Speaker 1: All right, shall we get started now.
Speaker 2: The reason, the real reason that I'm returning to this
Speaker 2: podcast is this. Over the weekend somebody referred to Steve
Speaker 2: Hayward as the new me, and I thought, that's it.
Speaker 1: The difference is that the remedy under the ADA and
Speaker 1: other anti discrimination laws is not stereotyping.
Speaker 2: We don't then it's not race basically. I take your point.
Speaker 1: I take your point, but you're saying then that if
Speaker 1: the problem of no access is about race, it's just
Speaker 1: too bad. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Stephen Hayward, Charles C. W. Cook,
Speaker 1: someone named Peter Robinson talking today with Charles Murray about
Speaker 1: his new book Taking Religion Seriously, Let's have ourselves a podcast.
Speaker 1: I really don't know what he've said at the end
Speaker 1: of that sentence. I don't think he knows what he've
Speaker 1: said either. Well, welcome everybody to Ricochet Podcast number seven
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty two. It's Stephen Hayward sitting in the
Speaker 1: host chair today the still vacationing James Lylax, joined as
Speaker 1: usual by Charles C. W. Cook and somebody on my
Speaker 1: screen who has identified as Peter Robinson, although I'm doubtful, Well,
Speaker 1: in the age of Ai Peter. I'm skeptical it's really you.
Speaker 2: But it's I'm busy, so this is actually a hologram.
Speaker 1: Right, okay, good? Where are you today? Are you out
Speaker 1: here in sunny California?
Speaker 2: I'm at home. I'm at home. I am indeed in
Speaker 2: sunny California, right, I am preparing. We're having a big
Speaker 2: deal at the Hoover Institution next week, a celebration of
Speaker 2: the life and work of Thomas soul Right, and I'm prepping.
Speaker 2: I'm I got a rather chastening note from the Supreme
Speaker 2: Court of the United States earlier saying that Justice Thomas
Speaker 2: would be attending and that he'd been asked to speak,
Speaker 2: and that he would like me to have a conversation
Speaker 2: with him on stage. Now. I don't know about you,
Speaker 2: but that made me sit up in my chair.
Speaker 1: Yes, it would mean to I would come, except I
Speaker 1: have a prior robbal Gay at the University of Mississippi
Speaker 1: all next week, so I'm very sorrey. I can't make it.
Speaker 1: Charles C. W. Cook is with us, but he had
Speaker 1: to dash to the front door to sign for the
Speaker 1: delivery of a passport, so I guess he's getting ready
Speaker 1: to flee the country or something like that.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: A special guest today, by the way, listeners is Charles Murray,
Speaker 1: who will be on with us in a few minutes
Speaker 1: to talk about his dynamite new book just out this week,
Speaker 1: Taking Religion Seriously. More about that and a proper introduction
Speaker 1: and due course. But first, I don't know how closely
Speaker 1: you're following politics these days, Peter. I find as I
Speaker 1: get older, I find it hard to keep up with
Speaker 1: the day to day rat tat tat of all the
Speaker 1: pundits and everything.
Speaker 2: Wow coming from you. I always sort of relied on
Speaker 2: you to keep up on it. For me.
Speaker 1: Well, I kind of keep up with the political science
Speaker 1: of it. I'll mention to you, since you are there
Speaker 1: at Hoover, I am reading just started last night, this
Speaker 1: brand new book by one of your colleagues, David Brady,
Speaker 1: the great political scientists. Oh yes, and I forget the
Speaker 1: title of it, but it's on sort of electoral cycles
Speaker 1: going back fifty years and it looks fascinating. That's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing I like, a sort of long form,
Speaker 1: data oriented calm conclusions about things and not polemics. And
Speaker 1: you know, the latest Twitter fight.
Speaker 2: So forth, we do we do have a the midterm
Speaker 2: is going to just the midterm is going to be very,
Speaker 2: very important. I interviewed Speaker Johnson. Oh, this would be
Speaker 2: going back four or five months now in Washington, and
Speaker 2: I said to him on camera, what are you expecting,
Speaker 2: excuse me, for the midterms? And he purred like a cat,
Speaker 2: and he said, on camera, we're out raising them. We
Speaker 2: have the morale we're going We've also done a remarkably
Speaker 2: good job this cycle of candidate recruitment. We're going to
Speaker 2: retain the House. And then we went off camera and
Speaker 2: I said, no, really, how are things looking for the midterms?
Speaker 2: And he said exactly the same thing. This is a
Speaker 2: man who I don't believe is all that good at GILE.
Speaker 2: So I am here to report that the speed of
Speaker 2: the House really believes that the Republicans are going to
Speaker 2: retain the House in the midterms.
Speaker 1: Well, now, I remember you saying a year or so
Speaker 1: ago that just observing from AFAR that you were impressed
Speaker 1: with Johnson coming into that job that's been so difficult.
Speaker 1: Now that you've met him and talked to him, is
Speaker 1: that is your impressed? Your favorable impression notched up stayed
Speaker 1: the same. Where do you land?
Speaker 2: I walked into that impressed by Johnson. My view of
Speaker 2: him went up even more.
Speaker 3: He is.
Speaker 2: Well. He has to have political smarts to be able
Speaker 2: to hold that house together. And he has held the
Speaker 2: House together, excuse me, he's held the Republican Caucus together.
Speaker 2: And of course, as we all know, his majority is
Speaker 2: extremely slim. He has had to resort, as of course,
Speaker 2: anyone in that position would have to resort to calling
Speaker 2: in Donald Trump and give him a call list on
Speaker 2: important votes. You need to talk to these six guys.
Speaker 2: There are arms I need you to twist. Fine, Bill,
Speaker 2: Mike Johnson has done that. But he's a genuinely good, relaxed,
Speaker 2: calm human being. His staff like him, you know, Washington, Steve,
Speaker 2: you know, not all staffs like their principles at all,
Speaker 2: even when they admire them or respect them in a
Speaker 2: certain way. His staff genuinely enjoys him. He is honestly.
Speaker 2: He reminded me of my hero Ronald Reagan, in the
Speaker 2: sense that despite all the pressures he's under, despite all
Speaker 2: the activity worrying around him, he himself seems a kind
Speaker 2: of node of calm. A man really is comfortable being himself.
Speaker 2: I was just impressed by him. He does seem serene.
Speaker 2: I'll give him that.
Speaker 1: And about his staff, at least they stay out of
Speaker 1: his shot. I'm like, sorry, that's right. That's what is
Speaker 1: Charlie is back passport in hand. Charlie. You know, one
Speaker 1: of the interesting things this week is I do like
Speaker 1: watching that Harry Enton guy on CNN their Polson I
Speaker 1: think shoots pretty straight, and he's pointing out what ought
Speaker 1: to be pretty ominous for Democrats, which is their generic
Speaker 1: ballot margin has been shrinking over Republicans, and now it's
Speaker 1: down to like three points, I think, and for variety
Speaker 1: of reasons I won't explain the Democratic generic margin needs
Speaker 1: to be larger from that to win a House election.
Speaker 1: It's just the way it all falls out. And that's
Speaker 1: even before you factor in any possible jerrymandering that might
Speaker 1: happen before the election next year. Do you think that
Speaker 1: this is just a reflection of the way the shutdown
Speaker 1: is not really working for Democrats or are there deeper
Speaker 1: tectonic plates behind the scene.
Speaker 3: This is a weird moment in that usually all you
Speaker 3: need to do in politics is look at the popularity
Speaker 3: of the incumbent president or Congress and reason from that.
