of, they have a stress response that’s damaging if it’s sustained, and they become more frightened. But if you expose them to exactly the same stressor and they do it voluntarily, they manifest an entirely different pattern of psychophysiological activation. Okay? It’s a stance of challenge, right, and not of fear. All right, so what are the things that you’re doing in psychotherapy when you get people to expose themselves to—you could say predators, because that’s an accurate way of dealing with it—is that you get them to

shift into a mode of voluntary confrontation instead of prey-like apprehension and retreat. And what they learn from that is that they can embody that pattern, which I would call a spirit metaphysically; they can embody that; they can practice it. It’s also the case there’s some evidence that there are epigenetic consequences of that. If you practice that process of voluntary confrontation with the terrible unknown, it can catalyze transformations that reach all the way down into the cellular. So we abstracted the fight with the predator into the imaginal space; we play out various tactics. Some of them

are conserved and transmitted; they adapt themselves to the structure of human memory and they make the foundation for our most fundamental narratives. Look, the reference I made to Harry Potter, the reference I made to The Lord of the Rings, and to The Avengers—these aren’t casual references. You know, we spend most of our computational, high-end computational power generating fictional worlds where we can portray meme battles so that everyone can observe them. Yes, so lion as genetic, dragon as mythic. Richard, this concept of the dragon as the abstracted predator as a whole—can we talk meaningfully about the

truth in these stories, where instead of talking about a predator or this predator or that predator, we’re talking about the concept of a predator meme? Yes, a dragon’s a meme. Yeah, it’s a deep meme. Well, it doesn’t impress me. I mean, I like reality, and obviously, it impresses Jordan, and that’s fine. It just— Have a different kind of mind, I think. Well, I had a comment about that too, you know, because I actually think that's true. So there's a psychological trait, openness, and openness fractionates into two types. One type of mind is associated with a

deep interest in ideas; people like that tend to prefer non-fiction. A variant of that is openness proper, and it's associated with a much deeper orientation towards the fictional and metaphorical. I do think we have different kinds of minds, but if we accept the presumption that there is a unity of knowledge—and I don't know if that's a presumption that you entertain, or presume, or share, because we could discuss the alternative—my sense is that those two pathways have to unify. Now, I don't think we know how to unify them in the West; that's why there is this

conflict between the scientific and the religious. It's not like I know how to rectify that. The best I can say is this is what I've learned from studying those stories. But I would also say, because I've studied your work, I do believe that the idea you formulated of "meme" is exactly the same thing that Merer Elliot is detailing out in his work. I think the reason that he's not attended to by the university is because he pays attention to the history of religious ideas. Everything he says demolishes the postmodern Marxists—demolishes them—which is something that seriously

needs to be done. So I keep thinking; I keep hoping. I think, God, it would be such a remarkable thing for Dr. Dawkins to know, especially Eliot's work. Although Eric Neyman would be a close second, because it takes the notion of meme—which is the recreation of the world in imaginal space, and the transmission of those recreations and their potential battles—that's what you specified—and it expands it out into something that endures across millennia. It's the logical extension of your idea, and it's not like people know this because there aren't people who know both literatures. So this

idea of lion as meme, lion as gene, dragon as meme... I think, in so many words, that sounds like that's sort of a summary of what you're getting at. I get the impression, Richard, that you might agree with the idea that the dragon is an effective, um, mythic abstraction of the concept of individual predators, but it's just not that impressive. Yes, it's just not that impressive. Be impressive at the same time that you are compelled and interested by the idea of meme. I mean, let me ask you a psychological question, if you don't mind. You're

obviously welcome not to answer it, but there's a reason that the idea of meme gripped you, and there's a reason it's spread; it's because you put your finger on something. So can I ask you how that idea emerged and why it attracted you? As a Darwinian, I'm interested in the process of natural selection. Natural selection is the differential survival of replicating entities. DNA is a very excellent replicating entity, whose replication and selection has given rise to the whole of life on Earth. I wanted to make the point that DNA is not the only possible replicator.

