It’s worth getting acquainted with both Dave Rubin and Gad Saad, and these two shortish videos give you the chance (they’re bits of a single one-hour video).
Dave Rubin is a comedian and talk-show host, best known to us nonbelievers as host of The Rubin Report (YouTube channel here), which is a good replacement for The Young Turks since the latter show went Full Leftist Authoritarian (I find it unwatchable; I’d rather listen to out-and-out conservatives like Bill O’Reilly!). Rubin has, in fact, been responsible for popularizing—and mocking—that group of identity politicians and Islam-apologists known as “The Regressive Left.” I prefer to call it the “Authoritarian Left” since not all their stands are regressive.
Saad, of Lebanese and Jewish origin, is an evolutionary psychologist and professor of marketing at Concordia University, right here in Montreal. He also has a widely read website, Homo Consumericus, at Psychology Today. His criticism of the Authoritarian Left, and his work on evolutionary psychology, are guaranteed to alienate the large section of the atheist blogosphere that rejects evo psych on purely ideological grounds while claiming that the entire field is scientifically worthless. Too bad—Saad’s a thoughtful and reasonable man, and I wish I had his equanimity. And it’s just dumb to reject wholesale the notion that while human morphology and physiology reflects our evolution, our behavior is an exception.
In the first video, Saad covers a lot of ground. For one thing, he goes after the dissimulator Reza Aslan, and wonders if Aslan knows he’s lying when he produces his “endless tsunami of nonsense.” He further considers whether there’s any difference between religiosity and lunacy, the connection between religion and sports, and whether religion that has no impact on the public sphere deserves criticism (i.e., is it injurious in any way to have unfounded religious belief on which you don’t act?). Finally, he tells us why religion will always be with us, and why “New Atheism” is demonized.
This second video, twelve minutes long, deals with evolutionary psychology, and why so many people are reluctant to give any credence to the notion that some of our behavior reflects natural selection that acted on our ancestors. Saad goes on to discuss what he calls “political correctness and the thought police,” and why their actions are harmful.
If you’d like to listen to Saad’s Ottawa lecture, “How political correctness limits the free exchange ideas on campus,” to which he refers in the video above, go here. I recommend it; Saad’s a very good speaker.
I think all of us are behooved to listen to those who oppose our views. How else can we critically examine our beliefs, or sharpen our arguments should we decide to retain them? But if you’re sick of The Young Turks or miscreants like Reza Aslan, Rubin’s show is a good palliative.
Prof. Coyne,
As someone who finds the idea of evolutionary psychology intriguing, I hope you’ll write more about the subject in future blog posts.
I don’t reject evolutionary psychology on ideological grounds, and I do believe that some of our psychology is a result of evolutionary processes, but I worry how scientifically rigorous this field is, at least at present. Sometimes it seems like this field finds facts to fit its theories rather than use facts to craft theories.
How do we know, for instance, how much of human psychology is created by evolution and how much is created by culture? How do we know when behavior x is the product of an adaptive benefit versus a change that merely wasn’t selected against? For instance, I like many dog owners often wonder why dogs consume their own feces, and I always assumed there must be some adaptive benefit that allowed this behavior to be selected for. But suppose this behavior merely is a random change that wasn’t selected against because it didn’t do that much harm? Or what if natural selection has nothing to do with it?
You can probably tell from my questions that I know little about this field; that’s why I hope that you will write about this so that your readers can benefit from your knowledge.
Jerry’s written about it a few times already, notice that Jerry’s thoughts on the subject have evolved (heh) over time.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?s=evolutionary+psychology&searchsubmit=Find+%C2%BB
First question, good question, that leads to another question:
Where did “culture” come from?
To misquote Goebbels, “whenever I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my Petri dish.”
I’m not sure where I first saw it (Oliver Sacks?)but the phenomenon of confabulation come to mind. We do what we do for emotional i.e. instinctive i.e. evolutionary reasons but then spontaneously invent stories to rationalize the behaviour. Having language we share (with compulsion by tribal instinct)those stories which makes culture and if the stories have a supernatural element then that makes religion.
I think that why the subject of nature vs nurture is so contentious is that both sides want to put the explanation exclusively in their own camp and both fail because it can’t be done. The culture-only camp can’t explain why some behaviours occur spontaneously starting in young children and happen the same everywhere in the world. The nature-only camp fails because they keep trying to explain every behaviour by confabulating some evo-psych story by alluding to our supposed life two million years ago on the African plain.