Speaker 3: But at the moment that's impossible because you see the
Speaker 3: headline which says Donald Trump is eight points underwater, or
Speaker 3: the Republicans as a whole an approval rating of thirty
Speaker 3: six percent, and then you look at the Democrats and
Speaker 3: they're twenty points worse. Now, in this case, they're not worse,
Speaker 3: they're slightly better on the generic ballot, but they're not
Speaker 3: better enough, and that is odd. Ever since I moved
Speaker 3: to the US, politics was thermostatic. You could pretty much
Speaker 3: guarantee that if a president had been there six years
Speaker 3: then there would be a pushback. Well, in twenty twenty six,
Speaker 3: Donald Trump woul't have been there for six years in
Speaker 3: quite the way that presidents are normally there for six years,
Speaker 3: because his terms have been set apart from one another.
Speaker 3: But he will have been president for six years and
Speaker 3: the Democrats are really in a bad position for that.
Speaker 3: If you compare it to, for example, twenty fourteen, where
Speaker 3: Republicans romped, it doesn't look like it's going to be
Speaker 3: anything like that sort of dynamic, which is odd.
Speaker 1: Well, you mentioned Trump being underwater in his personal approval
Speaker 1: rag we have here something but something of a reversal
Speaker 1: from the Reagan years. Peter will remember this. It was
Speaker 1: said that Reagan's personal popularity was always very high, but
Speaker 1: the media and Democrats told us his particular policies and
Speaker 1: ideas were not popular. That turns out not to be true,
Speaker 1: by the way, if he really got into it. But
Speaker 1: that was the media spin and talking point. But I
Speaker 1: do think it is in the case of Trump. Trump
Speaker 1: himself is personally unpopular for all the reasons that we know, right,
Speaker 1: So it sometimes amazes me this approval rating is even
Speaker 1: in the mid to high forties. But I do believe
Speaker 1: that a lot of his policies are popular, correct, right,
Speaker 1: And so I think that that plays out, I think
Speaker 1: in an awful lot of the rest of the shaping
Speaker 1: of the political landscape.
Speaker 2: This was the point that Barton Swim made in the
Speaker 2: Wall Street Journal What was it yesterday? Where he had
Speaker 2: this outrageous column which you called I think it was.
Speaker 2: He referred to Donald Trump as the tribune of democracy,
Speaker 2: the man who body democracy. Far from being a threat
Speaker 2: to democracy, he's embodying democracy. And he went through an
Speaker 2: issue by issue by issue, saying that although the Democrats
Speaker 2: are railing against him, they ought to think twice about
Speaker 2: how many Republicans, how many Americans approve of closing down
Speaker 2: the borders after the Biden years, A lot of Americans
Speaker 2: approve of that. Who approves of getting tough on crime
Speaker 2: in cities? All Americans? On and on, and it goes.
Speaker 2: The other bit of this is that Steve, you and
Speaker 2: I do go back to the Reagan years. I cannot
Speaker 2: recall seeing the Democrats in such total and utter disarray.
Speaker 2: And if you close your eyes and try impartially to
Speaker 2: say to yourself, Democratic Party, what are the names that
Speaker 2: come to mind as the leaders or the most prominent
Speaker 2: members of the Democratic Party, And you get Elizabeth Warren,
Speaker 2: Alexandria Caesio Cortes. We're going to get Mom Dami, apparently
Speaker 2: he's on course to win election as mayor of New York.
Speaker 2: You've got Bernie Sanders. You've got Chuck Schumer, maybe the
Speaker 2: least unpopular of all these figures. In other words, Peter,
Speaker 2: you're leaving somebody. Peter, Yeah, because I'm leaving. I'm leaving
Speaker 2: him to you. So everybody I just named, everybody I
Speaker 2: just named is way over on the progressive left, and
Speaker 2: the country just won't have that, Okay, now over to
Speaker 2: you and the governor of the Golden State.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, well Newsom right, he's leading. By the way,
Speaker 1: the latest poll i've seen shows Newsom as the front
Speaker 1: runner for twenty twenty eight number two Alexandria Cossio Cortanz.
Speaker 1: Watch he choose the Democratic Democramtocratic Nation presidential nomination.
Speaker 2: Right now.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about Newsom later on. I prefer to talk
Speaker 1: about him as little as possible. But he's taking a
Speaker 1: big gamble on his reapportionment initiative. I think if he
Speaker 1: loses that the blue will be off the rows, and
Speaker 1: I think he might, but we'll save that for some
Speaker 1: other day.
Speaker 2: Have we seen any polling on that. It's difficult on
Speaker 2: that initiative.
Speaker 1: But it's always been very bad on California ballot initiatives.
Speaker 1: But a couple of polls have it with his initiative
Speaker 1: and a slight lead. So I wouldn't be confident if
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 3: New for it to pass. Is it a simple majority? Yes,
Speaker 3: it's sixty in Florida.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's simple majority. Uh, and so we'll see all
Speaker 1: by mail. I think it's just the only question on
Speaker 1: the ballot. Well, here, maybe I will spend thirty more
Speaker 1: seconds on this. You may remember Peter, but maybe you don't.
Speaker 1: You were I was a teenager at the time. But
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan, in his second last year's governor ran Proposition
Speaker 1: one as a special ballot measure in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: and it was a great measure. It was a tax
Speaker 1: and spinning limitation initiative. But it was complicated and it
Speaker 1: lost because the you know, the media and all the
Speaker 1: unions ran a very clever campaign against it, and Reagan
Speaker 1: made a couple of mistakes in the campaign and that
Speaker 1: you know, stopped his momentum heading towards the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: six cycle. I think, and I think the same thing
Speaker 1: could happen to Newsome. This is a gamble that Newsom's taking.
Speaker 1: So we'll see just my special by way.
Speaker 2: Just we keep hearing that the President Donald Trump really
Speaker 2: wants to cut back on and possibly even eliminate mail
Speaker 2: in ballots because he considers them insecure. Well, I have
Speaker 2: news for the President. He can relax because here in California,
Speaker 2: in my household, I have five children. Two of them
Speaker 2: are residents of Michigan, one is a resident of Texas,
Speaker 2: and one is a resident of New York, only one
Speaker 2: of my five children as a resident here of California,
Speaker 2: and yet I just received ballot mail ballots for all
Speaker 2: of my children. I could I so so. I mean,
Speaker 2: of course, it's just out. It's crazy. The mail voting
Speaker 2: is out of control. I now they made a mistake
Speaker 2: with me, because if I do vote for all my children,
Speaker 2: I won't lawyers leave me alone.
Speaker 1: I won't do it.
Speaker 2: I'm not that excite guy again Prop fifty. Every single
Speaker 2: time I was.
Speaker 1: Afraid you were about to commit to a felony, and
Speaker 1: I was going to mute you in case you started
Speaker 1: down that road.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, I wouldn't do that. But the idea,
Speaker 2: right the mail in ballots in California are in any
Speaker 2: way secure is absurd, preposterous.
Speaker 1: Do you know who else was opposed to mail in balloting?
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter? Really, I don't know if you remember that story.
Speaker 1: It's twenty years ago now, I think two thousand and five.
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter did some fancy commission with James Baker was
Speaker 1: the co chair, and their report was very strongly critical
Speaker 1: of mail in ballots because of the potential for fraud.
Speaker 3: It does work quite well in Florida. But the cost
Speaker 3: of it, and the Democrats would never accept this is
Speaker 3: that they dish what's the word, de register or unenroll
Speaker 3: you after every election. So if you want to mail
Speaker 3: in ballots, not to register to vote, but if you
Speaker 3: want a mail in ballot, you have to reregister every time.
Speaker 3: You have to opt in wow, each each in every election.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, that would be a better way of doing it.
