Exploring Cultural Innovation and Survival of Religious Traditions

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

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

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

[00:00:00]

Simone Collins: Hello, everyone. I'm really excited because after listening to Sarah Hader on a podcast for.

Months, maybe years at this point, she is here on our podcast and we're so excited to have her on if you don't know her, she is on sub stack. Her sub stack is called hold that thought. You can find it at newsletter. sarahhater. com. That's H A I D E R. And on Twitter, she's Sarah, the hater as an H A I D E R, which is.

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

Sarah Haider: Thank you for having me. And let's jump

Malcolm Collins: right into the tweet that got us connected because I think it's good framing for the topic of this show.

Let's go. All right. Let's do it. Do you want to read it, Simone, or? Yeah,

Simone Collins: I'll read it. The other. The other day, Sarah asked if there were any groups slash resources [00:01:00] out there for lack of a better word that offer traditional parenting, but with a secular or rationalist approach. And someone from probably like a follower of this podcast followed us and followed Sarah and Connected us saying, Hey, you should probably talk to someone in Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: Let's start with whatever motivated this tweet.

Simone Collins: Yeah. What made you decide to tweet that? What do you think in there?

Sarah Haider: Yeah, it's been in the works for a while, but I am a new mom, new ish. I'm a toddler. So I was looking to connect with other parents. I have been for some time now that it's, like a play date age.

And, just thinking about how to think about parenting, like what are the models that make sense? Now we're at a point where we're thinking about, school, preschool, homeschool, Montessori, so all these big questions are coming up and I'm not the kind of person who trusts establishment, like the kind of, Normie options make me nervous sometimes.

And I actually have good reason to feel that way about our education system. I didn't love it when [00:02:00] I was going through it. I went to public school. I don't know if you guys did as well, but terrible experience. I just can't the prison metaphor is a good one, but I think it really killed my love of learning, which I had very naturally, same

Simone Collins: contractors.

Actually in the Bay Area, when I went to school, the same architectural firm did design most of the jails and the high schools. So

Sarah Haider: I think they had the same parent company that was creating the cafeteria food. Oh yeah. No, I

Malcolm Collins: imagine that's true in a lot of areas because it makes sense. If you're winning government contracts anyway, it is a school to pipeline ecosystem in a lot of these districts, right?

One and the other. Yeah.

Sarah Haider: Luckily I was not in one of those. places, but I was definitely in a like testing, get good grades and compete in incessantly have 10 hours of homework a night. A school environment. It was not amazing. I was thinking about that with my son as well.

And my background is actually in new atheism, which we were touching on a little bit.

Malcolm Collins: So for context, [00:03:00] for our viewers. This is I think, germane for the topic of this podcast, somebody who rose to fame and the new atheist community, Simone and I really rose, like we were mostly affiliated with the EA rationalist, less wrong community before this.

So obviously a bit of a different community, but very aligned, culturally speaking.

Sarah Haider: Definitely big areas of overlap for sure. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And the pronatalist movement in many ways within those communities represents a group that's Hey, we threw out a lot of stuff that maybe we shouldn't throw it out.

And it's hard to find people willing to engage. With any aspect of the traditionalist idea, like we often use the term neotrad to mean, and when I'm explaining it to reporters, I'm like what it means is we look through various older traditions for social technology that we can re implement and that still makes sense within our social and technological context right [00:04:00] now.

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

There are lots of social technologies that have evolved and can be re screwed together. That aren't just remove boundaries. Another thing that I was talking to somebody about recently that really colored this idea for me is for a long time. I've actually speaking to a reporter at the economist about this today.

Technology like societal progress has been. Tearing down fences and we didn't know why they were there. It's been very much okay there's this random rule here, let's get rid of it. And up until today, we're now finally at a part where we have torn out so much of the base infrastructure that people are now realizing, Oh, a lot of that infrastructure had a purpose.

And we get the opportunity to, we can either [00:05:00] rebuild things exactly the way it used to be. Or we can intentionally build the social infrastructure to really it. Optimize it going into the future in a way that humanity never really has which is really interesting to me. But anyway, yeah, just some context there.

Sarah Haider: Yeah. Yeah. So those could be I've always been like rationalist curious. Like I've always been like poking around in the blogs and not participating, but lurking. So I'm familiar just broadly speaking with some of the kind of movements and tendencies and values of like the rationalist sphere.

And I definitely feel that. That I align with that in a Personality sense. It's harder when, when we get to policies that it can get trickier there, because then that requires us to have the same facts on hand. So I don't know how much, maybe we'll fork a little bit when it comes to that, but I definitely, I like that approach.

The kind of optimistic yet grounded in like a real reality, let's engineer something. [00:06:00] I like that. And I wanted to be able to talk to people who could, I like the way you put it Malcolm, I like that you put, that you can look back into the past as also, also something that we can look towards, not just, we don't just have to come up with new ideas.

We can look back and think about the wisdom of our, forefathers or whatever. But that's a weird word, isn't it? Wisdom, because I don't know if they knew what they were doing, but nevertheless, it came together in a useful way for them. And I, I've come around to appreciating that as well.

