Episode 272: Neigh Means Yay

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] Don't touch the dog. That just ain't right. The Queen in Oz has spoken! I'm a very good man. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Who are you? Who are you? I'm a very good man. Good man.

[00:00:48] They think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:16] Dave, today we are going back to our roots. How excited are you to talk about zoophilia? So excited, Tamler! I was actually thinking, I wonder if we went back and listened to some of those early conversations on zoophilia, whether our attitudes have evolved.

[00:01:36] Yeah, no, I think you go back to episode one and we were talking about free will. If there's no free will, why can't I just fuck my dog? And for a long time people thought, well, for moral reasons, but not anymore.

[00:01:53] In the second segment we're going to talk about part of our, I don't know, like ongoing series on papers that then became famous books, but we just do the original papers, you know? Because that's when they were authentic.

[00:02:07] Then they sold out for the book and also because they're significantly shorter. Also, yeah, there's pragmatic reasons, but I also am sort of the opinion that most of the time most books should just be magazine length articles.

[00:02:23] People stretch them out into books because, you know, they want books. Speaking of stretched out, things that are stretched out, a new article submitted. This almost seems like it was too designed for us. The simulation people are getting sloppy or they got drunk or something like that.

[00:02:49] But it is, first of all, in the journal that appeared in the most recent issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, Peter Singer edited journal that we talked about and even did a whole segment on coming up with fake abstracts for. Do you remember that?

[00:03:04] That's right. I had forgotten. This article, I think it's very self-explanatory from the title. Zoophilia is Morally Permissible by Fira Ben Stowe. And that is a pseudonym. I don't know why, but...

[00:03:20] Okay. So first thing I want to ask you is this person could have come up with a better pseudonym than this. This was just, I feel like this was phoned in. I wonder if it's like code, like if you unscreen, it's like an anagram for like...

[00:03:34] I was wondering that too and then I thought... Hot lab sets or something. I'm putting your name into the Wu-Tang clan name generator. Okay. Your pseudonym from this day forward is Fortunate Magician. Okay. Seems like that would have been more appropriate for you, but... Yeah, no, damn it.

[00:03:53] But then it wouldn't have been a good pseudonym, I guess. For me, people know I can't do magic. So it's like, well, we know it's not Tamler. That's for sure. But you know what? You can do zoophilia. Apparently. If the argument presented in this article is sound.

[00:04:12] All right. This is very funny because it is written out of the analytic philosophy writing for dummies handbook. It hits all the different notes. If this is a hoax, the commitment to the bit is really impressive.

[00:04:29] I don't think for the record it's a hoax, but if it is, I really appreciate... Yeah. Like you said, it hits all the things we make fun of, but it also hits the things that I like about good philosophy.

[00:04:40] So I am actually... I know we're going to make fun of the paper because there are some sentences that are calling out to us to be made fun of. But I actually think this is a good paper. The topic is... Well, we can talk about why the topic...

[00:04:55] Why it's just on the face of it seems like it has to be a hoax because it seems so ludicrous. But I think there's something to this that needs to be tackled. And I think this does as good a job as a paper could to tackle it.

[00:05:11] The footnote, by the way, for the pseudonym is... The topic is so socially sensitive that I write under a pseudonym out of fears of negative repercussions on my career and private life, even if I do not engage myself in zoophilia. That's cryptic.

[00:05:24] Now, that's phrased in a really weird way. I was just thinking that. A philosopher phrased that. Just remember that.

[00:05:32] It is very much probably consistent with they do engage in zoophilia, but it makes it sound as much as possible like, you know, I'm not one of these sickos, but this would still be bad for my career. It's the equivalent of having their fingers crossed behind their back.

[00:05:55] Yeah, it's the footnote equivalent of that. So, it starts just motivating the topic as you would want to do. Sex with animals is a powerful social taboo that exposes its practitioners to utmost indignation and stigma. I love this.

[00:06:12] Zoophilia is one of the few sexual orientations, along with e.g. necrophilia or pedophilia, that remain off limits and have been left aside from the sexual liberation movement in the past 50 years. I don't get it now. Gay people and lesbians, that's okay. But what about the zoophiles?

[00:06:36] Nobody invited me to the alphabet party. Yeah. I would like to argue that this is a mistake. Very straightforward. Clear thesis statement. There is in fact nothing wrong with having sex with animals. It is not an inherently problematic sexual practice. So, that's the opening paragraph. I'm saying he.

[00:07:00] What do you think the honest percentages are that this is a woman writing this? 0.3. Yeah, right. You don't want to completely rule it out? Although I have a story. Yeah, I have a story that makes me add the .3 in there. Okay. I don't know that I told.

[00:07:18] I do feel like I've heard it but maybe not on the podcast. But I don't remember it. So, then they give an outline where they first talk about what zoophilia is. Then they sort of go over the history of the debate on the permissibility of zoophilia.

[00:07:34] And then they get to the meat of the objections. The objection that this is harmful to animals or that animals can't consent. And they try to mount some arguments that they can defeat these objections.

[00:07:50] And then they list the possible implications if we accept that it's not morally impermissible. Now that I think about it, like I've had a crazy day. So, I haven't had time to like try to think of what your reaction would be.

[00:08:02] But now that I think of it, like of course you're going to actually like this paper. Just for the analytic philosophy of it, the arguing for a counterintuitive conclusion. This is catnip for you. It really is. Even if you do not engage yourself in zoophilia.

[00:08:19] You find this compelling. Yeah, but I think that unlike some of the convoluted things that we've read. I think that the arguments are ones that legitimately engage with the arguments that people have made against. And I think that you really would have to like.

[00:08:43] I'm not going to say that I'm convinced with the conclusions. But I've thought about these before. I mean it started with, and I think this is what we talked about originally way back in the day. The Singer article on bestiality.

[00:09:00] And maybe even Will Salatin who had an article in Slate about the Singer view. Did we talk about that? I think we did because I remember it had like a clever title that I can't remember right now.

[00:09:13] But the traditional arguments at least I always thought were a little weird. If you were okay with killing and eating animals. And that's a big if I guess. But that sounds familiar. Yeah, Shag the Dog. That was the name of the Will Salatin article. Shag the Dog.

[00:09:31] Shag the Dog, yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's very good. I just want to like not skip over. Like I don't want to rush through just some of the writing thing that's in this. By zoophilia, I mean human engagement. So he just defines his terms, right?

[00:09:47] By zoophilia, I mean human engagement in romantic and or sexual relationships with non-human animals. There's somehow like three footnotes in that one sentence. We can distinguish between zoophilic activities, the term bestiality being sometimes used to refer to the activities.

[00:10:06] And zoophilic orientation understood as a general attitude of romantic and or sexual attraction to some animals. As an orientation, sometimes referred to as zoosexuality, zoophilia can be compared to other orientations such as heterosexuality or bisexuality. Why should these orientations be distinguished from mere fetishes?

[00:10:31] This basic definition calls for several comments. I like that it calls for, is my favorite thing. Like this needs to be said now given that definition. It is. The juxtaposition of formal talk with the content of the talk is quite like entertaining to people like us.

[00:10:55] So of course, like then like they cover a whole bunch of different acts. But then he says, second, I leave open the possibility for zoophiles to engage only in non-sexual activities such as displays of affection or caring behaviors.