Speaker 3: Just send them out at infinitum.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And Charles Murray joins us now on the podcast
Speaker 1: to Charles is a Resident Scholar Emeritus at the American
Speaker 1: Enterprise Institute, author of so many books that if I
Speaker 1: list them all and recall some of the controversies about them,
Speaker 1: we would use up half of our time at least.
Speaker 1: But we're here today to talk about his brand new book,
Speaker 1: Taking Religion Seriously. Charles, Welcome to Ricochet.
Speaker 4: I'm delighted to be with you guys.
Speaker 1: Well, now, I do have an important opening metaphysical question.
Speaker 1: I think it's a high metaphysical question.
Speaker 2: I can't wait.
Speaker 1: Well, it is, what is the Aristotelian ideal of the
Speaker 1: best dry martini?
Speaker 2: Huh?
Speaker 4: Well, here, I'm I'm thinking, of course, of Robert Bork
Speaker 4: who had very strong opinions on all of this, chief
Speaker 4: among them being no allies that this is a drink,
Speaker 4: not a salad. In Robert Pork's words. The second thing
Speaker 4: is that a martini is by definition gin. Vodka is
Speaker 4: another drink. Similarly, onions are not martini's, they are another drink. Now,
Speaker 4: having said all that, I have decided, after long consideration,
Speaker 4: that you don't want to put any vermouth in a martini, or,
Speaker 4: if you know the proverbial, wave it over the bottle.
Speaker 4: I used to go to the Palm Restaurant with Charles
Speaker 4: Crauthemmer and Bill Bennett and Pete Wayner for lunche three
Speaker 4: or four times a year, and I was mystified as
Speaker 4: to why I liked the martinis of the Palm better
Speaker 4: than the ones I made. And I tried all kinds
Speaker 4: of different driver moose, and it turned out that the
Speaker 4: Palm doesn't put an invermouth, that's spartits. And I have
Speaker 4: stuck by that wisdom ever since.
Speaker 1: So do you ever find out their secret? Do they
Speaker 1: have a secret gin or something? No?
Speaker 4: The secret is that if you have a twist that
Speaker 4: you really do a good job of getting the lemon
Speaker 4: oil out, and that is that's important. If you do that,
Speaker 4: the gen takes on a sufficiently lovely lemonae aspect that
Speaker 4: it makes it qualitatively better than if you don't get
Speaker 4: those few drops of lemon oil.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that is the correct answer, by the way,
Speaker 1: on all fronts. But let's move on from distilled spirits
Speaker 1: to Charles has never been more himself. Charles has never
Speaker 1: been more himself than in discussing a martini, because he
Speaker 1: begins even then by defining his terms.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right.
Speaker 1: Well, let's move on from the stilled spirits to the
Speaker 1: Holy Spirit and your new book taking religion seriously. So
Speaker 1: I guess Charles, let's open up this way. I think
Speaker 1: for all your longtime readers and people who followed your
Speaker 1: work for decades now, this is an unexpected book, an
Speaker 1: unusual topic, a somewhat unusual approach. I mean, you are
Speaker 1: chiefly an empiricist, although my observation is you've always been
Speaker 1: an empiricist in the mold of James Q. Wilson or
Speaker 1: patten weinhand, someone who wants to have data but also
Speaker 1: thinks like a reasonable human being. So how did you
Speaker 1: decide before we get into some particular important aspects of
Speaker 1: the book. How did you decide that you're going to
Speaker 1: write this book and declare for the wider public what's
Speaker 1: been going on in your spiritual life.
Speaker 4: It's all Mick Everstat's fault. Mick Everstat is one of
Speaker 4: the nation's premier demographers and colleague at AEI, and he
Speaker 4: had been interviewing me, along with another colleague, Carlin Bowman,
Speaker 4: for some long videos that AEI was doing kind of
Speaker 4: an institutional history and in this case, my life at AEI,
Speaker 4: And somehow we got onto religion in the last hour
Speaker 4: of three and Nick, who is a devout Catholic, was
Speaker 4: entertained by I think that's the right word, by the
Speaker 4: eccentric ideas that I've been developing about my religious beliefs.
Speaker 4: And when they turned off the cameras, Nick looked at
Speaker 4: me and he said, it ought to be your next book.
Speaker 4: And I had at that time been struggling with a
Speaker 4: semi autobiographical book about my role in the conservative movements
Speaker 4: and the libertarian movements in the eighties and nineties, and I
Speaker 4: was really bored with it. You know, my career hasn't
Speaker 4: been that exciting and enough for maybe an article but
Speaker 4: not for a book. And this really appealed to me
Speaker 4: because the fact is, Steve that this evolution. I will
Speaker 4: try to avoid the word journey, which is way overused
Speaker 4: when you get to religion. But this evolution of my
Speaker 4: thinking has been going on for thirty some years and
Speaker 4: it's been an important part of my life that I
Speaker 4: really haven't talked with anybody about. And the other thing
Speaker 4: which justified me in saying yes, I'm going to write
Speaker 4: it is I think I am representative of millions of Americans.
Speaker 4: I'm thinking of well educated, successful people, adults forties fifties,
Speaker 4: for whom religion has never been a big deal. They
Speaker 4: aren't militant atheists. They may identify as agnostics, but basically,
Speaker 4: you know, what's the point That there is no such
Speaker 4: thing as a personal God? That's certainly true. We live
Speaker 4: in the world of the Enlightenment, where we know a
Speaker 4: whole bunch of other things about religion aren't true, and
Speaker 4: so who cares?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And I've changed from that?
Speaker 1: Okay, So I think if I think, maybe it's not
Speaker 1: too much of a simplification to say that your path
Speaker 1: to taking theism seriously has two major prongs. One is
Speaker 1: you review some of the science which shows that the
Speaker 1: randomness hypothesis of the universe is implausible, and other things.
Speaker 1: And then there's the logic of morals, which i'll hold
Speaker 1: for a moment. Also on the science, there's one part
Speaker 1: I just want to ask you about, and I know
Speaker 1: Peter's jumping in his chair to get in. I was
Speaker 1: delighted to see you talk about the shroud of Turin
Speaker 1: at some length in the book, which is a thing
Speaker 1: that's fascinating me for a long time. Then you also
Speaker 1: mentioned another thing that's been on my mind, which is
Speaker 1: quantum entanglement, this very weird business in physics where the
Speaker 1: two particles separated can be in harmony with one another.
Speaker 1: And then you mentioned a third one, which is that
Speaker 1: I think it's Paige one forty three. You mentioned that
Speaker 1: I won't find it the actual observation of particles can
Speaker 1: change their behavior. In all three of these cases, I've
Speaker 1: thought to myself, and this is a little bit too
Speaker 1: crew perhaps or irreverent, But these are all God's little
Speaker 1: jokes on the rational mind. I mean, when the particles
Speaker 1: change their behavior when we're deserving them in a scientific experiment,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like God sitting back saying, AH caught
Speaker 1: you looking, didn't I.
Speaker 4: Well, there have been a whole bunch of things that
Speaker 4: have happened in the last century that are God's little jokes.
Speaker 4: For example, what could be a one better prank than
Speaker 4: to have physicists discover in the twentieth century what is
Speaker 4: basically a gloss on Genesis. I mean, the big bag
Speaker 4: is Genesis, let there be light. And also when you
Speaker 4: have the enlightenment view saying we're all materialists. Now, the
Speaker 4: brain is where consciousness resides. And once the brains, consciousness quits.
Speaker 1: What could be.
