Ross Douthat (NYT) on AI, Atheism’s Decline, and The New Right

Today on Upstream, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat joins me to discuss his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, making the case that institutional religion is not just socially beneficial, but intellectually defensible. We discuss the decline of New Atheism, the tension between traditional Christianity and Silicon Valley's techno-optimism within the New Right coalition, and where materialism falls short. Please enjoy the episode.

Ross, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for joining.

Thanks, Erik, so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Ross, why this book and why now? You're talking largely to Silicon Valley, largely to a tech audience.

All future-believing Christians, I'm sure. I've been reading the stories. I know, you know, God, God is on the move. So I think that the 2 questions are really one question, right? That I think that we are in a really interesting cultural moment around religion in the U.S. and the Western world, where we've sort of reached the endpoint, I think, of a period of secularization that started maybe roughly 20 years ago. Started around the heyday of the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, et cetera. And really continued, I think, through the pandemic and then sort of hit its limit, I think. And you can see this in the numbers. You can see the number of Americans with, you know, no religious affiliation had been going up and up and now it's plateaued. And you have interesting data from some Western European countries that suggest there's an actual modest religious revival. And I think you can see it in intellectual life too, that We're not at the point of sort of, you know, mass conversions to traditional religion, but we're at a point where the kind of new atheist case that getting rid of religious belief was going to make the world a better place doesn't really seem persuasive to very many people in 2025, given that the world does not seem to have become a calmer, more reasonable, and more scientific place as it's become less religious. And so I think you have a lot of people now who are sort of, you know, sort of in the anterooms of religion, kind of hanging around the threshold, interested in belief. A lot of people who haven't, who've been raised without any kind of religious tradition, no Sunday school or Christmas and Easter church, who have spiritual impulses but don't have any tradition to connect them to. And so this is, this is a book sort of written, you know, it's written for everybody, like all books, right? But it's, it's written in particular for people who are sort of in that kind of position, who might be spiritually curious, religiously interested, who might think that you have to basically, you know, set aside or ignore reason or science to really become religious. And I'm sort of arguing against that idea. But I'm also trying to provide a certain kind of a blueprint for someone who says, oh, well, maybe there might be a God, but I have no idea which religion to choose or how I would even, you know, go about being religious. What should I do next? So. The book is partially an argument for why atheism and materialism are probably wrong and a religious perspective on the world is probably true. And then it's partially a kind of self-help guide for the curious almost believer, of which there may be more now than 15 years ago.

It's fascinating. You once claimed that Christopher Hitchens, or you claimed that he once routed you in a debate. If he were—

I don't, I didn't claim, I didn't claim that. He did. He did.

Yes. If he were alive today, do you think he would have changed his mind on certain things based on how the world has, has, has, has changed, or might he have dug in even harder? It doesn't seem like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins have changed their mind much.

Well, you've had some interesting evolutions, right? So Harris, Harris is, has sort of tried to, as far as I can tell, make this really strong distinction between kind of Abrahamic monotheism, which he's like, it's just, you know, it's just wrong. It's, it's definitely wrong. I don't believe in any of that. And this kind of zone of spiritual practice and engagement that he thinks is compatible with science, which it is, I think. I think it's also compatible with believing in God, but that's sort of a separate argument. But he, he's sort of entered into, you know, a kind of spiritual but not religious zone where he's kind of a guru for people who want spiritual experience but can't bring themselves to believe in God. Whereas Dawkins, I think, has no interest in any of that, you know, meditation and woo woo stuff, right? But he's become a tiny bit more sympathetic to Christianity because he doesn't like wokeness and he doesn't like fundamentalist Islam and he feels sort of besieged by both those forces. So he'll say things like, well, I. You know, I suppose I'm a cultural Christian and I'll be sorry when Anglicanism disappears. I don't know what Hitchens, how Hitchens would have evolved. I think he would have changed a lot of his political views, as everyone has done. Not everyone, but most people have done. But I don't, I think of his atheism as a kind of romantic, sort of would-be revolutionary atheism that was less interested in proving that God didn't exist and more in saying, if there were a God, I wouldn't obey him or serve him. Right. He liked that idea of God as the North Korean dictator watching your every move. So that was very important to him. And I think that kind of, that kind of atheism can survive a sort of changed cultural context. I think in his case, it's more likely that you would have needed, you know, maybe an actual religious experience or something to sort of shift shift his path. But I lost the debate. So I was, I was brought in as a substitute for this debate. I was really young, worked for The Atlantic. They were holding a debate with Hitchens then in his prime on a beach in Nantucket. And it was supposed to be him and Andrew Sullivan, who was of course the, you know, gay Catholic contrarian writer. And then Andrew had a conflict that weekend. He might've even been getting married. I'm not sure. And they were like, Ross, you believe in God. You can, you can take on Hitchens. And, you know, I couldn't. He beat me. He just, you know, he had his shirt unbuttoned to the navel and had a scotch in one hand and wouldn't even look at me, just sort of played to the crowd who were all there for him. But to the extent that I learned anything from that, the debate, you know, his book was called Why Religion Poisons Everything or something like that. That's his subtitle. And I spent that debate trying to argue on his terrain and saying, No, look, religion has this positive effect and that positive effect, and you can't just sweep it all away. And, you know, I believe those arguments, but I think I sort of inherently put myself at a disadvantage. And I should have done what I try and do a bit more of in this book, which is start out by saying, well, look, you know, the reason, the reason to take religion seriously is that, you know, it actually has a fair amount of evidence on its side. It's probably true. And these questions about its cultural effects are sort of downstream. Of that.

