Steven Bonnell aka Destiny

Steven Bonnell aka Destiny is probably the most interesting online political commentator who broke into the mainstream in the last couple of years. I stumbled into him in 2021, in the dark days of lockdowns, when he was still relatively little known outside the circle of fervent Youtubers. On that occasion, he debated Richard Wolff, a well-known Marxist professor of economy on the topic of socialism vs capitalism and I think he won the encounter decisively. Bonnell was composed, well-informed, asked the right questions, and above all, was generally curious about what the other side had to say. Even Wolff's fans admitted that the prof didn't come out too well and I quickly became hooked onto Destiny's channel. I find that he is rather unique in origin story, style, and skills in a realm filled with hundreds of online pundits, and one of the best things that this cesspool space has produced in years.

Unlike most established political gurus, Bonnell has no academic background (not even a college degree) and no experience in journalism, or writing, or business and is not affiliated with any political party or ideology. In a field completely dominated by high-pedigree individuals, he is as blue-collar as it gets. A college drop-out who worked in a casino and a carpet laundry before taking up professional gaming as a full-time occupation under the name "Destiny". Soon, he started to engage in debates on various topics while simultaneously playing video games on the screen. That was in the early 2010s. Gamergate triggered the emergence of a large number of streamer-commentators among whom Destiny stood out as a left-leaning (in the American sense) personality in a crowd that largely stretches from conservatives to the far-right, but he really started to gain recognition in tandem with the rising of Trump.

The video-gaming part has been dropped by now, but Destiny is as present as ever, with his 24/7 14-hours daily online presence making Lex Friedman look like a slouch. He debates anyone and everyone on current issues and general topics in politics and economy (and sometimes in philosophy and science) from Nick Fuentes-like neo-nazis to die-hard communists, radical feminists and Andrew Tate fanboys, Hamas-sympathizers and Zionists, social justice warriors and election deniers, anti-vaxxers, radical libertarians, and anyone in- or wildly outside the Overton-window. 

Regarding his own views, he began as a "pull up yourself by your own bootstraps"-type conservative and over the years evolved into what he describes as a social democrat. I'd rather call him a centrist, but in the States, the political categories don't exactly mean the same as in Europe (as almost all Americans misuse the words "liberal" and "socialist"). In a nutshell, he is a social liberal and an economic centrist. To draw the general contours: he believes in liberal values (rule of law, democratic institutions, individual freedom) and in free markets buttressed by a welfare state. He is absolutely pro-Ukraine, pro-vaccine, strongly pro-Israel, strongly pro-Biden (and anti-Trump), left-of-center on trans issues, and regards the US as an altogether positive geopolitical force.

He is also unideological in a refreshing way, who tries to build his argument on empirical data instead of on some moral basis. As he once put it, if the evidence showed that central planning is superior to free markets, he would be open to be convinced by it, as opposed to most rightwing commentators for whom it's not so much a question of economics, but of identity. 

His atypical background aside, his views - which are fairly aligned with the mainstream - wouldn't make him stand out from the crowd. His uniqueness lies in his personality, skills, and content-incontinence. But most of all, his personality. He has one skill few people possess in sufficient amount and which is indispensable if one wants to stay in this business long. His skin is not so much thick as literally impenetrable. Destiny is impossible to be triggered by personal insults or condescension. In one on-premise debate, the right-wing degenerate Milo Yiannopoulos tried to crawl under his skin by telling the audience how Destiny parades his wife around as the town-whore (until his recent divorce, Destiny lived in an open relationship), then went a step further and made remarks on his 9-year old son. All this in the context of arguing for 12th-century Christian values. Destiny simply ignored him then offhandedly shot back with a joke Milo did not get. He came across as the piece of shit he is, and that was the end of his desired career comeback effort.

The source of this resilience is the result of both nature and nurture. At the core is something Destiny must have been born with instead of having learned because in an interview with Alex O'Connor (formerly known as Cosmic Skeptic), he admitted that he sometimes doesn't understand the emotional state of others. As a side note, he also doesn't think animals are anything more than consciousness-less biological machines, and repeated attempts from Alex failed to disabuse him of this disturbing view. The nurture part comes from growing up in the gamer culture where depraved talk (in his words) is the norm and people think it's funny because it's so bad and not taken seriously at the same time. Anyone who stays long there will grow insensitive to the most graphic death threats and obscene verbal abuses that are thrown around all the time. In the world of normal human beings, Destiny is just impossible to rattle. It doesn't mean that he is some Spock-like character who is immune to emotions. He loses his temper quite often and tells his opinion in a very vulgar manner if he runs out of patience with what he perceives as stupidity. 

Another thing he must have been born with is the obsession with which he dives into any topic that piqued his interest. When learning about a new thing - let's say the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict he started studying after Oct 7 - he famously starts from Wikipedia (which was mocked recently by Joe Rogan, which is funny, regarding how much time Rogan spends spreading misinformation about things he knows little about), then follows the links all the way to reading history books and UN resolutions if needed. A good observation he often makes is that if you actually read full articles instead of just their headlines, regardless of the source (let it be Fox News or CNN), you will be better informed than 90% of the people. Taking it a step further, Destiny often demonstrates the surprising fact that if you start from the level of a layman but completely dedicate yourself to studying a political/historical topic for a couple of months and you know how to discern the most important facts from the details, your judgment on major points can be as well-informed as the judgment of any expert of the topic.