[00:11:09] But it's sexual activities that are usually considered to be morally problematic. So most of my arguments will concern sexual activities. I never considered that zoophilia, that zoophilic activities might be like bringing your dog flowers after a fight.

[00:11:28] I mean, I do like if I feel like my dog has been going through a rough stretch for whatever, like I'll go and get a like a rawhide or some like. With a romantic inclination? Well, it's like what is romantic at that point?

[00:11:43] How is it romantic and non-sexual? This is why it calls for comments. Several, not just one, several. The ethics of zoophilia has been subject to little academic attention so far. It's one of those like surprisingly. Surprisingly. Research has neglected zoophilia in the general sexual liberation movement.

[00:12:13] What do you make? So they go on to talk about like estimates of the prevalence of zoophilia. So they list some studies based on, yeah.

[00:12:28] So where people ask like back in the day Kinsey asked people a whole bunch of questions and they found that 8% of male and 3.5% of the female U.S. populations had had at least one sexual interaction with an animal in their life.

[00:12:41] With a percentage exceeding 50% in some rural locations. Like, come on now. Like I think we're playing into certain stereotypes here. This is why they vote for Trump is if we're going to be doing this. I think this has been, this statistic has been debunked to be honest.

[00:13:02] One of the things that might be accounting for that high number is like if you have to like actually, you know, milk a horse to breed it. Like and you put that that was a sexual activity. But do you think you would do that if you?

[00:13:18] It depends how they asked it. You know, if they asked, have you ever touched an animal's genitals to the point of arousal or something, you know, they're not going to lie. They're honest, hardworking people. Yeah.

[00:13:30] More recent surveys suggest 2% of the general population find the prospect of having sex with animals to be sexually arousing. I worry, I do worry that this is more common than anybody wants to admit.

[00:13:45] And if it is in fact more common than people want to admit, then there are a lot of people who live in like terrible shame and guilt. Like the person I talked about way back in the day, like the student who had emailed me about their behavior.

[00:14:02] That's right. Remember that? Yes. I forget if you said it on the podcast. You want to give like a cliff notes version? Yeah, I did. Yeah, yeah. The cliff notes version is that one of my first years at Cornell, I got an email from a student.

[00:14:16] Well, I assume it was a student. It was a non-Cornell account. I certainly wasn't like known to like, I was pre-podcast day, so I wasn't famous. Like now. Exactly.

[00:14:26] So I can only assume that it was a student who had heard about me at Cornell, emailed me and said, hey, what do you think about the moral status of bestiality zoophilia?

[00:14:36] And I sort of just gave like a real quick answer with a link to actually the Salatam paper. And then they emailed me a couple more times following up saying, no, like I really want an answer. They said, I have a friend who engages in this behavior.

[00:14:49] And then finally they just said, look, it's me. Like I've been having sexual contact with my dog for years now. Like I consider myself as having lost my virginity to the dog.

[00:14:58] There was nothing in that email that makes me think they were like, you know, like they weren't punking me or anything. Like it seemed like a real sincere, troubled person.

[00:15:09] And I think my response was something like I actually like strictly speaking, if all of the things that they said were right, that the dog had like initiated contact and that seemed to be true. And I think that's what they meant to derive pleasure from it.

[00:15:21] Like it was all kinds of things. I said, like if all that's true and there's no harm, like strictly speaking, I don't think it's morally wrong. But like I think something you should probably do something about it.

[00:15:31] Like see somebody because the way that our societal conventions are like this says something like kind of wrong. Like would you want your daughter dating somebody who fucked their dog or like? I can say personally, no.

[00:15:46] But even after this paper, even after this paper, I would be like, you know, preferably not. I don't know if it would be a deal breaker.

[00:15:56] But what's interesting is that they want to define it as non-fetish and they say a fetish has to do with with non genital body parts or non inanimate objects or something. And isn't that baking it in?

[00:16:10] Like isn't even calling it a social orientation, baking into it some sort of acceptance? Yeah, I think that's right. So that's probably why like fetishes are just these weird things, some of which are OK.

[00:16:23] But yeah, when you call it an orientation, I do think you're trying to put it with all these other kinds of orientations that we have come to think are actually fine. And we used to think they were deeply wrong or sinful.

[00:16:41] And so, you know, like I think that's fair enough. Like I'm not sure I would put it there, but like I could see why you would want if you are really defending the view, why you would not want it be dismissed as a fetish.

[00:16:55] And in some ways, maybe it really isn't a fetish in the sense that I think some people, people like your student may be like they it's really important. It's a real relationship. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that is, yeah.

[00:17:10] And the author later on will distinguish people who are attracted to animals versus ones who like as a convenience use animals for sexual pleasure.

[00:17:18] I do wonder about, you know, I don't think this article talks very much about animals initiating, but it does talk a lot about animals consenting, which I feel like we like, I don't know if they cited us, but I feel like we had a pretty.

[00:17:34] Definitive discussion of consent, at least in chimpanzees. But do you remember that? Like if they sign it? Yeah. But like initiating it seems even more than consent. I mean, they might like start humping your leg or something like that, but I don't know if that's.

[00:17:53] Oh, I want us to have sex. Like right now, I want you to stick your penis in my ass. Right. Well, that's a whole different level. Let's start with Alice and her dog. Okay. Oh, yeah. So consider the following case.

[00:18:11] Alice self describes as being in a romantic relationship with her dog. She cares a lot about his well-being and strives to ensure that his needs are fulfilled. This sounds like a John Heidt below. They often sleep together.

[00:18:23] He likes to be caressed and she finds it pleasant to gently rub herself on him. Sometimes when her dog is sexually aroused and tries to hump her leg, she undresses and lets him penetrate her vagina. This is gratifying for both of them. How can we not?

[00:18:37] There's no way I can make it through this paper without that. Jerking off. Just go. We can take ten minutes after this segment if you want. Our voice comes back sounding weird and different. Flushed.

[00:18:53] Alice's story describes a kind of relationship commonly described within the Zeta movement, which apparently is the zoophilia. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, where there's a reciprocal emotional attachment between the human and the animal and sexual contacts are sexually gratifying to both of them.

[00:19:08] It is tempting to think that Alice's relationship illustrates one way in which humans can develop more equal and non-exploitative relationships with animals that go beyond our negative duties not to harm them.

[00:19:17] And then they go on to say, what is it that makes affectionately caressing one's cat of a different ethical standing than sexually caressing one's cat?

[00:19:25] If there is no clear-cut boundary between the ordinary love that pet keepers express and the romantic love that some zoophiles express, then why accept one and not the other? And then you get dragged in.

[00:19:35] Before I turn my attention to the objections that have been raised against zoophilia, I should point out that I am not interested here in the psychological and social factors that explain our ordinary, deeply misguided, he doesn't say that, but ordinary aversion to zoophilia. The source of our bias.

[00:19:55] Though I suspect that such factors permeate most attempts at proving that zoophilia is wrong. But, you know, that's ad hominem. I leave that to social scientists and psychologists. So there you go. A new project. A new field. Little work has been done.

[00:20:15] I'm sure there's evolutionary psychology papers about this, right? I don't know. I wonder. Yeah, it turns out it's not a very evolutionary successful strategy. No, but you know, can't hurt to try. Somebody had to find out. All it gets you is like the island of Dr. Moreau.