Yeah. So instead of playing on his frame, you would have sort of played on your frame or sort of changed.

Well, I mean, that's what, that's how you win, right? It's the, regardless, regardless of who's right or who's wrong, if you're accepting the terrain that your opponent has staked out for you, you're obviously at a disadvantage even before you get to the fact that Hitchens was a brilliant debater and I was a child.

Yeah. And so for people who haven't yet read the book, what you just said is a surprise to them. The idea that religion is mostly true, or is a surprise to a certain type of, type of person who maybe hasn't grown up with religion or has been sympathetic to some of the new atheist arguments. So square that circle or explain that case just a little bit for people who haven't yet read the book as to who maybe grew up on Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins as to—

Sure. I mean, I think what I think, I mean, the new atheists were always very effective, I think, at pointing out, you know, the sins and crimes of religious institutions, which are, you know, manifold and ample. And, you know, pointing out questions and tensions and contradictions in particular religious teachings and doctrines and scriptures and so on. You know, I don't think they got everything right in that zone, but I think it's— that's a perfectly reasonable zone of argument and critique around religion. But you can accept those arguments and those critiques. While also stepping back and saying, okay, but nonetheless, there are a number of good reasons to think that a basic religious world picture that says, look, the world is probably not an accident. It probably has some kind of conscious intentionality behind it. Human consciousness itself seems to have some sort of specific relationship to that larger intentionality. We have unusual powers and capacities. That are hard to explain in purely materialist terms. And in fact, perhaps there's some mysterious relationship between consciousness itself and the organization, the very organization of matter. There's a lot of really strange and striking stuff in quantum physics suggesting a kind of independent and even primary role for consciousness in the organization of the material world. And then finally, you have, you know, it's not just that you have reasons to think there's some kind of higher power. You have in the persistence of religious and spiritual experience, mystical experience, you know, weird, weird encounters, near-death experiences, you know, all this kind of stuff that's fairly disreputable. I think for the skeptic, it seems very disreputable. But I think as someone who grew up around people having religious experiences. I think at the very least, you have to say it's a really persistent and important part of human existence that is inadequately explained by reductive explanations. I think you can go a bit further, but you could say that at least. And I think when you combine those arguments, cosmos looks kind of designed. Consciousness seems to have this connection to the design, this capacity to understand it, maybe this role in sort of bringing it into full existence. And then, by the way, it sure seems like, you know, gods and angels and so on are still speaking to us, even in a disenchanted world. I think those are converging lines of argument that at the very least make it quite probable that, you know, it's worth going to church, saying some prayers, and trying to figure out what the architect of the universe might have in mind for your life. And I think people— I think there's sort of maybe an insufficient appreciation for some areas of sort of scientific and philosophical argumentation in the last 50 or 70 years where I think the lines of debate have shifted substantially in religion's favor. And, you know, probably at least some of your listeners are familiar with arguments about fine-tuning, the various ways in which it has turned out that Our universe, its physical laws, its constants, and so on seem incredibly precisely calibrated to allow for the emergence of stars and planets and, and life in ways that are, you know, if you set it up against all the possible universes, are nearly a sort of, you know, not 1 in infinity, because that's not actually a mathematical expression, but, you know, let's say a quadrillion to 1, right? And this has pushed the kind of materialist atheist perspective towards embracing ideas about the multiverse, saying, right, the way you have to explain this apparent design, and it really is apparent design of some kind, apparent conscious intention, that's what it looks like, is to say, well, we're just one of a quadrillion universes. And of course, we see this one because the others are all dead and there's no one there to see them. And, you know, It's a longer, a longer debate than one can have on a podcast about that. But at the very least, I think it needs to be recognized that this is, this is not an argument like Galileo showing you the heavens in a telescope or Darwin figuring out evolution by natural selection. This is a rival metaphysical speculation that is largely unprovable, posits universes that are invisible to us, posits a near infinite number of them. All in order to sort of explain away the evidence of some kind of design or intentionality. And I think, you know, at minimum, it changes the balance of the debate. It should lead you to give more credence to religious speculations, even if you aren't fully convinced. And that's before you get into other, I think, potent lines of argument as well.