Speaker 4: Funnier than to have science and the ability to keep
Speaker 4: people bring people back from near death experiences provide a
Speaker 4: great deal of evidence saying maybe it doesn't work out
Speaker 4: the way we expected it to. Maybe consciousness can exist
Speaker 4: independently of the brain. This is not theologians arguing for
Speaker 4: a life after death. This is the science saying something's
Speaker 4: going on that we can't explain through existing euroscience.
Speaker 2: Peter jump in stephenm I permitted, Charles, I'd like to
Speaker 2: come to the question of miracles, on which you're tiptoeing
Speaker 2: up to it in a moment. But first it's sort
Speaker 2: of for me the threshold question is this Maybe I'm
Speaker 2: the outlaw. I just don't know. I would like to
Speaker 2: put this to you and then just see how you respond.
Speaker 2: But when you say I Charles Murray, I Charles Murray.
Speaker 2: Charles Murray, who produced at least three of the most
Speaker 2: controversial books of the last several decades and two of
Speaker 2: the most important, Losing Ground and Coming Apart. You produced
Speaker 2: two books in your career that everybody had to read,
Speaker 2: all right, and then you say, oh, by the way,
Speaker 2: I've never really been particularly interested in God. Now that
Speaker 2: stops me cold, because all my life I haven't been able.
Speaker 2: I did try. I got to college, I got to
Speaker 2: Dartmouth and realized that all the cool professors were atheists,
Speaker 2: and so I tried it. And I was only able
Speaker 2: to keep it up for two weeks. I remember it
Speaker 2: exactly too, and then it just became too much of
Speaker 2: an effort. I have. The existence of God seems to
Speaker 2: me everywhere present. I haven't always been happy about it.
Speaker 2: Lord knows, I haven't always lived up to the implications.
Speaker 2: But I can't imagine how someone can go through the
Speaker 2: kind of life that you've led, the life of the mind,
Speaker 2: the life of awareness, the life of constantly interrogating this
Speaker 2: and that aspect of reality, the life of someone who's
Speaker 2: such an American patriot, and we see God all over
Speaker 2: the Founding. The founders had different levels belief in different
Speaker 2: but He's there. How can it be that you went
Speaker 2: through decades of your life just not particularly interested in
Speaker 2: the question.
Speaker 4: All right, we are getting to what I consider the
Speaker 4: only potential real contribution that the book has most of
Speaker 4: the book is, you know, I am not an expert
Speaker 4: on a whole variety of things that I talk about
Speaker 4: in the book, And I say explicitly in the text
Speaker 4: I'm talking from my perspective about the Big Bang and consciousness,
Speaker 4: and that I'm not an expert in any of this.
Speaker 4: I'm like you, I am forced to try to make
Speaker 4: judgments about fields in which I don't have the time
Speaker 4: to master them. So in that sense, I'm not making contributions.
Speaker 4: But I think it is a contribution to say that
Speaker 4: spiritual sensitivity is the same kind of thing quality and
Speaker 4: human beings, that the ability to appreciate music is, the
Speaker 4: ability to appreciate great art and great literature. In all
Speaker 4: of these cases, you have a trait that is not
Speaker 4: iq at all. I mean, we all know really smart people,
Speaker 4: and actually I'm kind of one of them who looks
Speaker 4: at a picture in a museum, a great picture, and
Speaker 4: I'm not moved. I leave it in five seconds and
Speaker 4: go on to the next one, and soddenly there are
Speaker 4: people who are tone deaf. Literally, well, you are on
Speaker 4: the right hand side of the normal distribution in spiritual sensitivity.
Speaker 4: For you, not being preoccupied with God, not his social utility,
Speaker 4: but the truth value of God is as natural to
Speaker 4: you as it is for some musicians to lose themselves
Speaker 4: in the music. And it says unnatural for me. And
Speaker 4: I'm also married to a woman who is at the right, say,
Speaker 4: had side of that distribution on spiritual sensitivity, and I
Speaker 4: have the equivalent of a score of seventy five on
Speaker 4: the IQ scale when it comes to spiritual sensitivity. So
Speaker 4: I think that's an important point to make for a
Speaker 4: couple of reasons. First, is, if it's true, and I'm
Speaker 4: sure it is, that means that people like me have
Speaker 4: to cobble together ways of getting into these problems that
Speaker 4: you don't have to do. You can take a much
Speaker 4: more direct route than people like I can. And the
Speaker 4: other thing is I want to disabuse my fellow people
Speaker 4: with the spiritual sensitivity of seventy five. I want to
Speaker 4: get them from I want them to stop saying, oh,
Speaker 4: people who claim all of these things about spiritual realities
Speaker 4: are just deluding themselves. I want them to realize, you
Speaker 4: are the one with the handicap. You are the one
Speaker 4: who it has does not have access to this information.
Speaker 2: So it's a trait. It's a trait. It's a truth
Speaker 2: that like many traits you've just spent your life studying.
Speaker 2: There's a bell curve here at Human beings vary on
Speaker 2: this point.
Speaker 4: And I'm not talking I'm talking about reality, all right.
Speaker 4: The beauty of music is not in the imagination of
Speaker 4: people who are going to appreciate music. They are the
Speaker 4: ones who can see the beauty. Similarly for great art.
Speaker 4: And I'm saying, people who have spiritual sensitivity are seeing
Speaker 4: things that are true that are very difficult for me
Speaker 4: to see.
Speaker 1: Can I just let me jump in for second, Peter,
Speaker 1: which is a short clarifying follow up question. So you
Speaker 1: know you used the phrase of Peter, the bell curve
Speaker 1: and Charles you talked about, you know, different modes or
Speaker 1: levels of spiritual perception but do you think in general
Speaker 1: human beings have an instinct for reverence.
Speaker 4: Well, they certainly have. There is a religious instinct that
Speaker 4: is evolutionarily driven. Nicholas Wade has a very nice book
Speaker 4: about that. An instinct for reverence, that's the Yeah, it's
Speaker 4: it's it's I think. I think the God sized hole
Speaker 4: that people talk about, I think that is. I think
Speaker 4: that is a human characteristic. And I think that for
Speaker 4: most of us, well we all have the God sized
Speaker 4: hole buried in there somewhere. Some of us never have
Speaker 4: to access it. A lot of times that becomes apparent
Speaker 4: to people in times of great stress and tragedy and
Speaker 4: so forth. That if you live a life that doesn't
Speaker 4: have much tragedy, it may very well be you can
Speaker 4: ignore it. We can distract ourselves. But I think the
Speaker 4: God's size follow was a human characteristic.
Speaker 2: Charles, by the way you put your answering all kinds
Speaker 2: of questions for me, you remember, as I Steve would,
Speaker 2: I Charlie wouldn't. Arnold Bitchman. Arnold Bichman was one of
Speaker 2: my closest friends here at the Hoover Institution. I remember
Speaker 2: walking into the lounge for a cup of coffee one afternoon,
Speaker 2: and Arnold, who then must have been ninety one or
Speaker 2: ninety two, looked up and said to me, do you
Speaker 2: believe in God? And my first thought was, Arnold, is
Speaker 2: a little late in the day for you to be
Speaker 2: asking that question. But truly it had just kind of
Speaker 2: worked his way to the front of his mind. All right,
Speaker 2: So onto this question of miracles. I'm not exactly certain.
Speaker 2: Bear with me if you would, because I'm on the
Speaker 2: bell curve that puts questions in a sloppy way, not
Speaker 2: as beautifully and precisely as you do. Try.
Speaker 4: You're the best interviewer I've ever had.
Speaker 2: Oh would you repeat that for Steve to hear that?
