Parenting, Faith, and the Future with Ex-Muslim Activist Sarah Haider

This episode explores the intersection of parenting, faith, and secular values, featuring ex-Muslim activist Sarah Haider discussing traditional and modern approaches to parenting and education.

1. Exploration of Secular and Traditional Parenting: Sarah Haider discusses her search for parenting resources that combine traditional values with a secular, rationalist approach.
2. Critique of Modern Educational Systems: Haider expresses skepticism towards conventional educational systems and their impact on children's natural love of learning.
3. Impact of Cultural Background on Parenting: The episode highlights how cultural backgrounds, like Haider’s Muslim upbringing, influence parenting styles and educational choices.
4. Rationalism in Parenting: There is an emphasis on using rationalism to reevaluate and perhaps reintegrate valuable traditional practices in modern parenting.
5. Community and Isolation: Discussion about how modern autonomy for individuals can sometimes undermine the community support crucial for families, especially in the context of motherhood.

1: Introduction and Guest Background

Sarah Haider is introduced, discussing her activism and her venture into motherhood. Sarah Haider: "I'm so excited to jump into these topics, especially how they relate to my own journey as a mother."

2: Educational Choices and Concerns

Haider critiques mainstream education and explores alternative schooling methods like Montessori. Sarah Haider: "I find the normie options make me nervous; I'm looking for something that nurtures a love of learning without stifling it."

3: The Role of Traditional Practices in Modern Parenting

Discussion on how traditional practices can be adapted to modern secular parenting. Sarah Haider: "There's wisdom in some traditional practices that we can adapt to our modern needs without taking the whole historical baggage."

4: Cultural Influence on Education and Parenting

Exploration of the impact of Haider's cultural background on her parenting approach. Sarah Haider: "Coming from a Muslim background influences my views on community and education, pushing me towards a more communal approach."

5: Conclusion and Reflections

Reflections on how to balance modern and traditional elements in parenting. Sarah Haider: "It’s about finding the right balance that respects our past but makes sense in our modern context."

1. Explore various educational models and consider how they align with your values.
2. Engage in community parenting groups that reflect both secular and rationalist values.
3. Reevaluate traditional practices, keeping those that offer value and adapting them as needed.
4. Foster a love of learning in children by choosing educational paths that encourage curiosity.
5. Maintain a balance between autonomy and community support in parenting.

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with Sarah Haider, an ex-Muslim activist and co-host of the "A Special Place in Hell" podcast, to discuss her search for a secular, rationalist approach to parenting and the challenges of raising children in a rapidly changing world. The conversation delves into Sarah's experiences growing up in a Muslim community, the unique characteristics of Islam as a religion and cultural framework, and the potential consequences of technological advancements on traditional societies.

Malcolm, Simone, and Sarah explore the role of social technologies in shaping cultural identity, the importance of cultural experimentation in ensuring the survival of diverse belief systems, and the potential pitfalls of relying solely on reason when crafting new traditions. The trio also discusses the Collins' unique approach to parenting, including their creation of the "Future Police" holiday, which aims to instill values of long-termism and agency in their children.

Throughout the discussion, the participants emphasize the need for thoughtful innovation in the face of cultural upheaval, the value of learning from the past while adapting to the present, and the importance of fostering a diversity of belief systems to ensure the robustness of human civilization in the face of unprecedented challenges.

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Sarah Haider

Guest Name(s):

Sarah Haider

Content Warnings:

None

A
I think that all the ways in which we have allowed women, especially young women, greater autonomy and control over their life choices, there has been a negative consequence for those same women, I think, when they become mothers, because it's the same forces that give you more autonomy as an individual weaken the social ties that are very important for families and for mothers. Would you like to know more? Hello, everyone. I'm really excited because after listening to Sarah Hader on podcasts for months, maybe years at this point, she is here on our podcast, and we're so excited to have her on. If you don't know her, she is on substack.

B
Her substack is called. Hold that thought. You can find it at newsletter dot Sarah.com. that's Haider. And on Twitter, she's Sarah the hater, as in h a I D E R, which is a great.

It's a great name, Sarah. She also does with Megan Dom, who we also love, a podcast called a special place in Hell, which is very fun. Your banter is fantastic. So we're very glad to have you here bantering with us. Welcome, Sarah.

A
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. And let's jump right into the tweet that got us connected because I think it's good framing for the topic of this show. Let's go. All right, let's do it.

C
Do you want to read it, Simone, or. Yeah, I'll read it. The other day, Sarah asked if there were any group resources out there, for lack of a better word, that offer traditional parenting, but with a secular or rationalist approach. And someone from, probably like a follower of this podcast followed us and followed Sarah and connected us, saying, hey, you should probably talk with someone. And Malcolm, let's start with whatever motivated this tweet.

B
Yeah, what made you decide to tweet that? What are you thinking there? Yeah, it's been in the works for a while. But I am a new mom, new ish. I have a toddler, so I was looking to connect with other parents.

A
I have been for some time now that it's like a playdate age and just thinking about how to think about parenting, like, what are the models that make sense now we're at a point where we're thinking about school, preschool, homeschool, Montessori. So all these big questions are coming up, and I'm not the kind of person who trusts establishment. Like, the kind of normie options make me nervous sometimes. And I actually have good reason to feel that way about our education system. I didn't love it when I was going through it, I went to public school.

