Charles Murray On Taking Religion Seriously – The Weekly Dish | Andrew Sullivan

Charles is a writer, social scientist, and longtime friend. He currently holds the F.A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. His many books include Losing Ground, The Bell Curve (co-authored with Richard Herrnstein), Coming Apart, Facing Reality, and Human Diversity (which we discussed on the Dishcast in 2021). His new book is Taking Religion Seriously. If you think you know who Charles is from the way the MSM has described him for years, this conversation may surprise.
For two clips of our convo — on how science has revived old ideas of God over the past several decades, and the connection between psychedelics and agape — head to our YouTube page. (Charles is the second guest we’ve had who has come out as an LSD experimenter on the show; Rod Dreher was the other one.)
Other topics: how Charles lived for decades without a “God-sized hole”; the security and comfort of modern life; when death and suffering was far more common; the 24/7 distractions of today; meditation retreats; Charles learning TM in Thailand; Quakerism and his wife Catherine’s discovery that she loved her child “more than evolution requires”; how religiosity falls on a bell curve; my Irish grandmother’s faith; “why is there something rather than nothing?”; the Big Bang and fine-tuning; logos; multiverses; the materialism of Dawkins et al; the evolutionary role of religion; CS Lewis; the Golden Rule; pure altruism; the transcendence in nature; near-death experiences; dementia and terminal lucidity; consciousness outside the brain; the soul; the collective consciousness in Buddhism; the strange details of the Gospels; the feminism of Jesus; the adulteress he saved; how grace is contagious; the Nativity; crucifixion and the Resurrection; the Jefferson Bible; the sacraments; the doubt in faith; Oakeshott; “Why We Should Say Yes to Drugs”; my HIV diagnosis; theodicy; Camus; TS Eliot; transhumanism, and the boredom of too much life.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Karen Hao on artificial intelligence, Michel Paradis on Eisenhower, David Ignatius on the Trump effect globally, Mark Halperin on the domestic front, and Arthur Brooks on the science of happiness. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
From a fan of last week’s episode with Michael Wolff:
I’m a subscriber and wanted to thank you for the interview with Wolff. What I gleaned from you both is that President Trump has a preternaturally self-indulgence with an almost supernatural ability to manipulate others. Feeling he is always on camera explains a lot about his behavior. What comes to mind is an image of a cabinet meeting in which high government officials are in rapt attention and pay homage to him.
Another listener writes:
I appreciate Mr. Wolff’s view of Trump as a TV avatar, and not a real person. His activities as his own PR man, supported by a vast cast of sycophants, rings very true.
As for Trump’s singularity, I have some different thoughts. First, going back to an earlier version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders II, there is still the diagnosis of Paranoia — not paranoid personality, not paranoid schizophrenia, but pure paranoia. The definition is:
Systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur
Absence of hallucinations
Preserved personality and intellectual functioning
The delusions were described as well-organized and internally consistent, often involving themes of being wronged, conspired against, or possessing exceptional abilities or status.
Such a person does not appear psychotic but is captured by his own delusional system and acts accordingly. I think that fits more than other attempts at diagnosing Trump.
Also, I wonder if historians of Roman emperors also have examples of people with similar characteristics. A quick sprint down the internet led me to Caligula, who had a serious illness and then developed the belief that everyone was out to kill him — not unreasonable, for sure — so he dispatched a lot of people he considered enemies. In other times, there have also been such malevolent characters; Pedro the Cruel of Castile comes to mind. And of course, today we have one of Trump’s models: Putin, who takes care of his enemies by dropping them out of windows.
I am more frightened than Mr. Wolff is about what comes next. As you point out, and we all know, during the interregnum after his first term, Trump was groomed by a bunch of monarchists and authoritarian types who seem to have captured his imagination about how he can and should exercise the power he now has — the courts, the Congress, and everyone else be damned. He is perfectly comfortable doing so. And his uncanny ability to keep his followers in line only exacerbates those moves.
I, like you, think he will do more to disrupt the midterm elections. The “Republican” attempts to capture the voting processes in many states will not be enough; he will not abide losing.
