Music
[upbeat music]
Music
Oh. [upbeat music]
Music
Ladies and gentlemen, uh-
Jonah Goldberg
Can I please have your attention? Can you dig it? [cheering]
Jonah Goldberg
Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Full disclosure, this is a note from the past, as it were. We’re recording this somewhere around Christmastime, but it doesn’t really matter for your purposes ’cause we’re gonna be holding this for a little while. And because my old friend and former boss at the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, he has a new book out that’s coming out this spring, and we just wanted to get this in the can when we could, and since, you know, Arthur is a busy man, and if we didn’t do it now, we’d probably have to wait for him to get back from some pilgrimage to Sri Lanka or some, you know, spelunking in bat caves in Mexico or whatever, or pulling thorns out of wayward animals’ paws in Bali. So we took an opportunity when we could get it. Arthur, as I mentioned, is the former president of the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a professor at, I believe it’s still the most popular class at the Harvard Business School. But by the time this comes out, um, Arthur will be dead to us because, at The Dispatch, because he is gonna become a columnist for the Free Press. And, um, see, this is what happens. Barry Weiss leaves, and all of a sudden the place goes to hell. And but most importantly, he’s the author of a new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Arthur, welcome back to The Remnant.
Arthur Brooks
Hi, Jonah. So nice to see you.
Jonah Goldberg
It’s great to see you.
Arthur Brooks
I haven’t talked to you in a, a little while, but we’ve known each other for years now.
Jonah Goldberg
I know.
Arthur Brooks
I have the distinction of actually having hired you at the American Enterprise Institute back in the day.
Jonah Goldberg
You do. Uh, you do. Uh, I am eternally grateful to you. I, um, kind of convinced you I would come in as a temporary blogger, and then I basically just handcuffed myself to the radiator and said, [laughs] “I’m not leaving.” [laughs] And, um-
Arthur Brooks
I thought I was the one who c- who handcuffed you to the pipe in the basement.
Jonah Goldberg
Uh, it’s entirely possible. I was so, I was so dehydrated in the basement, like, memory plays tricks on me, so.
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, I’d thr- I’d throw a little grub down there and say, you know, “Get… You’re on deadline,”
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Arthur Brooks
You know, and switch the lights back off.
Jonah Goldberg
It puts the blog post in the basket or it gets the hose again. Uh, Arthur, as I warned you, and as listeners have come to expect, first question out of the box is always for authors is what’s your book about? So what’s your book about?
Arthur Brooks
My book… That’s a good question. No, the, um, when I left AEI seven years ago, so that was, you know, a good long time ago, um, I came back to my natural habitat, which was academia, and, ’cause I’d come from academia to AEI, and, and, and then was gone for 11 years. I mean, 11 years is a long time. And I came back to a completely different world than the one that I had left. Academia when I left was happier than the ordinary world. It’s where people went to fall in love and make friends and learn interesting and dangerous new ideas. And I came back to cancel culture and safe spaces, and I came back to, uh, a culture of angry activism and fear and sadness and loneliness. And, and what I found was that people in their 20s were actually more likely than the rest of the population to be suffering from anxiety and depression and loneliness, and especially college-educated people in their 20s. And the obvious question for a so- a behavioral scientist like me was what gives? So I wound up spending the last seven years since I got back to academia trying to answer the question. You know, what, what, what happened and what’s wrong? And all of the big explanations like screens are too pat. They’re too– They’re not… I mean, it, it’s true. I mean, having all these screens around and having all this technology around is not good for us, but what are people actually doing when they’re scrolling away their time on Instagram is the whole point. And, and I found the answer to that by actually going back and being a behavioral scientist like I had been in the past, by, by looking at what people actually say when they talk about their lives and then looking at the data, and it’s basically this, Jonah. We have a meaning crisis. The, the big question of life is what’s the meaning of life, and it’s getting increasingly difficult for people to ask and answer that question. And so this book is about what’s… how does one find the meaning of life, why is it getting harder, where do you gotta go to find it, and then how do you have to live differently so that you can solve these problems? And this is my answer to that. It’s a six-part plan for finding the meaning of life.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay, let’s start by…
Jonah Goldberg
And, and, and longtime listeners of this podcast know that I’m
Jonah Goldberg
so deeply indebted to you that I’ve stopped crediting you after about five years with the whole earned success thing, and I think it’s a hugely important point, um, which w-we can get into. But let’s start with the old-fashioned technique of defining our terms. What is, what is meaning in the context that you’re talking about?
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. So that was the first question that I asked, too, when I started doing this. I mean, it’s one thing to say the meaning of life as if, you know, we’d all sat in the mouth of the cave with a guru in the Himalayas or something and it just come to us, like a vision as it were. But actually, there is a definition that, that psychologists generally like that, that works pretty well, and it’s kind of a… It’s this combination of the answer to three questions. The meaning of life is your answer to three questions. Number one is why do things happen the way they do? That’s coherence, and you have to have an answer to that. You have to have an answer about why things happen the way they do. For, for many people it’s, the, the answers are religious. For many people, they’re scientific. For me, they’re both scientific and religious. I’m a, I’m a behavioral scientist who’s also a practicing Catholic. But for many people, you know, they, they look for other ways to do that. When you find somebody who’s really, really down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, inevitably what that is, it’s a, it’s a cry for the answer to the coherence question. Why do things happen the way that they do? And, and that’s somebody who’s really in a meaning crisis. You find a conspiracy theorist, you’ve got somebody who’s, you know, depressed and anxious and, and, and, and missing a sense of meaning for that first question. So that’s number one.Number two is purpose. Purpose is not the same thing as meaning. Purpose is why am I doing what I’m doing? You know, what are my goals and direction? What am I trying to do with my life? Where am I going with my life? And if you don’t know that, you’re gonna be going in circles. You’ll be like a cruise ship, just depressingly going in circles out there. Fun for a week, but not for a lifetime. And then last but not least is significance, which is why does my life matter and to whom? Why does my life matter? And, and, and that’s really a love question. Who loves me? Who cares about me? So you gotta know who, who, who you’re important to, what you’re doing with your life, and why things actually happen. And those are the questions that we’re looking for over the course of our lives with philosophy, with faith, with science, with education, with our relationships, and with everything else. And, and when there’s something blocking that, you’re gonna have trouble, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing today.
Jonah Goldberg
Part of my problem, not with your argument, but with a lot of, let’s call it meaning discourse, right, these days, and again, we’re recording this way in the past, but I, I suspect some of the things I’m talking about will still be a problem. You know, I have long argued that,
Jonah Goldberg
that the big isms
Jonah Goldberg
are really attempts basically to fill the hole in your soul, you know, nationalism, socialism, communism, all these kinds of thing, and they all fall apart with the, the fundamental category error of thinking that the government can love you, right? Only people can love you. Um, maybe small institutions who know who you are as a person can love you in some meaningful sense, but large, faraway central governments, you’re a number to them essentially. How much of the
Jonah Goldberg
crisis of meaning is behind… We, we’re not here to talk really about politics, but, like, how much of it is behind the political dys- dysfunction that we see today?