I don't know if you guys did as well, but same. Yeah, yeah. Public school, terrible experience. I just can't. The prison metaphor is a good one, but I think it really killed my love of learning, which I had very naturally.

C
Same contractors, actually, in the Bay area. Where I went to school, the, the same architectural firm did design most of the jails and the high school. So I think they had the same parent company that was creating the cafeteria food. Oh, yeah, no, I imagine that's true in a lot of areas because it makes sense if you're winning government contracts anyway. Yeah, it's a school to pipeline ecosystem in a lot of these districts, right?

One and the other. Yeah. Luckily I was not in one of those places, but I was definitely in a, like, testing, get good grades and compete incessantly, have 10 hours of homework a night school environment. It was not amazing. I was thinking about that with my son as well, and my background is actually in new atheism, which we were touching on a little bit when.

Yeah, we were touching on before this. So for context for our viewers, this is, I think, germane for the topic of this podcast, somebody who rose to fame and the new atheist community. Simone and I really rose like we were mostly affiliated with the EA, rationalist, less wrong community before this. So obviously a bit of a different community, but very aligned, culturally speaking. Definitely big areas of overlap, for sure.

A
Yeah. And the pronatalist movement in many ways within those communities represents a group that's, hey, we threw out a lot of stuff that maybe we shouldn't have thrown out. And it's hard to find people willing to engage with any aspect of the traditionalist idea. Like we often use the term neotrad to mean. When I'm explaining it to reporters, I'm like, what it means is we look through various older traditions for social technology that we can re implement and that still make sense within our social and technological context right now.

C
And a lot of people, they think when you're looking to the past for social technology, they mean, oh, so you're looking to just the 1950s? No, there's a lot of cultures in the past. I can look to ancient Athens. I can look to things that was common in Rome. I can look to things that was practiced in Egypt in various time periods.

There are lots of social technologies that have evolved and can be re screwed together that aren't just remove boundaries. Another thing that I was talking to somebody about recently that really colored this idea for me is for a long time, I've actually speaking to a reporter at the Economist about this today. Technology, like societal progress, has been tearing down fences, and we didn't know why they were there. It's been very much, okay, there's this random rule here, let's get rid of it. And up until today, we're now finally at a part where we have torn out so much of the base infrastructure that people are now realizing, oh, a lot of that infrastructure had a purpose.

And we get the opportunity to, we can either rebuild things exactly the way it used to be, or we can intentionally build the social infrastructure to really optimize it going into the future in a way that humanity never really has, which is really interesting to me. But anyway, yeah, just some context there. Yeah, yeah. So those could be, I've always been, like, rationalist curious, like, I've always been, like, poking around in the blogs and not participating, but lurking. So I'm familiar, just broadly speaking, with some of the kind of movements and tendencies and values of, like, the rationalist sphere.

A
And I definitely feel that, that I align with that in a personality sense. It's harder when we get to policies, that it can get trickier there, because then that requires us to have the same facts on hand. So I don't know how much, maybe we'll fork a little bit when it comes to that. But I definitely, I like that approach, the kind of optimistic, yet grounded in like, a real reality. Let's engineer something like, I like that.

And I wanted to be able to talk to people who could. I like the way you put Malcolm. I like that you put that you can look back into the past as also, also something that we can look towards. Not just, we don't just have to come up with new ideas. We can look back and think about the wisdom of our forefathers or whatever.

But that's a weird word, isn't it? Wisdom? Because I don't know if they knew what they were doing, but nevertheless, it came together in a useful way for them. And I, I've come around to appreciating that as well. I think a lot of people have walked that path in the past, like ten years or so.

In the atheist, like, new atheist kind of community, not so much like there, there definitely was a big woke, woke pilling that happened. And like, atheism. I don't know how you guys feel about that. I feel like, I know, but it. Seems like the parts of it that survived actually became like, anti feminist channels and stuff like that, mostly dedicated skeptics.

C
Of whatever the dominant cultural group is. And I think that we see, I want to say they're true colors, but what they are, and I suspect this is a genetic proclivity, somewhat hard coded in some people that they get off most on just criticizing the dominant culture in our society. And the dominant cultural perception from me growing up transitioned from theocratic perception of the dominant culture, which is what I believed was the dominant culture when I was a kid. And I think it was accurate to a woke theology, which is it gives them something new to criticize. And yeah, yeah, maybe that.

A
Maybe there is definitely something to that about the public figures, because certainly if you get popular in the new atheism movement, you are known to be like this big critic of religion and religious values. And I don't think the average atheist necessarily is that way. Even if they, like, lurk around in the communities, they're not necessarily that way. So there's a misrepresentation of the kinds of person who rises to the top in that space. I tried not to be too much that way.

I was trying more to fight for the right to criticize religion because I come from a muslim background. In many muslim majority countries, there's like nothing resembling freedom of speech or religion. And that sort of carries over into muslim majority or just muslim communities here in western contexts as well, because many of them, for multiple reasons, end up becoming very isolated. And so you have this, like, mini nation, and there's a, I think, of a culture that is not open to dissent at all. So that's the kind of thing that I was talking about.

And I found that it was really hard to talk about Islam openly because there were some things you're not supposed to say, and that was one of the things you're not supposed to say. And so that was my entryway into pushing back against the normal, dominant, like, political paradigm. And my instinct, because I came in from that background, was to look away from religion. When I'm looking, or even religious communities or anything resembling religious communities or traditional communities or anything like that. Like, it was just, I don't think that I'm a person that's easy to bias.