Elections he may not win are something Trump cannot actually process. That’s a slight problem in a democracy. One more on that episode:
I was surprised to hear you and Michael both accept that Trump truly believes he did not lose the 2020 election. As someone who has followed Trump since the 1970s in NYC, I can say that despite his many flaws, he is not stupid; he knows full well that he lost.
For Trump, claims of a stolen election, despite it’s obvious and proven absurdity, was and is a winning strategy. Ever since coming under the influence of Roy Cohn, Trump has always embraced Cohn’s advice on how to win: never admit to a fault.
In the 1970s, Trump was obsessively driven to be a part of the tabloid culture in New York. Sensationalist content drove tabloid circulation. Truth/facts were not the issue. Trump understands this better than anyone and used the sensational “stolen election” to further his: “any publicity is good publicity”. Just as the mass readership of the 1970s/’80s supermarket tabloid news was more than prepared to be entertained and “believe” anything that was printed in the lurid headlines, Trump understands that his stolen election story is catnip for the MAGA crowd.
I think it’s more clinical than that. On the episode with Katie Herzog, a listener gets personal:
I enjoyed your insights about gay men and addiction and using medical technology (Ozempic) to cure overeating. I have kept myself away from gay subculture and sexual activity for 30 years. I rarely masturbate. My ex died of AIDS in 1995, and he was just about your age, born in 1964. Instead of availing himself of using drugs to keep himself alive, he misused medical treatment and died at the age of 31.
I’ve lived in Washington state for about 40 years and was living in the Seattle area for most of the AIDS epidemic. AIDS activists there held workshops in the 1990s on how to engage in safer sex (not just condoms) and still enjoy it. The techniques were incredibly useful. I also used a 12-step program for sex addiction. I became deeply involved in Transcendental Meditation, spending several hours every day meditating, plus morning and evening prayers from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. God helped me. Anyhow, I survived.
Regarding Ms. Herzog’s experience with naltrexone, using a pill to get sober is a form of “harm reduction” therapy. It’s a shortcut. One experiences less of the “suffering” she spoke of to stop drinking, and the same with Ozempic for overeating.
She didn’t disparage Alcoholics Anonymous, and I’m glad for that, but she implied that the naltrexone method worked better for her to reduce and gradually extinguish her dependence on alcohol. Now she is sober and experiencing the happiness and feelings of wellbeing that accompany not poisoning herself daily with alcohol. She stopped drinking about three years ago, but those are still the early years of recovery; they do not guarantee lifelong sobriety. Relapse is part of the process. She will need to watch out for it.
Time will tell whether her abstinence will last — which is where the Alcoholics Anonymous model comes in. My idea of addiction and sobriety is that once you have become addicted to a substance or a lifestyle (overeating, sex, internet and tech addiction, etc.), your brain is altered by that experience, and even if you stop or reduce the consumption or behavior, the changes in your brain remain.
My metaphor for that is a red blinking light in your head, which makes you want to use again. When you stop smoking — which scientists say is as hard as stopping heroin or methamphetamine — after three days, that blinking red light starts to slow down. After one week, more so — and so on, as the weeks turn into months. But once you have started an addictive pattern, that red light of craving never completely stops blinking.
In my case, I grew up in a family of smokers, including both parents. (My sister even married a cigarette salesman.) In the ‘50s and ‘60s, adults smoked at home, in the car, wherever. I had inhaled volumes of secondhand smoke by the time I was 12, which is when I had my first cigarette. I lived in South Carolina in high school when cigarettes from a machine were 25 cents a pack, and I smoked every day. In college I smoked a pack a day all four years, then off and on for about eight years. Then I quit, which took me a long time and was extremely hard.
Shortly after my mother and my ex-boyfriend died, I started craving cigarettes again — though it had never left me entirely. I kept thinking I would just like to smoke for a week or two, but I started smoking a pack a day for the next four years, absolutely unable to stop myself even while feeling shitty — physically and mentally.