I think a lot of people have walked that path. In the past like 10 years or so in the atheist, like new atheist kind of community. Not so much. Like there, there definitely was a big woke woke pilling that happened and like atheism. I don't know how you guys feel about that. I feel like I know, but

Malcolm Collins: It seems like the parts of it that survived actually became like anti feminist channels and stuff like that.

Almost like dedicated skeptics [00:07:00] of whatever the dominant cultural group is. And I think that, we see, I want to say they're true colors, but what they are and I suspect this is a genetic proclivity. The somewhat hard coded in some people that they get off most on just criticizing the dominant culture in our society.

And the dominant cultural perception from me growing up transitioned from. Theocratic perception of the dominant culture, which is what I believed was the dominant culture when I was a kid, and I think it was accurate to a woke theology which is, it gives them something new to criticize and yeah.

Sarah Haider: Yeah, maybe that, maybe there's definitely something to that about the public figures. Because certainly if you get popular in the new atheism movement, you are known to be like this big critic of religion and religious values. And I don't think that average atheist necessarily is that way.

Even if they like lurk around in the communities, they're not necessarily that way. So there's a misrepresentation [00:08:00] of the kinds of person who rises to the top in that space. I tried not to be too much that way. I was trying more to fight for the right to criticize religion because I come from a Muslim background.

In many Muslim majority countries, there's like nothing resembling freedom of speech or religion. And that sort of carries over into Muslim majority or just Muslim communities here in Western countries. Context as well, because there's so many of them, for multiple reasons and they're becoming very isolated.

And so you have this like mini nation and there's a, I think of a very a culture that is not open to dissent at all. So that's the kind of thing that I was talking about. And I, found that it was really hard to talk about Islam openly because there were some things you're not supposed to say, and that was one of the things you're not supposed to say.

Say and so that was my entry way into pushing back against, the normal dominant, like political paradigm. And my instinct, because [00:09:00] I came in from that background was to look away from religion when I'm looking or even religious communities or anything resembling religious communities or traditional communities or anything like that, like it was just, I don't think that.

I'm a person that's easy to bias. Nevertheless, this was my social context. This is everybody I knew. And this is still many of the people I know. So traditional is a bad word in the way religion is a bad word. It's it's the way that people think about it is.

Definitely tied strongly with women's disempowerment, all these like social ills that now we can talk about in a kind of a different way but it's impossible to move that conversation forward in some circles. So I was, when I was tweeting that I was actually wanting something else, I don't want to, I don't want to, be a part of the atheist parenting communities.

I feel like they are, when they're not looking at traditional cultures or even religious practices [00:10:00] associated with the religious, we don't have to accept it for the religious reason. We can accept it for a different reason. I feel like in an abandoning all of that. Or refusing to take a good look at it.

They were abandoning a huge and important source of knowledge. And as you said, social technology, so

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I'll elevate a a misconception here, but I think a misconception that also delineates probably where some of the negative parenting practices come from. So if you're talking about The rationalist community is 99 percent atheist.

They just don't primarily identify as atheists. And one thing that we often elevate on this show is that when a community identifies in a specific way, status hierarchies within that community can often begin to form. With how far you other yourself along the metric of identification within the community.

So an example here would be, if I'm a goth and I meet another goth, how much that person has othered themselves from mainstream society, whether it's through piercings or facial mods or a weird way of dressing, that is my immediate [00:11:00] assumption of their goth status. And so when a community has identified primarily, primary mechanism of identification is atheist you get How do you be more it's and other people can become a bit of a part of the status hierarchy Which can make it really hard to pull from these older social technology

Simone Collins: Oh, but I also think that a big problem with people looking at older social technologies and traditionalism Like you say is they often look at oh Oh, so this the traditionalism equals female disempowerment or a social isolation and they often do but I think that Often people look at the worst devices of the worst aspects of these traditional cultures and think of those as the defining aspects of those cultures when really what we talk about a lot in the book that Malcolm wrote the practice guide to crafting religion is that really the key is it has to be a hard culture and by hard we mean a culture where you Make serious sacrifices.

You other yourself to a certain extent, like you look funny or you dress funny, you have a weird name, you live differently. And you [00:12:00] really lean into and invest in, in that tradition and religion in a way that leads to benefits. So for example,

Malcolm Collins: it's hard to adopt a sense of identity if you're not making those kinds of daily sacrifices with a community and many of those

Simone Collins: sacrifices is also.

Are the things that do impart strength. So while female disempowerment does not impart strength as far as I'm concerned, things like fasting do because they help you develop stronger inhibitory controls.

And that's hard. People don't like fasting or giving things up. It's pretty fricking difficult.

I

Sarah Haider: might even push back in the female disempowerment thing, because I think there's push and pulls with all the different choices that we make in terms of, okay, we're going to allow more. for something here. There is sometimes there is a loss on the other side. It's not visible entirely, but I think that all the ways in which we have allowed women, especially young women greater autonomy and control over their life choices.

There has been a negative consequence for those same [00:13:00] women, I think, when they become mothers because it's the same forces that give you more autonomy as an individual weaken the social ties that are very, they're important for families and for mothers. Yeah. Or when they try to get married, for example, if you have a super

Malcolm Collins: sexually free

Simone Collins: partner and you try to get married,

Malcolm Collins: it's hard.