Speaker 2: So I did an interview a couple of months ago
Speaker 2: with Carlos Air at Yale. Carlos as a new book
Speaker 2: out entitled They Flew, and it is a book that
Speaker 2: takes seriously as a historical matter. He's a professor of
Speaker 2: history at Yale. Accounts of two particular kinds of the
Speaker 2: miraculous behavior supernatural behavior. The accounts all come from Catholic
Speaker 2: not all, but overwhelmingly they come from Catholic countries Italy
Speaker 2: and Spain for the most part. And we're talking about
Speaker 2: the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century, although one of
Speaker 2: the figures involved, Padre Pio now Sat Saint Peo, died
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty one. And Carlos makes the point that
Speaker 2: we have extremely good document mentary evidence that certain figures
Speaker 2: levitated in prayer and certain other figures were capable of
Speaker 2: or experienced by location. That is to say, we have
Speaker 2: documentary evidence that they were seen, spoke, touched in two
Speaker 2: places at once. And one of the reasons we have
Speaker 2: such good evidence, particularly for the older figures, is that
Speaker 2: the Roman Catholic Church itself found all of this a
Speaker 2: terrible nuisance, doubted it, and in case after case after case,
Speaker 2: set up tribunals to investigate the matter with the apparent
Speaker 2: hope of tamping it all down. Okay, And Carlos makes
Speaker 2: the point that we have historical we have eyewitness testimony
Speaker 2: for these events that is at least as good as
Speaker 2: the eyewitness testimony we have for the speech that Elizabeth first,
Speaker 2: the first gave it Tisbury, or that because of our
Speaker 2: not I was about to say Western, that's mistaken, because
Speaker 2: of our secular, because of the Enlightenment, Northern European frame
Speaker 2: of mind, that we have inhabited. We don't see it.
Speaker 2: There is an aspect of reality, and his argument is
Speaker 2: this is reality. Reality is big enough to contain strange
Speaker 2: things that strike us as levitation and by location, and
Speaker 2: we're not seeing it. So in this book, do you
Speaker 2: find yourself seeing more of reality? Is that a fair
Speaker 2: way of putting the question. I see you nodding, You
Speaker 2: see that. I was.
Speaker 4: I was so interested in your account of this book.
Speaker 4: And the title is the title is simply they flew. Okay,
Speaker 4: they we got done with this podcast. I am getting
Speaker 4: the kindle version of that book right, and because I
Speaker 4: am wholly sympathetic to that point of view. There are
Speaker 4: a variety of things that are extremely well documented that
Speaker 4: just look an awful lot, like miracles, and some of
Speaker 4: those involve of healing. But I'm not talking of something
Speaker 4: as simple as taking away the leprosy. I'm talking about
Speaker 4: what I read recently that has happened within the last
Speaker 4: decade or two with people who are dying a very complex,
Speaker 4: thoroughly diagnosed diseases and got well instantly. Okay. I I
Speaker 4: think that Carl Sagan's statement that has become such a
Speaker 4: cliche that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is true. But
Speaker 4: what I think that a lot of the skeptics of
Speaker 4: the world don't recognize is what extraordinary evidence we have
Speaker 4: for some really weird stuff. And nicely put so basically, well,
Speaker 4: I wouldn't have used the word stuff for this were
Speaker 4: a less polite company. But anyway, anyway, the when it
Speaker 4: comes to miracles and the Bible, I still, you know,
Speaker 4: struggle to decide how much I accept as true and
Speaker 4: not true. And of course the resurrection is the acid
Speaker 4: test with all of that. However, the idea that miraculous
Speaker 4: things happen, I have no problem saying there's a lot
Speaker 4: of evidence for that.
Speaker 1: So Charles, we have the ideal audience for your book.
Speaker 1: In our third host, Charles CW. Cook. Who, Charlie Cook,
Speaker 1: I don't think I'm betraying any real private information to
Speaker 1: say that you describe yourself as a church going agnostic.
Speaker 3: So Charlie Cook, Hi, Charles, this is true what Steve
Speaker 3: says in a sense of books. For me, I'm on
Speaker 3: page forty two, so I haven't got beyond that yet.
Speaker 3: But you started in night teen eighty five, so you
Speaker 3: were all around forty then I'm now forty and I
Speaker 3: like you have the seventy five IQ thing, I think,
Speaker 3: and I compare it with music. I actually took my
Speaker 3: car yesterday in for its annual service and I was
Speaker 3: playing music in the car, and I was so emotional
Speaker 3: getting my car done because of the music that I
Speaker 3: thought I must be right on the right hand side
Speaker 3: of your distribution for music with religion religion, I'm not,
Speaker 3: but my wife is. I'm married to a Catholic and
Speaker 3: she is devout, so she has that. So I think
Speaker 3: I have the ideal patterns for the book. But my
Speaker 3: question is so I had Rosstauthat on my podcast a
Speaker 3: few months ago, and he's also written a book about religion,
Speaker 3: and I said to him, what is your aim here?
Speaker 3: And he said, my aim is to convert you. My
Speaker 3: aim is to convince you that I'm right, and preferably
Speaker 3: you will become a Christian, and preferably you become a Catholic.
Speaker 3: Right this book, which I haven't finished yet, is that
Speaker 3: the aim or is there aim more to sort of
Speaker 3: dis dispense with this sneering that you see among a
Speaker 3: lot of people who are within the world. We inhabit
Speaker 3: people who are well educated where they really look down
Speaker 3: on all of these ideas as being silly or prehistoric
Speaker 3: or superstitious. Is that the aim of the book or
Speaker 3: do you have a more specific goal?
Speaker 4: No, Actually, you sound to me like my ideal reader. Okay,
Speaker 4: I mean you are exactly the person I'm at and
Speaker 4: what I'm.
Speaker 2: Saying to you you should charge him more.
Speaker 1: What I'm saying.
Speaker 4: What I'm saying to you is I feel your disability
Speaker 4: because I share your disability. And what I'm going to
Speaker 4: give to you is not a handbook. I'm just going
Speaker 4: to give you an example of how you can cobble
Speaker 4: together way of thinking about this that will get you
Speaker 4: deeper and deeper into what I am confident is a
Speaker 4: really important should be an important part of your life.
Speaker 4: And when you get to the end of the book,
Speaker 4: you'll see that the last chapter, which has to do
Speaker 4: what last chapters always do, I explicitly don't try to
Speaker 4: foist Christianity on my readers. I say, look, there are
Speaker 4: two things I think you ought to take away from this,
Speaker 4: but neither one of them is directive about except to say,
Speaker 4: this is a worthwhile endeavor and you really should invest
Speaker 4: the effort. And not only should you invest the effort,
Speaker 4: but you can despite our seventy five scores on the
Speaker 4: perceptual perceptual ability scale. And that's it. So it's a
Speaker 4: I'm not trying to own the agnostics and make them
Speaker 4: feel bad about being agnostics.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to.
Speaker 4: To say, you too, can recover from this if you
Speaker 4: give it some effort.
Speaker 3: Another interesting thing that I'm picking up despite only being
Speaker 3: forty two pages in, is very often the way that
Speaker 3: this topic is set up is as if on the
Speaker 3: one hand you have religion and then on the other
Speaker 3: hand you have science, and never the twain shall meet.
Speaker 3: But it's quite interesting just reading the chapter on the
Speaker 3: creation of the universe or the Big Bang, or however
Speaker 3: you want to look at it, how intertwined a lot
Speaker 3: of those questions seem to be, which is not the
Speaker 3: way we talk about it.