The problem with depending on a medical shortcut to stop using (Naltrexone or Ozempic) is that once the medicine is removed, the need for the substance is still there. The harm from the substance is taken away (e.g. weight gain, alcohol poisoning), but you still need to retrain your brain, which is what programs like AA or OA or ITA (along with prayer and meditation) help accomplish.
Another dissent over Big Pharma:
I loved the episode with you and Katie.
I had some drinking issues of my own for some years, but I ended up stopping because I had a terrible case of swine flu for two weeks, when I could not smoke or drink. By the time I was better, I had bypassed all the withdrawal symptoms because they’d been masked by the illness, so I thought, “Hey, maybe I should keep this going.” Now if I have even just a can of light beer, I’m hungover for two days, so that’s what keeps me away now.
But I’m mainly writing you to dissent about your rant against RFK Jr. and MAHA. First off, you are correct that Big Pharma saved your life, but the treatment for your condition happened to fit into the business model that Big Pharma is interested in: a long-term recurring prescription for a treatment, so things like HIV meds, statins, flu vaccines, Covid boosters, SSRIs. As a Goldman Sachs exec once said, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” He’s right; it’s not.
Big Pharma is not some benevolent force like you are understandably inclined to think it is. It’s just that you happened to land in the sweet spot that makes them money. But they have been shown time and time again to be willing to cut safety corners in order to get profitable drugs to market, as Merck did with Vioxx, Purdue did with OxyContin, and countless others. And the “Big” part of Big Pharma does matter, because those companies are the ones who can afford lobbyists to get what they want in Washington.
There has been a huge rise in chronic illness, autism, obesity, and many other health problems in the last 100 years or so. The life expectancy in the US is comparatively lower than other countries despite all the health care spending. Why is America so unhealthy? It does seem rational to me to investigate possibilities that affect large populations, like ingredients commonly used by Big Food, like pharmaceuticals taken by billions (pain meds, vaccines), and like novel chemicals used in the food supply, such as Atrazine or GMOs.
Unfortunately a lot of this ends up sounding conspiratorial, because the fact is, why would any corporations pay for scientific studies that investigate any of this? All it would accomplish is losing them money. So if RFK is going to use government resources to do what no one else is willing to do and investigate what is causing chronic illness and the rest of it, I think that’s great.
Points well taken. One more on that episode:
I’ve been a loyal reader since my college days in 2000. I’m the guy whose mom sent me Dish posts printed out so it looked like letters that I could read in basic training in 2002 when the news was off-limits. I’ve also been on at least one type of doctor prescribed medication or other since 1999 (with a brief exception during my time in uniform), so I really appreciated your conversation with Katie about the profound value of pharmaceutical empowerment to living a good life.
To that end, I thought you might appreciate a stanza from Leonard Cohen (my other literary North Star). It’s from the penultimate song, “The Hills,” from his posthumous album, Thanks for the Dance:
I can’t make the hills
The system is shot
I’m living on pills
For which I thank God
Here’s a guest rec for the pod:
Considering you were one of the first to board the Obama train (not to mention the Thatcher one), how is it that you’ve barely discussed the conservative leader in the UK, Kemi Badenoch? She is so sharp and articulate and seems to be Obama’s equal in many if not most respects. I’d love to hear your thoughts on her, or even have her on the Dishcast. She appeared on Bari Weiss’ podcast and made for a fantastic guest:
On last week’s column, “Why Bari Weiss Matters,” a reader writes:
I have admired you and Weiss for a long, long time. I know you aren’t really a fan of hers on all things Israel, so kudos to you for taking this moment to pass on a hit piece and instead offer up a nuanced, thoughtful take on peak woke, Trump’s approach to the excesses of the Ivies, and a responsible journalism that treats people like grownups. Thanks from a reader who goes back over 20 years to your blog, back when I had to look up the meaning of “blog”.
I’m not uncritical, of course, but I’d rather hope for the best at CBS, given the depth of Bari’s talent, moxie, and guts. From a former subscriber to The Free Press:
Manic as it may seem, I’m in both solid agreement and strong dissent with your piece on “the importance of Bari Weiss.”
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