Nevertheless, this was my social context. This is everybody I knew, and this is still many of the people I know. So traditional is a bad word in the way religion is a bad word. It's the way that people think about it is definitely tied strongly with women's disempowerment. All these social ills that now we can talk about in a kind of a different way.

But it's impossible to move that conversation forward in some circles. So I was, when I was tweeting that I was actually wanting something else, I don't want to. I don't want to be a part of the atheist parenting communities. I feel like they are when they're not looking at traditional cultures or even religious practices associated with the religious. We don't have to accept it for the religious reason.

We can accept it for a different reason. I feel like in abandoning all of that or refusing to take a good look at it, they were abandoning a huge and important source of knowledge, and as you said, social technology. So yeah, I'll elevate a, well, a misconception here, but I think a misconception that also delineates probably where some of the negative parenting practices come from. So if you're talking about the rationalist community, is 99% atheist. They just don't primarily identify as atheists.

C
And one thing that we often elevate on this show is that when a community identifies in a specific way, status hierarchies within that community can often begin to form with how far you other yourself along the metric of identification within the community. So an example here would be, if I'm a goth and I meet another goth, how much that person has othered themselves from mainstream society, whether it's or piercings or tension mods or a weird way of dressing, that is my immediate assumption of their goth status. And so when a community has identified primarily primary mechanism of identification is atheist, you get how you be more atheists than other people can become a bit of a part of the status hierarchy, which can make it really hard to pull from these older social technologies. But I also think that a big problem with people looking at older social technologies and traditionalism, like you say, is they often look at, well, oh, so the traditionalism equals female disempowerment or social isolation. And they often do.

B
But I think that often people look at the worst devices or the worst aspects of these traditional cultures and think of those as the defining aspects of those cultures, when really what we talk about a lot in the book that Malcolm wrote, the Practice Guide to crafting religion, is that really the key is it has to be a hard culture. And by hard we mean a culture where you make serious sacrifices. You other yourself to a certain extent, like you look funny or you dress funny, you have a weird name, you live differently, and you really lean into and invest in that tradition and religion in a way that leads to benefits. For example, many, it's hard to adopt a sense of identity if you're not making those kinds of daily sacrifices with a community. And many of those sacrifices also are the things that do impart strength.

So while female disempowerment does not impart strength, as far as I'm concerned, things like fasting do because they help you develop stronger inhibitory controls. And that's hard. People don't like fasting or giving things up. Pretty freaking difficult. I might even push back in the female disempowerment thing, because I think there's push and pulls with all the different choices that we make in terms of, okay, we're going to allow more for something here.

A
There is sometimes there is a loss on the other side. It's not visible entirely, but I think that all the ways in which we have allowed women, especially young women, greater autonomy and control over their life choices, there has been a negative consequence for those same women, I think, when they become mothers, because it's the same forces that give you more autonomy as an individual weaken the social ties that are very. They're important for families and for mothers. Or when they try to get married. For example, if you have a curious, sexual free Liu married, it's hard.

C
Yeah. Or a society with equal wages being harder for women to get partners if they always want a partner who's earning more than them. Or, I mean, there's so many ways that I think that there's. I wish that there was a more open discussion about some of these things, but it is hard to do. So I think, and I definitely agree with you in terms of hierarchies within communities.

A
This is why I, when I said rationalist, I wasn't even sure, do I want to be a part of a community where everybody considers them, some themselves, irrationalist? Because, yes, I found, like, within those communities, I think the rationalists really enjoy contradicting each other and do. I've written long things about how that community, it fell apart because it was a community where status hierarchy was determined by knowledge, like scientifically back knowledge. The problem is that if you try to front with a scientific study that everyone knows, then that actually hurts your position because it shows that you thought that something that was commonly known was not commonly known. So you can only really front with either scientific studies that go against what anyone would think is true, or scientific studies that are fringe or rare findings, which leads to the communities becoming what I call as a slur for them, butter eaters, because they have these things where they eat full sticks of butter every day.

C
Because there was, like one study that said it was a good idea. And because it was an obscure study, they looked good or like extra special for doing the weird thing, the obscure thing that people didn't know about. I didn't believe it. Discourages following, actually, that's a community that discourages true followers, which you do need in a healthy community, actually. Then this becomes a thing if we're restructuring culture, right.

We've got to think about how do we prevent these sort of downstream effects that you're easy to miss. You say something like, I often think of culture crafting as being like a monkey's paw. Like, you don't if you're not really careful in how you word things like, I want rationalism. Just like, define rationalism. They're like scientific studies.

And then the monkey's paw does its horrible rishon or I want atheism, and it's okay. How do you define atheism? Lack of old traditions. And then the monkey paw does its horrible wish. And so it's, if you're building something especially for your kids, for your family, you've got to think.

So I would love to ask you three questions I want to go through. One has almost become, like, a mainstay on this show that I think will make a mainstay on the show every time we have somebody who's deconverted from a religious tradition. What did you like about your birth religious tradition? What social technologies do? Do you think Islam does well?

Or. And before we go further, it's useful if you talk about the branch of islamic culture you came from, because one of the things we're always talking about on this podcast is, one the difference in muslim and western marriage strategies. One of the ones that we say is very interesting is Andrew Tate has taken, like, some muslim strategies around marriage structure and tried to almost sort of secularize it into a new family structure. And I'm like, that's interesting, but I don't know if that's something that western men should be emulating. But anyway, yes, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on.