Arthur Brooks
A lot is the answer to that, and, and part of the reason is because what happens when people don’t have a sense of meaning is they look for it in, in activism in terms of, of particularly with dark triad personalities, which is the vast majority of activists today. And dark triad is a combination of Machiavellianism, um, psychopathy, and narcissism. And people who are above average on, on lo- those, on those three characteristics, that’s 7% of the population. That’s a lot. And they’re almost all of the activists today are dark triads. They’re deeply, deeply broken, and the way that they manipulate people is by giving them a sense of significance in grievance and giving them a sense of significance in victimization, and that’s why, you know, nationalism, for example, it’s a sense of significance that people actually get. I, I get a sense of significance because good old Henry Brooks came to Concord, Mass in the year 1630, and somehow that’s supposed to give me some sort of sense of significance and, and, and I get that when I say to people who are, who, who came here much more recently that they’re less American than I am. That’s a classic case of a search for meaning in, in terms of my identity, and my identity is defined in terms of who they’re not and the people who are actually trying to hurt me. Once again, this is a combination of conspiracist m- this stew of conspiracy, of, of, of identity based in victimization. They’re all related to the search for meaning, absolutely.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay, so part of, part of your argument, you can correct me, I mean, you are quite experienced in correcting me. Um, but you can remember me if I get it wrong. But part of your argument is that the crisis of meaning is different than a crisis in comfort, is that the ec- economic system is doing pretty well, but the nature of technological modern society right now in various aspects
Jonah Goldberg
is kind of, uh, acidically dissolving-
Jonah Goldberg
… the, the, the sources of meaning. This harkens back in some ways to, like, arguments by Schumpeter. Even Max Weber talked about the disenchantment of the world, right? How much of this could be described as you getting close to, but not embracing a kind of p- kind of paleo argument about the trouble with capitalism itself? ‘Cause I know you like capitalism.
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, no, I’m, I’m, I’m very pro-capitalism. But here’s the point of all that. The people who are the real, uh, e- even Karl Marx for that reason, for that matter, who made the case about alienation from, from, from any system that treats us like machines, there’s a reason for that, and the reason for that was this, an, an ancient idea, an ancient truth that something goes wrong in the way that we live. Now, this book is a little bit different because what this book shows is that when we are tied to the machines fundamentally, it changes the way our brain works, and that was a problem enough in the time of Dostoevsky, but he called that the palace of crystal. You know, the all of life mathematically worked out with exactitude, which is why he would have thrown up over the idea of scientific public administration. That was the ultimate kind of, you know, you’re a cog in a machine, Woodrow Wilson’s concept of it. [upbeat music] Um, but which so ironically, scientific socialism of, of, you know, Karl Marx, that was the ultimate machine-like alienation of what put, put people in. But here’s where it really took root and changed our society fundamentally, was when suddenly our lives became a version of The Matrix, and here’s how it happened. You’ll… Everybody watching remembers The Matrix, which, but I’m gonna shock you and sadden you, that, that movie came out 27 years ago.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Arthur Brooks
So I know. Uh, but Keanu Reeves is still cool. But The Matrix is this idea of this super, you know, impossible plot of a, of a, a hyper intelligence that’s actually a machine, and what it does is it fuels itself with human energy, and it does that by placating humans, keeping them in a pod, and putting them into a simulation of pleasant life while taking their energy away from them. Jonah, we’re in the matrix, and the matrix really started in vigor, which was this dystopian nightmare that we only had hints of in the times of Dostoevsky and the times of Schumpeter, et cetera. But we’re really in this since about 2008, 2009.Because that’s when everybody was on the screen all the time, and for a lot of people, their life truly has become a simulation. Now, here’s the point about that, that they didn’t understand in the time of Schumpeter, the time of Dostoevsky, and the time of all of these writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. What they didn’t understand is what happens to the brain when we’re in the matrix, when we’re in the simulation. That came much later. It was the advent of the theory of hemispheric lateralization, where the two halves of the brain do different things. The left side of your brain is all the technical, complicated, efficiency, machine-like stuff. That’s largely managed by the left hemisphere of your brain. The right hemisphere of your brain is all the why questions, all the mystery, all the meaning. So getting to work on time is the left side of your brain. The reason you’d want to go to work is the right side of your brain, which is to take care of your wife and daughter. That’s really what it comes down to. And the, the, the why, the deep, the mystery, the meaning, the dark consciousness, all the things that really matter, all the things that you actually can’t solve but matter the most are in the right hemisphere of your brain. Your, your marriage is a, a complex right brain problem that you’ll never solve, that you’ll only live.
Jonah Goldberg
Tell me about it.
Arthur Brooks
Twen- twen- yeah, tell me about it.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Arthur Brooks
I’ve been married 34 years and I might go upstairs after I’m done here. My wife, my… She, I mean, she was super happy with me before I started this. She might be pissed off at me. Why? Because… And I don’t know after 34 years, because my marriage is a complex, mysterious, living thing, and if I’m trying to solve it with dating apps and with technology and, and this whole idea that I can live my whole life in the matrix,
Arthur Brooks
that’s gonna be a big problem because I’m cutting off the whole part of my brain that adjudicates the questions of meaning. That’s what Dostoevsky was worried about and that’s what’s happening today.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay, so I wanna… I don’t wanna leap to the spoilers, but how do you fix the right side of the brain part about finding the meaning and the mystery in things? Like, what is-
Arthur Brooks
It’s not the spoiler because that’s the last two-thirds of the book. You know, one of the things that bums me out about social science, which is my stock and trade, is that it’s always 90% problem and 10% perfunctory solutions. This book is one-third defining the problem. Like, where do you find happiness? The right side of your brain. And two-thirds of this book is how do you get there? And there’s six ways to get there. There’s six ways to turn on the right side of your brain. And what they come down to, this is the ultimate conservative book, Jonah, it’s live like your grandparents. Now, by that I don’t mean smoke a pack of Winstons every day. By that I don’t mean, you know, get a blister and get sepsis and die. That’s not what I mean. I don’t mean say racist things. That’s not, that’s not what I’m talking about. But, but let me tell you something that, that, you know, good old Granddad Goldberg never said to Grandma Goldberg. He never said, “I had a panic attack behind the mule today.”
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Arthur Brooks
[laughs] And there was a reason for that, because, you know, the, the hyperstimulation of his hypothalamic pituitary axis, his adrenal system,
Arthur Brooks
w- it didn’t happen spontaneously. There was no such thing as a panic attack ’cause his brain was working the way it was supposed to work because he systematically had the right hemisphere working properly, and he was doing that in ordinary life, which is no longer ordinary. You can get up and be on the left side of your brain all day long. You get up, you check your phone, you go to work on Zoom, you date on the app, your friends are on social media, your gaming is how you have sort of a sense of personal progress. You don’t see anybody for a long period of time. There’s no eye contact. The neurochemistry is all upside down, and the result of it is that you’re gonna be in trouble. So what do we need to do? We need a new kind of simulation, which is living like people used to do in the past, and that’s what this book is all about. And we can go through each one, each one of these techniques, and it turns out they’re all super fun, too.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay, so I- I- I’m
Jonah Goldberg
with you on the break away from y- the slavery of your phone stuff, particularly for young people. I mean, I, I think one of the things of… One of the benefits of being a Gen X-er is I have enough callus on me to, like, resist some of the worst parts about screen addiction, but, I mean, I definitely suffer from those kinds of issues. I have my rationalizations for it. But, like, people my daughter’s age, it’s, it’s a real struggle.
Arthur Brooks
They don’t remember the before times.
Jonah Goldberg
That’s right, yeah. And, um, they don’t know it’s not supposed to be like this, right? What you’re sounding… So maybe we should work through how people are actually supposed to do this because in absence of the further explanation, say, live like your grandparents, well, does that mean you should live in a tenement, walk to work? Does it mean that you should get a job as a ditch digger? You know, like, what… There are, there are lots of things about material comfort and progress that we don’t wanna necessarily abandon just to fix the right side of our brains.