Yeah, I, that resonates. I think where a lot of people get tripped up is, is terms like design or architect. sort of the implication often is like big man in the sky as opposed to terms like emerged or, you know, emergent or sort of, you know, evolutionary sort of give way, you know, imply more of one process. And that, that seems more sort of, you know, can resonate more with more people.

Yes. I mean, I, I think that Darwinism is an extremely successful You know, with— I didn't, I didn't do a long, a deep dive into Darwinian debates in this book. I just sort of, you know, stipulated that one can accept the consensus of evolution by natural selection and still see plenty of arguments to take the idea of God seriously. I think Darwinism was sufficiently successful that people tend to always look for Darwinian-style arguments to explain any feature of the universe that bespeaks design. And so you definitely have this in different theories of the multiverse. People are looking for sort of processes of selection that would yield our seemingly calibrated and fine-tuned universe, right? And so you'll get theories of like how, you know, every black hole generates a new universe. And over time, that selects for universes that create black holes and You know, in this, I mean, there are, there are all kinds of highly speculative arguments in this, in this terrain. And again, I'm not, I'm not saying that one should discount them, but they are often sort of trying to apply a very specific biological framework to cosmological questions where it's not at all clear that that framework applies. And they are also sort of sidestepping, not sidestepping, but like I think one way to frame the fundamental question that maybe, you know, is a little more palatable to people who get allergic to words like designer is to say, well, what, you know, we have access to 2 kinds of things in the cosmos, in our experience. We have access to mind and we have access to matter. And what matter is, is actually a harder question than, than people quite appreciate, as some philosopher friends have impressed on me. But, you know, matter, let's just say, is the material world, right? And mind is our direct apprehension. of ourselves and the world around us. And the assumption of materialism, right, is that, you know, mind is, mind is secondary, mind is epiphenomenal, mind emerges somehow from interactions of matter. But mind is in fact the primary thing that we experience. All of our interactions with matter take place through, through the lens of mind. Mind is, mind's existence is in fact very difficult to explain through sort of purely materialist explanations. They call it the hard problem of consciousness for a reason. The, the language of emergence tends to essentially kind of handwave over some sort of magical thinking. It's like, well, if you say it emerges, then you don't have to explain exactly what the concrete material steps are, and nobody can explain what the concrete material steps are that yield this kind of experience. So I think mind is, is more resilient just in the immediate mind versus matter contest than some people think. And then when you sort of add in the fact that, you know, again, you have a universe that looks as though it was structured and ordered in some particular way, and you have some kind of weird dynamic interaction between mind and matter. At the, at the quantum level, which seems to suggest that you need minds around for matter to take the shape it does. I think you're, you're well on the way to a somewhat religious perspective, right? That like, maybe in fact mind is primary and you don't have to call it God yet, but maybe, maybe mind is more of a primary and fundamental force in the cosmos than materialism would have you believe. I think there's a fairly reasonable and plausible reading of the evidence that takes you there. And then the question is, can I tug you a bit further to say, well, what should we call this, this Mind, capital M?

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It's really interesting just to reflect broadly. There does seem to be a bias in society towards this kind of emergent view of how things work rather than this sort of great man of history. You know, when, when a group of people or, or when we, when people claim, hey, this thing happened because this group or this person made it happen, sometimes those are called conspiracies as opposed to sort of like, there does seem to be this sort of, whether it's in politics or or, or beyond the sort of the default belief that, hey, things are either random or emergent or the results of a lot of complex processes that we can't even begin to understand or assess or deal with. It's like beyond us as opposed to just accepting, hey, sort of this man or this group or whoever made it happen. And so maybe that bias reflects us to also, it just sounds smarter.

Yeah, I think definitely there's a kind of anti-agentic bias in Historiography, social science, all of these places, right? That, that, that is in some way, not directly, but some way connected probably to materialist and reductionist views. I mean, I think an interesting, you know, an interesting question is just sort of what you think about the most, what people think about the most direct form of this, right? Like if you read, you know, a book that someone writes, a play, if you read a Shakespeare play, any of these things, do you feel like you're encountering something that a mind, a self created. And, you know, one of the, one of the first podcasts I did about this book was with Tyler, Tyler Cowen, the brilliant economist from George Mason who is very interested in religion and friendly to religion, but, you know, is sort of resistant to going all the way with me. Right. And I ended up having this brief argument with him about, you know, did he, Tyler Cowen, actually write his own books? Right. Because, well, because sort of reductive materialist theories of consciousness end up saying that Consciousness is an illusion of unity, right? Who is experiencing this illusion? We'll set that question aside. It's an illusion of unity. And in fact, the mind is, you know, sort of all these different, different, different programs running, doing different things. And there isn't sort of any kind of singular, singular person. And, you know, even that is not completely incompatible with some religious arguments. You have in different religions ideas about You know, different parts of the soul and different hierarchies within the soul. So all these things are never as neat and clean as, as, as one would like. But it is definitely the case, I think, that there is a— the materialist paradigm pushes you in the end towards saying, like Tyler did, well, I don't, I don't think that there was an I who wrote those books. I think a kind of collective process wrote, wrote those books. And I, again, it's unprovable, but, you know, when I read a book that I love, I do feel like I am communicating with an agentic self and that there is therefore an analogy to be drawn between that experience and the experience you have living as a being in the world, possibly communing with the, you know, larger, perhaps omnipotent agentic self that, that created this story that we're inside.