Like, what do you think Islam gets right, especially that you think western culture doesn't? Okay, so let me start from the first question, which was, how did I grow up? I. I was raised Shia Muslim, which is like a minority, but it's the Iran people in Iraq. But I was schooled in the Sunni, like tradition because that was the local community where I grew up.

A
So that's where I was going to sunny school. And that's, those are the, like, religious, like, competitions I was involved in. So it was, in my mind, actually, the two traditions are very mixed up. I'm actually confused. And it's only because I've been doing this kind of activism for a long time and this topic has come up that it has.

I've been able to pull them apart in my mind. But it's like saying that I was Catholic and also Protestant from evangelical on one side of my family and Catholic from my mom's side. But I think there's a lot that I like about Islam, and there's a lot that I think is unique and interesting. So it's actually not a hard question for me to answer at all. It's just that I think that on the whole, it is, like, deeply harmful.

So I don't have any trouble talking about all the things that are great about it. But I think that what's fundamental to understand is that the internal logic of Islam is so alien. I think it's so different. It's not. I didn't even appreciate how different, like how fundamentally different of a social structure it is until I couldn't possibly.

I couldn't. I'm not actually. We don't have the. We don't have the time, we don't have the. I don't have the intelligence.

But I think that it's just something I'm coming to fully understand. If anybody wants to read up on this, Ernest Gellner is a scholar that I would recommend. He is so interesting, but he wrote several books that are. He also. He wrote about, like, philosophy, words, linguistics, but also muslim society and civil society in particular.

What are the kinds of conditions that foster healthy civil society? So you took a look at muslim societies, asian societies and the west, and compared the ways that they structured power in the kinds of conditions that brood. Very eye opening, very thing. You remember from this. Just any specifics?

Putting me on the spot, I think.

I don't know. I don't know. I would have to prep. I would have to because there were so many. Okay, okay, okay.

Good ideas about it. We'll keep going. So what other specific things would you borrow from Islam for your kids? Back to that question as to what was, what's good about it. One of the things I always liked about Islam is the way that it encouraged charitability amongst other Muslims.

So there's a requirement to give a certain percentage of your income to the ummah, the community, the poor, really, in the community. Is that through any religious organization or just directly to. Is it direct giving or through an organization? I think it could be. I don't know if it's specified, but it could be anything.

It could be direct giving. You. Can you look at the words of the text? Because I was looking at this, it is implied. It's direct giving.

B
Nice. I'm sure some people have, or any tradition is going to over time have a lot of branches which end up hijacking this. But it is actually pretty unique in that you do not get this in most christian traditions where the expectation is that it goes through church infrastructure before reaching the poor, which is interesting, but continue. Yeah, so I like that about it. I like that it was an expectation, almost like a tax.

A
But Islam thinks of itself as very much a state religion and not even something that you can pull apart and say, this is the state and this is the church. I think even that conception reveals a kind of western approach to politics and religion. And so that that whole infrastructure is. Not something I support, but it is worse. Worth elevating this concept because it's one that I would definitely talk about when you're trying to understand Islam as different from the other major religious traditions, whereas I think Judaism is also pretty unique in this regard, in that Judaism is really structured to be an ethno group slash state slash religion, necessarily.

Ethnogroup. Yes, but would you say state? So it depends on the period of jewish history. If we're talking especially about Second Temple period Judaism, it was structured ground up to be a state system. And what happened to Judaism was how a culture evolves when a religious system that is really meant to be operating a state no longer has a state to operate.

C
That's why the destruction of the second Temple was so existential for the jewish people. And every exodus period was so existential for the jewish people. And then it has obviously heavily modified itself since that period. But I think it's re pulling on now with the state of Israel. It's restructuring itself in that older fashion with Islam, as you pointed out.

But it is worth elevating here, is it is a religion that is designed to be these state religion, and it doesn't function as effectively when it is not the state religion. And when it is not the state religion, it's always searching to become eventually a state religion, which can have positive and negative consequences depending on the, you might think only negative consequences, but I. Think it's just as somebody who grew up now, and I was raised primarily, I was born, actually I was born in Pakistan, and I remember coming here, but I was quite young, still seven, but as being raised in that religion, that has all these instincts of a majority religion. That's the instinct of Islam. And that is part and parcel of even some of the celebrations.

A
Like Eid is supposed to be this public thing that you all do together. The whole community is involved and it is happening publicly. And for Eid to be something like in the west, where it's very private now, it's like you visit, you go visit somebody's house, and then you take a drive and you visit somebody else's house in Pakistan, it's in the streets. And then Bakr Eid, which is the one where they sacrifice the animals, that's happening on the streets everywhere. It's a very public spectacle.

And that's part of it, part of the thing, the celebration that this is public, to be driven into kind of a private, the private sphere. I don't think Islam really thrives, and that's part of the reason I think diaspora communities that are Muslim feel a sense of like, disorientation, because I think that they're the instincts of the religious tradition that they have been brought up in do not fully and easily comport to being a minority in a country that has very different majoritarian majority values and traditions. Judaism, I think they don't struggle in the same way. I think just because their history has for so long been in that position, I think they tend to take it a little bit more. They thrive, actually.