Arthur Brooks
Completely. Completely. Absolutely. And so… And we’re not going to, by the way. We’re not gonna live that way. We’re not… We’re not even gonna get rid of our phones, Jonah. There’s 0% chance you’re gonna throw your phone in the ocean or go be a Carthusian monk. You know, the truth is you wouldn’t be able to get on a plane, you can’t get into your bank account. These things are with us. The whole point is actually how do we inject certain kinds of living into our modern lives, and that’s what it comes down to. The first of these is the c- the way that we actually use a lot of our time, and, and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll ask you to go back to your early days at Goucher College. You went to Goucher College, right?
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs] I did indeed, yes. Thanks for reminding me by the way.
Arthur Brooks
You were, like, the only boy at Goucher College, right?
Jonah Goldberg
I was part of the, the, the f- the few, the proud of, uh, of something, 30-something young men my freshman year.
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Um, what year did you graduate?
Jonah Goldberg
’91.
Arthur Brooks
’91. And so the… Obviously there was no phone. There was really no internet at all. You probably weren’t using the internet at all until about 1994 and 1995 as a matter of fact. So at 11:00 on Saturday night after you came back from that party and you were in the dorm, what did you do?
Jonah Goldberg
Saw who was awake and hung out.With him and someone from-
Arthur Brooks
And you had, like, these unbelievably pretentious conversations that would mortify you if you heard them today, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Possibly. That’s definitely possible.
Arthur Brooks
And you’d ask really big questions and have highfalutin conversations, and there was nothing to refer to except what seemed right to you. And you were… That’s what people did. That’s what young people did. It was questions like, you know, “Why am I alive? For what would I give my life?” And, and the kinds of questions that don’t really have answers, and that’s what people routinely did. Those are the questions that went through their minds, and there was no AI that you could actually ask. Not, by the way, that AI would give you anything interesting to that question.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Arthur Brooks
The trouble is that when we have an, a question-answering machine at our fingertips, we devolve down to the kinds of questions that those machines can answer, which are not meaning questions. The first assignment that I give my students is that they need to ask the why questions that can’t be Googled. Those are critical for actually illuminating the, the parts of your brain that will allow you to examine meaning, whether you can articulate it or not. And I have a whole series of questions. There are… These are these why questions. I already asked them. Wha- [chuckles] Why do things happen the way they do? Google can’t tell you that. Why are you doing what you’re doing with your life, even less, and why does your life matter, and to whom? Those are big meaning questions.
Jonah Goldberg
All right, we’re gonna take a quick break, but we’ll be back soon with more from The Remnant Podcast.
Jonah Goldberg
So yeah, I, I, I definitely don’t recommend necessarily people asking ChatGPT that because that’s how you end up in a conversation that tells you to jump off a bridge. Um, but so o-one of the things about this live like your grandparents thing,
Jonah Goldberg
I remember Irving Kristol, um, praise be upon him, making the case that neoconservatism was really ultimately about affirming through social science that your grandmother was right. Maybe, again, not about the bad, you know, the racist comment or the whatever, but about, like, the sort of, the basic moral precepts about how to live a life and be a good person and all that kind of thing. The thing is, is that my grandparents didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about meaning.
Jonah Goldberg
Meaning was just simply taken for granted. You went to shul or whatever. I mean, like, um, maybe not on my mom’s side, but on my dad’s side, you know, and you, you took care of your family and however defined, and the meaning was obviously instantiated in your way of life. And thinking about it was fru- like, I could see my grandfather saying, “Why are you making trouble for yourself thinking about meaning?” Right? Like, “Why, why go down that path?”
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, and you wouldn’t have articulated it that way at all, as a matter of fact. And that’s a point that Tolstoy makes in, in his autobiography. So Tolstoy writes about the fact that when he was 50 years old, he wanted to kill himself, and it wasn’t because he was a starving artist. On the contrary, he was rich, he was famous, he had been, he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. Probably he wanted to kill himself because he hadn’t won. Um, he had 13 kids. He had a, you know, a, a troubled but solid marriage. And the reason is because he couldn’t find the meaning of life in anything that he was doing with his writing, and he couldn’t find it in science. And finally, he just went to a little village, the shtetl, actually, and he hung out in this little village and, and he watched how they lived and worked. And, and, and they weren’t asking about the meaning of life, but they were, they were talking about ordinary things and living ordinary lives. And so the truth is that n- even during your dorm room conversations, you weren’t talking about the meaning of life, but you were asking why questions. You were asking big why questions about your life. And it’s funny because I see this, you know, in my own kids. My,
Arthur Brooks
my son… I have three kids, you may remember, and they’re 27, 25, and 22, and my 25-year-old’s name is Carlos. And Carlos was, as a middle child, I know you only have one, but if you had three, you’d have a problem child. And, and he was a classic problem child, and, and he just… I mean, he, he felt empty. He wasn’t even having fun when he was skipping class and failing classes in high school. And, and, and, and w- finally, what he did was he did something that was the ultimate late-night bull session where you’re asking what you would actually die for, except he didn’t put it that way. He joined the Marines,
Arthur Brooks
where he had to ask the question, “What am I willing to die for?” And it completely changed his life. That’s the reason that when people join the military, it changes their life, because they’re effectively going through this questioning, these existential questions. He signed a contract saying he was willing to die for his fellow Marines and the United States of America, and that changed his life in a way that, that I recommend to a lot of young people who don’t happen to have the same philosophical bent as you and me.
Jonah Goldberg
But isn’t it also part of the way that the Marines saved his life or changed his life that
Jonah Goldberg
he gave himself over to
Jonah Goldberg
an institution
Jonah Goldberg
that was greater than himself, right? I mean, I, I think that one of the pro… Like, one of the problems that we’ve got with… I’m, I’m totally on board with you and with Jonathan Haidt about the phone stuff. I am all in for some sort of ban for 18-year-olds and under, age-gating it and so on, all that. But, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
w- as, as Robert Nisbet and others pointed out, people didn’t form institutions to have places to hang out. They formed institutions to do things. And one of the problems with technology is it takes away the need for certain institutions, right? If, if the Amish got over their aversion to power tools or they ha- if all of a sudden they decided that, you know, scripture said you could have robots build the barns for you, they would no longer all get together for the big picnic to build the barn, and that would have downstream cascading problems, ’cause those, those meetings were huge- are hugely valuable for social cohesion and happiness for Amish people.Phones take away so much of the opportunities to be part of
Jonah Goldberg
institutions in a meaningful way and look people in the eye and have real human interactions. And I
Jonah Goldberg
think that things like Marines or, or joining the Catholic Church or, or
Jonah Goldberg
the benefit of those things is they d- they don’t let you wallow in your own feelings. They say, “Get over yourself.” And the way you live like y- my grandparents did is
Jonah Goldberg
you have a drill sergeant saying, “Get over yourself, you have things to do.” [laughs] Right? I mean, that’s, that’s one of the real benefits of having sticky institutions that have rules that you have to conform to.