Both nature and nurture must be true but no one has come up with a good synthesis yet.
There are predictions about behaviors one can make if you think they’re either adaptive now or were so in the past, and those can be tested. Behavior in that respect is no different from any other trait. I do acknowledge that for some researchers the standards for accepting hypotheses are low, but that’s not true for the entire field, so it’s unfair to reject it as a whole.
Yes. You can’t reject it on purely logical grounds. If you accept that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution and if you accept that the brain is a material machine and that the mind is its product then nothing in psychology makes sense except that it’s based in evolution.
Which of course is what you just said above.
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I’m willing to cut The Young Turks a bit of slack due to Cenk Uygar’s Muslim ancestry, but I have certainly had it up to here with Reza Aslan’s lazy and dishonest dissimulations. (I haven’t watched CU’s 3 hour discussion with Sam Harris.)
The Young Turks don’t get everything right, but except for a few topics I think they’re quite a good source of news and political commentary. They generally oppose the “Authoritarian Left” and I don’t think they can be lumped in that category, but they do strongly oppose classification of Muslims as significantly more dangerous terrorism-wise than other religionists. I think they’re wrong about that, but right that Muslim terrorism on the whole isn’t a threat to us.
The interview with Sam Harris was rather hostile, and that’s a large part of why Dave Rubin left the show, but he was given three hours to explain his views and it was basically fair.
Why is it that nobody ever cuts me any slack due to my Polish ancestry when I argue* for the repatriation of the former eastern territories of Poland lost in the aftermath of the 2nd world war ?
* I actually don’t care about this at all and in fact did not even know that it happened until I looked it up today as an example of ancestry based slack cutting.
The 3 hour discussion between Cenk and Sam was frustrating and difficult, but fair – both had plenty of time to make their positions clear.
It was the subsequent savaging of Sam Harris by Cenk (not to mention his similar treatment of his erstwhile colleague Dave Rubin) that made me completely stop watching The Young Turks.
The fact that he will repeatedly state things that are manifestly untrue about Sam’s positions on a number of things, and endorse Reza Aslan and CJ W*rl*m*n when they also slur him really makes me question his integrity.
It’s one thing to decide that you don’t like Sam Harris, or you take issue with his ideas; it’s quite another to use a very large public platform to repeat demonstrably untrue statements about him again and again.
It shows a really ugly side to him that has nothing to do with a commitment to journalism and everything to do with trying to assassinate someone’s character in the hopes that he will be publicly destroyed – and therefore silenced.
You nicely sum up my view as well.
I watched TYT occasionally, and saw this interview with Sam Harris, too. Cenk Uygur tried hard to appear obtuse and they seemed to not get anywhere. Thinking back, I haven’t the faintest idea what came out of it. This didn’t exactly instill a desire to watch more The Young Turks. But I like the Rubin Report every now and then and follow Gad Saad already for a while.
There’s now clearly a divide between New Atheists and Social Justice Atheists and it follows largely the zigzag of the Deep Rifts™ which broke up ever since Elevatorgate, including all the elements that emerged years ago, such as the conflicts around Evolutionary Psychology. Recall how the esteemed host teamed up with Steven Pinker against Usual Suspects. This was partially already under the headline of “science denialism”.
And as probably written twentythree times already, the Atheist-Skeptic Movement (or communities) still hasn’t understood what happened in the past with the information we have now; namely a much larger socio-political conflict mainly on the Left that resembles the conflicts of the 1990s with the Postmodernist Left. Sokal and Bricmont’s (1997) epilogue is particularily interesting in today’s light.
Not only are the negative effects largely the same, “a waste of time in the human sciences, a cultural confusion that favors obscurantism, and a weakening of the political left”, they are also largely correct about the “degenerated […] vulgate that mixes bizarre confusions with overblown banalities“ such as privilege, intersectionality nonsense and more under the Critical Race Theory umbrella – now in an even more idiosyncratic Tumblr version. We have a similar problem that the Regressive Left, Authoritarians or Social Justice Warriors are distinct yet highly fuzzy sets that describe more behaviours and certain positions than people or concrete factions. Today it’s a times even questionable what makes them exactly “left”, and the connection seems even more merely a “sociological link” as Sokal described it. So it’s not really postmodernism, and not really left, and not really a faction – yet distinct and we all know it when we see it.
