0:06

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This

0:08

is Sam Harris. Just a note to

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our subscribers. So if you enjoy what

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we're doing here. Please consider becoming

0:38

one. I'm here with Tom

0:40

Holland. Tom, thanks for joining

0:42

me. Thank you for having

0:44

me. I'm a huge fan of your work.

0:46

I have known about your books

0:48

for some years, but I

0:51

recently discovered your podcast, which

0:53

you do with Dominic Sandbrook,

0:56

a fellow historian, which is

0:58

fantastic. That's the rest is

1:01

history. I am working my

1:03

way through dominion. which is fantastic

1:05

and this came out a few years

1:07

ago, but I'm well into it. And

1:09

it's also great as an audio book,

1:11

which people should know. Well, Sam, I

1:13

could just say also, I'm just in

1:16

the process of recording it myself.

1:18

Oh nice. I've just been doing

1:20

that today. So it's going back

1:22

from the recording studio. So don't

1:24

get the audio book. Wait for

1:26

Tom to report it. Yeah, that's

1:28

interesting. So yeah, I don't know

1:30

if you find that as painful

1:32

a process as I do. I'm

1:34

finding it very painful. Very painful

1:36

indeed. I've actually had to rewrite

1:39

lines that I couldn't get through.

1:41

I'd inadvertently written tongue twisters for

1:43

myself and after 20 takes in

1:45

front of an ashen phase producer, I

1:47

literally have to change the language so

1:49

that I can neurologically accomplish

1:52

the task. You've written about

1:54

ancient Rome, Christianity as I

1:56

said in dominion, which we'll focus on. But

1:58

you've also covered the... of

2:01

Islam and the problem of jihadism

2:03

in the West, I just discovered

2:05

as late as last night the

2:08

short documentary you did on ISIS,

2:10

the Islamic State, which was quite

2:12

something to revisit. It's amazing how

2:15

the memory of the extremity of

2:17

that horror has faded for even

2:20

people who have focused on it

2:22

at the time. It was just

2:24

such a ghastly distillation of everything

2:27

that's wrong with that fanaticism. which

2:29

we'll talk about. So anyway, there's

2:31

a ton to cover and I

2:34

really want to get your sense

2:36

as a historian of the echoes

2:39

of history that we're seeing in

2:41

the present. I mean, so much

2:43

of the history that you've covered

2:46

on your podcast, you have a

2:48

great series on the French Revolution.

2:50

I think we're hearing echoes of

2:53

that in recent years, echoes of

2:55

the fall of Rome and other

2:58

concerns. Also, before we started, you

3:00

told me you have a new

3:02

translation of Suetonius' lives of the

3:05

Caesars coming out in April, which

3:07

people should look for, which I

3:09

didn't realize you're a translator. You

3:12

translated Herodotus back in the day

3:14

and I look forward to picking

3:17

that up. So anyway, that's a

3:19

long introduction. Tom, welcome to the

3:21

podcast. Well, thanks very much for

3:24

having me. So let's start with

3:26

the thesis in dominion, the argument

3:28

that... Christianity is the most enduring

3:31

legacy of the ancient world and

3:33

that many of us who think

3:35

we were never really indoctrinated in

3:38

it or by it. Certainly don't

3:40

imagine ourselves to be attached to

3:43

it. A outspoken atheist like myself

3:45

imagines that his morality was not

3:47

actually handed to him by Jesus

3:50

or Paul or medieval Christendom or

3:52

the Bible thumpers in my own

3:54

country with whom I'm even more

3:57

familiar. You argue that so much

3:59

of what we take to be

4:02

natural to us in secular moral

4:04

terms is really the legacy of

4:06

Christian ethics. So let's jump in.

4:09

I don't mean to lead the

4:11

witness too much, but let's just

4:13

start with what accounts for the

4:16

rise and endurance of Christianity on

4:18

your account. Well, the rise. Nothing

4:21

comes from nothing. So it is

4:23

clearly emerges from a confluence of

4:25

whole kinds of different cultural streams.