[00:20:40] Even for subjects that have received little attention, academic attention thus far, there's usually something about it in evolutionary psychology. That's true. So here's where I've got to tell you this anecdote. So I knew a person, a woman who was not from the U.S.

[00:20:58] and was weirdly open about like her sexual history, like the activities she engaged in. She clearly was like not, especially at that time in my life, like I'd never heard anybody be that straightforward about sexuality.

[00:21:14] She was from one of these countries, one of these like northern European countries where everything goes. And she once said, as we were walking to a coffee shop, she said, I sometimes let my cat lick my pussy. And I was like, wait, what?

[00:21:34] And she said, yeah, you know, sometimes when I'm like, I sleep naked and she has a cat, obviously. And sometimes like the cats under the covers and scratchy. Oh, yeah. That's what I thought. I'll wake up to the cat licking me down there and I won't stop it.

[00:21:52] And she made it sound like she actually like could have an orgasm that way. That's initiating. Yeah. So there are some and like this author will make go on to say like, look, I'm not saying every instance of zoophilia is right.

[00:22:04] Just like there's no you can't say every instance of any other kind of sex is right. But there are some clear cases where I think you can rightfully rule out harm.

[00:22:13] And you might even genuinely be able to bring consent in or some form of assent, whatever you want. So do you think it is the scratchy tongue? Like like one of those condoms with the little things, you know, like sticking out. For her pleasure.

[00:22:28] Yeah. For her pleasure kind of thing, you know, maybe. Not being the owner of female genitalia, I cannot imagine what that must be like. But I didn't think good. I didn't. Well, clearly she disagrees.

[00:22:42] But yeah, like that's a good that should be his case to maybe, you know, like consider another case. Consider the cuddling his cat. Cuddling his kitty. Cuddling his kitty. So he considers the two things, the two main objections, right?

[00:23:04] Harm. You're harming the animal and then you are failure to get failing to get consent and finds both of those objections to be wanting. The idea of harm, he's like, look, sometimes they're harmed.

[00:23:20] But what critics of zoophilia need to show is that harm is a necessary feature of sex with animals. This is a very demanding claim, which seems patently false at first glance. Go look at Alice. At whose first glance?

[00:23:34] Yeah, exactly. So Alice and her dog, they both love it. You know, your friend and the cat, they both love it. Sometimes there's positive evidence that the animal is having a pleasant experience. What's the positive evidence there, do you think? Well, did the dog finish?

[00:23:54] Were there any green pies involved? Green pies, that'll be part of the meta analysis. So with my friend and her cat, it's unclear whether the cat was doing anything other than, you know, doing what cats do, like lick things that they were salty or something.

[00:24:15] But with a dog, this is clearly a sexual reflex that it's having. It's initiating. And they do a good job of coming up with these examples. Where it's not men penetrating animals, because I think that's the first thing people think.

[00:24:32] And so they think like, look, you're sticking things up the ass of an animal like that. Of course, that's harmful. But there are cases that are not that. I always have this thought whenever I'm confronted with something like this,

[00:24:46] that the world is way weirder when it comes to this kind of stuff than I could imagine. Like I have fairly vanilla tastes. And I'll run into someone at a conference and they'll just say, yeah,

[00:24:59] like I go to this dungeon and like hang upside down and like it's the most intox... And I'm like, whoa, okay, yeah, that's cool. Why are you bringing Josh Nob into this? I didn't want to say the name. Yeah, no, it's true. And again, I don't know what...

[00:25:18] Like I know that this kind of behavior occurs. So like that's why I think that... Look, of all the things that we laugh at Journal of Controversial Ideas, this is like maybe an actually relevant...

[00:25:30] Maybe it's wrong and misguided, but it's actually relevant to some percentage of the population. Yeah. It's not just mental masturbation of the worst kind. It could be that like people look back at this episode like 50 years from now

[00:25:44] and they're like, they're such monsters that they're making fun of us. You know? Oh, I thought you were going to say they're such moral heroes for having been open to these arguments. Well, yeah. Or just that Tamler, the Jewish guy. Right.

[00:26:01] We're going to get way more feedback on this than on anything we said about Israel, by the way. Yeah. Wait, Omar! No! Quiet! Because now I have the green light right now. So just like... You may want to think about fucking up the podcast.

[00:26:16] You know what, Tamler? Sometimes woof means no. Not according to Fira Benstow. Okay, so there's the harm. Yeah, that's strong. They say that there are like some... Like if you accept that there are clear cases where there is not harm,

[00:26:39] and I think that's clear, then they say, some people have tried to say... This actually made me kind of laugh. We might argue that zoophilia degrades or even violates the animal's dignity. Now, dignity is a notoriously vague normative notion, especially so for animals.

[00:26:55] In fact, it is not clear that animals have a dignity in the first place. Then why are you starting romantic relationships with them? If they have no dignity, you can't shame them. Yeah. Maybe you can't harm them. Maybe you can't... Their consent wouldn't matter.

[00:27:16] It's like little things, little dog whistles. No pun intended. In this article. I feel like my dog has dignity. Yes. Charlie has dignity. I don't know about Omar. So right. And then the other thing is sometimes people say that it's a form of exploitation.

[00:27:35] But they say like, well, you really have to go out of your way to say what you mean by exploitation. In this case. And also like with something like this, it's like, OK, but is it more

[00:27:51] exploitation than killing them and eating them or putting them in factory farms? And he says like, because that is kind of like if you're OK with all the horrific things that we do to animals just in factory farms or wherever, it's like it's true.

[00:28:06] But like it is weird to be this opposed to zoophilia and not to immense like avalanche of suffering we cause on billions of them every day. So, yeah. Yeah. And I think that the consent arguments that people usually bring up

[00:28:24] like really do fail for most like for most things we do to animals, not even the factory farm things. Because if you if you really believe that an animal can derive pleasure from having contact with a human being, then your and your objection

[00:28:40] is that they never consented to it. Then you're sort of opening the door for even keeping animals without their consent is might be morally wrong. Right. Like it does seem like you have to have consent plus harm. They consent to being kept though.

[00:28:56] Like Omar won't leave the yard. Right. But by that same reasoning, I think like the approach and this is what they say, like approach behavior, like an animal approaching to eat from your hand can be taken as a form of consent.

[00:29:10] And so like for them to engage in those clear behavioral displays of consent for sexual behavior, like actually humping you. So here's what I think about this, though. On the one hand, there is something completely fucked up about the fact

[00:29:25] that we cause this much suffering to animals on factory farms to now be like, but what about their consent? If you have sex with them, just seems bizarre. Like where like where when did you start caring about their consent? That this is now an issue.

[00:29:40] That said, though, I really do feel like if you have like a dog or a cat and you're doing this, like there's a moral difference between the animal like not wanting to do it and you just like force them to do it.

[00:29:56] And the animal initiating it like with your friend. So that can only go so far. Like you're kind of already almost you're only including like pets of some kind in this sphere of possibly you give a shit about consent.

[00:30:14] And while you might have problems with that not being consistent, it's not it still matters, you know? Yeah. But aren't they arguing that like you just get clear, you get as much consent from some of this behavior as you could possibly expect? Yeah. So that. Yeah, right. Right.