Speaker 4: I think that the relationship between science and religion has
Speaker 4: flipped one hundred and eighty degrees, and they'll get to
Speaker 4: this later in the book, But from about fourteen hundred
Speaker 4: to nineteen hundred, roughly, you had a situation in which
Speaker 4: a variety of phenomena that had been and seen as
Speaker 4: evidence for God were explained by science. And that's where
Speaker 4: the phrase God of the gaps comes from that, and
Speaker 4: science progressively reduced the number of gaps and apparently reduced
Speaker 4: the space for religion. And in the twentieth century, starting
Speaker 4: with the astronomical discoveries in the early part of the century,
Speaker 4: it's science that has discovered new phenomena we didn't even
Speaker 4: know existed, for which they have no answers. So the
Speaker 4: Big Bang is the classic example. Are the three choices?
Speaker 4: Are we just the beneficiaries of a one on a
Speaker 4: trillion chance, which is kind of hard.
Speaker 2: To deal with?
Speaker 4: Do we have a million universes? So that that's not
Speaker 4: real plausible either, which leads you with the alternative that
Speaker 4: the parsimonious plausible statement is the universe was intentionally created
Speaker 4: for some purpose. It's not random. It's not Richard Dawkins
Speaker 4: Pitilla's in different universe. That's by the way, I have
Speaker 4: a quote I really love well. It begins the chapter
Speaker 4: in The Big Bang, I think Rutford Jastro saying that
Speaker 4: the scientists who have been studying the universe and cosmology
Speaker 4: clamber over the final rock, ready to make the final discovery.
Speaker 4: And there's a band of theologians that has been sitting
Speaker 4: there for centuries. And also in the case of consciousness
Speaker 4: existing independently of the mind, that's science has let us
Speaker 4: discover those possibilities, and it can't explain them through standard
Speaker 4: scientific paradigms.
Speaker 2: Charles Peter here again, in a way, I have another
Speaker 2: question for you. Then I think back to Steve, and
Speaker 2: in a way, it's getting back to this, which side
Speaker 2: of the bell curves went on. I feel I may
Speaker 2: be mistaken, but I feel that many people feel that religion,
Speaker 2: spiritual matters, all these things are fundamentally intuitive. And you say,
Speaker 2: I listened to a good deal of your conversation the
Speaker 2: other day with Nick abersat at AEI, and you said
Speaker 2: something that I found very striking. I'm going to paraphrase you.
Speaker 2: I can't quite quote it, but this is a close
Speaker 2: paraphrase that once you begin taking these matters seriously, you
Speaker 2: discover that spiritual matters are among the most intellectually exhilarating.
Speaker 2: I think that's the phrase you used, intellectually exhilarating subjects
Speaker 2: you will ever have encountered. And I thought to myself,
Speaker 2: coming from Charles Murray, who more than most people, Martini's
Speaker 2: aside lives in his mind, that is a very arresting statement.
Speaker 2: Could you unfold that a bit?
Speaker 4: Well, I will give a concrete example of I'm starting
Speaker 4: to get more interested in Christianity after I read C. S.
Speaker 4: Lewis's Mere Christianity. But then I immediately run into the
Speaker 4: revisionist literature on Christianity, the bart Ehraman's of the World,
Speaker 4: and who argue that, oh, the Gospels weren't even really
Speaker 4: written in the ordinary sense of that word. They were
Speaker 4: incrementally put together, redacted, augmented by anonymous authors. We have
Speaker 4: no idea who wrote the Gospels, et cetera, et ceter
Speaker 4: and we really have no clear idea of what Jesus
Speaker 4: really said. And that was all very aerod diede and
Speaker 4: it was even persuasive. But then I came across the
Speaker 4: title of a book I don't know how called Jesus
Speaker 4: and the Eyewitnesses, and.
Speaker 1: It was a book.
Speaker 4: The thesis was that the Gospels are very clearly intended
Speaker 4: to emphasize the degree to which they're based on eyewitness testimony.
Speaker 4: Point Number one. Part of being exhilarated is to have
Speaker 4: a fresh take on things, and all at once. Here
Speaker 4: is out of the tired nihilism of the revisionist scholarship.
Speaker 4: Here is this thing saying, actually, you go back to
Speaker 4: the Gospels. There's a lot of eyewitness stuff in here,
Speaker 4: and here are my reasons for arguing that, which involves
Speaker 4: some really interesting understandings of Aramaic and the original languages
Speaker 4: in which the New Testament was written. And there are
Speaker 4: sentences that make more sense if what you're really reading
Speaker 4: is Peter's a transcription of Peter's testimony to Mark, but
Speaker 4: it should read we went across the river, we cross
Speaker 4: the sea, and instead they used the they did. But
Speaker 4: it's a very sophisticated book. So at the same time,
Speaker 4: I had a scholar who was taking an unpopular stance,
Speaker 4: documenting it to a fare thee well and documenting it
Speaker 4: in really ingenious ways. And I just love that, and
Speaker 4: that that's true of a lot of the other things
Speaker 4: that I got into in the traditional defense of the
Speaker 4: New Testament, where I say, you know what, this is
Speaker 4: meeting all of my tests for plausibility, and tests that
Speaker 4: the revisionists fail miserably.
Speaker 1: Well, let me Charles Tross to an end with a
Speaker 1: sharper version of Peter's question. So, by the way, Charlie Cook,
Speaker 1: if you run out of time. Read the last chapter
Speaker 1: of the book where Charles restates the whole book and
Speaker 1: puts it in a summary form.
Speaker 2: I'm going to read the thing.
Speaker 3: I'm going to read the whole thing. I always did.
Speaker 1: I'm a completionist, right, and you'll be converted by the end.
Speaker 1: We think that's that's what Peter Robinson while anyway, there's
Speaker 1: a fragment of a sentence here towards the end of
Speaker 1: Charles Murray where you say God must not be anthropomorphized.
Speaker 1: And I'm in heated agreement with that statement for a
Speaker 1: bunch of reasons, and it's absolutely the unknowability of God.
Speaker 1: I've long ago became something of a fan of the
Speaker 1: Protestant theologian Karl Bart, even though I'm more Catholic in
Speaker 1: my theological sensibilities. Generally, he said God is holy other
Speaker 1: gone's under as the German phrase work right, in other words,
Speaker 1: that we cannot have rational knowledge of the nature of God.
Speaker 1: And so my challenge is is that that has to be,
Speaker 1: in other words, the final to use Cureguard's phrase, But
Speaker 1: I don't actually like the leap of faith. That's got
Speaker 1: to be hard for you, given your rational empirical nature.
Speaker 4: Exactly and it's not a leap of faith. Things can
Speaker 4: make more sense to me if, for example, I keep
Speaker 4: reminding myself that God exists outside time, which not all
Speaker 4: theologians agree with, but some, some pretty good ones do, because,
Speaker 4: for example, you have billions of people praying to God
Speaker 4: and he's supposed to listen to all those and maybe
Speaker 4: there are more billions of beings on other planets are well,
Speaker 4: if God is outside time, that's no problem because there's
Speaker 4: no rush, you know, he doesn't have to do things
Speaker 4: sequentially and in a variety of other ways. I don't
Speaker 4: want to anthropomorphize him because it makes it too easy
Speaker 4: to condescend to him, and of course you shouldn't use
Speaker 4: the word him. That's why I like to use the
Speaker 4: analogy between me and God and me and my dog.
Speaker 4: That and even though my dog is half Border Collie
Speaker 4: and is way too smart for his own good, he
Speaker 4: doesn't have the slightest idea of what I am in
Speaker 4: any important way. And even I'm pretty smart, I don't
Speaker 4: have the slightest idea of what God is in any
Speaker 4: concrete way. I can the concept, for example, that God
Speaker 4: is love. Well, it's not just somebody like c s Lewis.
Speaker 4: My wife got started on all this because the love
Speaker 4: she felt for our new daughter Anna back in nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty five was, as she put it in her brilliant phrase,
Speaker 4: she loved Anna far more than evolution required.