On top of his natural abilities, Destiny has 10+ years behind him as an online debater. He is just superb at what he does. He has a very quick wit, can think on his feet, and adapt to his opponent's style on the fly. He knows how to let buffoons like Milo undermine themselves while appearing professional and polite, can be extremely confrontative and engage in a shouting match if needed, but can also shine in a good-faith argument with very smart but ideologically blinkered opponents. But to be frank, he is the best when he loses his patience: he still doesn't respond to ad hominems in kind, but instead dials up the speech speed and launches barrages of perfectly reasonable arguments laden with expletives (a must-watch). 

He knows his limits as well and how much skills can matter over logical arguments. Once he said that the smartest flat-earther in the world would probably wipe the floor with him in a debate.

The quality is matched by the quantity. His output is inhuman. Despite having become a millionaire, he still spends 14 hours a day online, jumping from one debate to another, with no signs of exhaustion. When not, he goes to campuses to debate libertarians and trans-activists, and Trump rallies to interview those who turn up there. And still in a T-shirt, hoody, or tracksuit like a 20-year-old Gamer. It's an unusual way to spend your life. 

Even with all those attributes working in his favor, as recently as a year ago, I was sure that he would never break into the mainstream. The people he is associated with contain Marxist hardliners, white supremacists, Andrew Tate-worshipping misogynists, and some of the lowest scum the space can produce. If you'd like to venture into the dark underbelly of American political forums in any direction, you'll hardly find a better guide than Destiny. You can also be genuinely surprised by the difference in human quality between individuals even there. If I was forced to have a chat with a Nazi, I would choose Richard Spencer over Nick Fuentes without hesitation. 

The content is dicey, but the style isn't helpful either, to put it mildly. As mentioned above, Destiny comes from the gamer culture. Old habits linger on, and he can still be extremely vulgar, either on purpose or just for fun. Once he was discussing the concept of marginal utility in an online conversation and said something like "$10,000 could be a life-changing for someone in the bottom 10 percentile, but I would probably spend it in a couple of days just by fucking your mother a thousand times." There are thousands of hours of videos of him to cut out 10 seconds from to make him look like anything from a serial killer to a pedophile. In 2022, he got banned from Twitch for "hateful conduct". 

Nevertheless, on his eternal C-league status, I am happy to have been proven wrong. In the past year, he has appeared on debate panels, was invited to give speeches at universities, appeared on Lex Friedman's podcast, then on Within Reason with Alex O'Connor, and finally, on Piers Morgan. He sat across the table with Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Norman Finkelstein, Jordan Peterson from the "real world", and basically debated everyone in the Youtube sphere. He worked his way up from the sewers and made his entry to the top tier. Until he gets bored with it, I think he is there to stay.

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Bruce Lee

My earliest memory of Bruce Lee places me in the kindergarten yard in a conversation with one of my teachers. I was explaining her how Lee died. Early childhood memories are unreliable, they are more like re-prints of memories than of real events, but this one can't be too far off reality. My father had The Big Boss on a VHS tape at home and no qualms about what I can watch (the 1984 Terminator was the cause of years of early nightmares). He also possessed a wonderfully illustrated book about Lee in English, a treasure in a child's eyes, with a removable poster of The Way of The Dragon, and even a biography. The latter I read only a couple of years later, but many then times. 

Born a decade after his death, I shared my childhood hero with millions of kids of many generations around the world. And as to many of them, I probably owe my lifelong fascination for martial arts to Lee, the most famous martial artist of all time, and one of the most iconic figures of the twentieth century pop culture. If there is anyone deserving to be in my Hall of Fame, it is him.

Who was Bruce Lee?

Bruce Lee alias Li Jun Fan was born on 27 November, 1940 in the United States where his father was on a long tour with the Cantonese Opera Company, accompanied by his wife, Bruce's mother. Thanks to her own mixed heritage, the boy who came to the world in San Francisco,  California was 5/8 Chinese, 1/4 English, and 1/8 Dutch Jew. The family went back to Hong Kong three months later, and the son, although technically an American citizen, didn't set foot in the US until 18 years later.

In Hong Kong, thanks to his father's business acumen, Bruce grew up in a well-off family. His father, an occasional actor, also helped him into the movie business. Bruce started a career as a child actor at the age of six. By his teens, if not a household name, he was a recognizable face in Hong Kong. He excelled in roles of a street urchin with a good heart or of a rebellious teenager but was generally stiff and unconvincing in other types. His thespian fortes were not accidental. As a kid, he was a hyperactive boy who only stayed put when reading comic books. He performed abysmally in school and struggled in every subject but English so much so that he was held back twice. As a teenager, he was a troublemaker with serious problems with authority. But Bruce was also funny, witty, and charismatic, a prankster and a natural gang leader. 

He got into street fights a lot. At 14 he was defeated by a boy named William Cheung who practiced Wing Chun. Bruce, to regain his dominance, decided to learn martial arts, too. He soon became passionate about it, eager to try out every new technique he learned on the street. He was also equally passionate about another physical art, dancing. After winning a dance championship, later in life Bruce has always referred to himself, stretching the truth a bit, as the cha-cha-cha champion of Hong Kong.

In high school, he participated in his first and last official combat sports event, a boxing match against a student from another high school. He won the bout but wasn't satisfied with his own performance.

Not long after that, he got expelled from the school for threatening a teacher with a knife. By then he has brought enough shame to his parents that they decided to put him on a boat to America with the warning: make something out of yourself or don't come back.