[00:30:30] You know, it's true. Right. But even there, then they recognize that consent. The consent probably matters. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So we know it's one kind of problem case where it's a little hard to get a sense of whether they're aware of what they're doing.

[00:30:48] Consider, for example, the following case. Bob and his dog. Bob loves his dog. Every Friday when he comes home tired from working, he spreads honey on his penis and takes pleasure in letting his dog lick it. I love that he just restricts it to Fridays.

[00:31:05] You know, you start doing it like, you know, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then I'm always worried, by the way, because I've heard of people doing this with like peanut butter. Yeah. Wouldn't the dog start just gnawing? Yeah. I wouldn't let especially Omar anywhere near my penis.

[00:31:19] Bob's dog may not be aware of the sexual character of the activities engaging in, and we might intuitively think that this threatens the validity of his consent. This is why you can't trust intuitions. You know, you gotta debunk these. Yeah. This would be true if the sexual character

[00:31:37] of his action were a deal breaker. This is perhaps the case, but I would like to point out it is far from obvious. Of course, if Bob's dog was instead a human coaxed into licking Bob's penis, say Bob told him

[00:31:47] this was the only way to relieve an itch. What has that worked? This is great. This is like one banger after another. The sexual character of the action would probably be a deal breaker, so the information condition would not be satisfied

[00:32:00] and the validity of his consent would be undermined. This is so because of the specific ways in which humans typically regard sex. So he goes on to say that like we're just weird about sex. Like there's nothing to indicate that animals would feel that weird about sex.

[00:32:12] They would just be like, who cares if you got off on, I got some honey. You're anthropomorphized. It's disgusting if you give them all of our sexual hangups. You know, like you project that onto them. I'd buy that actually. You know, like just think of like the dogs

[00:32:28] getting these huge boners all the time. They walk around the house with their boners. They don't give a shit. And we're like, oh, red rocket. Red rocket. So in the end, we conclude that animals can consent to sex with humans. As for the validity of this consent,

[00:32:44] it's not a matter of consent. It's a matter of consent. The gist of my discussion has been that animals can validly consent according to most conceptions except the most demanding ones. And the latter turn out to be unacceptable for reasons, for other reasons

[00:33:00] or to make valid consent unnecessary to engage with sex with animals. Given that having sex with animals does not necessarily harm them, we can conclude that having sex with animals is not wrong. With that, the zoophilia is not wrong. Just a minor detail. Zoophilia is not wrong.

[00:33:17] Just a mic drop moment there. Boom. Bang, bang, bang. Boom. I brought you all the way here. Now what are you going to say? Now go fuck your dog with a free conscience. And so then they turn to the implications which are one immediate implication

[00:33:35] seems to be that zoophilia ought to be made legally permissible. This entails decriminalizing it where it is currently outlawed and fighting against the current wave of criminalization. Going beyond mere legalization and this is where they lose me. We could argue further that zoophilia

[00:33:53] ought to be socially normalized too. In this case, the next step in the historical process of sexual liberation might well be to accept zoophilia as a legitimate sexual orientation. Zoophilia needs their will and grace, you know, just to get everybody used to it.

[00:34:07] That's a lovable boy, isn't he? But he had sex with his dog for a while. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, but he's charming. Here's the thing. I can't even get weed legalized in Texas. Like, even if I did buy this thing,

[00:34:23] that has to wait in line. You know, okay. Push comes to shove though. Do you think anybody ought to be fined or imprisoned because they whatever, let a dog penetrate them? No, definitely not. But like if they raped the dog, they should. Yeah, yeah.

[00:34:43] Just any kind of animal. What if they were just blowing off steam? Yeah. And what if the dog was asking for it? You know, remember, though, that professor said he was just blowing off steam. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Penn State. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:03] Penetration is like a. I think we would need more evidence because, yeah, there are. There are. You know, did you ever hear about that there was like a famous case of like, I think it's a Microsoft executive who was into this stuff and he was letting a

[00:35:20] horse penetrate him anally and he ended up dying from it because like the horse burst whatever is internally. It's grizzly man. You only hear the audio. Ney. That's what they should go. Ney means ney. There's actually a lot of neys. Sometimes ney means yay.

[00:35:42] So like letting an animal penetrate you. Shouldn't be like on the face of it. That should be fine. I think the clear cases are when it's some guy. Yeah. If it's your dog, can't you plausibly argue that it's incest? Right. Yeah. Especially if you had the dog

[00:36:06] since they were a puppy. Yeah. Right. And like you're you're not going to be able to like your. Yeah. Yeah. I think you have to do it with like your friends dog. Yeah. Some strange dog swap. Don't worry, you're my stepdog. Oh no, that's just my stepdog.

[00:36:39] Your stepdog is hot. Really? You think so? So look, I'm at the point where I think I don't. I think it's weird and I don't want a society where people think of this as like a normalized thing to do for a lot of reasons.

[00:37:08] And I think that that the author downplays. Like, I know that there is a clear analogy to people being disgusted at homosexuality and therefore you might say, well, if you're going to let disgust guide you, then you might do some really immoral things. But there is like a

[00:37:28] weirdness to this behavior that I think can't just be dismissed as as bigotry. So the question is, how do we know that we're not just being biased? The the the the the the the the the the the the. That we're not just somebody reacting like this

[00:37:45] to gay people or trans people or a lot of the groups that we now think, well, it's been called like non-natural. Yeah, it's been called unnatural. I do think there is something about like the crossing of species that puts it in its own category,

[00:38:06] just the fact that there's all these different What if the duck quacks twice, but you don't know what kind of quack it is or whatever? Like there's so many different like, you know, variables to it that that's like a signal

[00:38:19] that maybe this is in a slightly different category than just another human being. When we have two human beings both insisting that they love each other and that they have a relationship, I think that's just like good reason to respect it.

[00:38:33] No reason to think that there is coercion or harm going on or if there is harm, it's like the pleasurable kind. And this we just, we can't really know. And I don't want to adjudicate what's harm and what's not

[00:38:46] when an animal can't tell us that this is harm. And so I think we have good reasons to discourage it. But I will say that the amount of energy put into this seems, it's always seemed ridiculous to me given how we kill animals to eat them

[00:39:03] and how we raise them to kill them to eat them. Like that seems like such an obviously more pressing moral problem than this. But it's to be, it's not like a lot of people are writing like zoophilia is wrong articles either. It's just that it is illegal

[00:39:16] whereas that stuff is legal and often subsidized. So yeah, no, that's the thing that honestly people are gonna look back at this generation. Somehow you'll get a pass on this particular thing but people are gonna look back and say like they were monsters.

[00:39:34] Like they knew what was going on in these factory farms and they just did it anyway. So yes, zoophilia over that. Do you think Fira Benstow is the Penn State professor? Ooh, no, this is such a clear philosopher writing. Yeah, that's true. That guy wasn't a philosopher, yeah.

[00:39:54] I think a dog wrote this. A dog, yeah, that would be funny. The dog, he's also kind of proud it's his first publication. Yeah, all right. We'll be right back to talk about loneliness. Today's episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Well, it's holiday season.