Yeah. Or a society with equal wages being harder for women to get partners if they always want a partner who's earning more than them or

Sarah Haider: I mean there's so many ways that I think that they're, I wish that there was a more open discussion about some of these things. But it is hard to do.

So I think I, and I definitely agree with you in terms of, Hierarchies within communities. This is why I, when I said rationalist, I wasn't even sure. Do I want to be a part of a community where everybody considers themselves a rationalist? Because yes, I found like within those communities, I think the rationalists really enjoy.

contradicting each other in

Malcolm Collins: an intelligent way. They absolutely do. I've written long things about how that community fell apart. It fell apart because it was a community where status hierarchy was determined by knowledge like scientifically backed knowledge. [00:14:00] The problem is that if you try to front with a scientific study that everyone knows then that actually hurts your position because it shows that you thought that something that was commonly known was not commonly known.

So you can only really front with either. Scientific studies that go against what anyone would think is true are scientific studies that are fringe or rare findings, which leads to the communities becoming what I call, as a slur for them, butter eaters, because they'd have these things where they'd eat full sticks of butter every day, because there was like one study that said it was a good idea.

And

Simone Collins: because it was an obscure study, they looked good or like extra special for doing the weird thing, the obscure thing that people didn't know about.

Sarah Haider: I didn't believe it discourages following actually it does that's a community that discourages true followers, which you do need in a healthy community, actually,

Malcolm Collins: but then this becomes a thing if we're restructuring culture, right?

We've got to think about how do we prevent these sort of downstream effects that you're easy to [00:15:00] miss. You say something like, I often think of culture crafting as being like a monkey's paw. Like you don't, if you're not really careful in how you word things, like I want rationalism, and it's define rationalism.

They're like, scientific studies. And then the monkey's paw does its horrible wish. Or I want atheism. And it's okay, how do you define atheism? Lack of old traditions. And then the monkey paw does its horrible wish. And so it's, if you're building something, especially for your kids, for your family, you've got to think, so I would love.

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

Or and before we go further, It's useful if you talk about the branch of Islamic culture you came from because one of the things we're always talking about in this podcast is one, the difference in Muslim and Western marriage strategies. One of the [00:16:00] ones that we say is very interesting is Andrew Tate has taken like some Muslim strategies around marriage structure and tried to almost secularize it into a new family structure.

And I'm like, that's interesting, but I don't know if that's something that Western men should be emulating. But anyway, yeah. So I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on like. What do you think Islam gets right, especially that you think Western culture doesn't?

Sarah Haider: Okay. So let me start from the first question, which was, how did I grow up?

I I was raised Shia Muslim, which is like a minority, but it's the Iran people and Iraq. And But I was schooled in the Sunni like tradition because that was the local community where I grew up. So that's where I was going to Sunday school. And that's, those are the like religious, like competitions I was involved in.

So it was, in my mind, actually the two traditions are very, um, mixed up. I'm actually confused and it's only because I've been doing this kind of activism for a long time and this topic has come up that it has, I've been able I, it's but it's like [00:17:00] saying that I was Catholic and also Protestant from evangelical on one side of my family and Catholic from my mom's side.

But I think that, I there's a lot that I like about Islam. And there's a lot that I think is unique and interesting. So I, it's actually not a hard question for me to answer at all. It's just that I think that on the whole, it is like deeply harmful. So I don't have any trouble talking about all the things that are great about it.

And but I think that what's fundamental to understand is that the internal logic of Islam is so alien. I think it's so different. It's not I didn't even appreciate how different, like how fundamentally different of a social structure it is. Until like now, I couldn't possibly, I couldn't, I'm not actually, we don't have the, we don't have the time.

We don't have the, I don't have the intelligence but I think that it's just something I've I'm coming to fully understand. If anybody wants to read up on this, Ernest Gellner is a scholar that I would recommend. He is so interesting that he wrote [00:18:00] several books that are, he also, he wrote about like philosophy, words linguistics, but also Muslim society and civil society in particular.

What are the kinds of conditions that foster healthy civil society? So he took a look at Muslim societies, Asian societies, and the West and compared the ways that they structured power in the kinds of conditions that brewed. Very eye opening. What do you think

Malcolm Collins: you remember from this?

Just any specific you're

Sarah Haider: putting me on the spot. I, I think.

I don't know. I don't know. I would have to prep. I would have to because there were so many ideas

Malcolm Collins: about it.

Sarah Haider: We'll

Malcolm Collins: keep going. So what other specific things would you borrow from Islam for your kids?

Sarah Haider: Yeah. Back to that question as to what's good about it. One of the things I always liked about Islam is the way that it encouraged charitability amongst other Muslims.

So there's a requirement to give a certain percentage of your income to the community, the poor [00:19:00]

Simone Collins: really in the community.

Sarah Haider: And that

Simone Collins: is that Through any religious organization or just directly to, is it direct giving or through an organization?

Sarah Haider: I think it could be, I don't know if it's specified, but it could be anything.

It could be direct giving. You can, you

Malcolm Collins: look at the words of the text, because I was looking at this, it is implied that it's direct giving. Nice. I'm sure some people have, or, any tradition is going to over time have a lot of branches which end up hijacking this.