You could imagine—there might be, and there probably is—on other planets, a different kind of replicator, not DNA. Then I thought, maybe we don't have to go to other planets; maybe there's another replicator staring us in the face: the virus of the mind—something that spreads not by DNA replication, but by imitation from mind to mind. So it could be a fashion in clothes, it could be a musical style, it could be an accent, a speech accent, it could be a children's game that spreads through school. All these things are replicators which spread by a non-genetic means

and might, therefore, potentially be the basis for a form of Darwinian selection. Yep, that Darwinian selection would be popularity—the spreadability of an idea, the longevity of an idea, the fidelity of it, the spreadability, the motivation by the idea. Like, would you expect... okay, that's a possibility. I would even concede that an archetype might be one way in which certain memes might spread more than others; it might be compatible with a Jungian archetype. So that's my answer to the question. I was coming at it as a Darwinian and wanting to make the point that DNA, probably

having spent the whole rest of the book stressing the gene as the unit of selection, may not be the only one. Okay, okay. So that's what I understood from your work. So it is on that ground that I saw the concordance between what you were doing and what Elliot was doing in his investigation into the spread of religious ideas. I like what you described—it's what I understood. Okay, so let me ask you another question about that. Could you imagine a scenario where a meme had sufficient functional adaptive significance so that the individuals who acted it

out gained a reproductive edge? Yes. Okay, so then you could imagine a situation where there was, I think I've got this right, a Baldwin effect between the meme and the genome. Okay, so then could you imagine an effect where the heroic hunters of the past, who decided to cease acting like prey animals—maybe when they got rocks or sticks—were acting? under the impulse that facing down the predator was the appropriate strategy because I was thinking about this reproductively. Like, you know that women are hypergamous; they like men, cross-culturally, about four years older than they are. The

most fundamental female pornographic fantasy involves vampires, werewolves, pirates, surgeons, and billionaires—dominant men who are capable of standing up to predators who can be brought into an individual relationship. Okay, so that's the fundamental reproductive story meme that seems to drive women. It's allied with the hero myth. There are different variants of the same story—the different sexual variants of the same story—and it seems to me it's not unreasonable to note that that's the fundamental story of humanity. So I don't understand why you're not impressed by that. Talking about the Baldwin effect, and suddenly we got into women.

What what women like—I mean, well, the men who act out the hero meme are much more likely to reproduce. It's an example, but perhaps we need to explain what the B—I was going to say that totally helps. Yes, that would be useful. Okay. It was suggested by Baldwin, I think in the late 19th century. It's a kind of genetic assimilation of a cultural or a learned idea. So the idea is that certain animals learn things, learn a clever trick; it might be nut cracking by chimpanzees, for example, or potato washing by Japanese macaques, or opening

milk bottles by English tits. And perhaps it spreads mimetically, as an epidemic of copying. That's known to have happened with the blue tits and great tits in Britain. Now, certain individuals are likely to learn it faster than others, and there may be genetic variation in the speed with which they learn it. As the generations go by, natural selection would have favored speed of learning the new trick, and eventually, they would have learned the new trick so fast that they didn't need to learn it at all. It becomes genetically assimilated into the genome. That's the Baldwin

effect. Okay, I would say that's essentially the same pattern of archetype evolution that's implicit in the Jungian theoretical framework. Well, that's very interesting because that suggests that Jungian archetypes might be genetically assimilated via the Baldwin effect. That's a fascinating idea. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, so now, I know we're coming to the end of our time soon anyway. It's nice to end on a shared point of interest, which is the Baldwin effect and the archetypes’ potential origin in the Baldwin effect. Do you think that that is something that is worth exploring further? Is that

something that we can investigate? Well, it speaks to the potential relationship between the spread of memes and the alteration of the genetic process by natural selection. I would say it probably happens fastest by sexual selection. So, right. Imagine that—a meme develops a representation, imaginal, and the people who embody it are more effective in dealing with predators. Then imagine that there's a concordance between that and the attractiveness of those males to women. It seems highly probable. Well then, you can see that because sexual selection is a pretty rapid mechanism, the Baldwin effect could get speeded up.

I totally agree with that. I've even suggested, actually, a slightly way-out suggestion that the habit of standing on our hind legs might have been sexually selected and then genetically assimilated by the Baldwin effect. Chimpanzees do sometimes walk on their hind legs. Now, if, for memetic reasons, that was sexually attractive in our ancestors, it could have spread as an epidemic of sexual display. Then natural selection could have favored those individuals who were best at standing on their hind legs, genetically speaking, and then it would become genetically assimilated. This sexually selected mimetic effect could have been genetically

assimilated and given rise to the genetic tendency to walk on our hind legs. So, I remember what I was going to ask you about this. So imagine you have a situation in the biblical narratives where the idea of sacrifice is dramatized and ritualized. So, it's acted out; it's not exactly understood; it's dramatized and acted out. Well, I believe there's a concordance between the probability that sacrifice would be offered and the ability of someone to forego gratification or to work towards a future end. They're the same thing. The ability to forego gratification, which is associated with