Speaker 2: And see, this is what happens with.
Speaker 4: People like us, you know, when you've got an Oxford
Speaker 4: and a Yale degree, you say things like I loved
Speaker 4: her far more than evolution required. And she felt that
Speaker 4: she was being a conduit for some greater love, which
Speaker 4: is very much like C. S. Lewis's argument that a
Speaker 4: lot of the moral law is God's way of revealing
Speaker 4: himself to us. And so I have I can say
Speaker 4: to that degree I can understand God. But I just
Speaker 4: want to keep in mind that's just a tiny part.
Speaker 1: Well you know, Gosh, I'm going to go back and
Speaker 1: find this. A few months ago I wrote a long
Speaker 1: essay on my substack called can God time Travel? And
Speaker 1: I think I said, no, that's a ridiculous question. But
Speaker 1: I forget my chain of reasoning. But I wish we
Speaker 1: had time to talk about C. S. Lewis. I've got
Speaker 1: my old copy of the Abolition of Man, which I read,
Speaker 1: according to my fly leaf in nineteen seventy six, when
Speaker 1: I was a senior in high school, and I'm still
Speaker 1: reading it now, all these years later. And so my
Speaker 1: last question is where to from here are you going to?
Speaker 1: How are you going to extend your speculations from here?
Speaker 1: And can we expect maybe some more articles or maybe
Speaker 1: even a sequel book to this? Oh?
Speaker 4: No, no more articles, the more secret. Well, I too
Speaker 4: quickly say that there are no more books. I've been
Speaker 4: caught out. I keep writing another one, but I'm really.
Speaker 2: Obvious we will all be meeting Charles in purgatory. We
Speaker 2: will have ten thousand years to get really good at poker.
Speaker 4: Well, what I see as my next steps are to
Speaker 4: try to join the party. I'm referring to something I
Speaker 4: say on the last page of the book that I
Speaker 4: often feel like a small boy with his nose pressed
Speaker 4: against the glass, watching a party on the other side
Speaker 4: that he can't join. And I'm referring to people like Peter,
Speaker 4: who has access to the kinds of joys I don't
Speaker 4: yet have access to, and I would still like to.
Speaker 4: And it's also true that I still have this person
Speaker 4: living with me named Catherine, who is at about one
Speaker 4: hundred and thirty five on the distribution of perceptual spiritual perception,
Speaker 4: and figure if I hang out with her another ten
Speaker 4: or fifty years, maybe I'll get there.
Speaker 2: Charles. Does Catherine say to you, oh, Charles, I'm so
Speaker 2: delighted that you've been able to work your way to
Speaker 2: the Or does she say, Charles, it's about time.
Speaker 4: I do remember a conversation we had maybe twenty years ago,
Speaker 4: maybe fifteen before I had got I was sort of
Speaker 4: a little ways along on this, and we were talking
Speaker 4: and she just looked at me and said, Charles, you
Speaker 4: believe it to God? She announced it to me, and
Speaker 4: I said, well, yeah, I guess I do. And she
Speaker 4: also her other role in life is to lovingly roll
Speaker 4: her eyes as I get interested in something like the
Speaker 4: Shroud of Turin, or for that matter, when I am
Speaker 4: interested in other historicity of the Bible, because to her,
Speaker 4: that's largely beside the point that it's the substance lies
Speaker 4: in Jesus' teachings, lies in the kinds of ways you
Speaker 4: can enrich your life by contemplation and prayer. And her
Speaker 4: husband is out there being the empiricist again and looking
Speaker 4: up news sources and putting together data, and I think
Speaker 4: she thinks it's kind of cute, and I think she's
Speaker 4: glad that I'm doing it, But she's way further along
Speaker 4: than I am. She does not have she does not
Speaker 4: have her point that out to me.
Speaker 2: If you know, I so love the idea that there's
Speaker 2: someone on the face of the earth who looks at
Speaker 2: Charles Murray and says, oh, he's so cute.
Speaker 4: Well, so I'm really glad she thinks so, and she
Speaker 4: believe and use that phrase.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 1: She does not.
Speaker 4: She does not condescend to me. But if you if
Speaker 4: you know Catherine, she know she would never do.
Speaker 1: That, right, Well, I do, and Charles give her my
Speaker 1: best and thanks for joining us. Good luck with this book,
Speaker 1: so much fun. We'll catch up in person sometime soon,
Speaker 1: I hope.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, I would just assumably not take another ten years
Speaker 4: before I'm on a ricochet again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, it's a date deal, right, byebye Charles, Bye
Speaker 1: bye toaqre Well try to cout. The other big story
Speaker 1: this week, which I gather you follow as part of
Speaker 1: your duties of hosting law Talk, is the oral argument
Speaker 1: at the Supreme Court over racial jerry mandering under the
Speaker 1: Voting Rights Act, where once again we had the delight
Speaker 1: of watching Justice Ktanji Brown Jackson make an utter fool
Speaker 1: of herself. But beyond the spectacle, what are your takeaways
Speaker 1: from what we heard this week?
Speaker 3: Well, we talked about this on the most recent Law
Speaker 3: Talk this week, and I asked John You and Richard
Speaker 3: Epstein to explain this to me, because on the surface
Speaker 3: it seems incomprehensible. You have Louisiana passing these redistricting maps.
Speaker 3: They pass a map and the map apparently dilutes minority
Speaker 3: votes too much and thereby is in violation of Section
Speaker 3: two of the Voting Rights Act. So they pass a
Speaker 3: new map that creates a second district in which minorities
Speaker 3: are a majority, and that's illegal because it violates the
Speaker 3: equal protection clauses. So they just can't win. They create
Speaker 3: a minority rich district that's racial gerrymandering, and if they don't,
Speaker 3: then they're violating the Voting Rights Act. The problem, obviously,
Speaker 3: is that both parts of the Constitution that are relevant
Speaker 3: here are fighting. You've got the fifteenth Amendment and its
Speaker 3: expression in the Voting Rights Act against the Fourteenth Amendment.
Speaker 3: So it's tough. But from what I understand, the real
Speaker 3: dispute is where the Section two of the Voting Rights
Speaker 3: Act actually requires the creation of majority minority district and
Speaker 3: also whether the Supreme Court ought to assume that conditions
Speaker 3: in the United States are the same in twenty twenty
Speaker 3: five as they were in nineteen sixty five, which they're
Speaker 3: very clearly not.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 3: I suspect what's going to happen in this case is
Speaker 3: that there will be a majority, probably six to three
Speaker 3: of justices who say, look, we are not allowed, absent
Speaker 3: extraordinary circumstances, to sanction government decisions that are explicitly based
Speaker 3: on race. This is a government decision that is explicitly
Speaker 3: based on race. Section two is not quite as clear
Speaker 3: as progressives claim it is in justifying it, and even
Speaker 3: if it were, the reality on the ground is not
Speaker 3: remotely close to what it was in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3: And so what you might get, although I think this
Speaker 3: is questionable on originalist grounds, but what you might get
Speaker 3: is a version of where, oh gosh, I forgot no
Speaker 3: name the Supreme Court justice from Arizona who was the
Speaker 3: first female.
Speaker 2: And Andrede O'Connor, thank you, Sandraday O'Connor. You maybe be
Speaker 2: forgiven for forgetting.
Speaker 3: But Sanderday O'Connor and I wasn't a fan of this
Speaker 3: because I don't really think the constitution works like this.