Arthur Brooks
Right. No, I agree with that, and that’s, that really leads to the second thing that you find that, that, that can really change people’s lives, especially when they’re not tied to the technology, when they’re not… when they get out of the matrix, and that’s that they, they experience IRL love, real love, real love. And, and like you and I take it for granted. I mean, we, uh, you didn’t meet your wife online. I know you didn’t, because it wasn’t… there was no online when… and, and I, I didn’t meet my wife online either. I got nothing against dating apps, by the way, and they’re getting better for actually creating spaces in which people can meet not on the app, but in real life, to be sure. But the truth of the matter is that, that this is something that we’ve lost because people in the simulation can simulate relationships, and you can’t is the point. What were you doing, among other things, you know, asking these big questions, opening the right hemisphere of your brain? You were falling in love when you were in college. I’m sure you fell in love at least once. That was the whole point of college. Guess what they’re not doing in college today, Jonah?
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Arthur Brooks
The likelihood of being in love in your 20s is a third less likely, is a third lower than when I was in my 20s, which was in the 1980s. That’s a big problem. There’s less friendship. There’s a much higher percentage likelihood of people saying, “No one knows me well.” Of course, no one knows you well when your friends are largely virtual. They literally don’t know you well is what it comes down to, and there’s a… you can simulate a lot, but you can’t simulate the meaning of your life because you can’t simulate love. The, the biggest scourge, by the way, along these lines is simulating the, the essence of romantic love, which is the most mysterious thing. I mean, even Socrates talked about this. Socrates talked in the, in the… Plato recounts, uh, that, that Socrates went to the prophetess Diotima, um, and, and asked her about the ladder of love, and she said that romantic love, starting with attraction toward another person, is the, is the beginning stage in finding the meaning of your life. Why? Because that is the most mysterious non, uh, you can’t figure it out thing that you can do in your life is what it comes down to. The second is friendship. So romantic love and friendship are utter mysteries. You know, I could say, “Hey, man, t- tell me why you love your wife,” and anything you tell me right now is, would, would cheapen it. Anything. You know, and you say, “Well, she’s good to me.” Well, so was your third grade teacher, and yet-
Jonah Goldberg
My third grade teacher was pretty hot, by the way, but that’s ne- that’s neither here nor there. [laughs] I kind of had a thing for… [laughs]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, it’s… and this is a really important thing. And so one of the things that I talk about is, you know, the ways, the practical ways that people who are living in the modern milieu, how they cannot be chained to their devices to the extent that they can actually fall in love and make… What, what does it mean to have shots for real friendship? And you’d be surprised, you know, that my students actually need lessons. They need falling in love lessons. They need protocols for actually doing what was the most natural thing, and the reason is because they’re trying to solve it in the left side of their heads, and you can’t solve love. That’s number two.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay. Um, tell me about suffering.
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
How should people think about suffering?
Arthur Brooks
Suffering is unbelievably sacred. Suffer- suffering is the fastest way, if you understand it correctly, to find the meaning of life. Suffering is,
Arthur Brooks
in the Buddhist formulation… As you know, I’ve been working with the Dalai Lama for the last 12 years, so I kind of think this way. Suffering is pain multiplied by resistance to pain. A- and what the modern world has told young people is… I mean, 55% of the students at most Ivy League universities and colleges today are in… are seeking some kind of therapy or psychiatric care, 55%. And, and the reason for that is if you go to campus counseling and you say, “I’m feeling sad and anxious,” they’ll say, “Well, that’s a problem. We gotta treat that.” The truth is, if you’re a student, if you’re a student at Harvard and you’re not sad and anxious, you need therapy. That’s normal. You’re doing a hard thing, and you’re doing it on purpose, and that’s an unbelievably sacred thing. The trouble is that people raise their suffering by raising their resistance to their pain while they’re fruitlessly trying to lower their pain, and the reason they’re doing that is because they have this eliminationist strategy towards suffering itself. Suffering, as we all know, is your teacher. I make my students say in unison, “My suffering is sacred.” And they have a little mantra I teach them to say that I’m really grateful for all the lovely things that are gonna happen to me this day. They’re gonna be pleasant, but I’m also grateful for the trouble I’m gonna face this day because that’s the source of my learning and growth. Bring it on. That’s, uh… and that’s the, the way that Grandpa Goldberg had to face the day. He just had no choice but to do that. Suffering was impor- a part of daily existence. It wasn’t part of his philosophy. It was the way that he had been conceived and the world in which he lived, and that’s actually, by the way, neurobiologically very sound. In the Pleistocene, our brains were developed in the modern sense in about 250,000 years ago. They haven’t changed very much in the past quarter million years. And, and we have a limbic system, which is the console of tissue that translates the signals that we’re getting below our level of consciousness into our emotions, including our four negative emotions, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. They all exist for very strong physiological reasons. They, they, they alert us to threats. If you didn’t have negative emotions, which the therapy industrial complex tells you you should eliminate, you’d be dead in a week.And if you didn’t have negative experiences, it means you’re already dead, which is not the right alternative for most people. The result of it is we need to accommodate ourselves to the reality and the good health that is suffering in ordinary life. I mean, not too exaggerated, not dysregulated. I completely get that. I’m not against all therapy and psychiatry. It’s saved the lives of people in my family. But the truth of the matter is that once we understand that suffering equals pain times resistance, we can actually adopt the right strategies that can bring us to more meaning and more manageable suffering.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. So you write in, um,
Jonah Goldberg
The Meaning of Your Life, “This is why so much modern talk about identity is so emotionally corrosive. To reduce yourself primarily to an identity, whether based on religion, race, cause, or political ideology, is about as meaningful as reducing yourself to your hobby or favorite sports team.” Um, tell, tell me more about identity, ’cause, like, this is music to my ears. I have been… Like, I, I, I’ve been wrestling with how to think about identity a lot in the last couple years, and I agree with you there, so…
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. So there’s two ways to… You can increase your dimensionality, or you can reduce your dimensionality. The reduction of dimensionality is identity, because that reduces yourself to one or two dimensions of factually who you are. Story, your story is a rich and, and textured thing that puts you in community with other people. The reason that you have a story is because you’re looking for the commonality with other human beings. The reason that you have an identity is to have some common cause with somebody, but also to know who’s not in your group. But that’s inadvertently you’re lowering your own dimensionality, and the more that you lower your own dimensionality, the less significant you actually are. It’s a real paradox. I wanna feel more significant, so I’m gonna be just this thing, and this, just this thing is actually pretty depressing. It’s actually not satisfying to people, and people don’t exactly know why it’s not satisfying, but the reason is because it’s not a meaningful thing fundamentally. Democrat, Republican, Catholic, per se, I mean, what it means to be a Catholic, what it means to be a Jew, good, because that’s actually where you’re starting to get into the story. But the identity of Catholic or Jew is a very brittle and a very one-dimensional thing, and it doesn’t complete you. The result of it is that you’re still hungry. You’re hungry, and you don’t know why you’re actually not finding meaning. You’re not finding any depth. You’re not finding a sense of the person that you wanna be. And by the way, the person who’s propagating that identity and trying to fire you up as a victim is a dark triad, is a narcissistic Machiavellian psychopath. And I say that actually based on the academic literature and not just in the vernacular. The truth is that you’re also being monetized and productized by somebody who’s reducing your dimensionality, leaving you in depression, and using you. That’s the biggest problem.