I think they thrived in that environment. Yeah. And now they do. They thrive as subcultural groups with separated, often like legal systems and stuff like that, which is really interesting. It's so interesting the idea of a religion and culture that's optimized on a societal level rather than on an individual level, because I'm so used to growing up with the extreme opposite end of the spectrum.

B
Not that my parents were, they called themselves born again Buddhists, really. They were like the most non religious people in the entire world. But they came from basically a calvinist kind of background or protestant background, which is just, it's so individualistic that of course they would end up calling themselves born again Buddhists after a certain number of generations and just doing their own thing. And their metaphysical beliefs were like a mixture of inspired by Scientology and other science fiction books and Buddhism and whatever they saw on tv recently. And that, that was all just so on the local level, whereas here you're looking with Islam at holidays, they don't really make sense if it's not literally on a community, not, not just the block party, but like the entire city.

And that makes it really hard, I think, for you to try to replicate some of those things that worked well for your own kids. Cause they're not gonna have that community. Did you find the most utility? Yeah, sorry, repeat that first bit. Which holidays did you find the most utility in?

C
If you were gonna practice them for your kids and you could have them practice at a society wide level, which ones would you be like? This particular good value or is it useful social technology? I wouldn't do any of the muslim ones. I wouldn't. I like Christmas, so I think Christmas is freaking awesome.

A
That is what I would do. There's only two in Islam, and one is from a kid's perspective. I didn't think either was spectacularly interesting unless you went outside and then you had a blast. The one where you kill all the animals, that one was actually traumatizing. I remember when I was young, I was taken to a slaughterhouse of a cow and I saw it happen and I remember the blood.

I can't forget, and I don't even have a fantastic memory, but I remember everything about that. I remember the, like, with the butcher's son playing in the blood, because for him it was just whatever. Yeah. Like, I'm just having a good time. Yeah.

B
Yes. And I was just like, dad, I want to go home. I need to go home. Remember just all these animals on the street, it was not. Maybe it's something you come around to as you grow, if you grow up in it and then you're an adult, and then you have all these great memories associated with it, but just as a child, it wasn't, it wasn't my.

C
What's the other one? The other one is, it's like Christmas, but you get money at the end of it. Money's good. You just get money. You get money instead of presents, you get money.

A
But I like presents better because I think it's personal. Like, I like that somebody's thinking of me rather than just handing me a $20 bill. And for kids, it's, oh, you would probably like our religion. We'll have to have a separate conversation about that at some point, but I. Think that's better for her podcast.

C
But I was going to say this Christmas, it's a great thing because it's like people are always telling us, oh, a constructed religion that's meant just for the best interest of your kids with unique holidays that would never catch on. And I'm like, Christmas and Santa Claus, what are you talking about? Obviously this stuff can catch on. Yeah, but Christmas is also one of those holidays that works when it's done publicly, when it's a season, when it's the colors and it's the warmth and everyone's making those cookies and smells that are associated with crispy. Although our kids talk about the future police, which is like the Santa of our weird holiday, our flagship holiday, more than they talk about Santa, for sure.

Yeah. We've had, like, our holiday than they. Proselytize our religion more than we do. Like, the babysitter will come over and they'll be like, the future police got this for me because I did this. And like, the future police might do this or that and they keep.

B
Our babysitters are giving us the side eye and we're like, it's a thing. I don't derailed it. Simone, derail this. Another question I wanted to ask, which is one or I've actually wanted to talk to a muslim scholar about this. I'm the wrong person for it, I can tell you.

C
Probably the wrong person, but you might be just the right person because you have lived in both cultures and you're from outside the community, is. I have never fully gotten the animosity affiliated with the Sunni Shia split. When I look at something like the catholic Protestant split, for example, I can understand why there's animosity. There's two completely different systems for how to determine what's true. When I look at splits within jewish communities, I can understand where that animosity comes from.

But the Sunni Shia split doesn't seem to be a theological split. It seems to be a purely governance system split. And so my thesis is that the. And you can tell me if I'm wrong about this, is the animosity is actually because Islam is designed to be a state system, so the governance split matters so much more than it would in another religion. Yeah.

Yep. Is that it? Yeah. The politics can't be separated. And it was a political difference and it was a meaningful political difference.

A
And the two sects are. They do practice differently. And I mean, it differs a little bit from country to country. Country. Like, I was talking to this ex Shia from ex Muslim, from Saudi, who was Shia, but in her experience with shiasm is not mine.

My experience with Shi ism was as a minority religion within majority sunni population. That's how Shiism has developed as well, actually. So there's like layers to all of this. But I get getting back a little bit to the local and individualistic aspect of Christianity. I think that's key to.

It's key to how well it has functioned in this specific modern, liberal kind of societal context and why it has just worked in tandem with developing so many interesting and innovative, like, not just technologies, but social systems and ideologies and ways of thinking about the world. I think that has been. It is key, and without it, you end up in a completely different space. But I will add that it's not the case that Islam is just, like, centrally controlled. It's actually not really centrally controlled at all.

Yet there is this high culture, like, this high Islam that matters. There are folk traditions, but those tend to be the remnants of whatever that region used to believe in before it was conquered by muslim army. So that those sort of folk religion of Bangladesh looks very different than the folk religion of Turkey. Having said that, I feel as if those are disappearing. And that is what you would expect over time, as literacy increases everywhere, and then you're able to look at the book and determine that, okay, this is the originalist interpretation of Islam is actually the true one.