4:28

The most obvious of those, of

4:30

course, is the inheritance of Hebrew

4:32

scripture. Jesus is saturated in that

4:35

Paul and the first Christians as

4:37

well, but there is also the

4:40

influence of Greece, Greek culture, Greek

4:42

philosophy. Paul writes in Greek Greek

4:44

and he invokes Greek philosophical concepts

4:47

and indeed infuses them into his

4:49

letters. I think that you can

4:51

discern more distantly because it is

4:54

an influence on Hebrew scripture rather

4:56

than directly. on the world of

4:59

the early church. Persian dualism, the

5:01

sense that the world and the

5:03

cosmos is a moral entity, that

5:06

there are such concepts as good

5:08

and evil, which the Persians would

5:10

define as truth and the lie,

5:13

as light and darkness. And then

5:15

of course there is the context

5:18

that is provided by the Roman

5:20

Empire, which is very self-consciously. Universalist.

5:22

Virgil, Rome's greatest poet, claims that

5:25

the Romans have been given empire

5:27

without limit by the gods. And

5:29

the physical manifestations of that assumption

5:32

are the great roads that are

5:34

starting to be cast like a,

5:36

you know, the mesh of a

5:39

net over the various provinces that

5:41

the Romans have conquered. The shipping

5:44

lanes have been largely cleared from

5:46

pirates. and so the world has

5:48

been joined together in a way

5:51

that it had never previous. been

5:53

and Christianity emerges as in a

5:55

way that is very conscious of

5:58

that that kind of universal dimension

6:00

and Paul in this is I

6:03

think is the key figure a

6:05

Judean raised with a deep knowledge

6:07

of of the scriptures but also

6:10

he has a very very keen

6:12

awareness of the vastness of the

6:14

world and in a sense the

6:17

non-judience in the Roman Empire, a

6:19

chance to share in what have

6:22

already been discerned by many Gentiles

6:24

as the kind of the spiritual

6:26

and scriptural riches of the Judean

6:29

inheritance. And I think in that

6:31

context, you can see why Christianity

6:33

would be as successful as it

6:36

is, because it is absorbing all

6:38

kinds of elements that are elements

6:41

that are culturally present in the

6:43

world of the Roman Mediterranean and

6:45

mixing them in a way that

6:48

proves very appealing to large numbers

6:50

of people across the Roman Mediterranean

6:52

and indeed beyond the Roman Mediterranean

6:55

into the into the lands of

6:57

the Persians as well. But isn't

7:00

the appeal still somewhat paradoxical? It's

7:02

just something that I think you

7:04

cover in your book and it's

7:07

a point that I think Paul

7:09

made and... Nietzsche also made. I

7:11

think those are Paul and Nietzsche

7:14

could be considered the bookends of

7:16

Christianity, but both acknowledged how astounding

7:19

it was that a living God

7:21

was crucified and that somehow this

7:23

abject failure within his lifetime to

7:26

conquer anything became the symbol that

7:28

so much of the world found

7:30

spiritually inspiring. Right? There had been

7:33

this historical precedent of... various kings

7:35

and other figures being acknowledged to

7:37

be divine, right, becoming divine at

7:40

some point in their lives or

7:42

just claiming to be divine and

7:45

yet they're not the center of

7:47

a 2,000 year old cults or

7:49

worldwide religion. So let's linger for

7:52

a moment just on the strangeness

7:54

