Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Ross Douthat. Ross, thanks for joining me. Sam, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. So we've never met. Am I right in thinking that? We have never met. Okay.
No, this is the closest I've come to your physically embodied presence. All right. Well... Let's see if the internet keeps us together here for the requisite hour or hour or two. Well, so I've been reading your book this week, Believe, which, when did this come out? It's pretty recent, right? Yeah, it came out, I think, February of this year, of 2025. Yeah.
And this is where you make your case for the rationality and even necessity of religion, which I think we're going to get to because I think you and I have a, we share a sense that our culture is ailing. But I think we probably diverge, at least on several key points, as to whether religion is part of the cure or part of the disease.
But I don't think—I mean, I think our core concerns are so held in common so fully that I think we— I don't know. I'm interested to see where this conversation goes, because I don't want to have and I don't think we will produce a conventional debate between an atheist and a believer about the rationality of faith, although I think some of those points are going to be unavoidable.
Yeah, we'll have a dynamic interaction that ends with your conversion. Yeah, well, that's how you sold this to me, right? On both, you know, if you're right, we're both hoping for that. That's right. Okay, so I think we should probably start with the problem. What most worries you at this moment when you look at it? Because you spend a lot of time thinking about politics, as I do.
You probably spend more over at the New York Times. commenting on culture regularly. What most concerns you at this moment?
I guess big picture, a little bit separate from the turbulence of politics right now, is I'm worried about a kind of sense of human obsolescence in the 21st century that I think has been partially forged by the experience of digital culture and disembodied ways of living and is visible in
A lot of different trends, including political polarization, but especially in sort of general unhappiness, anxiety, issues of mental illness and so on that are in turn connected to people not getting married, not having kids and effectively not perpetuating human culture. And I think we're in the shadow right now of that.
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Chapter 2: How does Ross Douthat justify the necessity of religion in modern culture?
along the way, that there are going to be all these forms of life and ways of living that are just not adapted to, again, even the world we live in now with kind of this level of digital existence, sort of people separated from physical reality, from meeting other people in reality. Like there's already a lot of strain on very basic things like having friends, getting married, having kids. Yeah.
And when you add in, let's say, lots and lots of jobs disappearing and a kind of, you know, existential metaphysical anxiety about AI being able to sort of substitute for things that we thought of as human distinctives, plus, you know, whatever, whatever other weirder forces come in.
Yeah, I think it is a very difficult situation that people need to be prepared for, I guess, is how I would put it. Doesn't mean that we're doomed at all, but some things are going to be doomed. Yeah. some places and people are going to be doomed.
And you want to start thinking now, really, you want to start thinking, you know, 25 years ago about how you, right, like you as a, you know, a person with relationships and friendships and you as someone who's involved in culture and politics, what you're doing that is sort of making your humanity resilient, I think, against these forces.
Yeah, so if you take the job piece, which is really the first point of concern for people, imagine a world where something like UBI was the necessary response to all of the abundance that AI has created. So people don't have to work. Everything has become like chess, which is to say the computers are better at everything or virtually everything that humans used to do to work.
Clearly, we need to figure out some new ethic and economics and politics around the non-necessity of human labor and figure out how to spread the wealth around. And so at that point, it would be true to say that something like UBI, I don't know if UBI is the actual right framing, but let's say that was the case.
Many people, certainly most people commenting on this issue seem to think that most of their neighbors, if not themselves, need to spend eight hours a day doing something they might not want to do. in order to feel like they have a purpose in life.
But it seems to me we have a kind of ready sample of people, a fairly large population if you look at it historically, who haven't had to work and figured out how to live reasonably or at least recognizably happy lives under those conditions. And those are, we call them rich people, right? Or aristocracies of one flavor or another, right?
People who really didn't have to figure out what to do that others would pay them for. Or if they did that early in their lives, they got to a point where they didn't have to do it any longer. And then they had to figure out what to do with leisure and It would seem very surprising to me if in the presence of unlimited leisure, we as a species and as a culture couldn't figure out how to enjoy it.
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Chapter 3: What concerns arise from digital disembodiment and declining birthrates?
But do you think that, I don't know if that's a fair description exactly of the way human beings think about work. Historically, yes, it obviously does have elements of arbitrary force productivity and toil.
I think of the broad achievement of modern civilization, though, as one that has partially, not completely, but partially liberated people from the purely arbitrary and punitive nature of work that's allowed lots and lots of people, not just a narrow elite, to have jobs that they take some kind of genuine satisfaction in that are themselves sources of community.
I think one of the lessons of the COVID era and the work from home era is that not everyone, but lots and lots of people did find a form of sort of community and solidarity and so on in the workplace, in those kind of collect in collective action that employment offers, even when it's not the most exciting thing in the world. And then it's also, yeah, I mean, it's not like historically
People who are working, I mean, a historical model in the United States of America, right, for long periods of time has been communities and situations that are oriented around family, where you are working for your family, you're working to support them in agrarian societies, you're working collectively with your family.
And again, I don't want to say from a 21st century perspective, like, you know, ah, the dignity of the toiling serf for something like, obviously there's incredible impositions involved in work and child rearing and all these things in most of human history.
But I think it's too dismissive to say, you know, oh, we're just liberating people from something that is inherently forced upon them that they don't really want. I think people are working creatures. They're communal creatures. They like doing things together. They like having a sense of mission. They like doing things to help the people closest to them.
So you are taking something away if you're saying, oh, no, here's your UBI and just decide what to do with yourself. But Ross, any part of a job that maps on to what people actually like doing that they would do for free, well, then that's precisely the kind of thing presumably they would do if they could do anything they wanted, right? If they were given 24 hours in the day
to spend however they wanted with their friends and family and with other collaborators they meet. All of this highly potentiated by access to unlimited intelligence and wealth. And again, this is the utopian version of AI we're talking about.
Then, if they want to become Christian contemplatives or build houses that are bespoke for people who want their houses built by human artisans or whatever, it could be Burning Man for half the people and Meister Eckhart for the other half. There would just be no... impediment to just using your attention the way you want to use it.
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