What I've been practicing or what my grandmother has tattoos on her face, I didn't know that was not acceptable. I didn't know that was a local tunisian tradition. And, in fact, it's not islamic at all, and I have to get rid of it. So there is a kind of a coming together, flattening almost, of Islam as it looks and as is practiced worldwide, which is a little troubling and a little sad, I think. Yeah, I definitely say that sad.

C
Losing that cultural diversity. Okay, so another question I have for you, because you're talking about, like, the christian system, which I will admit has led to a tremendous amount of technological and economic growth. But there was a period where a form of Islam caused one of the greatest technological leaps in human history during the islamic golden age. Do you think that was so. A lot of people will say that was just serendipity, like, the libraries were destroyed, the area became less economically powerful, and that's why.

Do you think that's why? Or do you think that there was a shift in the theology of Islam that made it harder for modern Islam to match the technological greatness of its ancestors, or a shift in underlying technological trends? I think there's a lot of historical reasons that are just like, that is how it played out, and that is why it happened. And it is also the case that the. This is the benefit of having kind of a religion in which the political rulers do have spiritual power and spiritual leadership positions, because if they happen to be liberal and if they happen to be tolerant and interested in, you know, technology and innovation, which is what?

A
That is what I would put as the central factor in why the golden age looks so different than other times. However, I'm not prepared to. I'll give you motivation. I have a thesis on this and you can tell me if it sounds wrong to you or right. So I think there were two key factors.

C
One is I think that Islam pushes a drive towards a form of academic study of stuff like math as a way of understanding God. And so long as math and chemistry didn't directly contradict islamic scripture, it could be seen as a theological pursuit. And that is why during the period where before technology got so hard that it started contradicting scripture, it really synergized very well, isn't it? Isn't that was the catholic church. Oh, the Catholic.

Whoever did math like Muslims. I mean, it leads to. No, but I mean in the sense that that's how they approached the study of the natural world as a study of God. Because you were studying his creation. So it was all part and parcel of the same thing, this science.

As a good point, you've got all the like Gregor Mendel and everything like that and all the study out of the monasteries. So you closer to God until it doesn't and then it's not. Okay. And then the secondary thesis that I had, which could also be wrong, but it's one that informs my thinking a lot, is it was the spread of Sufism that ended up collapsing the culture among the elite circles that allowed them to look for sources of knowledge in what we would argue is corrupted mental states. That is, emotions and visions are a better source of truth than study of the natural world.

But you could say maybe that's wrong too. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about that. I would have to give that one a little bit of thought. I'm not automatically dismissing it.

A
And then the way the first theory makes me think, I do think it's. Worse studying these things. If a culture was productive at one time and not productive at another time, and you can isolate what elements changed, then I can know what elements are useful to build into my own family's culture. Good point. In a world where fertility is collapsing, we, those of us with high fertility could end up having a disproportionate play in the future.

I think that at least in modern times, this is not a deeper going back to the core of what Islam might be a point, but I think that it, what it is in the modern world, at least the example of the west definitely played a part in how Muslims viewed science and technology in general because they were able to look across the pond and see where science took all these guys who thought that they were going closer to God, but now we know that they aren't closer. Yeah. And how did that go? Yeah, and, yeah, so there's that example that they can always point to and they can say no, they looked at, they approached the world in this fashion. They abandoned revelation and instead started using their reason to make out all kinds of things.

And now they have strip clubs. This is, it was just this explicit example of, you don't really have to think through it, you don't really have to just see it play out. And I think that that has a huge impact on how Muslims think of even modernity. Right? Like modernity is a bad word.

Capitalism, like all this consumerism like that all just goes together really. But in the muslim world they really do. Modernity really is atheism. They're not. If you're looking at it from the perspective of evolved cultural traits designed to increase fertility rate of cultural members, it is a successful memetic package.

Yeah. To be good enough to be to reproduce on a societal level in long periods of time. Hey, I could never disagree. And I think the apostasy taboo really does help. There you easy in, easy end, but it really difficult to get out even if you wanted.

So there's lots that Islam and the taboos and the traditions like, there's so many ways in which it really is a great meme. If just living, just surviving is your most important, it's the thing that you are focusing on. However, I would also add that I don't know if what has worked for the muslim world up until now will survive our most recent leap. I don't think that we talk about all these things with social media is creating social alienation and isolation. But if you look at the research for in Muslims, places where you think they would have a healthy sense of community, in fact, the same kind of erosions are happening, but they also don't have running water.

So like it's the combination of two horrible things that are coming together. I am not sure. It might be, they might be find a way through it with their strong social networks. I think that maybe they won't, like maybe they'll get the wrong end of the sticks in both ways at least I'm concerned about that in any case. No, no, I think you're absolutely right.

C
And this is something we regularly see. You're studying fertility collapse generally cultures that have had some cultural hack that has acted as a bulwark to fertility collapse. When the dam breaks, it breaks very fast and all at once. But then, of course, that leads to downstream, especially negative consequences. Because within, for example, these already conservative muslim cultures, if everyone who is open to using a cell phone has been medically sterilized, that means only the most extremist iterations are going to get through, as we call it in.

Because we do some like pseudo religious stuff. We say, you've got to walk through the valley of the lotus eaters. That's what our civilization is doing right now. That is so much harder to do given the way that they're, given their level of development. It is actually, it's easier to procure a smartphone than it is to have a laptop or a computer.