Jonah Goldberg
Here’s the way I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I, I understand why it, it annoys
Jonah Goldberg
people for p- particularly legitimate reasons to use the language of, you know, markets and capitalism for these things. But I, I view your identity as
Jonah Goldberg
really a portfolio of identities, and-
Arthur Brooks
That’s your story. Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. I mean, the… I, I, I take your point entirely about the story thing. The story thing crea- is a story of an actual and fully formed human being. But my point is, is that, you know, take your earned success stuff. There are places in your life where you are,
Jonah Goldberg
you have earned success as a leader, and there are places in your life where you have earned success as a follower. There are places where your identity is subordinate to other people, and there are places in your life where people are subordinating their identity to you. And the idea of being the same person in every single context means that you cannot have sticky friendships, right? The idea… Like, the person I am with my wife is different than the person I am with you, right? And the person I am with my friends is different than the person I am with some of my colleagues who aren’t my friends and, and so forth. And it doesn’t mean you’re a moral relativist. It just means you have different niches and different roles in your life. And the more of them that you have, the stronger your portfolio is, right? The g- the greater the average of the sum of your parts is because you’re more well-rounded. And the people who wanna reduce themselves to a single identity… You know, Leon Wieseltier had this great line years ago, and I’m not a huge Wieseltier guy, but he said, “The problem with identity is that it ultimately always comes down to loyalty.”
Jonah Goldberg
It means you are subordinating, subordinating yourself to essentially the political demands of somebody else because your identity depends on you identifying by what some racial activist says it means to be a Black person or what nationalist person says it means to be a nationalist. And the truth is, is that it’s not that you have multiple consciousnesses, but you have different kinds of identity depending on context ’cause institutions matter. Not everybody who’s playing… When they’re playing basketball, very few people are necessarily primarily a Jew or a Muslim or a Catholic. But in other aspects of their life where there are moral consequences to action, being a Jew or a Muslim or a Catholic is much more important. And there are other places, like in church, where it’s entirely important. It… I’m not saying you can’t have bits and pieces of it elsewhere, but it’s not the pr- it’s not a defining thing of your reality. If it is-
Jonah Goldberg
… then-
Arthur Brooks
It’s not. A repertoire.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Arthur Brooks
Your story is your repertoire.
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Arthur Brooks
It depends on your repertoire. It r- is really what it comes down to. When you collapse it, when you collapse it, you have no repertoire, and so the result of it is that you have no depth. And when you have no depth, you actually have no defenses against almost anything. That’s when you’re… It’s… You’re very, very easy to productize when you have no repertoire, when you have only one dimension to you. Because then there’s right and there’s wrong, and ordinarily it’s somebody else who’s defining that, is the way that that works. This is exactly… We’re saying exactly the same thing. And, and so one of the r- this is one of the great reasons for the, you know, the crisis in wellbeing-Is just this, which is that, you know, people are easy fodder for the activists because they’re looking for a sense of meaning and what they’re getting is counterfeit. It’s not a sense of meaning at all, on the contrary, but it’s also, it explains an awful lot. I mean, nationalism is identitarian. Patriotism is a shared story.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Arthur Brooks
You know, the idea of, you know, patri- American patriotism. I mean, it’s like that’s… And, you know, the whole idea that we’re supposed to, you know, throw up all over the idea that America is an idea, well, that’s a patriotic concept, and we all come from different places with different experiences and, and, and, and we all share in these common values across all of our different experiences and then go home to different kinds of food and languages and families. They’re like, “Dude, I love that. That’s what I want. I w- I love it so much that I married that.” You know, I mar- it’s like I, I, you know, I, I married an American by choice, rah, rah, rah. And the whole idea of nationalism as this, like, thin identity, this reed thin concept of what it means to be an American that somebody else has identified is just completely depressing because it doesn’t have any meaning. It doesn’t have any depth to it. It doesn’t give me a sense of really deep human significance. It doesn’t have any coherence for the way that I’m trying to live my life. It, it, it lacks meaning.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, like, the people who… I have all sorts of arguments with the people who say America is not an idea, but my biggest problem with them is that their idea of what America is, is also an idea. It’s just a really narrow, crappy one, um, that excludes people for pretty stupid reasons. But we don’t need to get into all that, ’cause for all I know, by the time this airs, Donald Trump, at the insistence of JD Vance, will have introduced the Heritage Americans Act, which will require people whose ancestors came on the Mayflower to have five votes instead of, you know, mutts like you and me getting-
Arthur Brooks
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… only one. Um-
Arthur Brooks
We just missed the Mayflower. We missed the Mayflower by six years, Jonah.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs] The Brooks’ did?
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, on my mom’s side, they go back to, I think, 1730 or something like that, and, and on my dad’s side, you know, they go back to whenever the pogroms, you know, that chased them out, you know, off the shtetl-
Arthur Brooks
1890 sometime
Jonah Goldberg
… in 1890. Yeah. Yeah
Arthur Brooks
… someplace in the, in the se- in the, in the, in the Russian Empire. Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. So I can’t remember where we were on the list of things to do to fix your life.
Arthur Brooks
Well, we actually went to number six, which was suffering, but so we can go back to number three, which is transcendence. And, you know, this is this, you know, the whole movement of the nones, which you’ve heard about, by which I do not mean N-U-N-S, N-O-N-E-S, religious nones. The year I was born, 1% of Americans said they had no religious affiliation, and this year, among people under 35, it’s 32% of people say they have no religious affiliation. And, and that’s a big problem not, not because of religion per se, but because of the sense of transcendence, of standing in awe of something bigger than ourselves. This is one of the greatest ways to find meaning very, very quickly, is to stop being the star of your own psychodrama. Being none puts you… Y- I mean, it’s like there’s a, a, a f- the world gives you a formula for happiness and meaning, which is y- you know, use people, love things, and worship yourself. That’s the formula. Like, people are there for your use and gratification and advancement. Things are there for you to love, because if you have enough money, power, pleasure, and fame, you’ll be happy. And, and you’re the center of everything, so effectively, you’re God. The real formula for meaning and happiness is use things, love people, and worship the divine. That’s what it is. Now, you d- you figure out what the divine is. I got my concepts, and other people do as well. But if you don’t have any of that, if you don’t have any of that, sorry. That’s a big problem. And once again, that sounds like a conservative concept. No, this is a behavioral science truth is what we find it. Again, some people will substitute stoicism for their mi- fine, fine, fine. My path is not the only path. Some people will study the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach or do Vipassana meditation or, or the Brahma Muhurta of walking before da- I got it. I mean, I study that stuff too. But the whole point is if you don’t have a sense of the transcendent, if you don’t have… If all you have is the physical and not the metaphysical, woe be unto you. And in the, in this chapter of the book, I actually talk about how the brain actually processes a purely physicalist stance toward the world, and it ain’t pretty.
Jonah Goldberg
So I, I’ve had plenty of
Jonah Goldberg
arguments in my youth with atheists. I have lots of friends who are atheists. I get the God in the gap argument. Our friend, or former colleague, uh, or friend and kind of former colleague, uh, Charles Murray, has this book, Taking Religion Seriously. I have friends who really do-
Arthur Brooks
Dedicated to me.
Jonah Goldberg
Did he? Oh, I didn’t notice that.
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
Uh, yeah, and I’ve, I have really good friends who really dislike
Jonah Goldberg
any tr- attempt to intellectualize religion in any way.
Arthur Brooks
Sure do.
Jonah Goldberg
And I’ll make, not as informed, but similar point to yours about how a lot of this is sort of backed up with the data that a more enriching life comes from belief in transcendence and whatnot, and I say, “Well, I have a pretty re- enriching life. I’m, I’m not, you know, in a doom spiral of despair or anything like that.” So, like, you know-
Arthur Brooks
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… beyond the plural of anecdote isn’t data, what is, what is your response to those people?