of the Jesus story. Yeah, it's

7:56

incredibly strange and as you say

7:59

the strangeness is not the idea

8:01

that... a man can in some

8:04

way also be divine because most

8:06

people in the Roman world take

8:08

that for granted. And in fact,

8:11

the fastest growing cult in the

8:13

first century AD is not Christianity,

8:15

but the cult of another man

8:18

who was thought to be the

8:20

son of a God, who proclaimed

8:23

good news, who claimed to rule

8:25

over an age of peace, and

8:27

who when he died... was believed

8:30

to have ascended to heaven to

8:32

sit at the right hand of

8:34

his father, and this is Caesar

8:37

Augustus, the man who rules effectively

8:39

as the first emperor, the son

8:42

of Julius Caesar, who brings peace

8:44

to a world that has been

8:46

ravaged by civil war, and the

8:49

achievements of Augustus are what raise

8:51

him to the heavens. The Romans,

8:53

and indeed many in the provinces,

8:56

feel that his achievements are of

8:58

a divine order. The idea that

9:01

someone who not, it's not just

9:03

that Jesus was an unimportant provincial

9:05

from a backwater, but the fact

9:08

that he had suffered a peculiarly

9:10

horrible death, crucifixion was the paradigmatic

9:12

fate that was visited on slaves,

9:15

because it was not only agonizing,

9:17

but it was also publicly humiliating.

9:20

in a sense humiliation for the

9:22

Romans were seen as being almost

9:24

more terrible than physical pain. And

9:27

you're right that in a sense

9:29

Paul and Nietzsche do kind of

9:31

bookend this sense because in Paul's

9:34

letters again and again you get

9:36

a sense of utter shock that

9:38

this could have happened. Paul's letters

9:41

are not kind of a cool

9:43

measured articulation of doctrine. He is

9:46

wrestling with a sense of overwhelming

9:48

astonishment that in some way the

9:50

one God of Israel has been

9:53

made manifest. as someone who suffered

9:55

this hideous death, and it kind

9:57

of blows his mind, and he's

10:00

endlessly trying to make sense of

10:02

it. I think what then happens

10:05

over the course of the Christian

10:07

centuries that follow is that it

10:09

takes Christians a long time to

10:12

get over the shock and horror

10:14

of this. It's really notable that

10:16

through the early centuries, Christians do

10:19

feel, yeah, this is embarrassing. I

10:21

mean, they feel, they continue to

10:24

feel unsettled by it. And even

10:26

once Constantine has become a Christian

10:28

and the Roman Empire starts to

10:31

become institutionally Christianized, this sense of

10:33

embarrassment remains. And I think you

10:35

say in the book, this is

10:38

a fact that had never occurred

10:40

to me to even wonder about,

10:43

but it took some centuries before

10:45

the depiction of Christ on the

10:47

cross became really admissible. Right. So,

10:50

I mean, one of the earliest

10:52

ones. that is done by, so

10:54

there's a very early one that

10:57

is done by someone mocking Christianity,

10:59

so it shows a man with

11:02

an ass's head being crucified. It

11:04

comes from graffiti in Rome and

11:06

it's clearly mockery. One of the

11:09

earliest illustrations by Christians comes on

11:11

an ivory box that's now in

11:13

the British Museum and it shows

11:16

the passion. So on one side

11:18

you have Judas being hanged and

11:20

looking very unhappy about it. On

11:23

the other side you have Christ.