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[00:41:48] ♪ And I was so down, close to a stout ♪ ♪ He had the gators when she walked in the door ♪ Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the predictable time of the show where we like to take a moment to thank all of you

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[00:43:24] At $2 and up, you get all the bonus content that we release and that's what I wanna talk about. On our Patreon, we just did a little bit of work to, well, they have a new feature called Collections and that lets you basically organize the bonus content

[00:43:42] by any theme in any sort of collection that you want. And right now we have done that with a few things. So our Ask Us Anything audio that all of our $2 and up subscribers get and our video that our $10 and up subscriber get, subscribers get are up there.

[00:44:01] You can find the beat compilations very easily in a collection. We also have all of the movie episodes, or at least from when we started doing Patreon, I will get the rest of them up there somehow. And we have two seasons of The Ambulators and the Dostoyevsky series

[00:44:19] and all of our Borges episodes. So we're gonna keep adding to that. Hopefully it makes being a Patreon supporter just a slight bit easier and better. Thank you to everybody, of course, who is our patron. At $5 and up, just to round this out,

[00:44:36] you get to vote on an episode topic and you do get access to our Brothers Karamazov series. You get access to some of my intro psych videos and a couple of Tamler's lectures. And at $10 and up, you get those Ask Us Anything videos,

[00:44:51] but you also get to ask us a question and we film those once a month. You can also go and buy swag if you wanna support us in that way. You know, holidays are coming up. If you wanna get a t-shirt and mug, go for it.

[00:45:05] You'll find links there. Thank you again to everybody for all your support. We really, really appreciate it. And happy Thanksgiving, because I don't think we're gonna release an episode until after Thanksgiving. So yeah, happy Thanksgiving for Americans, of course. I don't know what the rest of you do,

[00:45:22] but happy Thanksgiving anyway. Woo! I'm slamming it tonight. You guys are dead in the water. All right, way to go, Donny! All right, so this is a topic that we've been wanting to talk about for some time.

[00:45:38] I think it came up in an AUA from our beloved patrons and we couldn't get the book, the Putnam book, but we did track down the Bowling Alone article and we've also looked at some other kind of more updated studies and reports.

[00:45:56] So this is from an earlier period. This was written in 1995. Robert Putnam is, God, I don't even know, is he a sociologist at Harvard? He's a political scientist. He's a political scientist at Harvard. And so he publishes and it's really about the decline of civic engagement

[00:46:18] and the decline of social capital. What is social capital? As I understand it, social capital is the network of relationships and associations you have with other people that make society kind of run smoothly. And so it's a desire to quantify the unquantifiable rather than physical capital you have.

[00:46:43] Right, and to turn it into something like money and property. Yeah, right. But it really is, it's kind of fucked up to have this term that's modeled on capital capital and what it is is social connections that you have. Supposedly the thing that was the most important

[00:47:02] that all that capital was a very instrumental means to achieve, but here it goes the other way. So he talks about the decline of civic engagement. Voting was down by 25% at the time. In the nineties, so this was, yeah, 1995, the Clinton years.

[00:47:25] It was kind of a depressing time for politics. You know, Clinton dole. It's like, do you wanna vote in that? Jesus. But then it's not just voting. The people who have attended a public meeting on town or school affairs fell by more than a third from 1973 to 13% from 22%.

[00:47:49] Also about people going to a political rally or a speech or serving on a committee at a local organization, working for a political party. By every measure, Americans' direct engagement in politics and government has fallen, he says, over the last generation.

[00:48:06] And this is despite the fact that average levels of education, which are traditionally been the best predictors of political participation, that they have risen sharply throughout this period. The reason he says that he's interested in civic engagement and what affects civic engagement is that he thinks

[00:48:24] that civic engagement directly affects the quality of a representative government. And so he says, at least that at least was the central conclusion of my own 20 year quasi-experimental study of subnational governments in different regions of Italy. Although all these regional governments seemed identical

[00:48:38] on paper, their levels of effectiveness varied dramatically. And when he went and looked to see what it was that was predicting the difference in quality, it was just these traditions of civic engagement, voter turnout, how much they read newspapers, membership in societies and clubs.

[00:48:55] And so the decline of that in the United States leading him in 1995 to think, shit, like the quality of our government is going to be potentially directly affected by the decline. I mean, I feel like it's the other way more likely

[00:49:13] that the quality of the government goes down. He even says like you could expect some understandable disgust after Watergate, Vietnam, Iran-Contra, I think he says, all sorts of ways in which the government feels like they're corrupt. And also by this time, now that we're in the Clinton years,

[00:49:35] corporate bought like both parties, turning away from more than a semblance of pretending that you care about poor people and not just like lobbyists. It's just seems like, yeah. That's his point, like if only he went to church, maybe there wouldn't be corporate buyouts of political parties.

[00:49:58] Yeah, I mean, I don't know how you determine the direct, the causal drives. If you see decline in civic engagement before you see a decline in government quality, then that would point to the direction going one way. I guess if you have a good way of measuring

[00:50:16] government quality, but anyway, like even if I'm right that people are maybe more legitimately disgusted with politics, he's like, well, it's not just that. It's church related groups, labor unions. Again, there's might be a reason for that. Labor unions in fact, he says have been falling

[00:50:39] for four decades, especially between 75 and 85. It was at 32% in 1953 to 15.8% in 1992. He says the solidarity of union halls is now mostly a fading memory of aging men. So yeah, so there's unions. There's also like parent teacher associations. Did you ever go to parent teacher association meetings? Yeah.

[00:51:11] Did you? No, no, I didn't even go to parent teacher conferences. Yeah, we're just too cool to like care about our child's education. Also, I liked this fraternal organizations between the 80s and the 90s, like groups like the Lions off 12%, the Elks off 18%, the Shriners,

[00:51:34] particularly rough stretch off 27%, the Jaycees off 44% and even the Masons were down 39% since 1959. It's like the Masons, is that for a healthy society? You need like a strong, like Illuminati. He then says that you do find these other groups where they like, we are participating in more.

[00:52:04] We do belong to them, but there are the kind of groups where you don't actually have to meet anybody and hang out with people. It's like he says, like the gardening club is different than the Sierra club. The gardening club is like, okay, we're all meeting

[00:52:20] and we're hanging out and we're planting stuff, I would imagine. Whereas the Sierra club is I give this amount of money and get like travel books and a bumper sticker for my car. Then he also talks about bowling alone. This is the kind of paradigm case,

[00:52:37] like bowling itself has gone up, but the league memberships have gone down. Decreased by 40% between 1980 and 1993, whereas the number of bowlers went up by 10%. So here's my question about this. I was surprised that this was like what bowling alone meant

[00:53:00] in this article, not being part of a league. I've never gone bowling alone, but I've also never bowled in a league. I felt the exact same way. And it feels like a sort of trivial criticism at what is a paper that's about much more,

[00:53:17] but your central, the central example, the thing that you title your book about, like I went bowling with my friends all the time. Does he just mean that there is a civic nature of a league that does something to you that's different

[00:53:33] than bowling with like your three buddies? Yeah, I was asking myself that same question. Because on the one hand, like bowling is one of the most social things that I do when we do it. Like you're actually like, you're not watching anything or then you're all like talking,

[00:53:48] hanging out, drinking beers, bowling. But when you're doing that, you're with your friends and you could just be at each other's houses, having like dinner or like at a restaurant. You're not meeting all these other people that you don't know and that are probably from different backgrounds

[00:54:04] and economic backgrounds, different just cultural values, stuff like that. So I could see that being a difference between bowling leagues and just bowling with your friends. It's not in that, that's one way- I call it solo bowling, which is just not- That's inaccurate.