I'll bring up Tyler in a bit because it was a fascinating interview. But first, I want to go back to Hitchens and let's imagine a thought experiment. Where Christopher Hitchens, rest in peace, let's say he passed away at the peak of new atheism popularity, only to, or he was in a coma, only to wake up, you know, 15 years later or wherever it is in the world that we're at now. And new atheism is not sort of at its peak among intellectual elite. In fact, the intellectual elite is sort of more interested in religion. Or Chris Hitchens was listening to this conversation. Fill him in, this imaginary Christopher Hitchens, on what, what happened. Why did sort of New Atheism not work? Why was it sort of, why did it fail to capture the hearts and minds in a durable way?

I mean, one, I think, I think you would say first that it, it did, it was somewhat successful, right? Just in terms of sort of shaping discourse and influencing people. And It's not like Richard Dawkins is responsible for the long-run decline in churchgoing. That has more to do with all kinds of complex sociological factors. But, but certainly the New Atheists sort of hurried that along. So, so you do want to give them credit, right? They, they did help make the world in which we live today. The question is more like, why, why aren't people happy with the world that they made? Right. And I think one obvious answer that again, some of the New Atheists who are still alive themselves would concede, is that a lot of the things that Hitchens and others were rebelling against or arguing against and attacking, the sort of highly dogmatic habits of mind, belief in unprovable, sort of unprovable, invisible supernatural categories, you know, sort of a kind of collective hysterias, panic, moral panics, and so on. All of these things that, again, they were sort of folding under the category of things that people who believe in God do turned out to be just things that people do. Right. And honestly, I think that was obvious all along. You can find plenty of secular antecedents for some of the crazier things that have happened. But I think if you look at Western politics right now, and if you take sort of, you know, the most extreme versions of politics are, let's say, you know, Hyper woke progressivism on the left and hyper Trump obsessed MAGA on the right. Both of those forms at their worst look, you know, they look like forms of fundamentalism in the Hitchens style. Neither of them are especially religious. Yes, you know, the woke will sort of nod to indigenous ways of knowing and spirituality and so on. And yes, part of the MAGA base is evangelical Christians, but Clearly, the main thing going on there are non-religious forms of politics that are more important to people than their religious identities. And they're just, you know, they're just showing that it's not the, the problems, the problems with religion that the New Atheists were critiquing are just, you know, persistent human habits and follies that show up in societies that believe in God and societies that don't. Now, Hitchens, in his— It in his book had this move because he anticipated objections like that. And he said, well, sure, you can see in, let's say, atheistic Soviet communism, you know, forms of the same pathologies that I attack in religions. But that's because atheistic Soviet communism is also a religion, right? It's— and, you know, he would, he would say the same about, you know, certain forms of Fascism or something, presumably, right? But once you've made that move, you've sort of emptied out your particular critique, like the particular critique that says it is belief in an all-powerful God that leads to dogmatism, intolerance, and reigns of terror. And if you then say, well, you don't actually have to believe in God to have those things, you just need to be dogmatic in some way or believe in some inevitable form of historical progress or something, then you aren't really critiquing religion anymore. You're just critiquing human nature. And I think that's in the intellectual and social landscape, that's a big, a big shift that more people sort of see the world that way. They're more likely to say, okay, it's not, you know, it's not 6-day creationism that's making people, you know, act like fundamentalists. It's just that, you know, people are tribal and get hooked on ideologies and act like fundamentalists. And then the other thing that shifted, and this, this I think is, you know, a little, little harder to prove definitively, but like, if you look at just sort of the psychology of the secular world, like the psychology of secularism in the first decade of the 21st century was just very optimistic. There was this really strong sense, especially among liberals around the election of Barack Obama, But sort of generally that, like, you know, the world was making progress. We were advancing. The, you know, the darkness of the past was being left behind. You know, Bill Clinton's Bridge to the 21st Century, the audacity of hope and so on. Right. And the reality is it's just a little easier to be an atheist in an environment where you think secular history is going in some wonderful direction. Right. Because then you have a kind of optimistic horizon. I don't think it's an adequate horizon, obviously, as a religious person, but it is, it is a horizon to sort of Orient your life around to say, okay, we are working for this better tomorrow. And good news, the better tomorrow is coming. It's on the way. You know, people, fewer people, especially fewer secular liberals in the age of populism and Trump and a multipolar world and COVID and everything else, fewer people believe that. It's harder to believe in an arc of history that's just bending secular liberalism's way. And so you, once that disappears, then then you're thrown back on the limits of atheism's perspective on the cosmos. It's like, well, you know, sorry, we can't guarantee anything about the future. Life is random. You're an accident. Probably climate change is going to wipe us out if the, you know, if Roko's Basilisk doesn't, doesn't get us or whatever. Right. And people get depressed. They get anxious. And like, I live among secular liberals. I always have, you know, they're lovely people. my friends and neighbors. And you can see this shift, like people, young people especially, but people generally were fundamentally sort of optimistic and future-oriented without God 15 years ago, and today are fundamentally pessimistic and anxious and future negative. And that, you know, causes some people to say, maybe we should, you know, look again. Look again at the old religious perspective on the world, which didn't promise us immediate utopia on Earth, but gave us a reason for sort of larger optimism, cosmic optimism. And that's what, in the end, the new atheism just really struggled to say. Where do you get cosmic optimism if you've just lost an election and you think the bad guys are in power?

