298. Neil deGrasse Tyson — Starry Messenger (2)
2 (12m 6s):
There's an entire chapter there on law and order where I explore what it means to have a law that applies to everyone and what the origin of that law might have been. And so, but you wanna know, should we tax more? Should we tax less? I will. I I'd like to vote on that, but I'm not going to tell you how to think about taxes, but I will discuss with you some consequences of high taxes or low taxes that you might not have otherwise considered. That's all this book does. And now we live in a time where someone tells you something different from how you think, and the immediately wanna fight you on the premise that you're trying to change their view.
2 (12m 53s):
And I'm not really trying to do that. I'll just give a simple example in the meat eaters and vegetarian chapter. There's some people who are vegetarian, cuz they just simply don't want to kill animals. Okay. And fine. Again, it's a free country. Eat plants if you want. This is not the issue here. Those same people might have a humane mouse trap in their basement. They don't wanna snap the neck of a mouse that wanders too far. So they, so it's, it's trapped live. They gotta check on it every often, every couple of days, cuz mice dry up really quickly. So you gotta, you gotta check up on 'em and then you find the mouse and you release it into the wild.
2 (13m 33s):
You feel good cuz you didn't, you didn't kill the mouse. What you maybe you didn't realize that by returning the mouse to the wild, you have doomed it to be consumed by all manner of Woodland predators from owls, foxes, snakes, crows, and the average life expectancy of a mouse in the wild is between nine, 18 months. Whereas in the comfort of your basement, they could live up to six years. So here you are wanting to save the lives of, of rodents. Yet you are dooming them to an early death, as long as you're self aware of that.
2 (14m 14s):
And you still want to doom it to an early death, go right ahead. It's your house. Okay. But I'll also call to your attention as I do in the book that you're probably living in a house made from the wood of 50 trees each, which could possibly lived a hundred years, but didn't because they were cut down to make the two by fours, the structural members, the floorboards, the, the, the side panels, all of this and each tree produces about 15 times the mass of your mouse in oxygen every day, every day.
2 (14m 57s):
So it's 15 times the mass and the tree is home to birds and insects and fungus and, and, and all kinds of things. So who do you think nature cares more about the one ounce mouse or the trees that you cut down to build the house you lived in to then doom the mouse to an early death. So if we're gonna talk about your urges and, and, and, and postures, you are taking in life and in civilization, because you think they are righteous pause for a minute and analyze how righteous it might be.
2 (15m 37s):
And this book is a total exploration. Oh, by the way, there's some topics that I have no opinion on that in the book. I don't have an opinion on taxes. I'll tell you why there was gonna be a chapter on wealth and poverty. And I assembled all of my scientific analysis of it and it didn't make a full chap. It wasn't a full length chapter. So I couldn't justify here's your, your next book? Eight pages. Yeah. I, I had maybe eight pages. I have to think longer and harder about wealth and poverty. Hard problem. Before I can start jumping in there. I had, it's a hard problem. And I had some good nuggets in there, but not a chapter's worth. So that's, that was on the cutting room floor. So, so it's really just whatever. Oh, and I introduce every now and then an alien to, to observe people's conduct and assess what they think is going on versus what we think is going on.
2 (16m 27s):
Cuz they have no biases. I'll give an example. You didn't ask, but I'm putting it in here. I'm in on the role here. So that's alright, go roll baby. One of them is suppose there were aliens who were sort of sentient plants. Okay. And they're coming to visit earth. Earth was in their tour guide, the tour catalog because earth, they know had rain forests and a huge plant di biodiversity. And so they just wanna see what's going on here. And these are aliens that live off of sunlight and on their ship, they just have lamps that they lay in and that that's where they get their energy. So they've never killed anything in their entire lives.
2 (17m 8s):
The, the idea of killing something to survive is like completely far into them. So they arrive at earth and they see people who kill animals to live, but they don't really understand animals. Okay. But they do understand plants, okay. Plants are their brethren. So they find another category of humans that exclusively kills plants for their survival. They would freak out, okay. They would say, what
3 (17m 38s):
Are you doing? What? These are all people
2 (17m 41s):
They're just sitting there, innocently, gathering sunlight. They can't even run away from you. And what are you doing? You're hacking, you're cutting them down. And you're eating them. Not only that you are harvesting their reproductive organs, especially to be consumed the flowers, the nuts, the berries, the, the, all of this. They would just freak and they'd continue to watch. And they'd look at people shopping in whole foods. And they see people in the P as, as in as infanticide because what are they doing? They're specially buying baby carrots, baby spinach, baby artichokes, baby eggplant be sprouts.