Bruce arrived in Seattle in 1959, aged 18. His father secured him a tiny lodging and a dishwasher job in the restaurant of a Chinese acquaintance. He finished high school and, to the surprise of everyone, in 1961 he even enrolled at the University of Washington as a drama major. Eager to stop washing dishes and waiting tables, he started giving cha-cha-cha lessons. In the breaks between the classes, he entertained his students with Wing Chun demonstrations. Eventually, he opened his informal kung-fu studio with a handful of students at the age of 19.

There were only a few Eastern martial arts enthusiasts in America at that time, but Bruce quickly caught the eyes of some of them. He was charismatic, fun-loving, boisterious and an incredibly gifted athlete. He gained both friends and admirers quickly, and the two groups almost perfectly overlapped. In 1963, with an American friend James Lee (not a relative) he published a book about Wing Chun kung-fu, what he later, after breaking with traditional martial arts, regretted.

In his early twenties, Bruce had two aspirations. Either getting into Hollywood or opening a chain of schools overall the US and dedicating his life to martial arts. At first, he had moderate success in the second endeavor. He opened multiple studios, but their attendance was meager and the revenue barely enough to pay the bills. 

He also quickly discovered another challenge. In America, he started to get disillusioned with traditional martial arts, even with the more practical Wing Chun style he learned. They were stiff, impractical, and put more emphasis on practicing unrealistic techniques than on real sparring excercises. The Wing Chun techniques didn't really work against the bigger and more athletic Americans. He realized that he has to move beyond what he learned in Hong Kong.

His fame among martial art practitioners grew and eventually caught the attention of Ed Parker, the father of American Kempo. Parker organized the 1964 Long Beach Karate Tournament and he invited Bruce to give a demonstration of kung-fu, which at that time was an just obscure Chinese martial art few even heard about. This was Bruce's first chance to perform in front of a large audience.

Multiple demonstrations followed, on which he often spoke about traditional martial arts in disparaging terms. In 1964, the kung-fu community of Chinatown, Oakland where Bruce opened a studio had enough. Not only was the cocky Lee badmouthing their styles, he was teaching the art to non-Chinese. A local martial artist, Wong Jack-man, decided to issue a formal challenge to Bruce, which lead to highly controversial duel. Bruce defeated Wong in a matter of minutes, but as after his boxing bout, he was extremely dissappointed with his own performance. After the short fight he was exhausted, his fists were bruised, and realized that Wing Chun's close-quarter techniques were not effective against someone who avoids direct engagement. This experience reinforced his growing dissatisfaction with kung-fu.

Eventually, becoming disgusted with its obsession of forms, rigidity and ineffectuality, he turned his back on Chinese Kung Fu completely. His personal style, what he in 1967 christened to Jeet Kune Do, was mainly based on Western boxing, fencing, and some Wing Chun techniques and principles. Even the name "the way of the intercepting fist", esoterically Oriental as it sounds, is adopted from the fencing tactic "stop-hit" that aims to intercept the opponent in mid-attack instead of a parry and counter-attack combination.

He watched boxing matches endlessly. He especially admired  Mohammad Ali, whose matches he would watch for hours, shadowing the champ's moves over and over again. His training ethos put free sparring at the center of the training session and dispensed with traditional Eastern training elements. Bruce was an early proponent of a totalitarian art encompassing all forms of stand-up fighting and grappling - Mixed Martial Arts, as it's called today.

He also become obsessed with nutrition and body-building. In his early twenties, he could still be described as slightly pudgy a young man with still some baby fat on. He explored many diets and imposed some exotic ones on himself over the years. Apart from running every morning, and the hours honing his martial art skills every day, three times a week he lifted weights. The boy with a baby fat transformed his body to that paragon of physical perfection we can see in his movies.

In 1964, he married one of his students Linda Emery and not long after they had their first baby, Brandon. Linda's family was not enamoured by the prospect of having a pennyless Chinese wanna-be-actor as a son-in-law (the racialist resentment was not unrequited when Linda visited Bruce's family in Hong Kong later), but after the marriage Bruce quickly won them over with his characteristic charm.

In 1966 came a breakthrough in his acting career when he was cast into the role of Kato, the masked Asian martial artist sidekick of the vigilante Green Hornet. The show lasted only one season but it propelled Lee into the right circles, of both Hollywood and the martial art world. Still uncertain about the future, he moved back and forth between opening schools and vying for new movie roles.

With acting, teaching, and having a family, he had no time for University. Although he silently dropped his studies in 1964, his interest for psychology and philosophy only deepened. He was a voracious reader. One of his early aspirations was to own a second-hand bookshop. By the end of his life his personal library contained over 2,500 books.

Utilizing his newfound fame as a minor Hollywood celebrity, Lee continued touring the US giving demonstrations on Karate tournaments, which were starting to become the big thing in the mid-sixties. As the guest star Kato, he demonstrated his famous one-inch punch, 2-finger push-ups, side-kicks that sent his partners flying in the air, his preternatural speed, and performed free sparring. He befriended several champions of the era. Between 1967 and 1969 Karate champions Joe Lewis, Mike Stone, and Chuck Norris, or Jhoon Rhee, father of American Teakwon-Do became not only his friends, but training partners/students as well.

Getting friends and admirers was easy for him. He was a natural showman. Witty, charming and always fun. This wasn't lost on his female acquitances either. Beyond the traits his male friends admired, Bruce was gorgeous. Despite being a loving husband and father, he often had relationships, and didn't even put too much effort in keeping them secret. This was something that his wife Linda, his always supportive and devoted wife did not deserve, but apparently didn't know about them either.