Right. Yeah, there was. Too much of this thinking that religion sort of accelerated or popularized this sort of hysteria or fundamentalism, when in fact we would have greater appreciation on a greater appreciation later on is that in fact also serves as a check or a restraint on that same hysteria or, or fundamentalism by sort of, you know, popularizing ideas like forgiveness and original sin and turn the other cheek and, and that what would replace it was, was in fact worse.

Yeah, you, you get, and you get different versions of this on, on different sides, but definitely you can see certain forms of wokeness as a kind of Christian view of like original sin and sort of almost Calvinist view of how, you know, depraved people are. Everyone is poisoned by white supremacy and structural racism and sexism and misogyny. But since there's no God, you can never actually like be forgiven or you can maybe be transformed if you sit through enough Robin DiAngelo lectures.

Right.

But there's no, there's no promise of God's grace. And then on the right, yeah, there is a, I would say, you know, a distinctive lack of the quality of mercy in certain forms of, of right-wing, of right-wing populism. Trumpian populism and so on that, you know, again, none of this, none of this protects you from disaster, right? Like, I think George W. Bush was in many ways obviously a more moral person than Donald Trump, more idealistic and not coincidentally more religious. But nonetheless, the Iraq War was still the greatest sort of deliberate disaster of my adult lifetime. We're pending, we're pending the, you know, pending whatever happens to the global economy under Trump. Right. But, you know, so being the New Atheists were right that being a well-intentioned religious person does not prevent you from making, making grave blunders. But nonetheless, am I, when I listen to, you know, people in Trump's circle talk about their enemies, am I sometimes nostalgic for some of George W. Bush's evangelical-inflected rhetoric? Yes, I am. Absolutely.

Yeah. And so that encouraged people like Bret Weinstein to say things like, hey, religion may not have literal truth. You know, he's a scientist. He couldn't get that. But it has metaphorical truth, or this idea that it, if you live in accordance with it, your life will be better. Clearly it's adaptive. It's been around forever. You know, Tyler Cowen has called himself a pro-religious non-believer. So there's a lot of people who say, hey, clearly, you know, the rituals, the traditions, the sort of, there's some benefit to being, if not, if not practicing, at the very least sympathetic to religious ideas or trying to recreate some of the, some of the benefits it brings via, via other means. But is that not enough for you?

And, but even like, I'm Catholic, right? The basics of Catholicism is like, you got to get to Mass on Sunday. You got to go to confession twice a year. I've got a bunch of kids. You got to get your kids to confession. Like just this weekend, I have to reorganize our schedule to drag 3 of my children to confession because it's Lent and they have to go to confession, right? Like all of these things, they're, they're challenging obligations. And I'm quite sure that I would not be able to sustain, again, even just like the sort of bare minimum practice of, of the Catholic faith. If I didn't have a strong sense that God is probably real, you know, Jesus of Nazareth probably was raised from the dead, and the bet you're making is a bet on those possibilities being real, not just good news, you know, your endorphins increase after a certain kind of calisthenic prayer, and your relationship with your wife is 10% better if you, you know, sit, sit in a church with her for an hour a week like that. That's just not. It's not sufficient. It's, it's a good spur for a certain kind of person. I'm not saying, I'm not saying this, that spur is necessarily bad, but you've got to, you've got to have more. You have to persuade people in Bret Weinstein's position or Tyler Cowen's position or, you know, your audience, whoever's position, that there's a good bet to be made on the idea that when you pray, someone is listening. Because that, that, that's just a much, much stronger spur to practice. Like, when you die, you are probably going to meet God, a being like God. You know, we don't have to, we don't have to put a label on it. You're going to meet a being, and that being is going to have some questions about how you lived your life, and you should be ready for those questions. I think that's just a much more powerful basis for a religious culture than a kind of evolutionary account. of how one might benefit from churchgoing.