A third aspect is current again, too: namely, the attempt to other criticism as “rigth wing”; delcare it as an alleged hatred of minorities and women; or being against social justice itself (and not against propagandistic and confused “theory” and it’s aggressive applications).
Yes! Grania has it exactly right. The Cenk/Sam interview itself was fair, it was what Cenk did afterwards that was the problem.
I used to watch TYT, but rarely do now.
I started watching Rubin in the last few months, and have found him really good.
Sam Harris is always worth listening to imo, whether you agree with him or not, which I sometimes don’t.
Hmmm. I missed that bit on TYT, but I generally watch their posts that I think will supply me with new information not ones that are simply an editorial on something I know a fair amount about. Ergo, via that filter, I probably skipped a lot of the Harris commentary.
There’s a research assistant for TYT that lives up here in the Bay and frequently hangs out at the coffee shop near my house.
Both videos are fantastic. Gad is not only entertaining he powerfully motivating.
So much of Gad’s central idea stems from not some esoteric feature of any particular religion but the encompassing idea that people who hold false beliefs are not taking this existence seriously.
Faith places an unnecessary, yet obligatory scientific and ethical burden on the believer. It is a waste to our species.
Last note, I believe the latter about Reza: I think he promotes what he does because he knows it makes him popular, not because he is self-deceived.
My daughter is currently in university in southern Ontario, she is the occasional recipient of many of the things that Jerry and Gad talk about…via me. Her roommates (4) think Reza is one of smartest and most honest people on the internet. She now knows better and is stunned by their position. I hope she challenges them but she is only now discovering the corruption the education system, and is not yet sure how deep it goes. I hope the new show with Gad will crush that gap in knowledge down to nothing.
I am not sure that it would be a good idea for her to challenge her roommates. They are not interlocutors with whom she can freely exchange thoughts when she wants and stay aside when she doesn’t. She is practically locked together with them and I think the easiest way to coexist is to bypass the potentially explosive topics.
I do not see a reason for anyone to find Reza Aslan honest, other than Islamophilia. And I don’t know a way to cure Islamophilia.
Thanks for posting these videos. They are a good listen/watch.
My own ability to listen to the other side is limited when it comes to endless repetition of the same bogus ideas. My life is too short to spend time, for example, listening to creationists justify their hostility to evolution. Similarly, when some knocks on my door with an offer to share the good news, I’m not inclined to listen to their side, unless I feel like trolling them for jollies.
+1
I wonder how long it will be before Gad Saad is labelled as a “porch monkey” and a lapdog.
Assuming that that has not happened already.
Given that his heritage and ethnic background is Arab Jew (he’s from Lebanon originally) I’m thinking other terms might be thrown at him, but “porch monkey” won’t be one of them.
By way of analogy, “Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh-American gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, was murdered in a hate crime in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.”
I would suspect that those that level the charge of “porch monkey” against moderate and liberal Muslims would have the same level of discernment as the post 9/11 vigilantes.
It’s enough that your target meet the vague criteria of some pre-conceived stereotype.
I really like the simplicity of some of his points so far.
One: Why should we be concerned about the metaphysical claims of people from centuries ago, when we give no weight to their claims about how the world works?
Two: for every prescription for belief and morality in a religion, there is at least one other religion that prescribes the exact opposite belief or morality statement.
It’s odd how the atheists of the authoritarian left reject evo-psych. You would think that being atheists who are more involved with the direction of the world would want to know why religion exists in the first place so that they could use that knowledge to build a better world. The only avenue we have for understanding the ubiquity and hitherto tenacity of religious believe would be through some lens of evo-psych. Sort of like how we use sweetener to make healthy food more palatable.
Authoritarian Leftism is a large, moralizing movement so they’ll show all of the behaviors of the large moralizing god religions. Which is ironic for the atheists involved with it.
I think you’ve nailed the contradictions within the authoritarian left.
The authoritarian left dislikes evolutionary psychology because they see the work evolutionary psychologists do (uncovering the likely reasons for certain instinctual behaviors) as condoning racism, sexism, rape, etc.
They see everything as a cultural construction. There’s no room for biology in their world view.
The statement :”reject wholesale the notion that while human morphology and physiology reflects our evolution, our behavior is an exception.”
is in danger of being a straw-man of the criticism often leveled at evo-psychology.
Obviously evolution has had a great deal to do with forming our minds – the trouble is we cant find evidence (fossil beliefs from 50000 years ago ?) and compare them with modern beliefs.