Despite all the successes and friendships of Hollywood men and elite sportmen, Bruce's teaching fees and rare movie roles barely covered his expenses and now he had a family to feed, too. In 1967, a sturdent and friend of him, Jay Sibring, the hairstylist of stars, gave him an idea. As a personal self-defense trainer, he should angle for big Hollywood names. To catch the eye of the creme, he should charge extraorbintant fees. Lee, not fully convinced, nevertheless went along, and to his surprise, soon he found among his students James Coburn, one of the biggest stars of the time, and Steve McQueen, the King of Cool, the biggest star of Hollywood. His slowly forming but eventually deep friendship with McQueen was a mixture of mutual admiration, envy and rivalry. McQeen wanted Lee's physical gifts and Lee wanted the stardom.

In 1968, Bruce and Linda purchased a house in Bel Air, Los Angeles. On the surface, Bruce achieveved the dream of every American immigrant. He married an American, made into Hollywood, befriended the stars, owned a beautiful house. But everything was built on debt. The family often lived from one paycheck to the next. Bruce was as financially irresponsible as flamboyant. Shortly after buying the house he could not afford, he spent the full 7,000 dollars he unexpectedly got from his mother who sold one of his father's buildings not to pay off some of his debts, but to buy a red 911 Porsche. His prospects were not rosy. At the time, there were not that many roles to go around for Asian characters in Hollywood. He refused to play the traditional role of the subservient Chinaman, and he spoke English with heavy accent.

Even though his career as an actor did not progress as fast as he wanted, his reputation as a martial artist wunderkind and teacher, the legends of his feats, and his circle of Hollwyood friends grew. He rubbed shoulders with Frank Sinatra and taught Roman Polanski. If not yet a successful actor, he was the most sought after martial arts instructor in Hollywood.

Too turbocharge his career, Bruce had a idea for a movie. An X-rated, allegorical martial arts epos, combining martial arts and philosophy. He named it The Silent Flute. He tried to convince first McQueen, then Coburn to partner up with him on the movie, but after some promising start on Coburn's side, he was eventually rejected by both men. That really hurt him personally and Bruce woved that one day he will show them. He will be a bigger star than McQueen.

He also had another idea of a TV-show featuring a Chinese martial artist roaming the American West, the Warrior. Unfortunately, he tshow was dropped in favour of another of a similar theme, the Kung Fu. Lee auditioned for the lead role of that, too, but he was found too intense for the character of a reluctant, contemplative dispenser of justice. The role was given to David Carradine.

In 1970, Lee suffered a debilitating back injury during a morning work out. He was forced to bed for 3 months and the doctors told him he would never kick high again. 3 months of bed-confinement would be a torture to anyone, but it was especially cruel for someone whose life revolved around his physical abilities. To make the most of it, Bruce turned his energies into writing. The sketches, notes and essays in which he tried to capture both his philosophy to martial arts and technical repertiore was collected and published after his death by his widow Linda in a book titled The Tao of Jeet Kune Do. Not unlike popular books on fencing of earlier times, the Tao covers techniques, tactics, psychology, physiology, training advices and discussions of concepts like rythm and timing. In the end, Bruce recovered completely.

By the early 70s, he temporarily gave up on Hollywood, and took up an offering of making a movie in Hong Kong, The Big Boss. Lee with his family sold their Bel Air house and moved to Hong Kong. Lee, who by then had got used to American standars was appalled by amatuerism of Hong Kong movie makers. He clashed heavily with the director and the producer. His behaviour on the set was typical Bruce Lee and the opposite of normal stereotypes. He was loyal to and gracious with the stuntsmen and the crew and rude and disrespectful for those above in the hierarchy.

To his surprise, the low budget and amateurish Big Boss which was based on 3 pages on script, terrible acting, and lousy directing turned out to be thunderous success in Hong Kong. His second movie, the Fists of Fury in 1972 was even more of a blast. The audience have never seen anything like Bruce before. Hong Kong cinema was flush with Kung-fu movies of course, but the fight scenes in them were extremly long and artificial. What Bruce Lee did seemed frighteningly real. Amazing, but at the same time something that can both work in real life and can be learned. Secondly, in both movies, a Chinese guy sticks it up to the British and the and hateful Japanese. The Hongkongers who were mostly refugees from the mainland living under their British overlords, were in a desperate need of national pride. Bruce gave it to them. Audiences raved and literally were throwing chairs in the air in the theaters. Bruce has become a superstar literally overnight.

Fame pressed hard on him. Paparazzis, constant challenges for duels, intrusion in his familiy's privacy, attacks of Hong Kong media mocking his rusty Chinese and questioning his nationality made him stressed and paranoid. He hired bodyguards from his former stuntmen friends and - the human weapon himself - even started carrying a gun. 

Bruce decided to keep total control over his next movie, The Way of The Dragon. He wrote, directed, and starred his spagetthi Eastern. He offered the role of the bad guy to the most famous American Karate fighter of the time, the then middle-weight world champion, Chuck Norris. Even though its climax is arguably one of the greatest martial art fight scenes of all time and it was a big commercial success, Lee didn't think the movie was good enough to be released in the West as a vehicle to get back into Hollywood.