[00:54:22] It's like, I feel like I'm surprised this wasn't made a big deal of because it was like the first, like I was like, wait, no, I can't be right. And then like, as I was like Googling the book, like I don't remember people really talking about that.

[00:54:34] They just kind of took it for granted. They not have the keen eye that we have. It's the analytic philosophy training comes in handy. That's what I mean. Alone doesn't mean with other people. But I do think that's in itself an interesting difference

[00:54:50] and one that's very much in line with what he's saying is it's not that we all just sit in our house and don't do anything. We don't like to be in groups with people that we might not know or who might be different from us. And so-

[00:55:03] It's super interesting as I was reading this, of course the data are old and you put a link to an updated like Bowling Alone 20 years later. But as I was reading this, I was like, all of this stuff sounds painful to me.

[00:55:19] Like to be a member of the Elks Lodge or to like be a gardening club. I don't wanna do any of that. So- No, I was thinking that you would especially, I had that, I mean, I am also like that, but like you especially.

[00:55:32] Like you don't wanna do any of this shit. Serving on a committee of a local organization. Oh my God, man. Like local government, you know? Oh, you couldn't pay me. And then- Like I at least think that, I wish I did more of that.

[00:55:46] But again, you actually put me there and I'm like, get me the fuck out. I'm gonna make you an elder in your local church. You're just like unabashed about it, whereas I feel kind of a little conflicted. Even like when he was talking about

[00:56:05] the percentage of people who have hung out with their neighbors in the last week or whatever. I'm like, I say hi to my neighbors when we're both getting the mail. I have friends, why am I gonna talk to my,

[00:56:16] like why am I gonna hang out with my neighbors? Yeah, you hang out with my neighbors. Again, speaking of my neighbors who, we don't like hang out with our neighbors hardly at all, but we had this big power outage. We've had two big ones, one after Hurricane Ike

[00:56:37] and one after that horrible thing in February where none of us had heat or electricity. And both times we would all be hanging out outside together, having beers, talking, having a good time. It was like really fun. And we were like, I wish we did this more often.

[00:56:55] I remember after Ike, we got our power turned back on. We were kind of lucky. It was like two or three days into it. And it was a Sunday and I was like, oh my God, I can go watch Sunday Ticket.

[00:57:05] You know, like I got a Sunday Ticket, I just went back and yeah, that was just... So like, that's the, it's true. Like I think he's onto something, I guess. Yeah, I think that we are the generation that came up in these trends.

[00:57:21] And like, to me, it's internalized. My preferences are internalized. Like I get that if I were in the 50s, I would be whatever, bowling in the league. All of those things that he describes remind me of like the Flintstones. Like they bowl in leagues and they're members

[00:57:39] of the Elks and the Shriners and like all this stuff. Like, yeah, I get that I am, we are of that generation that came right when this was all eroding. He wants to say that this is decreasing social capital. It's almost by definition, right?

[00:57:55] When you are eroding the nature of these relationships that we have, the connections that we have to our neighbors, to our local communities, social capital goes down. And what that means, I'm not sure. But what really interested me about this whole idea

[00:58:11] is not whether or not, like you were saying, it has negative effects on government, but really on whether or not like there is something that's deeply psychologically interesting about the change in society and like whether or not this has had an impact on, I don't know,

[00:58:28] on the health of us as individuals, on the quality of our relationships. Like, would we be better off? I don't know. It is like this new experiment. I mean, I guess television is the major culprit here.

[00:58:42] Like once you make it like you can hang out in your house and that's fun or like it gives you what you need. All right, now you're not going to the local bar. You're not going to the club. You're not going to bowling league.

[00:58:53] You're not, but in any case, it's gotta be, like it's fairly recent and like it must have an effect. I bet it has an effect on political polarization that you only hang out with your friends who are more likely to be politically like-minded

[00:59:06] to yourself so you don't, the other people, the other tribe just seems like they're evil or crazy or. Yeah, and I think that's why attempts at bringing people together from different political perspectives kind of fail because there's no good excuse that brings people together.

[00:59:28] Like this other stuff was just like it was a side effect of being part of a community that you were exposed to everybody else. You weren't like some part of a novel study where you bring Republicans and Democrats into the same room

[00:59:40] and make them hang out or whatever. No, here you were- Perspective taking. Yeah, right. Here you were just like your community was dependent on you being able to have a relationship with these people regardless of what they might believe.

[00:59:56] And I think he was like, what you're saying about TV, my favorite part of this whole article was the prescience with which he talks about the technological transformation of leisure as this sort of like cause of this loss of social capital, lack of civic engagement.

[01:00:12] He says, there's reason to believe that deep-seated technological trends are radically quote unquote privatizing or individualizing our use of leisure time and thus disrupting many opportunities for social capital formation. The most obvious and probably the most powerful instrument of this revolution is television.

[01:00:28] Time budget studies in the 1960s showed that the growth in time spent watching television dwarfed all other changes in the way Americans pass their days and nights. Television has made our communities or rather what we experience as our communities wider and shallower. In the language of economics,

[01:00:42] electronic technology enables individual tastes to be satisfied more fully, but at the cost of positive social externalities associated with more primitive forms of entertainment. And then he goes into what is hilarious given what's happening now and given how little it was happening in 1995. The new virtual reality helmets

[01:01:00] that we will soon don to be entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective interests? It is a question that seems worth exploring more systematically.

[01:01:12] The new Google glasses are going to transform the way we interact with the polis. Yeah, but like in 1995, I think this is so insightful. In 1995, we didn't even know in which ways our entertainment was gonna become privatized. And this is one of the reasons

[01:01:33] that we even chose this article as are many times mentioning in like the AUAs that there is something about private streaming services that have allowed people to just hone their own interests and expose themselves to very niche kinds of forms of entertainment.

[01:01:54] And what Putnam thought was privatizing about TV was still compared to what we do now, like super collective. Yeah, we were already just doing it in our own houses. But at least like we were watching the same things and then when we were at work,

[01:02:10] we were like, you know, what did you see that like Magnum PI or Cosby show? I missed that. Like, it's not that long ago. It's like 10 years ago, we were still watching or like, you know, 12 years ago, we were all watching Breaking Bad at the same time

[01:02:25] and listening to Serial. And now it's like, you haven't even finished Righteous Gemstone. Oh, I finished it. Finished it. Oh, you did? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So good. Yeah, no, and sometimes you're just like, you tell a friend, have you watched this show?

[01:02:41] Which in your mind is like the best show on TV right now and they've never even heard of it. And you're like, what? Never heard of it, yeah. And it used to be like, you had a dinner party and like you could spend the whole time

[01:02:50] talking about The Wire or The Sopranos or, you know, and you would pass the DVDs to other people if they hadn't seen it. And like, that's when we really still cared about each other as a kid. When we watched Friends. It's such an interesting case of maximizing self-interest,

[01:03:10] making self-interest more efficient, which is like a natural thing to maximize on, like give people more and more precisely what they want, having this deleterious large-scale effect where we all might end up worse off because we were all- Self-interested in this very narrow sense. Yeah.