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I think the questions it raises around religion, and well, there's a few interesting questions, right? Like, so one question is, When people envision AI as a kind of successor species to us, do they imagine the successor species as being conscious in the way that we are? And in my conversations with AI people, I find there's a certain slipperiness here, right? Like, on the one hand, you will get people who say, well, no, I mean, we don't, we don't understand consciousness. We don't, we don't, we're not building consciousness because we don't understand it. We're just building machines that can do things, right? And all that you need to get to a world where AI takes over in some way is, you know, whatever kind of programming and, you know, purpose develops in them without having a sort of sense of I, thou, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever consciousness may be, right? But then on the other hand, you know, when you, when, if you continue the conversation, then there's slippage, right? Like if you, you know, if you read like the, what was it, the Sam Altman blog post on the merge, right? The, from 2017 where he's, you know, basically, you know, basically saying a version of this successor species thing, right? So this is, how are we going to relate to our successor species? I mean, he's talking about AI like it's going to be conscious.

Right?

Like that, and that, and that, maybe that slippage just reflects how hard it is for people to talk about a, you know, imagine a non-conscious intelligence, right? You just slip into these human models to talk about it. But I think it reflects a kind of basic uncertainty around the project where you have people who think, people who are reductionists, right? Materialists who think, you know, ultimately consciousness, all that we can fully know about consciousness are outputs. And so we should assume if we get a certain kind of output that consciousness must be in there. It must have emerged. We don't know exactly how, but, you know, certainly acts like it's conscious, so it will be. Or you have, but you also have people who, who think that, no, you know, we're just going to get this kind of hyperintelligence, hyperintelligent thing without ever, you know, resolving anything about our own consciousness and how it emerges. But To me, there's a way in which there is a kind of like, I've written this, but there's a kind of summoning aspect involved here where you are, you're like, it's not that, I mean, there are people in Silicon Valley who are sort of, there is a kind of weird, you know, sort of new age supernaturalist edge to some of what they're doing. But for the people who aren't, even them, there is a kind of summoning. It's like, we're going to build, we're going to construct this thing, it's going to act like a human being, except way smarter, right? It's going to do everything we can do and more. And then at a certain point, we're assuming that a self will come to dwell in it. And we don't know exactly how, but we think, we think that's, that's going to happen. And as someone who thinks that the self, the mind, has an existence independent of the material, I don't rule that out. Right? Like, I don't say here, as, you know, a Christian who believes I have a soul and you have a soul, that the AI can never have a soul. I mean, maybe, maybe, maybe it could have a soul. Maybe, you know, we don't know how, how beings acquire souls. I also believe, you know, in things like demons, right? So there's a lot of different ways that you can, you can, you can have a spirit inhabiting something and But yeah, I think, I just think it's really interesting terrain. And I think neither the people involved nor some of the outsiders like me have fully figured out what the terms are. Like, what are we defining as like consciousness versus intelligence, right? Like these are distinct categories. How do they overlap? People will talk about intelligence the way they talk about consciousness, but they're different. I don't know. There's a lot there. I mean, I do think though, last thing. If you can get, you know, let's say you can get AGI that does everything humans can do and you put it in a robot body and it can do what we do in the real world too, but we think it's not conscious. Some people would say, well, this makes a pretty strong case for materialism. I actually think it runs the other way. I think it makes a case for the weirdness of consciousness, right? Because if it's, it's essentially you've created like a highly intelligent pea zombie. Right. To use this sort of like a P zombie is, you know, a being just like you and I, but does everything we do, but just a stimulus response. Not, there's no sort of conscious agency behind it. Right. So, okay. So AI is like a, you know, super intelligent P zombie. Why aren't we P zombies? Why do we have this thing going on inside us that is not zombie-like, this sense of will and imagination and choice and and just sort of, you know, direct, direct experience. It makes it more mysterious, not less, if we can build equivalents to us that aren't conscious but do everything we do. So that was a lot, but it's, I, I, I clearly, I don't have definitive, I don't have a definitive take on this, but it's a very interesting landscape, to put it mildly.

Right. And it's part of the broader sort of set of ideas of of transhumanism that tech has become excited about, whether it's the, you know, we just talked about AI, but whether it's Bryan Johnson's Don't Die or these other sort of, yeah.

I mean, Bryan Johnson is just a Mormon who, right, like God, I mean, someone made the joke on, on Twitter the other day. It's like he left Mormonism behind and discovered a new religion where you attain eternal life while refusing alcohol and caffeine. And it's like, oh, and next he's going to develop like a garment to wear, a special garment that's Good for, I don't know. I mean, that's maybe that's unkind to Bryan Johnson. Well, but, but so on the transhumanists. So this is the place where definitely, I think the kind of digital transhumanism, not the Bryan Johnson, make your body live forever, but the people who think we're going to upload our minds to the cloud and live forever that way. Those people actually do need to solve the hard problem of consciousness. In order for their plans to work. And I'm pretty skeptical that they will, right? Like, for them, for them, it actually makes a huge difference whether AI is sort of has a self in the way that we have selves, because they're never going to bootstrap their way into digital existence if you can't somehow construct an actual digital self. If they just like, you know, take a bunch of, take their life in photographs and upload it to the AI. They're not uploading themselves to the AI. They're just dying, right? So they, they need like Ray Kurzweil or whoever. I don't know who the, the current, I mean, well, even Altman in that, I think, I think Altman, I don't know what you think. I think Altman thinks he's going to maybe live forever as a silicon god or whatever. He, he really needs to solve the hard problem of consciousness before he can pull that off.