In 1972, he started to shoot the Game of Death, another movie where he wanted to demonstrate his philosophy to martial arts, even more explicitly than in The Way of The Dragon. Negotiations started to have George Lazenby, the latest James Bond, as a co-star of the movie. Perhaps 20 minutes material was produced, and the movie was released only 1978, 5 years after Bruce's death.

1973 came the Enter the Dragon, Lee's first superproduction meant to conquer Hollywood for him. As one of the international cast of main characters, Bruce played an unstoppable killing machine driven by cold revenge. The movie made Lee a houshold name all over the world but he didn't live to see that. On July 20, 1973, in his mistress's flat, Bruce died of cerebral edema. The indirect cause of death is still debated. The most probable theories are that of heat stroke and medicine allergy. After his death, Enter the Dragon made the so far obscure Asian actor the Hollywood superstar he had always wanted to be. The audience loved it and even the critics had to grudgingly admit that despite its extreme violence (the threshold was lower in 1973), the movie is something they haven't seen before. Fights in Western movies still followed the John Wayne-type coreography. Lee broke the way of a new genre that was carried on later by Chuck Norris, Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and countless other actors cum martial artists ever since. But he was only followed, never replaced. Bruce Lee's name has irrevocably fused with the image of the ultimate martial artist, the unbeatable fighter.

His body was put to rest in Seattle, the city where he and Linda fell in love. Among the six men carrying his coffin on his last journey were James Coburn and Steve McQueen. 

Lee has become a superstar, far beyond anyone, even he could have imagined. He did become bigger than McQueen. Apart from the remotest corners of the world, practically there is no one over 30 who hasn't heard about Bruce Lee, a man who died fifty years ago at 32. They might not recall the titles of his movies or when he lived or they mistakenly think he was a Japanese Karate champ. But they know Bruce Lee, the icon. 

For us who watched his movies when we were kids, and take his presense in the public consciousness a given, it's almost impossible to appreciate the enormity of his achievement. Similarly nigh impossible to find any name or face that is more recognisable than his, with the possible exception of Elvis. But perhaps not even the King can push him off the throne of pop culture. Bruce Lee, after all, was invincible.

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A Man from Vulcan

If one day it was revealed that some of the best minds on Earth are aliens, robots, or genetically engineered humans, the case of Sam Harris would surprise me the least. All the other super-smart people I put in his category - like Dawkins, Pinker, Hitchens, Dennett, or Peterson - had had decades-long careers in academy and/or journalism behind them before they rose to fame. But no one heard a word about Harris before he suddenly appeared out of the blue in 2004. He was in his mid-thirties and he was as eloquent, mature, and confident as any of his peers. With his irresistible attack on religion, especially on Islam, he entered public awareness with a bang.

Vulcan to Earth

His Spock-like relentless and uncompromising adherence to logic and reason, which Harris wields in debates like a surgical scalpel, just reinforces this picture of inhumanness. And like Spock, he often seems lost when he faces other people's irrationality. For example, he is visibly frustrated by the impossibility that half of the US population can vote for Trump, and he rarely refrains from voicing it. Above these, he has at least two other abilities that seem to be beyond mere mortals. First, and here I shamelessly steal from someone on Reddit, Harris can speak not only in full sentences but in full paragraphs. Having a huge vocabulary and the ability to use it is rare enough, but being incisive, perfectly coherent, and even funny in a spontaneously triggered 5-minute long soliloquy is just superhuman. Second, he can deliver hilarious punchlines with a poker face one can only see from professional comedians - after rehearsals.

Eastern Wisdom

If Harris is not from Vulcan, he has a very interesting biography and spheres of interest. He was raised by a single mother, with no siblings. In his late teens, he tried MDMA and got fascinated by the possibilities of altered states of mind. During university, he studied and even taught some martial arts (and he is an enthusiastic BJJ-practitioner today). He dropped out of school and spent the next couple of years in India and Tibet studying with many respected and famous Buddhist teachers, and experimenting with psychedelics. He claims to have spent a net two years in silent meditation. After he came back to America, he finished his BA in philosophy and received a Ph.D. at Stanford in neuroscience. 

He summed up his experiences and ideas on the subject in his third book, Waking Up (2014). He made the case for the possibility and the need for a certain type of spiritualism that is rooted in the contemplative traditions of the East but is in accord with modern science.

The New Atheists

But resemblances to the usual "rich Westerner went to the East and experienced enlightment at the hands of old Hindi masters"-story end here. Harris is a staunch materialist and a strong proponent of science and reason. Everything he holds about the self, identity, and free will (that is, they don't exist) is, as far as I know, confirmed by science. He acknowledges (and preaches) that Buddhism discovered something profoundly important about the human condition, but he regards the rest of the religion - all religions -, with its deities, cosmologies, and rituals, as pure garbage. Even his view on mediation is very pragmatic. According to him, it's a mental exercise that can't necessarily be recommended to everyone. Not everyone is built to bench-press with his own body weight or run 100m in 15 seconds. Furthermore, he admits that while years of meditation practice can give one a glimpse into other states of consciousness, taking a couple of milligrams of psychedelics inevitably does. 

He is also a militant atheist who rejects any kind of supernatural. And as an atheist he made his debut. He wrote his first book, The End of Faith (2004), as a reaction to 9/11, on the absurdity and harmfulness of religion. In 2007, he was one of the Four Hoursemen of the New Atheists (with Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens) and he mostly spent the following decade participating in public debates against religious (mostly Christian or Jewish) apologists. I loved those debates and I'm really sorry that they've got rarer nowadays - I guess both sides have said everything they had to say, many times over. Nevertheless, even if New Atheism somehow fizzled out, the Internet preserves everything, and I can't recommend enough to watch some of his debates - the man has a mellifluous voice and at the same time, he really is hilarious.