11:25

on the cross and he couldn't

11:28

look more chilled. I mean, he

11:30

looks, well, he looks like he's

11:32

hanging out in California on a

11:35

beach. He's buff, he's toned, he's

11:37

got a kind of loin cloth

11:39

on, and in fact, what he

11:42

looks like, of course, is an

11:44

athlete who has won in a

11:47

great contest, which is one of

11:49

the ways that in the Roman

11:51

world, Christ's victory over death, is

11:54

understood. And it's not for another

11:56

500 years after that, so just

11:58

before the first millennium, that you

12:01

get Christ portrayed as dead on

12:03

the cross. throughout the high Middle

12:06

Ages, there is a very deep

12:08

and intense fascination on the part

12:10

of Christians with the physical sufferings

12:13

of Christ with his passion. And

12:15

then I think people, artists and

12:17

thinkers and writers in the Christian

12:20

world push it to such a

12:22

limit that almost they become desensitized

12:25

to it. And by the 19th

12:27

century when nature is writing. I

12:29

think that most people probably going

12:32

into a church and looking at

12:34

a cross are not thinking of

12:36

it as an absolutely hideous instrument

12:39

of torture and they're probably not

12:41

visualising the appalling sufferings that a

12:44

man nailed to it would have

12:46

undergone. And it's kind of paradox,

12:48

a very niche in paradox, that

12:51

probably the most... devastate, you know,

12:53

to Christian faith the most devastating

12:55

atheist who's ever written in the

12:58

Christian tradition, Frederick Nietzsche, should have

13:00

felt the power of the cross

13:03

so profoundly, and he feels it

13:05

as something disgusting. He feels it

13:07

perhaps in the sense that a

13:10

Greek or Roman would, the idea

13:12

that that someone who had suffered

13:14

such a servile fate could in

13:17

any way be worthy of approbation,

13:19

let alone worship, appalls Nietzsche. because

13:21

he sees it as an offence

13:24

against the values of strength and

13:26

power and glory and beauty that

13:29

he identifies in Greek and Roman

13:31

culture and which frankly he thinks

13:33

has been corrupted by Christianity, this

13:36

faith of slaves, as he describes

13:38

it. And one of the reasons

13:40

he describes it as the faith

13:43

of slaves is because crucifixion is

13:45

the fate that is visited on

13:48

slaves. And I, when I was

13:50

writing dominion, I was about two

13:52

chapters through, and then I got

13:55

commission to make this film that

13:57

you mentioned in your introduction about

13:59

the Islamic State, and I ended

14:02

up going to this town called

14:04

Sinjar, which had been... the home

14:07

of people called the Yazidis. I'm

14:09

sure you'll know, I'm sure lots

14:11

of people listening will know, people

14:14

who were accused by the Islamic

14:16

State not just of being infidels,

14:18

but of being devil worshippers and

14:21

had been treated peculiar horribly. And

14:23

the women had been rounded up

14:26

and those who were thought too

14:28

ugly to take off as sex

14:30

slaves had been killed and those

14:33

who hadn't had been taken off

14:35

and sold into sexual slavery. But

14:37

the men, some of them had

14:40

been crucified. and to be in

14:42

a town that had been liberated

14:45

just a few weeks before by

14:47

the Kurds and the Islamic State

14:49

were a couple of miles away

14:52

from where we were across kind

14:54

of blank open fields, to be

14:56

in a town where people had

14:59

suffered crucifixion at the hands of

15:01

people who viewed crucifixion as the

15:04

Romans had viewed it as a

15:06

fate that it was not just

15:08

the right of the powerful to

15:11

visit on the defeated, but a

15:13

moral duty. I found kind of

15:15

existential horrible and I suppose it

15:18

kind of opened my mind to

15:20

the sense in which I think

15:22

the idea that someone who is

15:25

tortured to death has a moral

15:27

value over the person who tortures

15:30

him to death underpins my moral

15:32

system and I think the moral

15:34

system of the vast number of

15:37

people in the West and I

15:39

came back and I rewrote the

15:41

introduction to the book. to focus

15:44

on the crucifixion as being the

15:46

kind of mad strangest, weirdest symbol

15:49

that anyone in antiquity came up

15:51

with. And it may not be

15:53

a coincidence that it is of

15:56

course the most enduring symbol, probably

15:58

the best known symbol maybe in

16:00

world history. Yeah, one thing you

16:03

get from reading history is certainly

16:05

reading dominion or your other, I

16:08

guess, Rubicon conveys it to your

16:10

discussion of Rome. It's just how

16:12

foreign and through a modern lens

16:15

pathological the ethics of antiquity were,

16:17

right? I mean, is it decidities

16:19

who said that the strong do

16:22

what they will and the weak

16:24

suffer what they must? Or some

16:27

that's probably close to the translation?