I want to segue or, or have the last 15 minutes be focused on the the new right, a topic which you've spent a lot of time exploring and writing about. But first, I'll start with kind of an intellectual question, which is, or a high-level question, which is, what do you think Nietzsche got wrong in his critique of Christianity and particularly his comparison of it to, or description of it as a, as a slave morality? Because there's a strain of thought on the right that says, hey, the bad ideas of the last century, you know, communism and then sort of wokeness were sort of this, you know, slave morality run amok, whether it's on the economic class side or the social identity side. And maybe it, you know, they take what you said seriously, which is, hey, Christianity is a foundation for some of these ideas. And maybe the root is the, is a problem and we need some, some more master morality. You know, I'm butchering it a little bit, but.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, that's right. I mean, I, one, I mean, obviously, like some of it just starts with the fact that You know, I think Nietzsche was wrong not to believe in basic premises of Christianity, right? And certain things flow from those premises, right? If you believe in the God who has revealed himself in the Old and New Testament, then you're going to have a different attitude towards the poor and weak and vulnerable and suffering than a kind of pagan master morality would have, right? So. I think Nietzsche is the, the fundamental error, right, is in not seeing the, you know, the sort of the truth of Christian ideas about equality and mercy and, you know, sort of, and the, the dignity of, of the weak and so on. And that from Nietzsche, you know, some of that. Some of that is slave morality in the sense that it says, like, you know, your slaves, your slaves are your equals and you shouldn't, you know, whip them mercilessly to achieve some kind of, you know, some kind of like great man's goal. It puts, it puts a limit on, on, you know, people sort of, yeah, it puts, it sort of imposes limitations on people of great capacities. It says you may have great capacities, you may be able to do great things, but you cannot treat weaker people in certain ways along the way, or you are wicked and evil and liable to damnation. Right. And I think that's right. I think, you know, evidence of the 20th century after Nietzsche, without calling him a Nazi, like he's not a Nazi, right? But like that, there are, there are places that, that right-wing thinking goes that are understandable from the point of view of like a philosophy that essentially says we're going to put no limits on the strong. You have to put limits on the strong, right? So that's, that's step one. I think then what Nietzsche misses, and I should say, like, you know, there, there are certain, certainly versions of Christianity that reflect his critique that are sort of, you know, that can't take their own side in an argument that sort of have, you know, contempt for Great achievements and so on, and are sort of, to put it in Tolkienian terms, right? A, a Christian culture should be able to support both the world of the hobbits and the world of, of Gondor, right? The world of sort of high civilizations and great achievements. And a Christianity that just says everyone has to live as a hobbit is going to look a bit like Nietzsche's critique. Nothing against hobbits, but, you know. It's not, it's not the fullness of what humans can do. But I think in the end, what Nietzsche misses is that there are these hierarchies in human life. There are, you know, people who do more and achieve more and so on. But the saint, the, the ultimate type of sort of Christian perfection, is not a falling off from the hero. It is the next step of advancement beyond the merely sort of this worldly heroic, right? So from, from my perspective, the saints, the martyrs, Christ himself, you know, they are more super than, than the Superman, right? And, you know, the Christian, the religious line, your power is made perfect in weakness. That is actually the revelation that true Christianity offers, right? That it's not that the great man isn't great. In some ways, it's that there is a further greatness that gets you closer to core truths about reality that should discipline the great man and should provide some kind of aspiration beyond mere mastery of, of the world. But I don't think Christianity, rightly understood, should be opposed to mastery. It should be trying to sort of hold in balance the idea that mastery is good, but it is good in a particular place, in a particular framework with goods beyond it. And much of Christian civilization, I think, you know, had, had this quality. If anything, you know, Christian civilization did not do enough, probably pre-Nietzsche, you know, over hundreds and thousands of years to restrain the excesses of the masterful. Right? It doesn't do enough to restrain the medieval knights who go around killing and pillaging. It doesn't do enough to restrain the, you know, the crimes of the conquistadors. But it is, but it is trying to hold in balance a world where people, people build kingdoms and people build cities and people do great things and create works of art while also saying that the highest thing is sainthood. I don't know. That's a, that's at least a partial response to that.

Yeah, no, the, the balance there is, is critical. And it's interesting because you see it playing out on the, on the new right, which you've been chronicling. You know, you had Curtis Yarvin, sorry, Steve Bannon on, on, on the podcast. You had Marc Andreessen on, on the podcast. You know, we had Curtis.