The real fame and notoriety however arrived in 2014 when he was basically assaulted by Ben Affleck on national television, who, in a show where Harris talked about the unacknowledged popularity of dangerous ideas in the Muslim world, tried to expose him as an ignorant Islamophobe. Although I think Affleck managed to come across as an opportunistic virtue signaler, countless people jumped in his place in the coming years who tried to depict Harris either as a racist (apparently not knowing the difference between race and culture) or at best a "secular fundamentalist". Harris's attitude of refusing to play safe in controversial topics got him into public spats with a great number of prominent people - Glen Greenwald, Noam Chomsky,  Nassim Taleb, Chris Hedges,  Ezra Klein among many. Even Hitchens - who himself got the labels of racist and Islamophobe many times - found some of his remarks irresponsible.

Nevertheless, Harris never backed down, and his written responses to some of the attacks are not something to miss out (a longer one on Chris Hedges and a short on Nassim Taleb). Neither is his j'Accuse of the Catholic Church - which is a piece of art of assassination by the pen.

The Moral Landscape

In 2010 Harris spoke at the TED conference about the scientific roots of morality, and he wrote his second book, The Moral Landscape on the subject. In the book, he argued that there are objective moral truths in the world that can be derived from scientific observations. Since David Hume declared that you can't get to an "ought" from an "is", the common understanding among moral philosophers is that science describes how the world is, but it has nothing to say about how it should be. Morals are relative, and no one can objectively judge others' moral systems. Harris thinks it's nonsense. The same way as there is no Taliban-physics, there is no Taliban-morality - commanding the killing of homosexuals, apostates, and shameless female relatives - that we must accept as equal to ours. There are unrefutable, universal, culture-independent truths about the human condition. Science and logic can help us to discover and build our ethics on them. Although the view that there are things that are good or bad on their own, independent of one's culture, is hardly controversial to ordinary people, Harris committed a philosophical and anthropological blasphemy. 

The Intellectual Dark Web

In violating social taboos Harris didn't stop at religion. Since around the start of the Woke-movement, he has been both a target and a critic of it. He is generally on the Left in political issues, but he raised his voice early against the Cancel Culture, Antifa, and what he sees are erroneous claims and ideas in the Black Lives Matter movement - on the latter subject he is not any radical than some black thinkers, like Glenn Loury, John McWorther, or Coleman Hughes. In 2017 he invited Charles Murray on his podcast. Murray is a social scientist, who wrote a book in 1999 about IQ and its role in personal achievement that unfortunately contained a short chapter about the IQ-differences between races. The book was controversial in 1999, but in the 2010s it got into the public consciousness again and made Murray practically radioactive. Although Harris expressed that he doesn't see any good reason to research that particular subject, he felt that Murray actually doesn't have a racist bone in his body and is probably the most unfairly maligned scholar of the day. Due to his public stance on Islam, Harris' standing was already low among the farther reaches of the Left, but that podcast episode landed him on the  Southern Poverty Law Center's hate-speech list.

As a response to this zeitgeist, in 2018 the Intellectual Dark Web was "formed" as a tongue-in-cheek, unofficial club for free thinkers who were willing to stand up against what had become a mainstream orthodoxy on questions about race, gender, religion, and society. I think the name was the brainchild of Eric Weinstein, and the membership was established by an independent NYT article, probably to the surprise of some of the named individuals: the Weinstein brothers, Ben Shapiro, Michael Shermer, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Christina Hoff Summers, and Harris. IDW wasn't really taken seriously by anyone, least of its members, and I think the only reason it caught on is that it sounded kinda badass. It was certainly badass enough to attract followers from the Alt-Right and to make Dave Rubin feel important. At the end of the day, I think the whole thing was for the worse. It gave the opportunity to unsavory characters to rub shoulders with serious thinkers and made the good guys look suspicious.

The Trump-years

Harris was early to warn about the possibly disastrous effects of a Trump-presidency. In 2016, in a short essay, he claimed that Trump had caused irreparable damage to the country just by campaigning for the presidency. His general view of the man has only changed for the worse since then, but basically remained intact, and I largely agree with his diagnosis. As he said early on, around Trump there are secrets, but no mysteries: what you see is what you get. Trump is a malignant narcissist, a shallow, petty liar, and apart from his obvious talent to rile up the masses, a complete idiot who got where he is by a colossal convergence of a series of bad luck. And if America gets through the next four years without a major disaster - Harris said in 2016 -, it just dodged the bullet.

But Left-wing idiotism can very well give him a second term. I think the Trump-era posed a once-in-a-lifetime test of character and judgment for anyone involved in (or simply forming an opinion on) public life, and Sam passed it with flying colors. 

He remained critical about how the liberal mainstream continued to go down the rabbit hole of Wokeness. But, unlike James Lindsay, Gad Saad, Maajid Nawaz, or some members of the IDW, he never got sucked into the anti-Wokeness bubble, either. White-guilt driven far-left zealots and cowering elites are bad, but not nearly as bad as having a racist madman as the President of the United States who has been letting hundreds of thousands of people die out of sociopathic indifference. In January 2021, Sam publicly gave back his imaginary IDW party card. I'd be surprised if he ever shared the stage again with the likes of Dave Rubin or Ben Shapiro.