But it is actually pretty unique in that you do not get this in most Christian traditions where the expectation is that it goes through church infrastructure before reaching the poor, which is interesting. But continue.

Sarah Haider: Yeah. So I like that about it. I like that it was an expectation, almost like a tax, but Islam thinks of itself as very much a state religion.

And not. Not even something that you can pull apart and say, this is the state and this is the church. I think even that conception it reveals a kind of Western approach to politics and religion. And so [00:20:00] that, I, that whole infrastructure is not something I support.

Malcolm Collins: But it is worth elevating this concept because it's one that I would definitely talk about when you're trying to understand Islam as different from the other major religious traditions. Whereas I think Judaism is also pretty unique in this regard in that Judaism is really structured to be an ethno group slash state slash religion.

And. Not necessarily,

Sarah Haider: Ethno group, yes. But would you say state? So it depends on the

Malcolm Collins: period of Jewish history. If we're talking especially about a second temple period Judaism, it was structured ground up to be a state system. And what happened to Judaism was how a culture evolves when a religious system that is really meant to be operating a state no longer has a state to operate.

That's why the destruction of the second temple. Was so existential for the Jewish people and every exodus period was so existential for the Jewish people. And then it has obviously heavily modified itself since that period, but I think it's re Pulling [00:21:00] on now is the state of Israel. It's restructuring itself in that older fashion.

With Islam as you pointed out, but it is worth elevating here is it is a religion that is designed to be the state religion. And it doesn't function as effectively when it is not the state religion. And when it is not the state religion, it's always searching to become eventually a state religion.

Which can have positive and negative consequences depending on the, you might think only negative consequences, but

Sarah Haider: I think it's just as somebody who grew up, now I was raised primarily in the, I was born actually, I was born in Pakistan and I remember coming here, but it was quite young, still seven.

But a As, being raised in that religion that has all these instincts of a majority religion, that's the instinct of Islam. And that is part and parcel of even some of the celebrations, like Eid is supposed to be this public thing, that you all do together. The whole community is involved and it is happening publicly.

And for [00:22:00] Eid to be something like in the West where it's very private now, it's like you visit, you go visit somebody's house and then you take a drive and you visit somebody else's house. In Pakistan, it's In the streets, and then, and Bakra Eid, which is the one where they sacrifice the animals that's happening on the streets everywhere, it's a very public spectacle, and that's part of it, it's part of the thing, the celebration that this is public to be driven, into kind of a private, the private sphere.

I don't think Islam really thrives. And that's part of the reason I think diaspora communities that are Muslim feel a sense of like disorientation. Because I think that they're the instincts of the religious tradition that they have been brought up and do not fully and easily comport to being a minority in a country that has very different majoritaries.

Majority values and traditions. Judaism, I think it's, they don't struggle in the same way. I think that just because their history has for so long been in that position, I think they [00:23:00] tend to take it a little bit more. I did thrive actually. I think they thrive in that environment.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and now they do.

They thrive as subcultural groups was separated often like legal systems and stuff like that, which is really

Simone Collins: it's so interesting. The idea of a religion and culture that's optimized on a societal level rather than on an individual level, because I'm so used to growing up with the extreme opposite end of the spectrum.

Not that I was, my parents were, they called themselves born again, Buddhist. I really, they were like the most. Non religious people in the entire world, but they came from basically a Calvinist kind of background or Protestant background, which is just it's so individualistic that of course they would end up calling themselves born again Buddhists after a certain number of generations.

Like just doing their own thing. And their metaphysical beliefs were like a mixture of inspired by Scientology and other science fiction books and Buddhism and like whatever they saw on TV recently. And that. That was all just so on the local level, whereas here you're looking, with Islam at holidays they don't really make sense if it's not [00:24:00] literally on a community, not just a block party, but like the entire city, and that makes it really hard, I think, for you to try to replicate some of those things that worked well for your own kids, because

Malcolm Collins: they're not going to have that community.

Did you find the most utility in it?

Sarah Haider: Yeah, sorry, repeat that first bit.

Malcolm Collins: Which holidays did you find the most utility in? If you were going to practice them for your kids, and you could have them practice at a society wide level, which ones would you be like, this partakes a good value or is a useful social technology?

Sarah Haider: I wouldn't do any of the Muslim ones. I wouldn't. I like Christmas. So I think that is what I would do. There's only two in Islam and one is from a kid's perspective, I didn't think either was spectacularly interesting unless you went outside and then you had a blast.

The one where you kill all the animals, that one was actually traumatizing. I remember I, when it was, when I was young, I was taken to a slaughter of a cow and I saw it happen and I remember the blood, I can't forget. And I don't even have a fantastic memory, but I remember everything about that.

I [00:25:00] remember the, like the butcher son playing in the blood. Cause he was just like for him it was just whatever. I'm just having a good time. Yeah. Yes. And I was just like, dad, I want to go home. I need to go home. Remember just all these animals on the streets. It was not.

Maybe it's something you come around to as you grow, if you grow up in it, and then you're an adult, and then you have all these great memories associated with it, but just as a child, it wasn't it wasn't my favorite.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, what's the other one?

Sarah Haider: The other one is it's like Christmas, but you get money.