[01:03:31] Or like a game theory thing. Exactly, yeah. Like a tragic comedy of the, or tragedy of the comms. Comedy of the tragic. Comedy of the tragedies. Did you look at some like updated stuff? Because obviously these stats are,

[01:03:47] I think the same general trend from what I can tell has continued for the most part. But what do you find in the more empirical? Yeah, so I tried looking up just loneliness. Now, Bowling Alone really isn't about loneliness

[01:04:01] so much as it is about the kinds of stuff that might give rise to loneliness. But I don't know if the book- Sorry if we're going bowling with our friends. Yeah, I don't know if the book dives into loneliness more,

[01:04:11] but like this was one of our interests in this topic, which was, is there, like it really does feel like loneliness has gone up. And you might be surprised, Tamler, that the data are mixed. But to the extent that I have been able to like

[01:04:31] call through some of the more recent review papers, it does seem like there was definitely a bump of loneliness during COVID. And maybe there's evidence that adolescent loneliness specifically has increased over time. But it looks like loneliness in general,

[01:04:51] like by whatever metrics we use to study it longitudinally, which are not that great, it seems to be about the same as ever, right? It seems like we, there isn't, you can't properly call something a loneliness epidemic given what we know about it.

[01:05:07] I think it's just become a lot more salient and maybe COVID just actually did make us lonely. Well, NPR says from this Google search that you can call it a loneliness epidemic. And they say that even before the COVID,

[01:05:28] which I thought I had read, like I didn't write this down. I thought you were the data guy. But yeah, but that even before COVID, like you just take, obviously that's gonna have a huge effect. And so you just have to like bracket that.

[01:05:43] But even before COVID, up to 2019, I had read that people were having like huge drops in social interaction, especially among young people. Yeah, was it about loneliness specifically? So if you look at loneliness measures across North America and other countries,

[01:06:09] it does seem as if there is some increase in loneliness over time in some countries, but they seem small. Yeah, so this is, I'll put a link to this. This is a recent review article looking at meta-analyses of studies of loneliness over time.

[01:06:25] And they at least argue that it's not clear that there's been this trend. I don't know, it's really hard. It's hard to measure, as you might imagine. And I swear by my own anecdota, and I think you do too, that our students have been like hit hard

[01:06:43] with what happened to them. Like I was just talking to a student in my office today who was like, I feel like I don't have social support or whatever. It's just hard to know how much has bounced back. I feel like this semester actually has been

[01:07:00] the first return to whatever pre-COVID normal, the first at least sign that that was the way this was going. And I don't know, that's a very small sample size. I don't have that many students this semester, but you walk into class and people are buzzing again

[01:07:15] instead of just silent and on their phones. So I do think it's hard to measure. It's also like when you're talking about social interaction, you know, a lot of the way guys interact now is like video games online, but interactive video games where they're all like

[01:07:34] talking shit to each other and they're all, they're interacting through the game. Which strikes me as kind of like maybe like the bowling in a league versus bowling with friends kind of thing. It is different, but it's not necessarily tied to loneliness. It's tied to something else.

[01:07:53] You know, we didn't prepare for like this specific topic that I'm about to mention, but Jonathan Haidt and others have recently been arguing hardcore that loneliness and depression and other mental health metrics have been going up. And they argue that it coincides with the emergence of the smartphone.

[01:08:12] And so if you look at the data, like right around 2010, when smartphones might have been more likely to get into the hands of teens, you start seeing life satisfaction go down, loneliness go up, depression go up. I think that there's a lot of debate

[01:08:32] as to whether or not this is true. And again, it might turn on like specifics about the data that they're looking at and like causality. But it seems, doesn't seem- Because it coincides with the 2008 financial crisis. Yeah. Almost exactly. And you raised this point when we were doing

[01:08:52] our Ask Us Anything thing, that we're not in a good position to gauge the ways in which our, say, daughters, they interact with each other. Like it seems to us to be like a foreign, distant, you know, non kind of like loneliness combating

[01:09:11] ways of interacting, but they're not for them. Or at least it doesn't seem like they would. I mean, I will say I'm gratified that her college experience doesn't seem that different than my college experience in terms of just going at like, it's not that online focused.

[01:09:28] But yeah, the general point is right that like I think we aren't great judges of when they feel connected and when they don't because sometimes they're just not doing the things that we did to be connected. And you know, part of me thinks that

[01:09:45] if you think about it as this is just this general epidemic that's affecting everybody, I think you could quibble with that. I wonder though if just the sphere of a more extreme kind of loneliness, like not like, oh, she's only texting with her friends

[01:10:01] and not going to the local ice cream shop or getting beers and drinking in the school parking lot or whatever, like it's not just that, it's like, no, these are really socially isolated people who spend a ton of time online on like Reddit sites

[01:10:18] with people they don't know or whatever the sites are. Like, I wonder if just that sphere of like clearly lonely people and socially isolated people, people who don't feel a real connection with anybody no matter what kind it is like online or not,

[01:10:35] like if that the numbers of those kinds of people have gone up. Again, it could just be that they're now, they were always there, it's just like we didn't know about it because they weren't online, I don't know. Yeah, it's hard to know, for instance,

[01:10:48] like the incel movement, like whether there are more, I mean, I'm sure there are more. I mean, like taxi driver, not that he's exactly that, but it's like, that was a thing, you know, Holden Caulfield, like this has always been a part of literature and film.

[01:11:04] This article in Nature Review Psychology that's looking at these meta-analyses that have been done on this, they make an important point when you're trying to look at data on say the effects of social media on loneliness. It's actually hard to find effects of social media

[01:11:34] just causing loneliness overall. And they say that one of the reasons is because social media like has very different effects sometimes, so they say first, most macro level factors influence social relationships and by extension loneliness through multiple indirect pathways, some positive and some negative.

[01:11:53] These positive and negative pathways might counteract each other such that the net effect of specific macro level factors on loneliness is close to zero. For example, social media can lead to more frequent social contact and decrease people's sense of social isolation, but also displace offline interactions

[01:12:07] and increase online mobbing and cyber bullying, potentially increasing loneliness. So when you combine them, the effect looks like it's close to zero. And that's true, like lumping together anything online just can't be what's gonna yield the right answer about this stuff

[01:12:25] because I think we've seen how social media or at least internet access can actually probably got a lot of people through the pandemic in ways that they wouldn't have been able to get through. Yeah, and connects us with like old friends. I mean, like unfortunately now that Facebook

[01:12:42] is not like usable, at least I don't use it. I knew what people from my high school were doing. I knew, like I definitely had more interaction with like academic people that I knew and liked. Like I kind of miss those days.

[01:12:55] They seem innocent where you would just post stuff. Normally you would just be joking around with people that you had met at conferences and or family or your like aunt. That was, I thought pretty healthy. Like this whole thing of Facebook like having a politically poisonous effect

[01:13:12] is like, I never saw that. People say that about YouTube too. And like my YouTube is like guided meditations and film essays. Like it's the healthiest thing that I do is go to YouTube. So like, I think it is really hard. Some people use it in a way

[01:13:30] that gets you more connected with people. And some people go down like terrible rabbit holes and it just kind of increases and highlights their isolation. Right, so I think it's a mistake to just, you know like John Height is, I think he just came out with a book

[01:13:46] where he's just like, no look, it's clear. Don't give your child a smartphone. Like just don't. And I don't know, like it feels like you are also taking away a large part of their ability to interact with their peers. You know the philosophy that I had was

[01:14:02] if smartphones are shitty for you, I want my daughter to be shitty in the same way that her friends are shitty so that like at least she doesn't feel like so different. Yeah, in the same way I'm shitty. Drag her down. Yeah, I agree.