Making Sense - the podcast

It got lost in the chronology, but Harris started a podcast, Making Sense in 2013, on which he has been talking to someone interesting nearly every week. The topics are eclectic - he has interviewed scientists, journalists, hostage negotiators, writers, scholars, Buddhist teachers - but the quality is constant. It is really one of the best podcasts out there, and I have picked up many great books from his interviewees after listening to someone new for the first time. He also launched a successful meditation app, Waking Up, in 2018. It's basically a series of guided meditation, interspersed with frequent interviews and lectures.

The bad part

The podcast reminds me of one of the two things I find annoying about Harris, and that is his relentless pessimism. I understand that he readily discards the beliefs in the self and free will - so he sees us, at the end of the day, as mere biological machines. I also understand that this corresponds to the current state of science. I also get that one day I and everyone else will lose everything and everyone we love. But I still want to cut my throat every time after listening to one of his frequent 10-minutes monologues on these two subjects. But even beyond this, he has a morbid fascination with depressive topics. Once he planned to have three consecutive podcast episodes about the looming possibility of nuclear annihilation, child pornography, and the existential danger of AI, respectively. Thank God, the pandemic came by, and he changed course after the nuclear war part.

AI, by the way, is one of his favorite doom and gloom topics, and one I wish he talked less about. Being alarmed about the future of artificial intelligence is and not uncommon even among experts. But whenever Sam gets into explaining his fears, he also makes it obvious that he is not one of them. He may turn out to be right, but for the wrong reasons. To be fair, he is someone who is always open to change his mind on unfamiliar territories, so after listening to enough experts, he might end up being right for the right reasons.

The other thing I dislike about him is his overprotective attitude to his reputation. When attacked, he lashes back mercilessly. Not everyone can just shrug criticism off in a Ricky Gervais-way, and Harris's responses are fun to read, but I would expect someone who doesn't believe he has a self to indulge to be less thin-skinned. 

The last piece of criticism I'd level against him is what I referred to at the very beginning. I don't know anyone for whom cold rationality would be such a pronounced part of their identity. But I think this makes Harris sometimes myopic, especially in the area of religion. Most other people can and do live with contradictory beliefs, and even the ones expressing belief in the literal truth of the Bible don't go on rampage killings against adulterers and homosexuals. 

Summary

To sum it up, Sam Harris is one of the most influential and clear-thinking public commentators of our time, as well as one of the most divisive ones. I think the cause for the latter is not only his willingness to venture into controversial topics (where misrepresentation by detractors is very easy) but also his main forte, his preternatural eloquence. Listening to a truly devastating critique of something that is part of one's identity almost never achieves the intended result. Harris's punchlines at the expense of religious beliefs (or Antifa- or Trump-fans) are priceless, as long as you are an atheist (or normal). But they probably put off most people on the other side exactly as much as they attract his fans.
Nevertheless, his fearlessness to engage in conversations on sensitive subjects and even taboos is what makes Harris an invaluable part of public discourse. His thoughts cut deep and wide, and he is brutally honest without the intention to hurt. He is not always right, but more frequently than most, and even when he is wrong, he asks the right questions. 

May he live long and prosper!

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The Messenger of Ancient Gods

If I was forced to name a single person who really captures the zeitgeist of our era, I don't think I would make a big mistake with the Internet celebrity-villain Jordan Peterson. He entered the public consciousness around 2015 as the main character of the infamous gender-pronoun debate, and in the course of maybe two years, he has gained almost unprecedented fame and notoriety on the Left as the transphobic proponent of the oppressive, male-chauvinistic order. For others, he has become the fearless defender of freedom of speech and thought. Since 2015 the Canadian clinical psychologist - cum - public intellectual wrote a much-publicized self-help book, appeared in and authored countless podcast episodes, engaged in public debates viewed by millions, and probably inspired more op-eds than anyone except the incumbent president of America.

If Gad Saad is an interesting supporting character in the Culture War-saga, Jordan Peterson is not merely a hero of the anti-PC side, he is the eternal champion incarnate.

And, considering the reach and interactivity of 21st-century media, he might be the man receiving the largest volume of unfair criticism in human history (I have no idea how to quantify it, and if it's possible, I might be off by orders of magnitude, but I'd be surprised).

He started with a one-man rebellion against government-imposed mandatory use of pronouns, but in the following years, he's widened his message to cover Wokeism, gender-relations, postmodernism, myths, and religion. There is a lot to like and a lot to criticize in what he says. I have a very positive view of his character and a very mixed one on his views. I find him spot-on on social issues and left-wing ideologies, questionable on the territory of myths, and dead wrong on religion.

The Peterson-story started when the professor of psychology at the University of Toronto took a public stance against Bill-16. The bill the Canadian government planned to introduce was meant to provide protection against gender-discrimination, which at first sight has little to find a problem with. According to Peterson, however, it could be used to impose a mandatory speech-code to force citizens to use arbitrary pronouns (of which there are around 70, and anyone can demand to be addressed as any of them). A failure to do so can cost one his job or can even mean prison time. Peterson likened the justification of the bill to the Marxist-ideology and claimed that it can be the first move of the rising totalitarian state. That raised some eyebrows even among Peterson-sympathizers. On the other hand, people soon started to get publicly shamed, fired, or forced out of their jobs for similar and mostly imaginary offenses (see Brett Weinstein and his wife from the Evergreen College, or Nicholas Christakis from Yale, just to name the most prominent cases). Lindsay Shepherd, a Canadian graduate student was formally censured by her university for simply presenting a public debate featuring Peterson to her class, thereby "creating a toxic atmosphere". Five years later the state of affairs reached a point when J. K. Rawling is called transphobic simply for suggesting that "people who menstruate" might be called simply "women". There is a call for censoring her books. 