At the end of it, you get money instead of presents, you get money. But I like presents better because I think it's personal, like I, I like that somebody is thinking of me rather than just handing me a 20 bill

Simone Collins: and for kids. Oh, you would probably like our religion. We'll have to have a separate conversation about that at some point, but I think that's better for her podcast, but I was going to say,

Malcolm Collins: It's a great thing because it's like people are always telling us, Oh, a constructed religion.

That's meant just for the best interest of your kids with, unique holidays that would never catch on. And I'm like, Christmas and Santa Claus. What are you talking about? Obviously this stuff can catch on. Yeah.

Sarah Haider: [00:26:00] But Christmas is also one of those holidays that works when it's done publicly.

When it's a season, when it's the colors, and it's the warmth, and everyone's making those cookies, and you have the smells that are associated with Christmas.

Simone Collins: Although, our kids talk about The future police, which is like the Santa of our weird holiday, our flagship holiday, more than they talk about Santa.

They proselytize our religion more than we do. Like they'll a babysitter will come over and they'd be like, the future police got this for me because I did this. And like the future police might do this or that. And they keep our babysitters are giving us the side eye. And we're like it's a thing.

I don't know. You brailed it, Simone. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Another question I wanted to ask, which is one, or I actually wanted to talk to a Muslim scholar about this. Okay I'm the wrong person then

Sarah Haider: for it. I can tell you that right now. Yeah, you're

Malcolm Collins: probably the wrong person, but you might be just the right person because you have lived in both cultures and you're from outside the community.

is I have never fully gotten the animosity affiliated with the Sunni Shia split. When I look at something like the Catholic Protestant [00:27:00] split, for example, I can understand why there's animosity. There's two completely different systems for how to determine what's true. When I look at splits within Jewish communities, I can understand where that animosity comes from.

But the Sunni Shia split doesn't seem to be a thing. Theological split it seems to be a purely governance system split And so my thesis is that the and you can tell me if I'm wrong about this is the animosity is Actually because Islam is designed to be a state system So the government split matters so much more than it would in another religion Is that it?

It

Sarah Haider: is. Yeah, the politics can't be separated and it was a political difference and it was a meaningful political difference. And then the two sects are, they do practice differently. And I mean it, it differs a little bit from country to country. Like I, I was talking to this.

ex Shia from, ex Muslim from Saudi who was Shia, but in her experience with Shiaism is not mine. My, my experience with Shiaism was as a minority religion within a majority Sunni population. That's how Shiaism has developed as well, [00:28:00] actually. So there's like layers to all of this.

But I get getting back a little bit to the local and individualistic aspect of Christianity. I think that's key to, it's key to how well it has functioned in this, specific modern liberal kind of societal context. And I Why it has just worked in tandem with developing so many interesting and innovative, like not just technologies, but social systems and ideologies and ways of thinking about the world.

I think that has been, it is key and without it, you end up in a completely different space, but I will add that it's not the case that, Islam is just like centrally controlled. It's actually not really centrally controlled at all. Yet there is this, high culture, like this high Islam that matters.

There are folk traditions, but those tend to be the the remnants of whatever the, [00:29:00] that, that region used to believe in before it was conquered by Muslim army. So that, those sort of folk religion of Bangladesh looks very different than the folk religion of, Bangladesh.

the turkey. Having said that, I feel as if that those are disappearing. And that's, that is what you would expect over time as, literacy, increases everywhere. And then you're able to look at the book and determine that, okay this is the originalist interpretation of Islam is actually the true one.

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

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I definitely feel sad losing that, that cultural diversity. I, okay, so another question I have for you, because you're talking about like the Christian system, which I will admit has led to a [00:30:00] tremendous amount of technological and economic growth, but there was a period Where a form of Islam caused, one of the greatest technological leaps in human history, during the Islamic golden age.

Do you think that was so a lot of people will say that was just serendipity, like the libraries were destroyed, the area became less economically powerful, and that's why. Do you think that's why? Or do you think that there was a shift in the theology of Islam that made it harder for modern Islam to match the technological greatness of its ancestors, or a shift in underlying technological trends?

Sarah Haider: I think there's a lot of historical reasons that are just like, that is how it played out and that is why it happened. And I, it is. Also the case that the, this is the benefit of having kind of a religion in which the political rulers do have spiritual power and spiritual leadership positions, because if they happen to be liberal and if they happen to be tolerant and interested in technology and innovation, which is what That is what [00:31:00] I would put as the central factor in why the Golden Age looks so different than other times.

However, I'm not prepared to in detail give you, a

Malcolm Collins: thesis on this, and you can tell me if it sounds wrong to you or right. So I think there were two key factors. One is I think that Islam pushes a drive towards a form of academic study of stuff like math as a way of understanding God. And so long as math and chemistry didn't directly contradict Islamic scripture, it could be seen as a theological pursuit.

And that is why during the period where before, technology got so hard that it started, Contradicting scripture. It, it really synergized very well.

Sarah Haider: Isn't it? Isn't the but, but that was the Catholic church. Oh, the Catholic, what? We never did math

Malcolm Collins: like Muslims. I mean it No, but I mean in the sense

Sarah Haider: of that, that's how they approached the study of the natural world as a study of God because you were studying his creation.