cortical development, is a great predictor of future success. Let's say future success because we know, for example, that the trait conscientiousness, which is something like the ability to delay gratification, is the best predictor that isn't cognitive of long-term future success. The ability to sacrifice the present for the future is a hallmark of a strategy of adaptation that's going to propagate down the generations. That's interesting. As a Canadian, you probably know about the potlatch phenomenon, yes, where a great sacrifice is a social display. Destruction of one's own property, which is a form of sacrifice, is a

mark of prestige, right? Well, it indicates—those communities indicate two things: your willingness to distribute generously to the community because you're a big man if you can do that, but also your faith in the process by which that wealth was generated. I'm so good at—I think women use wealth as a marker of sexual attractiveness, not because they're interested in wealth, but because wealth is the best single predictor of the... The ability to generate wealth and the Potlatch is that kind of manifestation. It's like, yes, I have all this stuff; I can give it away and burn

it, and I can make it again because it isn't the wealth—it's the capacity to generate the wealth, right? It's a process or a spirit, you could say, if you wanted to get metaphorical about it. So there's this remarkable concordance between your work and these works that I've been investigating. Like I said, no one knows the two literatures, and so it's very frustrating in a sense because I understood your concept of meme, I would say, in exactly the way that you just laid it out, and I thought, this is exactly what I've been studying. There are

these fundamental narratives, and the people who embodied them—look, the heroes in the theater—are actors of a narrative meme. They're obviously attractive; people flock to watch them. If you take vervets and you show them pictures of the other vervets in their troops, they spontaneously gaze longer at the higher-status vervet, right? It's exact. So imagine this in human society: you have people who act out the appropriate meme, let's say, which is something like a meta-strategy for dealing with predation. It's something like that; you can approximate that to a greater or lesser degree. The more you approximate that,

the higher you are on the sexual selection hierarchy. I think that's clear. It's a bit more complicated than that because women seem to be the— the pornographic literature that women prefer is both the capacity to stand up against predation and maybe even to be a predator; but that has to be brought into alliance with the ability to make an intimate relationship and share. So it's like half monster, half cooperative distributor, cooperative generous distributor. It's something like that. You can see that's a real knife's edge evolutionarily because you want someone who can keep the real monsters

at bay, but if they're such a monster that they don't share and aren't generous and can't take care of their children, they're just another bloody predator. So, Richard, the Baldwin effect applied not so much just to the mantic preference for people who stand up, for example, but something like a dragon, the abstracted predator—is there any kind of Baldwin effect implication of this kind? I think there could be. I mean, I think it's an interesting idea that Jungian archetypes could be Baldwin-IED memes, and perhaps the dragon could be one of those. Well, you have that terminology,

even the Baldwin effect terminology, but that notion is implicit in his writings. He was struggling; he also didn't precisely understand sexual selection, let's say. So the idea lurks implicitly in his work. There's never a statement like that, but you can see clear indications of his struggling towards something like a Baldwin effect explanation. Chaps, I'm afraid that we are just about out of time, but we will be having a secondary conversation on DailyWire Plus, which we'll be doing in just a moment. So, people listening, if they're interested in more, can go and find more there. But

for at least this part of the conversation, hopefully we've landed on a point of somewhat agreement between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, which I think is a pretty significant success, I would say, in many ways. Well, I think we also established part of the reason that there's a difference. I do think that your temperamental tack and my temperamental tack are different; they're gen different. You know, are you more interested in things or people, would you say? Because that's a fundamental dimension of differ, say, in terms of interest. I don't think I admit the question, really.

Okay, okay. Well, the reason I asked is because the proclivity to prefer non-fiction, which is more of a masculine proclivity, is associated with a tilt of interest towards the domain of things rather than the domain of people. So, I'm interested in eternal things. I'm interested in things that were true before there were any humans and will be true long after humans are extinct—which sort of lets out all symbolism and metaphor and stuff like that. Maybe it depends on the Baldwin effect. Yes, okay. Thank you, sir. I'm very happy that I have the chance to talk

to you today, and thank you very much, Alex, for hosting this. And for everybody who is watching and listening, as Alex pointed out, we're going to turn to the DailyWire side right away, and if you want to join us for another 30 minutes of this conversation, then you'd be more than welcome to do that. So, thank you, one way or another, for your time and attention today. Thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale for spending the time and energy necessary to make this, I hope, a raving success. I certainly was interested in the

conversation, and so thanks to you guys as well. [Music]