A
So from a literal functioning perspective, cell phones have become a really important part of the way that their world works. I would say we're just used to them for a longer period of time. But I actually think because we have the, our foundations are quite strong, our institutions are quite strong, we can get away from technology and survive in a way that is becoming increasingly harder for them to do because they're in this crucial, like, mid, like bizarre stage of development. And so that's just something that, it's something to think about. And I think that the way that cell phones in particular, smartphones in particular, and their connectivity to the Internet, the way that has pierced through the social fabric, because you have, okay, you have these, you have societies, you have a lot of this meta control over people and what they're thinking and what they're thinking, truly, because you're talking to each other and all of that is very control and bounded.

But now here's this escape hatch. I have a lot of social controls here. I think the world does this and this is how it works. And this is what truth is. But now I have something in my pocket where.

In which once I join that place, I can be as individualistic as any american and I can access all of that information that they have. I can see what they're doing and it will impact my brain too. So that the social control that you have just, it's hard to maintain in that kind of environment. They're watching a lot of porn there too, right? And they're virgins.

They're. Yeah. And a lot of people are aware of how significantly muslim fertility rates have fallen in even non wealthy muslim countries it has been. And when you think about the fact that they don't have regular access to birth control in the same way that we do that. It's also.

It's more striking when you think about it. Yeah. And as we always point out on the show, is one path that some groups will take to get through the valley of the lotus eaters. It's blinding themselves by that. What I mean is completely like, we will kill our kid if we catch them with a cell phone, and you're going to find this in some communities, but if you blind yourself to get through at the other end, if you're then coming out and telling everyone else you're going to kill them and they have to follow your system, you're still blind.

C
Okay. And they have automated kill drones. You don't have the same amount of cultural power that you would have if you got through using power of will that was reinforced culturally. So the question is, how do you do this? I can give you an answer.

It sounds like Simone really wanted to tell you about our or future holidays. So why don't you do that and get her reaction to it? The very gist of our attempt at this is we practice descendant worship. So we tell our children that essentially our God, our family's God, is their descendants thousands, millions of years in the future, who plausibly even have the ability to travel through time and intervene to create the future that should come, because we also have this sort of weird deterministic. But you still have free will view of how the world works.

B
Very mechanical. Um, and so for future day, for example, we steal toys. A future police steal through us, of course, toys or things from their lives that cause bad behaviors. Addictive devices, games, things like that, iPads, whatever. Last year, we just took all their toys.

We just. Yeah, all their toys disappeared because we're like, oh, let's make this really dramatic. And then. But they loved it because in their place, we left, like, scorch marks with a bunch of different things and, like, weird future like evidence. And they're like, oh, what happened?

And then they have to make a pledge in this family book that we're using as a time capsule slash heirloom to how they're going to make the world a better place and how they're going to become a better person for that year and for the long term future. Upon making that pledge, of course, then the future police will see it and receive it. They receive their toys back, plus some additional toys. And if they achieve those things that they committed to, at some point in this year, they'll get an even bigger gift as a reward. So there are gifts involved.

There's. There's photo opportunities involved and the kids just freaking love it. And we started to though this wasn't part of the plan for the holiday is throughout the year, as they are moving closer to their goals, they do get not just one future police gift, but a couple things. Because their goals weren't like, oh, I'm going to start a business, or I'm going to graduate high school, or I'm going to ace algebra. So not exactly cognitive processing of, yeah.

They'Re very young, so it's more like, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna be nice to my brother kind of stuff. So, like, they are getting things from the future police as reinforcement, and they just freak. They love it. And they know that the future police are watching, so it's affecting their behavior, but it's also a fun, cute thing. But the idea here was this, in most of our holidays is we had a specific value.

C
We wanted to convey the idea of having agency over the future and long termism. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's great and remarkable and very inventive of you. I've been thinking myself about what to do and what to adopt and how lazy to be in that respect.

A
In terms of creating your own thing, though, do you think about. There's the one. The problem of, does this take away the magic when it is so articulated also on your end? Like, you, you're like you're telling them the purpose of the thing that they're doing in a kind of. In an explicit way that people don't.

People normally don't. And do you think that will take away from the experience or make it less effective? Right. No. Or just no.

No. I can explain why. So even within the theology of the future police, they are to a child, right. In the same way that, like, God changes the conception. People have a God when they're young.

C
It's like Zeus. It's like a guy in the clouds. And when they're older, they're like, oh, it's like some in corporeal, we would say they're changing, like, small probabilistic quantum fluctuations, which have a butterfly effect, which has changed larger behavior. And if they were going to create this holiday and convince us to do it, they would have had it appear in a way where we thought it was our idea and we were doing it for their best interest. So in a way, unlike Santa Claus or something like that, even to an adult, the future police really plausibly did create the holiday and really are gifting them things.

B
We were being manipulated along. Okay, okay. All right. Okay. That's.

A
Do you think it, do you need converts now, though? Because it's a, it's not gonna be a community thing, though. Exactly. And the thing is, it doesn't need converts, but what we really, what we want converts. I'll take those.

B
Take them. What we really want to fight for and why we're so excited to see your tweet. And this brings it all back, which is good, because the kids just got back home from the park, Malcolm, and they're about to storm the castle. It's okay. But so what we really want people to do is what you're doing, which is I want to culturally innovate from a very thoughtful perspective.