Yeah. So it was all part and parcel of the same [00:32:00] thing. It, the this science as something oppositional. Yeah. You probably, that's

Malcolm Collins: a good point. You've got all the Blake, Gregor, Mendel and everything like that, and all the study outta the. monasteries. So yeah, it's basically

Simone Collins: closer to God until it doesn't, and then it's not okay.

But then

Malcolm Collins: The secondary thesis that I had which could also be wrong, but it's one that informs my thinking a lot is it was the spread of Sufism that ended up collapsing the culture among the elite circles that allowed them to look for sources of knowledge in what we would argue is corrupted mental states.

I. e. emotions and visions are a better source of truth than study of the natural world. But you could say maybe that's wrong too.

Sarah Haider: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about that. I would have to give that one a little bit of thought. I'm not automatically dismissing it in the way the first theory makes me think I don't know how

Malcolm Collins: to

Sarah Haider: distinguish it.

I do think

Malcolm Collins: it's worse than studying these things. If a culture was productive at one time and not productive at another time, and you can isolate what elements changed, then I can know what elements are useful to build into my own family's culture. Good [00:33:00] point. In a world where fertility is collapsing, we, those of us with high fertility, could end up having a disproportionate play in the future.

So

Sarah Haider: Let me I think that at least in modern times, this is not a deeper going back to the core of what Islam might be a point. But I think that it, what it is in the modern world, at least. The example of the West definitely played a part in how Muslims viewed science and technology in general, because they were able to look across the pond, and see where science took all these guys who thought that they were going closer to God.

But now we know that they aren't close. Yeah. And how did that go? Yeah. Yeah. So there's that example that they can always point to and they can say, no, they looked at. They approached the world in this fashion. They abandoned the revelation and instead started using their reason to make out all kinds of things.

And now they have strip clubs. [00:34:00] This is, it was just this explicit example of, you don't really have to think through it. You don't really have to, you just see it play out and I think that has a huge impact on how Muslims think of even modernity, right? Like modernity is a bad word.

Capitalism, like all this consumerism, like that all just goes together really. But in the Muslim world, they really do. Modernity really is. Atheism,

Malcolm Collins: And they're not, if you're looking at it from the perspective of evolved cultural traits designed to increase fertility rate of cultural members, it is a successful memetic package.

Sarah Haider: Yeah. To be to be good enough to be to reproduce on a societal level in long periods of time. I, Hey, I, Could never disagree. And I think the apostasy taboo really does help there. You easy in easy end but it really difficult to get out even if you want it. So I think there are, there, there's lots of [00:35:00] Islam and the taboos and the traditions, like there's so many ways in which it really is a, it's a great name.

If just living, just surviving is your most important it's the thing that you are. focusing on. However, I would also add that I don't know if what has worked for the Muslim world up until now will survive our most recent leap. I don't think that, we talk about all these things with, social media is creating social alienation and isolation, da.

But if you look at, the research for, in Muslim, Places where you think they would have a healthy sense of community. In fact, the same kind of erosions are happening, but they also don't have running water. So like it's the combination of two horrible things that are coming together.

I am not sure it might be, they might be finding a way through it with their strong social networks. I think that maybe they won't, like maybe they'll get the. wrong end of the stick in both ways. I am, at least I'm concerned about that in any [00:36:00] case.

Malcolm Collins: No, I think you're absolutely right. And this is something we regularly see, if you're studying fertility collapse generally cultures that have had some cultural hack that has acted as a bulwark to fertility collapse.

When the dam breaks, it breaks very fast and all at once. But then of course that leads to downstream, especially negative consequences because, within, for example, these already conservative Muslim cultures, if everyone who is open to using a cell phone has been medically sterilized, that means only the most extremist iterations are going to get through.

As we call it in, cause we do some like pseudo religious stuff. We say, you've got to walk through the Valley of the Lotus Eaters. That's what our civilization is doing right now.

Sarah Haider: That is so much harder to do given the way that they're, given their level of development, it is actually, it's easier to procure a smartphone than it is.

To have a laptop or a computer, so there's, from a literal functioning perspective, cell phones have become a really important part of the way that their world works. I would say, [00:37:00] we're just used to them for a longer period of time, but I actually think because we have the our foundations are quite strong, our institutions are quite strong.

We can get away from technology and. Survive in a way that is becoming increasingly harder for them to do because they're in this crucial, like mid, like bizarre stage of development. And so that's just something that it's something to think about. And I think that the way that cell phones in particular, smartphones in particular, and the internet, And the, their connectivity to the internet, the way that has pierced through the social fabric, because you have, okay, you have these, you have societies, you have a lot of this meta control over people and what they're thinking and what they're thinking truly, because you're talking to each other and all of that is very control and bounded, but now here's this escape hatch.

I have a lot of social controls here. I think, the world does this and this is how it works. And this is what truth is. But now I have something in my pocket where in, in which once I joined that place, I can be as [00:38:00] individualistic as any American, and I can access all of that information that they have.

I can see what they're doing and it will impact my brain too. So that the social control that you have, just, it's hard to maintain in that kind of environment. They're watching a lot of porn there too, right? They're virgins they're

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And a lot of people are unaware of how significantly Muslim fertility rates have fallen.