Yes. Not, not someone else. We had someone else. One of my colleagues interviewed Yarvin, so I can't, I can't interview Yarvin for a while. You can, you can only interview, interview Curtis so many times.

Yeah, exactly. You know, I wouldn't have imagined in 2020 that Curtis would be in the New York Times just in a few years. Evidence of how much things have changed. So what do you make of the, of sort of where the coalition and the new right is going? You've chronicled the tensions between the MAGA right and the tech right, you know, very practical grounds. Maybe we're seeing it play out right now with sort of on the economic case, but certainly on sort of metaphysical or philosophical, or there's a lot of fractures in the new rights.

Yeah. Well, 2 things, right? So one, I think longer term, there is this fundamental tension that you can get if you just go listen to my interview with Bannon after listening to my interview with Andreessen, right? Which is that the kind of tech right. Allowing for the presence of Christianity in the tech landscape does have a presence, obviously, maybe a growing presence, but the tech right is fundamentally more Promethean, more Nietzschean, less likely to accept any limits. Right. And the Christian in the end has to say there are some limits and, you know, we can argue about exactly what those, those limits are. But once you get to the point of, you know, sort of things like transhumanism being on the table. The Christian and the Promethean are going to, going to come into conflict, you know, AI and so on. Like all of these technologies provide plenty of, or, you know, radical genetic engineering, right? Embryo, embryo selection, all these things provide big points of potential tension. I don't think that's what's playing out right now in, in the Trump, in the Trump White House, though. I think the tension in the Trump White House, I, I'm, you know, still, or the tension around conservatism is more like about sort of your attitude toward contemporary America. And it's sort of like, again, to put it in right-wing terminology, it's like, are you red-pilled or are you black-pilled? Right. And the red pill says, you know, well, you've got to, you know, you've got to recognize like the progressive power structure as this force in American life. You have to be willing to use the levers of power to fight the left more fully than conservatives have in the past. You have to be aggressive in the culture war, all these kinds of things, right? But you can be red-pilled and also say, but basically, like, you know, America, America is not in the worst shape in the world, right? The Pax Americana is worth preserving in some form. It needs help and needs alteration, but it should be preserved, right? Right? And this, the whole system doesn't need to be overthrown and purged. Whereas if you take the black pill, maybe you're going to say no, like things are much more far gone than that. And you, you know, you need to be willing to essentially accept all kinds of potential chaos and disarray and damage that affects not just like, you know, a progressive institution that you're targeting, but the whole economy, the whole of society. And you see this in the trade debate with tariffs and stuff. Like, there are people on the right defending Trump whose attitude is basically just like, America sucks. We're a bunch of financiers and, you know, people doing DoorDash delivery. That's our whole economy now. There's nothing else. There's nothing worth preserving. And if everyone has to get poorer for a while in order to rebuild, so be it. And same thing in foreign policy, like NATO, you know, global alliances. There's nothing there. We just need to pull back to North America, maybe take Greenland. And you know, and and rebuild, right? That's that's I think the tension. That I think that's a really important tension. And and Trump has impulses in both directions, but like his trade stuff is for it's it's welcomed by the blackpilled right. It's like yeah, we don't need your crappy consumer goods, right, man? We don't need your tech. You know, you Silicon Valley guys, right? Like you're you're responsible for you know you're in bed with China too. You're responsible for you know, stripping the heartland and destroying our manufacturing base and a recession, bring it on. That's not my view. I think that's, I think that's the wrong view, but I think that's the, that's the manifest tension. It's like, you know, American empire, is there anything worth saving there? Yes or no. Right. All those kinds of questions.

Well, maybe in closing, I mean, do you think J.D. Vance Is going to be loyal to— is going to be more red pill or more black pill? Or how do you make sense of him?

I mean, you know, he's the vice president, right? So he's operating in the paradigm in the world that Trump creates. I don't think you can be president and be black pilled. That's basically my view. I think that JD— I mean, again, without sort of overimputing ideas to him, I think both, you can see both impulses in his public rhetoric, right? That like, you know, if I would say, if you read his speeches, he's more red-pilled. And if you read his tweets, maybe he's a little more black-pilled. But like, if I were giving him or any future Republican contender advice, I would say, you know, don't take the black pill. You can't win elections and govern America. Even if, if the black pill were correct. We would just be screwed and there wouldn't actually be, like, you're not going to rebuild America by inducing a major recession. And, you know, all you're going to do is lose the next election. I don't think that's really what people in the Trump administration want to do. But I think that, like, getting out of a purely negative mode on contemporary America is necessary to win and govern in what is a democratic society. where, you know, most people are not convinced that everything that happened in the last 40 years is a disaster.

Let's, let's, let's wrap on that. I want to be mindful of time. The book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. I highly recommend it. Ross, thanks for coming on and having a fascinating conversation.

Thank you. This was great. I really appreciate it, Erik.

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