And maybe it's a little religious, and maybe it's not a little religious, it's whatever. And we want as many people to take a whack at this as possible, because there will always be people who choose to go with the traditional religion, like that is being tried. So it's not an experiment that I'm concerned about. What I'd love to see more of is essentially that startup seed investment, where 99% are going to fail, that's fine, but a couple are going to become unicorns and become additional viable religious traditions that may create additional thriving alternatives to people, because we need thriving, alternative religions that can make sense in a post globalization, post Internet, post smartphone world. And so I'm happier if someone chooses to do their own thing like what.

C
You'Re doing, we should elevate the larger theological structure of this system is if God is communicating with us, through which cultural systems succeed and don't succeed, then he can only talk if there is a diversity of cultural systems to compete against each other. So this is the theological framing to it. The logical framing to it is to say, if we're entering this period of mass cultural die off, we're going to need as large a diversity of people to make it through the valley of the lotus eaters, unblinded for human civilization to survive and not become some sort of like, large, fast, fascist monoculture. And so the more cultural experimentation we have, the better off we're going to be, because the more robust our species is going to be on the other side of this, where robustness is correlated with a diverse group of cultural systems surviving to the end of it, that. Might not be necessarily diverse by the end of it, like it might be that there's one.

A
It took a long time for religious systems to get to where they are and to be as robust as they are, and they're still not that robust. So if we're just inventing them on the fly or, like, trying to reason our way into them, which is. I think I wonder about that as a method, regardless, which is crazy to say, as somebody who's. This is all I have. This is what.

This is the thing that I. I don't even know how else to go about in the world, but it. A certain amount of serendipity and just like, chance encounters formed some of the experimentations because I think that might have been, like, throughout history, because I think they. The reason would have rejected them. Reason might have said, this is never gonna work.

This is not. We shouldn't do this. But for whatever reason, it just so happened that they did it and they tried it and it worked. I think a lot of it's right time, right place. Jesus was not the first apocalyptic jew.

B
Right. Sometimes it clicks. Right time, right place. And there's an underlying logic that you didn't understand right at the moment, but it worked. And so you keep doing it.

A
So that's. I think it's. That's interesting. Yeah. And actually, we need so much more diversity than is maybe possible, but we'll.

B
Fight for it anyway. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Great. We'll have to brainstorm more about this, but I.

Yeah, anyway, I'm so glad you're thinking about these things. We're taking such a thoughtful approach, and. I'm in a boring. I'm in DC, which is boring. I was just talking to.

C
You're not far from us. Yeah, you're pretty close. We're in Pennsylvania. Okay. I'll have to stop by and say hello at some point.

A
For sure. Forever nearby. Let me know. Yeah, I was actually thinking I need to be in, like, California or New York in order to meet like minded people, but maybe not. Not at all.

All right. You're in a really good, like, in the. Actually, some of the most thoughtful parents, like, from a cultural standpoint that we know are in DC. Yeah. So you're in a very good zone, and.

B
Yeah, but. Okay, so everyone check out Sarah Hater's work. It's just like, basically everything I've encountered that you've written or done in terms of, like, podcasting has been fantastic. So Sarah the hater on Twitter and check out Sarah Hater on Substack as well. Thank you so much for coming on, and we'd hope to have you back at some point.

A
This was great. Thank you. Thank you. Do you guys have guests often? Yeah, on this podcast, but it's harder to keep good consistency when you're doing guests, as you probably know.

Okay. But you're super fun. You're super fun and super cool. So we just don't post them. Great.

B
When we don't post them, it's typically because the people have never been on podcasts before and they, like, answer questions with yes or no. It's not great. That's not it. You're just hedging in case she's boring. No, you're not going to be Simone.

You're not going to be boring.

It's going to be good. I'm excited, indeed, being pretty good today, so I'm not worried. It's good that I'm feeding her, though. But look, I mean, look. So the doors behind you, they're pretty thick.

If we just shoved two bookshelves in there that are suspended from. It's like a barn door where there's an overhead suspension. So there are two suspended bookshelves and, like, they can part to create a small doorway and they're probably too much of a hassle, but where are we to go? You said right between the playroom and the bunk bedroom in the thick double door area behind you? Yeah.

C
Oh, you mean. Oh, what? A secret bookshelf? Yeah. Like a bookshelf that then opens into.

A door or make that whole wall there. A bookshelf? Uh huh. Oh.

B
A suspended bookshelf could be pretty cool someday. Secret bookshelf. I don't know. It would take up room. I would.

Honestly, our house is so perfect. What are we going to do with it? Like you said, like some kind of dumb plans. I could do that, Simone. Yeah.

Fat lines. Probably already has one. But whatever. It's sold, Malcolm, it's sold and we can buy it. We can storm it.

C
That's why we have guns. I don't want fat. I'm not vacuuming fat lands, okay? I'm not cleaning those floors. I'm not doing it.

B
Can't. That'd be such a nightmare to vacuum. Yeah. Can you imagine cleaning all of those toilets, vacuuming all those floors, heating all those rooms? At least that one haunted house that we looked at, the one that was, like, super creepy, that had, like, a super old house attached to it, at least you could just cordon that off and be afraid of all the ghosts.

C
That's what they did. How's this? Is this better?

B
Is this better?