Speaker 3: But SANDREDA. O connor famously said that, you know, affirmative
Speaker 3: action was okay, but maybe not in twenty years.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: And the thing is with that is that is better
Speaker 3: than permanent racial discrimination. It's worse than saying racial discrimination
Speaker 3: is flatly illegal. So I think the Court just may
Speaker 3: go down the road where they say, look, there have
Speaker 3: been points in our history where this was justified. It
Speaker 3: is no longer justified. We're not allowing this one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the clearest things
Speaker 1: Chief Justice Roberts has ever said was that counting by
Speaker 1: race as a sordid business. And so, Charlie, I think
Speaker 1: we saw two things out of it this week. And
Speaker 1: then Peter, see what you think. One is what you
Speaker 1: put it is it's obsolete. I mean in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: it was one thing to say in nineteen sixty five
Speaker 1: to say, Mintgomery, Alabama, No, I'm sorry, you can't elect
Speaker 1: your entire city council with at large, you know, the
Speaker 1: whole city votes for five candidates. You have to have
Speaker 1: districts where where you know black candidates could possibly get
Speaker 1: a majority. Okay, I think we've gone from something like
Speaker 1: I think in around numbers one hundred elected blacks in
Speaker 1: office in the old States of the Confederacy to now
Speaker 1: over ten thousand. So why do we still need to
Speaker 1: be doing it this way? And then connected to it,
Speaker 1: I think you really saw exposed this week, especially Soda
Speaker 1: Mayor and Jackson, the transparency of why they want these
Speaker 1: districts done. They want to elect black Democrats. And I
Speaker 1: thought it was very effectively parried by one of the
Speaker 1: advocates for Louisiana that in fact, there are something like
Speaker 1: what sixty black members of Congress or members of the
Speaker 1: senior loves of the government, and only fifteen of them
Speaker 1: are in majority minority districts. And then politically here I've
Speaker 1: always said for long time to liberals, I said, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, is it a good thing? Isn't this
Speaker 1: really creating a ghetto? Shouldn't you want white candidates to
Speaker 1: appeal to black voters and black candidates to appeal to
Speaker 1: white voters. Is it on our politics more healthy that
Speaker 1: way than in trying to divide us up and say
Speaker 1: your political interest in ideology should be determined by your melonin.
Speaker 2: Level correct correct correct, by the way I was struck.
Speaker 2: I didn't follow them the arguments or the case with
Speaker 2: anything like the degree of interest that you and Charlie did.
Speaker 2: But arguing for I believe this Solicitor General and for
Speaker 2: the State of Louisiana were a lawyer with a Hispanic
Speaker 2: surname and another lawyer who was clearly of South Asian,
Speaker 2: Indian or Pakistani descent, the idea that we're in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty five is absurd. My question would be as follows
Speaker 2: to follow up on if I may on, This is
Speaker 2: not me just making yak talk. This is me asking
Speaker 2: a real question to see what Charlie thinks. I interviewed
Speaker 2: three or four months ago Justice Alito and Justice Alito rather,
Speaker 2: to my surprise, the way he's very cautious, speaks in
Speaker 2: measured terms. Even his demeanor is measured and moderate and cautious.
Speaker 2: But the one place that he was just explicit, so
Speaker 2: to speak, on Varnish, not that he spoke with any
Speaker 2: particular anger or energy, but he was absolutely explicit in
Speaker 2: his view that the Constitution is color blind and that
Speaker 2: drawing distinctions based on race is unconstitutional, full stop. Now
Speaker 2: this is in my head because I'm doing I'll be
Speaker 2: interviewing Justice Thomas on Monday morning, and I looked at
Speaker 2: his concurrence as Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard, which
Speaker 2: held two years ago that admissions Patscha, Sora Dey, O'Connor,
Speaker 2: and Grutter saying, well, as long as you mean well
Speaker 2: and as long as we can expect discrimination in admissions
Speaker 2: university admissions to fade over time, it's constitutional. And in
Speaker 2: Students for Fair Admissions, the Court found that it just
Speaker 2: wasn't constitutional. And in his concurrence, Justice Thomas was utterly
Speaker 2: explicit and really quite ringing in the You could almost
Speaker 2: hear him saying it almost felt like a piece of
Speaker 2: oratory rather than a dry analytical document. Again, that the
Speaker 2: Constitution is color blind. Is the court fight with all
Speaker 2: of this jeremndring. If making distinctions based on race is unconstitutional,
Speaker 2: then we stop our analysis right there. This gets thrown out.
Speaker 2: We stopped just trying to parse how things were in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty five, We just stop it right there. Does
Speaker 2: the Court have the guts to go that far?
Speaker 3: So I actually slightly disagree with the analogy because I
Speaker 3: do think there's a legal wrinkle here. If you look,
Speaker 3: for example, at the question of affirmative action. You mentioned, yes,
Speaker 3: affirmative action is, in my estimation, banned both in statute
Speaker 3: by the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four and
Speaker 3: by the Fourteenth Amendment. That is a clear case. I'm
Speaker 3: with Alita. I watched your excellent interview of him, and
Speaker 3: I see why he was emphatic. The wrinkle here is
Speaker 3: that while the Fourteenth Amendment bans racial discrimination, the Fifteenth
Speaker 3: Amendment leaves it up to Congress to enforce voting rights,
Speaker 3: and it gives it some wiggle room to consider race.
Speaker 3: And the reason for that, obviously is that if you
Speaker 3: look at the South at the time, it was predicted
Speaker 3: correctly that Southern states would try to prevent freed slaves
Speaker 3: from voting. Where I think progressives have made a big
Speaker 3: mistake is they conflate voting rights, that is, making sure
Speaker 3: that people are not prevented from voting based on their
Speaker 3: skin color, with racial gerrymandering, which is not the same thing.
Speaker 3: And that quote from Justice Jackson where she said black
Speaker 3: voters are disabled was preposterous because she wasn't suggesting that
Speaker 3: black voters are unable to vote, they can't go to
Speaker 3: the polling place, they can't fill in the mail ballot.
Speaker 3: She was suggesting that if they are not given their
Speaker 3: own racial enclaves, then they're somehow unable to participate in
Speaker 3: American democracy. But I do think it's slightly more complicated
Speaker 3: than the other areas where I'm one hundred percent against
Speaker 3: any racial questioning whatsoever, because the fifteenth Amendment does allow
Speaker 3: Congress to consider it in an affirmative sense. It's just
Speaker 3: that they've taken it way too far. And now what
Speaker 3: they're doing is they're creating areas within states in which
Speaker 3: the government, the federal government no less, basically says the
Speaker 3: Democrat has to win because they conflate Democrat and African American.
Speaker 3: So it is slightly different. But yeah, I mean, the
Speaker 3: last thing I'll say is it has annoyed me in
Speaker 3: the media coverage because the media coverage has all been
Speaker 3: conservative justices may weeken Voting Rights Act, but you could
Speaker 3: just as easily write conservative justices may bolster equal protection Clause,
Speaker 3: which is.
Speaker 2: Good nice, yeah, yes.
Speaker 1: Well all right, so both of you mentioning Justice Alito
Speaker 1: allows me to circle back to where we began with
Speaker 1: Charles Murray because I'm reliably informed the Justice Alito is
Speaker 1: a Jen Martini man, a dry gen Martine man, and
Speaker 1: not with an ollif this is what havi Arcis tells me,
Speaker 1: who knows him well and as another fellow Martini man.
Speaker 1: But that brings us to the end of our show today.
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Speaker 1: cast material. It brings us new listeners uh and uh
Speaker 1: and makes us allows us to grow our audience. And Peter,
Speaker 1: great to see you. We were worried he in the
Speaker 1: witness Protection program somewhere and uh, Charles, I will see
Speaker 1: you again in two weeks. I'm away next week, but
Speaker 1: I will see you again in two weeks. Bye bye, everybody.