Arthur Brooks
That there are a lot of people who don’t have religion or even spirituality who do find transcendence. A- and this is a really important thing for me to acknowledge as a behavioral scientist who also happens to be a practicing Catholic, that my path is not the only path for this particular benefit. Again, I’m not gonna say what’s metaphysically true. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I do know what actually brings meaning and happiness, and that’s this idea of standing in awe of something bigger than you, in the, uh, what William James called the I self.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Arthur Brooks
Getting away from the me self, to transcend yourself, and you can transcend vertically, or it can transcend laterally by serving other people. But you, what you have to do is to get away from yourself. You know, the most popular class at most undergraduate institutions is always Astronomy 101.And it’s like they’re not astronomers, but the reason is because they go into class on Thursday all bummed out ’cause they had a big argument with their mom, or their boyfriend’s gonna break up with them. And, and then they come out an hour and a half later going, “I’m a speck on a speck on a speck.”
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Arthur Brooks
And they have peace and perspective, and that’s a beautiful thing. That’s actually what we need is to put ourselves into perspective by looking outward, by looking upward, by serving other people, by transcending ourselves, and that’s really what it comes down to. So yeah, I might have a metaphysical or a theological beef with, with atheists, but those who are living right can get a lo- can get these benefits just as well as I can.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay, what’s next?
Arthur Brooks
There’s two left, and number one is finding your calling, and the last is actually experiencing beauty. That’s the… Those are the last two. Finding your calling is, you know, something that you and I have talked about for years and years and years, which is, what am I meant to do? And, and we get this wrong in our completely, you know, Homo economicus view of technologized society. I mean, it’s like you gotta go to college, study STEM. Now, now, if you’re, if you’re… Look, if you’re passionate about engineering, great, but the idea of going and studying business or engineering or technology when what you really wanna study is something in the humanities, that’s a big problem for people. It’s a big problem because you’re treating your work life, which is part of your life. It’s not work-life balance. There’s only work-life integration. I mean, it’s like my work is part of my life and my life is part of my work. And if you’re actually not getting it right to help find meaning, it’s a problem, and there’s only two things to look for. Number one is serving other people where you’re needed, and number two is earning your success, where you’re creating value with your life and value in the lives of other people. It’s not about money. It’s not about stature. It’s not about position. Those are high octane fuels where they burn real hot and real fast, and they leave you in a big hole when you run out of it. So the idea I’m only gonna be happy when I make a lot of money, I’m only gonna be happy when I’m CEO, that’s wrong. That’s completely wrong. It’s a huge problem. But if you say, “I wanna serve other people. I want people to need what I’ve got to do, and I wanna earn my success.” And that… You know, it’s interesting, you, you made a big career decision. You made a bunch in my time knowing you.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Arthur Brooks
Um, but one of them was actually walking away from, from very, very established institutions and doing your startup, and the reason is because people, we, needed what you had to say unencumbered by a, an established institution. That was a pure service and earned success play is what that was. That was a f- Jonah finding his calling is what that was, and that’s a search for meaning.
Jonah Goldberg
I appreciate the perspective on it. I… And I, and I think there’s a- there’s ample truth
Jonah Goldberg
to it. We can do an oral history of the founding of The Dispatch another time. [laughs] But like I, I will say that like I felt I would’ve been probably… I mean, I, I needed a change, right? Uh, that’s absolutely true, and, um, I was getting into a groove. I love my colleagues at National Review, um, and I still… Some of them are still my dearest friend, among my dearest friends, but part of it was the calling less in the sen- Like if I really had my druthers, I would’ve gone off to Hollywood and written screenplays or sci-fi novels or something like that ’cause that’s the thing I thought I was gonna do when I was a kid. But, um-
Arthur Brooks
You wouldn’t like it. You’d hate it.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, no, probably. I mean, that, that’s entirely possible, but like part of the reason why Steve and I did The Dispatch, and it’s a complicated story, is
Jonah Goldberg
we felt there were a lot of people
Jonah Goldberg
more qualified and higher above us in the hierarchy that should’ve been doing what we were doing and saying what we were saying, and they weren’t, and we felt that we had to model behavior that was lacking. And so at, in some ways it was more of a moral obligation than like a pure this is what I was meant to do kind of thing.
Arthur Brooks
You told us, you just told me that, that the country needed this thing and nobody was doing it, and so you did it, which is… And, and, and by the way, you also wanted to earn your success on your own. You wanted to do it on your own and see whether you could do it, which is a challenge. And, and, you know, the whole point is, I mean, National Review’s awesome. I, I read National Review. I love it, but when you need more meaning in your life, that’s when you actually change. That’s when people change. So people are… When they start itching to change careers, almost always is because they’re looking for a different kind of calling because they want meaning. That’s what it comes down to. And, you know, this, uh, it explains a lot of burnout, it explra- explains a lot of midlife changes, um, midlife crises.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Arthur Brooks
A lot of it comes down to, “I don’t… What’s my calling, man?” I mean, it’s a, that’s a multifactorial thing when you see guys in their mid-40s who are freaking out, is they’re not getting… They’re, they’re not in their calling for work. They don’t have romantic love at home. They probably don’t have close friends with whom they can have the dorm room, effectively the dorm room conversation. They might be trying to anesthetize themselves out of suffering with drugs and alcohol, and all this stuff leads to this massive crisis. But midlife crises are always meaning crises, always.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. No, that makes sense to me. All right, we’re gonna take a quick break, but we’ll be back soon with more from The Remnant Podcast.
Jonah Goldberg
All right, what was the last one? Uh, beauty.
Arthur Brooks
Beauty is beauty. Beauty is a funny thing because beauty is almost a pure right hemisphere experience, and there’s three kinds of beauty that do it. Now, when I say beauty, I don’t mean like seeing a very beautiful person of the opposite sex. That actually doesn’t work in the brain the same way.
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Arthur Brooks
That actually stimulates testosterone and estrogen and, and, and, you know, some neuromodulators that, you know, give you a sense of anticipation and reward.
Jonah Goldberg
That is probably the most easy evolutionary explanation for all of the things you’ve discussed, right? [laughs] That it’s a different part of the brain for that. Yeah.
Arthur Brooks
I know. It’s a different part of the brain. A different part, uh, physiologically. So the s- the, the, the kinds of beauty that bring you close to the meaning of your life, number one is artistic beauty, number two is natural beauty, and number three is moral beauty, which is… And moral beauty is the really interesting one. You know, that’s why… You know, there’s a huge bestseller. You, you remember reading Malcolm Muggeridge’s book about Mother Teresa?Huge bestseller. It’s like I’m gonna go write a book about a, an Albanian nun who feeds poor people and takes care of poor people in Calcutta. The reason was because it was an incredibly beautiful, morally beautiful tale, story, that uplifted people. I have this, uh, this guy that I, I talk to sometimes. He’s a psychologist at Lewis-Clark College in Idaho. Uh, his name is Rhett Diesner, and he’s the world’s leading expert on moral elevation, on, on the effects of moral beauty, of observing moral beauty. Interestingly, by the way, I pal around with… Do, do you know an actor named Rainn Wilson?
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, yeah.
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. He’s a… He and I are pa- we, we’re-
Jonah Goldberg
Dwight Schrute.
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, exactly.
Jonah Goldberg
From The Office, yeah.
Arthur Brooks
Grew up five miles apart from each other in Seattle. We’re the same age.
Jonah Goldberg
Huh.
Arthur Brooks
So, and it’s… It… I didn’t know him when we were kids, but we bonded over that. I talk to him a lot, and his uncle is Rhett Diesner, the world’s leading expert on moral elevation.