It is entirely possible that evolution is working and leaving no trace of the process.
We see the end result of biological evolution and its constant interaction with cultural evolution.
I have seen people who critique the just-so hypothesis of some sloppy evo-psychology as lacking all evidence as “rejection of the idea that evolution played a part”
e.g. I have seen this said of Rebecca Watson and it isn’t an honest criticism. It is a rather obvious straw-man.
Somewhere in the recesses of my highly evolved mind I seem to remember an attack on the discipline of evo-psych that was more substantial. It criticised the discipline for favouring a distal cause (i.e. millions of years of evolution) over proximal ones (such as our sedentary, civic, technologically evolved environment) as the explanation for human behaviour.
I watched the full Gad Saad interview – it was pretty good – and the several others (Sam Harris, Ali Rizvi, Majid Nawaaz, Douglas Murray, Sarah Haider, etc).
However, I’m not quite sure how to react to Rubin. In one respect he’s fighting a good and noble fight for free speech – and I like that he allows his guests to speak. My only issue is that he appears to do little research and rarely – if ever – questions the claims of some of his more reactionary interviewees. Not even when the claims are outlandish (eg Milo Yiannopoulos, Tommy Robinson, Ben Shapiro, etc).
For instance, he had on UK right-wing, former-EDL leader Tommy Robinson. While some of what he said was true* and revolting, Robinson repeatedly stated these are national epidemics rather than isolated instances. Much else of what he said was difficult to verify (relying, for instance, on his personal experiences in prison).
If Rubin had done some research he would’ve been able to take Robinson to task on this sort of over-generalising/over-extension.
That’s one of the things about the more insidious end of the reactionary right: they often take examples of real verifiable events and then claim that they are occurring everywhere all the time and that the offending group (Jews, Muslims, Blacks, etc) are secretly in control of everything.
It might be nice if Rubin got on the heroic Maryam Namazie to correct some of the misinformation spread by Robinson. Her group One Law for All put out a good doc on the reactionary right and why we shouldn’t pal up to it just ’cause it opposes Islam too.
http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/new-report-enemies-not-allies-the-far-right/
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*Alarmingly there have actually been instances of Labour Party council meetings being segregated by gender to appease Muslims in areas with large Muslim populations. Another issue he raises is the hideous Rotherham sex abuse scandal – in which Yorkshire police covered up ~1,000 cases of child rape over decades because the perps were Muslim males of Pakistani origin.
Yes, and these sky-is-falling reactions can have disastrous consequences. One of the reasons the U.S. has such a poor social safety net is because the right-wing looks at a few instances of people trying to cheat and concludes therefore that no assistance should be available, societal consequences be damned.
It feels as if the universe is colliding here. I’ve seen Prof. Coyne’s videos (https://goo.gl/vnTTm2) on the Agatan Fnd channel and have long been following the Gadfather. This is just fantastic. I’m looking forward to an interview on Mr. Saad’s channel, sir! We all will benefit from such a dialogue.
Not wasting much time with American political bletherings, I haven’t really been watching the development of this terminology. But I do notice that it mirrors the analytical approach of the “Political Compass”, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before. Their page does have an analysis and explanation of their approach, but they also recommend that, if you’re going to take the test, you do it before reading their methodological description.
I see that they’ve added their analysis of the (current) US presidential candidates, which may be of some interest to voters there.
Wouldn’t it be “behooven”?
Technically, “we” should be the object, so the correct construction is “It behooves us to…”
“Behooved” is the past tense. I don’t think “behooven” exists.
I think it’s a small town in the Netherlands.
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A smaall town, you say?
Now that I think about it, I think “behooved” is what ungulates are.
Or horses, he said, with equinimity.
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Jockeying for best pun?
Just along for the ride.
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Excellent interview with Gad. I have been watching many of Rubens interviews and they are very good. Even when he is interviewing people like Shapiro he manages to have good conversations.
TYT is a show I still watch but they are certainly ‘regressive’ in some of their analysis.
Please continue writing about ex-muslims and the authoritarians, love it.
I don’t agree with calling them the authoritarian Left. TYT have stood for some pretty silly positions but they’ve never been authoritarians. They’ve repeatedly been in favour of freedom of speech.
Slowly catching up again… Saad’s presentation is not my cup of tea, but it was very useful. I’m sure to look for his pieces!