[01:14:19] That was never a tempting thing just cause I, you know, like she does a lot of funny shit on that phone. Like even just us, like just connecting me to her and like just stuff I know she does with her friends

[01:14:32] and stuff like that, like that all seems good. It's obviously you don't, she doesn't cut it off at exactly the right point where it's like optimal for her wellbeing. So, you know, she can get lost for, she can lose a couple of hours on Instagram or whatever.

[01:14:46] But, you know, it's like I feel like that's a symptom and there's something, if there's a problem, it's deeper than cell phones. Like cell phones just gives this new outlet for something that is already maybe a little bit corrupted or something.

[01:15:05] Yeah, so what I'm now really curious about given the bowling alone stuff is, is there really something fundamentally different about the ways that he says we interacted when we were more engaged in this civic kind of stuff? Not like our opt-in friends,

[01:15:27] like the way that we do it now, our opt-in TV, opt-in friends. Is there something about these kind of communities that you're forced to be a part of that have any sort of protective effect? And I don't know what the answer to that is,

[01:15:44] but he points out like religion has, like religious participation declined, I think he points out. But it's not that people were saying that they were less religious. It's just that religion became this sort of individualized thing. Like pick your own, there was a sociologist that came up

[01:16:02] with a term called Sheilaism that was a result of a set of interviews that he was doing with people about religion. And Sheila was just one of the interviewees. And Sheilaism just means people who pick and choose from different religious traditions and make it their own. Like smorgasbord.

[01:16:17] Exactly, where you're getting the religious part but you are sidestepping any of the community and tradition and really responsibility. You know like. Yeah, instead of going to church, you're doing guided meditations on YouTube. You know like that's a different kind of thing.

[01:16:36] You didn't mention that slow motion Tom Brady running is probably another popular YouTube suggestion for you. I was never into anything involving Tom Brady that wasn't directly on the football. That wasn't like deflating balls in slow motion. Like there's this documentary

[01:16:56] where he like makes out with his kid. What? I mean not makes out, but like gives him a big old kiss on the lips that doesn't, it's not even like a peck. All right, well last thing before we wrap up. There is this one idea that Putnam considers

[01:17:12] which is that it's like kind of women's lib that is causing this. And I think he ends up dismissing it. But the idea is that women used to like be a big part of civic engagement. They had all these clubs and like, I don't know Tupperware parties.

[01:17:35] Yeah, and no, but like more PTA involvement, more like women's groups and all that has gone down as they have been perhaps mistakenly allowed into the workplace. And like he kind of says, which I like, like it could be that like that explains also the men's drop

[01:17:57] but like it's not like men are all doing like half of the housework now that women are working. Yeah, even if that's true for women that now that they're working there, they have less time to do all this volunteer stuff. That wouldn't explain the men's.

[01:18:12] But I did wonder if like, it's not just women working. It's also just men working more, just everyone just seems to work more now. And like, I don't know what the studies are about like number like hours, but it seems like the average working American

[01:18:30] works more hours now. And also the work kind of bleeds into their other time to an extent that that might have an effect both for men and women. What do you think about that? Yeah, it seems like it has to be true that women joining the workforce

[01:18:47] had an effect on women's civic engagement. And I think it is also true that women just tended to be more like women are more religious, they're more likely to attend church and do stuff like that. And if you're forced to work and you're just tired,

[01:18:59] you're less likely to do that. But I do think that that's the plausible explanation is that our leisure time has gone down. Yeah, like just like unqualified leisure time especially. Yeah, and we're also like to get back to the other point,

[01:19:15] we're maximizing the efficiency of our leisure time, not just through entertainment, but you think about like there used to be singles bars. There were people would go in like the same city and meet each other. And now that's all been sort of co-opted by algorithms.

[01:19:35] I do think this has to be the thing. It used to be you go home and either you're just gonna sit there and like not do anything, or maybe listen twice a week to your favorite radio program or something. And so like there's just gonna be more incentive

[01:19:53] to go out then than there is now. Now you can like, and especially if that combines with maybe working more hours, by the time you get home, you're already tired. Yeah, you wanna throw on a Veep or a Righteous Gemstones

[01:20:08] or like something that's genuinely like funny and good. And it's not just like, oh man, I don't wanna watch Fantasy Island. Yeah, totally like that. Love Boat I wasn't allowed to watch because I was too little and it was like adult themed.

[01:20:25] Oh yeah, there was always a lot of kissing. I do like at the end Putnam is talking about like what is to be done. And he had this, I don't know why, but this actually made me think highly of him

[01:20:44] when he says, look, if we're looking at these overall trends we have to count the costs and the benefits of community engagement. And he says, we must not romanticize small town middle-class civic life in the America of the 1950s. In addition to the deleterious trends

[01:21:01] emphasized in this essay, recent decades have witnessed a substantial decline in intolerance and probably also an overt discrimination in those beneficent trends may be related in complex ways to the erosion of traditional social capital. We used to just meet at KKK meetings. Exactly, yeah.

[01:21:18] Reconcile the insights of this approach with the undoubted insights offered by Mancur Olson and others who stress that closely knit social, economic and political organizations are prone to inefficient cartelization in what political economists term rent seeking and ordinary men and women call corruption.

[01:21:32] You always like when they say like, that's a part of the Paul Blumen you. Actually this bad thing is good. Well, it's that, you know what I liked is that he spent clearly a lot of time arguing for this position

[01:21:46] but he's like, listen, like I have to admit that it could very well be that like there are some bad things that I have not like been paying attention to. So he's not like just discounting his whole thesis. He's saying there's bound to be costs associated with it.

[01:22:04] So he's not just built like, I guess what I like is he's not just building a case with only positive evidence. He's like giving- And he's not alarmist about it. Exactly, exactly. You know, it's not like, I don't know, John Hite gene twinge or whatever

[01:22:19] where it's like just like take your kid's phones and drive it out to the middle of the desert and bury it. And in fact, yeah. Or your kid is gonna be depressed. Yeah, sorry, now that you say that though, like the article does read,

[01:22:35] I know this is like a journal, but it seems like it's aimed at a popular audience. It does seem like if a paper like this were written now, it would just be more alarmist. But who knows? I mean, like this is one where I don't think

[01:22:52] I can trust my general sense of things. I don't know about if I can trust the studies either, but like, I don't know like how different, even something like, you know, the alarmism of articles is now compared to then. It certainly seems worse, but-

[01:23:11] Yeah, you have this problem that their alarmist ones are shared more, right? It's not like I'm reading every New Yorker article or every article from The Economist. New York review of books. Yeah. Yeah, well, but there's one thing I can say for sure

[01:23:26] is that if you're going bowling with friends, you're not bowling alone. That's so weird, right? Have you seen a single person bring this up in anything you've read about bowling alone? No, it's like a tagline that is actually like not, it's so weird. It's so weird.

[01:23:44] Everybody just takes it to be- Yeah. Yeah. All right, join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.