In, in, in even non wealthy Muslim countries, it has been Yeah, and when you think about the

Sarah Haider: fact that they don't have regular access to birth control in the same way that we do, that is it's also, it's more striking when you think about it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah and as we always point out on the show is one path that some groups will take to get through the Valley of the Lotus Eaters is blinding themselves.

By that, what I mean is completely like we will kill our kid if we catch them with a cell phone. And you're going to find this in some communities but if you blind yourself to get through at the other end, if you're then coming out and telling everyone else you're going to, kill them and they have to follow your system.

You're still blind. Okay. And they have automated kill drones. You don't have the same amount of cultural power that you [00:39:00] would have if you got through using power of will, that was reinforced culturally. And so the question is, how do you do this? I can give you an answer. It sounds like Simone really wanted to tell you about our future holidays.

So why don't you do that and get her reaction to it.

Simone Collins: We the very gist of our attempt at this is we practice descendant worship. So we tell our children that essentially our God, our family's God is their descendants, thousands, millions of years in the future, who plausibly even have the ability to travel through time and intervene to create the future that should come.

Cause we also have this sort of weird deterministic, but you still have free will view of how the world works. Very mechanical. And so for future day, for example, we steal toys. The future police steal through us, of course, toys or things from their lives that cause bad behavior, addictive devices, games, things like that, iPads, whatever.

Last year, we just took all their toys. We just, yeah. All their toys disappeared because we're like, Oh, Let's make this really dramatic. And then, but they loved it because in their [00:40:00] place, we left like scorch marks with a bunch of different things and like weird future, like evidence, and they're like, Oh, what happened?

And then they have to make a pledge in this family book that we're using as a time capsule slash heirloom. To how they're going to make the world a better place and how they're going to become a better person for that year and for the longterm future. Upon making that pledge, of course, then the future police will see it and receive it.

They received their toys back plus some additional toys. And if they achieve those things that they committed to at some point in this year, they'll get an even bigger gift is a reward. So there are gifts involved. There's, there's photo opportunities involved and the kids.

Just freaking love it. And we started to though, this wasn't part of a plan for the holiday is throughout the year, as they are moving closer to their goals, they do get not just one future police gift, but a couple of things. Cause their goals weren't like, Oh, I'm going to start a business or I'm going to graduate high school, or I'm going to ace algebra,

Malcolm Collins: but

So not exactly cognitive processing.

Yeah

Simone Collins: They're very young. So it's more I'm [00:41:00] not gonna, I'm going to be nice to my brother kind of stuff. So like they are getting things from the future police as reinforcement and they just They love it and they know that the future police are watching. So it's affecting their behavior, but it's also a fun, cute thing.

But the idea here was

Malcolm Collins: this in most of our holidays is we had a specific value we wanted to convey the idea of having agency over the future and long termism.

Sarah Haider: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, I think that's great and remarkable and very inventive of you. I've been thinking myself about what to do and what to adopt and how lazy to be in that respect.

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

And do you think that will, Take away from the experience or make it less effective or anything? [00:42:00] No. Or just, no. No. Okay. I can explain why.

Malcolm Collins: So even within the theology of the future police they are to a child, right? In the same way that like a God changes the conception. People have a God when they're young.

It's like Zeus. It's like a guy in the clouds. And when they're older, they're like, oh, it's like them in Capal. We would say a, there, changing like small probabilistic quantum fluctuations, which have a butterfly effect, which has changed larger behavior. And if they were going to create this holiday and convince us to do it, they would have had it appear in a way where we thought it was our idea and we were doing it for their best interest.

So in a way, unlike Santa Claus or something like that, even to an adult, the future police really plausibly did create the holiday and really are gifting them things.

Sarah Haider: We were being manipulated

Simone Collins: all along.

Sarah Haider: Okay. Okay. All right. Okay. That's. Um, do you think it, do you need converts now though? Because it's a, it's not going to be a community thing though.

Exactly. And the thing

Simone Collins: is it doesn't need converts, but [00:43:00] what we really. What we really want to fight for and why we're so excited to see your tweet. And this brings it all back, which is good because the kids just got back home from the park, Malcolm, and they're about to storm the castle. But so what we really want people to do is what you're doing, which is I want to culturally innovate from.

A very thoughtful perspective and maybe it's a little religious and maybe it's not a little religious. It's whatever. And we want as many people to take a whack at this as possible because there will always be people who choose to go with the traditional religion like that is being tried. So it's not an experiment that I'm concerned about.

What I'd love to see more of is essentially that Startup seed investment where 99 percent are going to fail. That's fine. But a couple are going to become unicorns and become additional viable religious traditions that may create additional thriving alternatives to people, because we need thriving alternative religions that can make sense in a post globalization, post internet, post smartphone [00:44:00] world.

And so I'm happier. Yeah, if someone chooses to do their own thing, like what you're doing. We

Malcolm Collins: should elevate the larger theological structure of this system is if God is communicating with us through which cultural systems succeed and don't succeed, then he can only talk if there is a diversity of cultural systems to compete against each other.

So this is the theological framing to it. The logical framing to it is to say if we're entering this period of mass cultural die off. We're going to need as large a diversity of people to make it through the Valley of the Lotus Eaters unblinded for human civilization to survive and not become some sort of like large fast fascist monoculture.