16:29

A phrase that is being quoted

16:31

a lot at the moment, it

16:34

must be said. And yeah, I

16:36

mean, so you actually make that

16:38

point in your in your documentary

16:41

on the Islamic State as you're

16:43

walking through Sinjar that... This was

16:46

a promulgation of a Roman ethic,

16:48

essentially. I mean, I think you

16:50

say something like they murdered these

16:53

people very much the way the

16:55

Roman legions would have, or there's

16:57

some line like that, direct comparison

17:00

to Rome, which I found briefly

17:02

shocking because I realize I rarely

17:05

view the Greeks and Romans through

17:07

this lens of moral judgment, the

17:09

same kind of judgment I lavish

17:12

upon. jihadists, right? But yet there's

17:14

something awful about their ethics and

17:16

their their celebration of strength over

17:19

weakness. I mean that is a

17:21

perspective that I would argue is

17:23

shaped by 2,000 years of Christian

17:26

weathering because I mean Nietzsche certainly

17:28

saw the morality of the Greeks

17:31

and the Romans as something admirable

17:33

as of course in due course

17:35

did Hitler. But it's wrong to

17:38

say that the Romans are immoral.

17:40

They weren't at all. They saw

17:42

themselves. as the most moral of

17:45

people, and this is why the

17:47

gods had given them the rule

17:50

of the world. And they have

17:52

a very... You read like the

17:54

stoic philosophers, right? And you're in

17:57

the presence of some of the

17:59

greatest wisdom philosophy has ever produced,

18:01

and yet to know of the

18:04

normalcy of crucifixion occurring in the

18:06

background is peculiar. I mean, I

18:09

think, so as a child, I

18:11

always found Greece and Rome infinitely

18:13

more glamorous than... than the Israelites

18:16

and then the apostles. So I

18:18

was always team pharaoh, team never

18:20

could chance a team poachers pilot.

18:23

I kind of thrilled to the

18:25

glamour and the swagger of the

18:28

swagger as an even younger child.

18:30

And I guess that I was

18:32

perfectly capable of being thrilled and

18:35

excited by... the thought of the

18:37

Spartans at Thermopoli or Caesar conquering

18:39

Gaul. And I would do that

18:42

in part by also identifying my

18:44

moral inheritance as something that derived

18:47

from Greek philosophy. But I guess

18:49

that one of the, well actually

18:51

probably the main thing that led

18:54

me to write dominion, a history

18:56

of Christianity, which I had I'd

18:58

never been on my agenda. I

19:01

always have viewed, I had a

19:03

kind of almost synesthetic sense of

19:05

antiquity, and I thought of Greece

19:08

and Rome as with bright blue

19:10

Californian skies, and I thought of

19:13

Christianity as, you know, the drizzle

19:15

of an English autumn setting in

19:17

and blotting out the sun. But

19:20

I realized as I wrote about

19:22

Caesar, who was hailed as a

19:24

great man by his fellow citizens

19:27

for... inflicting hundreds of thousands of

19:29

casualties on during the course of

19:32

the conquest of Gaul enslaving an

19:34

equal number and kind of exulting

19:36

in it and realizing that this

19:39

really wasn't my own system at

19:41

all. And I began, I felt,

19:43

it was kind of like, you

19:46

know, I suppose the kind of

19:48

the prickle in the back of

19:51

the throat that heralds the onset

19:53

of a cold, the sense that

19:55

something was kind of, that I

19:58

couldn't quite get a handle on

20:00

was was waiting to take me

20:02

over. And I began to think,

20:05

well, is it actually Christianity that

20:07

changes? Is that what explains the

20:10

process of transformation? And I explored

20:12

it in the third work of

20:14

history I wrote, which was focused

20:17

very much on what I think

20:19

is a kind of great process

20:21

of revolution in 11th century Latin

20:24

Christendom, so the western half of

20:26

what had been the Roman Empire.

20:29

And it's often called the Papal

20:31

Revolution, because the revolutionaries are people

20:33

who take control of the Roman

20:36

church and it's led by popes.