2 (18m 26s):
And so the most barbaric living things on earth would be the humans who are harvesting plants to be eaten and they quickly run away. Okay. And they say, I think there's no sign of intelligent life on earth. Now of course we have to kill something to eat. Except there is an exception. There are two foods that provide full compliment of carbo, of, of carbohydrates, fat and proteins, which are the three basic branches of nourishment. We need to survive. There are two foods that do that, where you don't have to kill anything and you know what, they are milk and honey milk.
2 (19m 7s):
And honey's even in the Bible milk and the land of milk and honey
1 (19m 10s):
Vegan say that it's exploiting the bees labor.
2 (19m 14s):
There's the problem. So now you have this add-on to vegetarianism, which is provided by a philosopher who decided that let's just add this into the, into the mix. So which in fact doesn't kill anything, but is excluded simply because it subtracts nourishments for be babies and, and, and, and, and cow babies. Okay, well, so this is being very speciesist cuz what it says is you have my full permission to kill any plants you want, but don't even take these nourishments, which don't kill anything.
2 (19m 56s):
And, and you can't eat those now. I think bees don't want it. Don't like it when you steal honey, but they can probably make more cow would rather its milk went to a calf, but it can surely make more. So these aliens, all I'm saying is if there's meat, aliens and, and vege and, and vegetable aliens, and they come to earth, the only people they will not resent are is anyone who eats milk and honey, cause those are the ones that don't kill anything, a one chance to not have to kill any lifeform at all. And it's excluded in the vegan diet. So that's an interesting sort of dichotomy there in our behavior.
1 (20m 37s):
Yeah. I like the alien perspective. If you brought aliens down here and they observed our obsession with how much melanin people have in their skin to reference your race chapter, they'd think we're nuts. I mean, what, what you, what do you have charts? How do you, how do you judge, this reminds me of that star Trek, the original series episode where the aliens were divided between those that are black on one side and white on the other side. But there were two different races and, and Kirk and Spock are confused and the alien says, you don't understand don't you see he's black on the white right side. And I, and I'm black on the left side and everybody knows the ones that are black on the right side are the narrative Wells and they don't work. And, and they're not as smart. And Spock is like, what?
1 (21m 16s):
Right,
2 (21m 17s):
Right.
1 (21m 18s):
Yeah.
2 (21m 18s):
So Jean robury made it clear gene Roddenberry as well as, as well as our guy from the Twilight zone brought Sterling. Yeah. They, they both used science fiction as the platform for social commentary. Yeah. In ways that if you just simply made a show with direct social commentary, it probably wouldn't get through, particularly at those times, late 1950s and mid sixties. So yeah.
1 (21m 46s):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm free to, to set up mouse traps in my house, cuz it's my house. I can do what I want. Okay. If I'm a cake baker in Colorado and I don't wanna bake a cake for a gay couple, is that my freedom to do that? Or if you want to use an earlier example, it's my restaurant. If I don't wanna serve black people, I, I should be free not to do so. Or if I'm governor of a state of let's just say Alabama and I don't wanna segregate the schools. I, I don't want to integrate the schools. I'm gonna keep the schools segregated, you know, segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. And so on at which point, you know, Kennedy, was it Kennedy or Eisenhower Senate and federal troops that said, no, this is the law of the land we are integrating.
1 (22m 26s):
And if you don't do it, we're sending men with guns. Right. So here you see this tension, to what extent does the government send men with guns to change your moral behavior?
2 (22m 37s):
Yeah. So, so moral code, you know, where we get our morality is an interesting question. My view on that is that we, we sort of it's, it emerges from rational discourse in an analysis of whatever a prior moral code might have been in your land. And if you look at that trend over the decades and certainly over the centuries, as the quote goes, the moral arc, have you had a whole book with this title? The moral arc? No. Did, was it your book or am I confusing you with Steven Pinker? Yeah.
1 (23m 12s):
The moral arc is mine and yeah,
2 (23m 14s):
But
1 (23m 14s):
He, but he's close.
2 (23m 15s):
Thank you. Good. Yeah. He's close. Yeah. We're we're in the same sandbox here. Yeah. So the moral arc does bend towards progress progress in the sense of progressive thinking where there's equality there's, we're being just means you, you treat people as you would treat yourself, right? This goes way back, you know, even to, you know, Jesus' time. So that seems to be a pretty powerful potent way to shape your, your society and your civilization. What I would say is the posture I would take as it's, as it's expressed in the law and order book is you want to segregate schools.