And so the more cultural experimentation we have, the better off we're going to be because the more robust our species is going to be on the other side of this, where robustness is correlated with a diverse group of. Cultural system surviving to the end of it.

Sarah Haider: They wouldn't, might not be necessarily diverse by the end of it.

Like it might be that, that there's one. It took a long time for [00:45:00] religious systems to, to get to where they are and to be, they're still not that robust. So if we're just inventing them on the fly or like trying to reason our way into them, which is, I think, I wonder about that as a method, regardless.

Which is crazy to say as somebody who's, this is all I have. This is what, this is the thing that I hit. If I don't even know how else to go about in the world, but it, a certain amount of serendipity and just like chance encounters formed some of the experimentations. Cause I think that might've been like throughout history, because I think they, the reason would have rejected them, reason might've said, this is never going to work.

This is not, we shouldn't do this. But for whatever reason, it just so happened that they did it, and they tried it, and it worked.

Simone Collins: I think a lot of it's right time, right place. Jesus was not the first apocalyptic Jew, right? It's just sometimes it clicks. Right time,

Sarah Haider: right place.

And there's an underlying logic that you didn't understand right at the moment. But it worked and so you keep doing it so that's I think it's it's that's interesting. Yeah, and I actually [00:46:00] in we need so much more diversity than is maybe possible, but

Simone Collins: we'll fight for it anyway.

Sarah Haider: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Great.

Simone Collins: No, we'll have to we'll have to brainstorm more about this. But I yeah, anyway, I'm so glad you're thinking about these things. We're taking such a thoughtful approach.

Sarah Haider: I'm in a boring, I'm in dc which is boring. I was just talking to, you're not far from us. Yeah, you're pretty close.

How are you guys? We're in

Simone Collins: Pennsylvania,

Sarah Haider: oh, okay. I'll have to stop by and say hello

Simone Collins: at some point. Sure.

Sarah Haider: For sure. If you're ever near nearby, let me know. Yeah I was actually thinking I need to be in like California or New York. In order to meet like-minded people, but maybe not.

Simone Collins: Okay. Not at all. All right. You're in a really good, like in the a Actually, some of the most thoughtful parents, like from a cultural standpoint that we know are in DC. Yeah. So you're in a very good zone and yeah. But okay. So everyone check out Sarah haters work. It just like basically everything I've encountered that you've written or done, in terms of like podcasting has been fantastic.

So Sarah, the hater on Twitter and check out Sarah hater on sub stack as well. [00:47:00] Thank you so much for coming on and we'd have to have you back at some point.

Sarah Haider: This was great. Thank you.

Simone Collins: Thank you.

Sarah Haider: Do you guys have guests often?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Sarah Haider: On this podcast. Not that often.

Malcolm Collins: But it's harder to keep good consistency when you're doing guests, as you probably know.

Sarah Haider: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Because sometimes they're boring. But you're super fun. You're super fun and

Simone Collins: super cool. You just don't post

Malcolm Collins: them then.

Simone Collins: Great. Yeah. That's, when we don't post them, it's typically because the people have never been on podcasts before and they like answer questions with yes or no,

Malcolm Collins: and it's not great.

Simone Collins: That's

Malcolm Collins: not it. It's not it. You're just hedging in case she's boring.

Simone Collins: You're not going to be boring. You're not going to be boring. I'm hoping that, yeah. It's going to be good. I'm excited.

Indy's being pretty good today. So I'm not worried. It's good that I'm feeding her though But look, I mean look so the doors behind you they're pretty thick If we just shoved two bookshelves in there that are suspended from, it's like a barn door where there's an [00:48:00] overhead suspension. So there are two suspended bookshelves and like they can part to create a small doorway and they're probably too much of a hassle, but

Malcolm Collins: where are we to go?

You said right between

Simone Collins: the playroom and the bunk bedroom in the thick double door area. Behind you? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, you mean, oh, what a secret bookshelf?

Simone Collins: Yeah, like a bookshelf that then opens into a door, or

Malcolm Collins: you make that whole wall there. Bookshelf.

Simone Collins: A bookshelf. Uhhuh. .

Malcolm Collins: Oh,

Simone Collins: A suspended bookshelf.

Could be pretty cool. Someday. Secret bookshelf.

Malcolm Collins: I don't know, it would take up room.

Simone Collins: It would. Honestly, your house is so perfect. What are we going to do with it? Like you said, like some of the dumb lands Fatlands, I

Malcolm Collins: could do that, Simone.

Simone Collins: Yeah, Fatlands probably already has one. But whatever, it's sold, Malcolm.

It's sold.

Malcolm Collins: And we

Simone Collins: can buy it!

Malcolm Collins: We can storm it! That's why we have [00:49:00] guns!

Simone Collins: I don't want that. I'm not vacuuming fatlands. Okay. I'm not cleaning those floors. I'm not doing it.

Malcolm Collins: That'd be such a nightmare to vacuum.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Can you imagine cleaning all those toilets, vacuuming all those floors, heating all those rooms?

I at least that one haunted house that we looked at, the one that was like super creepy, that had the super old house attached to it. At least you could just cordon that off and be afraid of all the ghosts. That's what they did. How's this? Is this

Sarah Haider: better?