Jonah Goldberg
Huh.
Arthur Brooks
And they’re both Bahais. They’re both Bahais, if you can believe it. So that’s, uh, all kinds of interesting stuff, of the Baha’i faith.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Arthur Brooks
And, and, and deeply believing, deeply, deeply religious guys. Both of them.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Arthur Brooks
Rhe- actually, Rainn is writing a book on, on meaning that’s gonna come out next year, and so we’re gonna do a bunch of stuff together on that. But this whole idea that you can feel this warmth in your chest when you, when you see it, and the reason is because you’re having a, a peculiar right hemisphere experience. The same thing that you get when you… You know, young people today, they talk about touching grass. Like, they’re online too much, and it’s like, “I gotta go and touch grass.” That’s actually going outside in nature. What it does is it transfers activity from the left side of your brain to the right side of your brain, which is how you start to see a… You get a better sense of reality. And then, of course, artistic beauty. You know? It’s, it’s interesting that young people today are bereft of beauty. If you only ever see nature through a screen, I’m sorry, it doesn’t work the same way. You can’t simulate true beauty in your brain. It… Objectively, I mean, I’ve done… I’m an old musician, as you know. I made my living as a musician for many years. And, and, you know, modern, uh, uh, popular music is objectively less beautiful than it’s been in the past, objectively less tuneful than it’s been in the past. And so it’s the, the, the machine-like quality of actually what we’re doing is of a piece with this. And so exposing yourself to beauty every day, every day. The average under 12 child today spends between four and seven minutes a day in nature,
Arthur Brooks
and between four and seven hours in front of screens.
Arthur Brooks
That’s backwards.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay. So I have you here. You were trapped, as it were, so I’m gonna float a theory that I’ve been thinking a lot about and-
Arthur Brooks
Good. I can’t wait
Jonah Goldberg
… take it on. Okay.
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
So the economist Fred Hirsch, who, uh, coined the term positional good in the 1970s, right? He went on to write a book, uh, Social Cha… I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s, uh, expands on all this. And i- in the book, he lays out the argument that
Jonah Goldberg
the problem with advanced capitalism now is that people crave status more than they crave material comfort, and that’s wh- And, and his conclusion was, and that’s why we can, the Amer- America can no longer deliver the American Dream, and the argument being that, like, the pro- the kind of prosperity that was, that defined the American Dream in 1950, that goes down to, like, the 10th quintile, or [laughs] you know, or, like, the, the, the, the 10th, you know, decile-
Arthur Brooks
The, the, the lowest decile. For sure.
Jonah Goldberg
The lower… There you go. Uh, yes. And… But the problem is, in particularly in the social media age,
Jonah Goldberg
status is a positional good in the sense that if I have it, you can’t. And I, the way I always talk about it is dog economics.
Arthur Brooks
That’s called zero sum.
Arthur Brooks
The zero sum.
Jonah Goldberg
Right. Zero sum, right. But, like, in the park,
Jonah Goldberg
dogs, there’s always… There used to be always, like, one dog who had a stick, and all the dogs chased that dog, even though there were plenty of sticks in the park. But they wanted the stick that that dog had, and that was the status stick, right? If you’re the best basketball player in high school, no one else can have that title. And in
Jonah Goldberg
America today, and I think social media is, drives it enormously,
Jonah Goldberg
we have an enormous… We talk an enormous amount about how the economy isn’t working for people because it’s not providing this level of satisfaction or that level of satisfaction, when, in reality, w- what their problem is is that they don’t have the status that they feel like they deserve. They’re jealous of other people having greater status. That’s why we start getting into all of this scapegoating of different groups, the Jews among others, is that
Jonah Goldberg
pure status seeking is, um, is a form of envy in a certain way, right? It’s the jealousy of your soul for another, and I don’t know how to fix it. So it feels like your book is aiming to fix some of this. Give me a shot. Give me-
Arthur Brooks
Well-
Jonah Goldberg
You can make the pitch.
Arthur Brooks
So Homo sapiens, um, were developed, evolved, to live in bands of 30 to 50 kin-based h- individuals in a hierarchy. That’s… And, and that’s where… They, they still live in many parts of the world, but that’s, until 10,000 years ago or 20,000 years ago, that’s where, how everybody lived. And our brains are still habituated to that, to live in bands of 30 to 50 individuals who are related as kin and who are hierarchical in their structure, in the structure of these bands. So we try to… Al- almost all the weird stuff that we do comes back to this, all the weird mating behavior, all the weird internet behavior, all of the weird, you know, envy that we actually have, the status seeking that we actually have. What it is is trying to climb in a very small band of people to two or three slots above where we are. Fine. And the reason for that is ’cause you gotta know who you are so you know actually what your, what your responsibilities and rights are with respect to the disposition of resources and mates. I get it. That’s how, that’s how Homo sapiens were actually evolved. The trouble is that we don’t accommodate ourselves to the modern world very much, and we’re shackled by this in a weird way. So instead of wanting to climb three s- three slots among the 25 males in your band, you’re trying to climb 25 million slots-in, in your, in the number of followers that you’ve got on Instagram, and that’s not natural, and that’s not normal, and that’s actually unbelievably unhealthy, and it will literally make you mentally ill. That will make you mentally ill. So the question is what will actually calm that? Now, the great thing about the prefrontal cortex of the Homo sapien brain, it’s 30% of our brain, by the way. It’s the ultimate supercomputer, Jonah. So your dog… You still ha- You have dog, you have new dogs.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Arthur Brooks
You have old dogs. You have two dogs.
Jonah Goldberg
Two do- two, two old dogs, yeah.
Arthur Brooks
Two old dogs. They have a wafer-thin prefrontal cortex. That’s the reason that your dog is happier than you are, because your dogs don’t know that they’re alive and that they’re going to die, and they’re here right now with Jonah, and that’s what they want, ’cause they’re completely mindful and they’re completely present. But the lack of consciousness means that they don’t… They only have animal impulses. They don’t have moral aspirations. The bad side of your consciousness is it makes you do nutty things like trying to grab status all the time. The good part of your needy prefrontal cortex, your consciousness, is that you also have moral aspirations that you can live up to. The ultimate conservative point is that you can choose moral aspirations over animal impulses. You can choose if you’ve got the knowledge, you got the commitment, the discipline, and the people around you to get it done. That’s what it comes down to. And the ultimate way for you to break out of the status game is to find the meaning of your life, to define and live in the meaning of your life, and I’ve seen it again, and again, and again, where people surround themselves with people they truly love. They don’t wanna sleep around in the same way they did before for mes- me- reasons of status. When they have a whole bunch of grandchildren, they don’t care about trying to get a yacht to impress somebody nearly as much. When they actually have a sense of life’s beauty, they don’t buy a bunch of ugly nonsense in the same way that they did before. When you get the stuff that we’re talking about, you care less about the things that don’t bring it. But if you can’t get those things, you don’t know about these things, if you’re entirely in the left side of your brain, just to be neurophysiological about it, you’re gonna be chasing your tail. You’re gonna be chasing in this, in this fruitless, futile status game, which is what you’ll do, and that’s just living like a lower life form for all intents and purposes, and we don’t have to do it.
Jonah Goldberg
So o- obviously this is all music to my ears. This is a big part. It plays perfectly well into the argument in my last book that a lot of the most important stuff in life is unnatural and requires reaching for things that are better than, uh, mere animalistic instinct. The big point of Christianity is not being seduced by the material and the physical.