20:38

And it forces through a kind

20:40

of very radical process of... a

20:43

recalibration of society that essentially divides

20:45

the world into rival spheres that

20:48

in due course in the West

20:50

is what we call religion and

20:52

the secular. And this is a

20:55

division that did not exist in

20:57

antiquity. It didn't exist in any

20:59

other of the civilizations of Eurasia.

21:02

And I enjoyed the paradox that

21:04

secularism would not probably have been

21:06

secularism without secularism without secularism without

21:09

secularism without the labours of 11th

21:11

century popes in seem to be

21:14

a very entertaining paradox. So I

21:16

explored that and then on the

21:18

back of that I then became

21:21

interested in what was the role

21:23

of Islam in all of this

21:25

and I wrote a book on

21:28

Islam where I was quite skeptical

21:30

about quite a lot about early

21:33

Islam. I... In the shadow of

21:35

the sword. So it seemed to

21:37

me that the great question about

21:40

Islam is where does the Quran

21:42

come from? and it is amazing

21:44

the number of books by very

21:47

distinguished scholars, so it's not even

21:49

kind of popular history, who will

21:52

say about the revelations, Muhammad received

21:54

the Quran. From the Archangel Gabriel?

21:56

That's the scholarly opinion of the

21:59

Academy. They don't say that, but

22:01

they might say, he received the

22:03

revelations and they leave it at

22:06

that. And I thought, well, that's

22:08

not really an adequate explanation if

22:11

you're not a Muslim. I mean,

22:13

if you're a Muslim, then of

22:15

course, it's perfectly adequate. I mean,

22:18

you know, that's the foundation of...

22:20

of a Muslim's faith, but if

22:22

you're not, you've got to say

22:25

where does it come from. And

22:27

it did seem to me that

22:30

the Quran was, I mean, if

22:32

the Quran had materialized in, I

22:34

don't know, 15th century New Zealand,

22:37

I mean, that would be a

22:39

miracle. It would be incredible. But

22:41

the fact that it materializes in

22:44

a place that is rife with

22:46

Jewish and Christian and all kinds

22:49

of cultural influences, and that this

22:51

is exactly what it reflects. made

22:53

me think that Islam was a

22:56

product of this, but one that

22:58

had gone on a radically different

23:00

direction from Christianity. And so thinking

23:03

that and studying it and kind

23:05

of reifying my thoughts about what

23:07

today we would call Judaism and

23:10

Christianity and Islam and Zoroastrianism were

23:12

kind of related but quite radically

23:15

different in their presumptions. Again sharpened

23:17

for me the sense of what

23:19

was distinctive about... Christianity and my

23:22

own sense of being very very

23:24

shaped by it and so that's

23:26

how I then came to write

23:29

dominion and dominion was a process

23:31

of stress testing that theory because

23:34

when I began it I wasn't

23:36

entirely sure what conclusions I would

23:38

I would end up with. Well

23:41

I want to get to Islam

23:43

as I said but let's linger

23:45

here on the connection that you

23:48

argue for between Christian ethics and

23:50

secular ethics that... Many of us

23:53

imagine to be, you know, quite

23:55

denuded of any. you know, propositional

23:57

claim about the truth or necessity

24:00

of Christianity. Someone like myself, I

24:02

moved through the world having various

24:04

moral intuitions informed by just my

24:07

own thought and then just my

24:09

collision with the history of ideas,

24:12

whether it's Western philosophy or Eastern

24:14

philosophy or religions like Christianity. But

24:16

that amalgam translates in my thinking

24:19

into something that is, has no

24:21

necessary connection certainly to Christianity. So

24:23

let me just throw a few,

24:26

or try to create a few

24:28

wrinkles in that picture. One is

24:31

that, so when you take Christianity

24:33

itself, the early Christians, you know,

24:35

from Jesus onward, first of all,

24:38

they were Jews, and I think

24:40

it's... If you'd like to continue

24:42

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