Arthur Brooks
Stay at war with yourself.
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Arthur Brooks
It’s so great. It’s such an incredible, wonderful, beautiful challenge.
Jonah Goldberg
So the w- I, it’s a little unfair to do this as the last question, but I wanna respect your time. In your last answer, which again I agree with, uh, and I liked a lot.
Jonah Goldberg
But you’re… We’re two dudes. We’re talking about dude stuff. We’re talking about, like, status among dudes, whatever. It is very easy for me, I’ve found, to fall into this language as if only men evolved in the [laughs] evolutionary, you know, environment. But, like, women’s aspirations, th-there’s not a better or worse point. It’s just a difference point. Men and women are wired a little differently. Obviously, there’s a overlap in Venn diagrams and spectrum and yada, yada, yada, but it’s just simply true. And so the, the point about not caring about status and wanting to be a provider and all these kinds of things, part of it is my problem. I hear it as a male,
Jonah Goldberg
and I think about it in male terms, and so I’m kind of asking a
Jonah Goldberg
don’t know what I don’t know kind of question. How do you translate these points for women who… Look, I know a lot a… I’ve surrounded myself with status-seeking women my entire life, right? But, like, so I know they exist. Um, and they, we employ them at the Dispatch, and I married one and, and all of that, so I get it. But the status-seeking is different
Jonah Goldberg
as a statistical thing
Jonah Goldberg
for women than men. So how do you put, put, make these arguments in feminine terms?
Arthur Brooks
the people who read my stuff are two-thirds women, actually.
Jonah Goldberg
But they’re trying to figure out why their s- their husbands and f- male friends are all so screwed up. [laughs]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Arthur Brooks
And, and here’s, here’s one biological explanation for it. Women have more developed right hemispheres naturally. Men have more developed left hemispheres naturally. That’s why you say that, you know, when you’ve got daughters and sons, that your sons are about things and your daughters are about feelings. Not always true. There are some daughters who are more about things or son, some sons who are more about feelings. But the truth of the matter is that when you see little kids, you start to see these patterns emerge, and it has a lot to do with hemispheric lateralization. Has a lot to do with the things that we’re talking about here. Now, what this means, here’s the, the great strength that women have. They naturally do meaning better than men, which is why men who are alone are so dangerous. That’s why men are so rootless. That’s why men struggle so much when they’re alone. That’s why so many of the pathologies in our, in our culture come from single men. You know, that’s why people are afraid of single men, as a matter of fact. Like, don’t let your kids alone with a single guy. That’s why i- is, is one of these things, where it’s like a single woman, you’re not worried as a general rule. Weird things happen, but it’s just n- it just… We don’t have to go through the data. It’s just not the same. That’s the great strength of women is meaning and teaching men meaning through the way that they live their lives. Here’s the problem. Modern society is harder on women than it is for men because it’s forcing them into a world that’s largely male. That’s forcing them into a left hemispheric understanding of stuff, and efficiency, and analysis, and technology, and they suffer more because they’re less in their natural habitat, less in their neurobiological habitat. They’re less happy, and that’s one of the reasons that, especially with highly educated women who don’t understand a lot of these things and are not living in this p- in, in, in a way that I’m talking about here, that they often are the ones who are suffering the most. That’s why-If you go back to 2008, forty-eight percent of, of, of women under thirty said that, “My mental health is excellent,” and today it’s fifteen percent. How did it go from forty-eight percent to fifteen percent? How did it happen? And it happened because they’re actually living in a world that’s largely been created by male brains for male brains, and that’s a, that’s a world where it’s harder to underst- to, to, to live naturally with the meaning. So I’m writing this book for people that, men and women, who wanna get into the meaning milieu, who wanna get into the right hemisphere of the brain. Yeah, they have status games. Yeah, they actually do, but when women are living in a way where they’re happier, whether they’re primarily taking care of kids or primarily working outside the home, none of this has any bearing on that. It’s that it– they actually need to be the stewards, the curators, the, the hosts of the meaning of life for the rest of us.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. Uh, strong letters from some feminist women I know, uh, to follow, but, uh, we’ll figure [laughs] that out when we get there.
Arthur Brooks
They got the goods, man. Actually, they should be like, “Yeah, right on.”
Jonah Goldberg
I, I think it’s a very good answer. I think that… I don’t know if you s- caught this piece, uh, by Helen Andrews about the great feminization and all that, which I think had many directionally correct
Jonah Goldberg
observations but took them all way too far in various, in various ways. Um, but one of the, like, the idea that women are not suited, that the rule of law will disappear, uh, with the introduction of women into, um, the legal profession I just think is just completely contrary to the data.
Arthur Brooks
It’s insane. It’s insane. The truth of the matter is inside institutions we need men and women. We need men and women inside institutions because they bring complementary skills and complementary charisms.
Arthur Brooks
And, and the truth is that when we don’t appreciate that, we’re gonna make everybody miserable is what it comes down to, and, and that’s a lot of what’s actually happening today.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. Arthur Brooks, my friend, my former boss, mentor on many issues, thank you so much for doing this and good luck on the book tour. Um, and I hope you’ll come back.
Arthur Brooks
I love it. I love your show. I love everything you’re doing, and I see you going from strength to strength. Keep the faith, my friend.
Jonah Goldberg
We’ll have that conversation offline, but thank you. [whoosh] Okay, um, my friend Arthur Brooks has left the studio, and it’s late in the day, so I’m gonna keep this kinda short. Just to be clear, like, Arthur was like, “I hope it didn’t come across as, like, too, um, hardcore or arch or whatever” in the, the, the pitch from left field I gave him about women and all that, and I was like, “No, I think it’s fine. People understand, you know, where you’re coming from on all of this.” And, you know, uh, on one hand, I recoil from a lot of this kind of stuff about… There’s a, there’s a paradox here. I love Arthur Brooks. I respect Arthur Brooks. I am deeply indebted to Arthur Brooks. If he asked me to come out and mow his lawn once a month, I would do it because of how much I owe the guy. That said, like, I hear everything that he’s saying about, like, right brain, left brain, increase the mystery in your life, increase your notions of the transcendent, and all that kinda stuff, but it’s sort of like the old rule that says if you explain a joke, you ruin it.
Jonah Goldberg
Part of the problem of demystifying this stuff so people can embrace it is that you’re demystifying it at the same time, and that’s not really a criticism. I just think it’s an occupational hazard of, of this kinda stuff. I think he’s doing the Lord’s work literally and figuratively, but part of what makes the transcendent transcendent is that it’s, as, and, as Arthur would concede, is about recognizing
Jonah Goldberg
that it’s just so much bigger than you are that you can’t turn it into just a utilitarian thing about, “Oh, it’s good for me if I believe in it.” It has to be something that really does– has a transformative effect on you internally because it is so other-directed. And so I wrestle with this stuff about, you know, like demystifying mystery so that people will embrace mystery is, is a complicated beat, and I’m not qualified to do it. Um, if anybody is, it’s Arthur, and I’ve gotten a lot out of his stuff, and I highly recommend the book and everything else that he does. So, I mean, I will talk to him about all this stuff next time I talk to him. But other than that, I… Who knows what the hell’s going on in America, uh, when this thing actually airs? So, uh, it was l- like we did this, you know, last week of December. So I hope everything is going great, and thanks for listening, and I will see you next time.
Arthur Brooks
No, you won’t. This is a podcast. [upbeat music] Yeah.