At this point, Peterson is vindicated. He called attention to something which he described in hyperboles. He deserves credit for his courage and foresight, which doesn't mean he is right about where the bill leads to. Obsessive gender theorists bringing about a totalitarian government that sends rebelling citizens to Gulags? Not likely. But getting fired and shamed publicly because you don't agree with the mainstream view on race, gender, and sexuality (the mainstream that was massively different only 10 years ago)? That is happening right now with real people, every single day.

Peterson has opined on other left-wing topics as well, most famously on gender inequality, most famously in the Kathy Newman-interview. This I recommend watching in full. It features Peterson at his best. He is extremely calm, composed, articulate, and sincere but not humorless. This was a character-assassination attempt disguised as an interview, which backfired badly on Newman. Peterson was eloquent, respectful, and approachable, whereas Newman conducted the interview in such obvious bad-faith that she almost made a parody of herself. If their genders had been swapped, she (he) wouldn't get a job again at any prominent news outlet. Just imagine a male reporter posing this question to a female interviewee: "So you have written a book to help troubled young women finding their place in the world. But why should we, men, care for this?".

In a nutshell, Peterson rejects the idea that different outcomes by gender or race are the result of an oppressive, patriarchal, white society. Women and men - statistically -, have different personality traits and different preferences in life. Many more women are attracted to being a modestly paid kindergarten teacher than men, and much fewer women than men want to be petrol engineers. Achieving social status is more important to and expected from men. He also points out the men are overrepresented both at the top of society and at the bottom as well. They are the overwhelming majority among the victims of suicide, drug addiction, violent crime, mental disorders, or occupational accidents. And the fact, generally accepted as the normal state of the world, thus no one ever thinks about it, is that men do almost all the physically demanding, dangerous, or just filthy jobs from fire fighting to sewer cleaning. Without going into further elaboration, which I did elsewhere, I share his view. 

However, he has more to say about gender relations than an opinion on income inequality, and some of them are pretty controversial. At one point, addressing the #MeToo movement, he mused that maybe men and women should not work at the same workplaces, as the last 50 years is too short to draw conclusions on the experiment. That sounded one harebrained idea, that could be (and had been) interpreted as further proof of his misogyny (I was simply wondering that he might have gone nuts). But if you watch the full segment on the topic in that interview (approximately 15 minutes), the picture changes completely. Here Peterson was thinking out loud about something he admittedly didn't know the answer to. His whole body language and the context paints a very different picture as the soundbite did. It also seems to me that Peterson likes to provoke, and today it's really not tolerated.

Labelling Peterson as a misogynist requires the complete refusal to consume anything he says or writes in full context. He opines on things that are very much up for debate by our current understanding, so he is bound to be wrong in a number of cases. Like everyone else.

All things considered, I think Peterson has some very good observations on gender-relations and society, even if some of his more radical theories don't resonate with me. I find much less to agree with him once he starts talking about myths. As far as I understand, he claims that ancient myths and stories are vessels of distilled and deep human wisdom, and their mere survival through millennia is the proof of their "truth". Which sounds at least worth thinking about. But when he says that the story of Cain and Abel is so profound that an individual simply couldn't come up with it? Well...I don't think so. I'd expect to find countless stories with more insight by wandering in a random bookstore. But he is a psychologist who has spent decades thinking about these kinds of things, so maybe he has a point. But those also have a point who think that if one searches for patterns and hidden meanings hard enough, he can find them almost anywhere. During one of their public debates with Sam Harris, Peterson was talking about some ancient myth in which the hero faces his own father in the bottom of a pit, and he emphasized the tremendous significance the father-figure and the pit as a location have. Upon which Harris remarked that if it had been the mother on a mountaintop, people like Peterson would eagerly jump in to explain how profound that arrangement is.

One area related to myths where I find Peterson confused and confusing is what he calls "archetypal truth". He rejects the idea of objective truth (like 2+2=4) and instead thinks that a belief is true if it helps our survival. At least, that's my understanding. The discussion of this idea resulted in a tortuous 2-hour discussion between him and Sam Harris, to the exasperation of both Harris and the listeners. I'm sure false beliefs can be useful in certain situations (e.g. belief in a benign God and the future reward can help to endure periods of suffering), and literary geniuses (like his beloved Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche) can offer genuine insights into the nature of reality which cannot be confirmed by science, but I don't understand why Peterson insists on conflating these with "truth" in the normal sense.

Peterson reminds me of the protagonist of a novel by the 19th-century Hungarian writer, Kalman Mikszath. In Beszterce Ostroma (The Siege of Beszterce), the wayward noblemen, Count Pongracz, refuses to accept modernity and lives his life as a medieval lord in his imaginary world. In the prologue, Mikszath explains the motivation of his hero something along the following lines (which I paraphrase from memory): "The past is a bottomless well, and looking into it deeply can befuddle those who don't have a strong head. Count Pongracz didn't have a strong head, and he gazed into the well very deep indeed." I think Peterson does have a strong head, but by temperament and professional curiosity he is both susceptible to see patterns in semi-randomness and willing to go great lengths to uncover hidden meanings in obscure things - real or perceived.

Which is probably a good explanation for his infuriatingly vague attitude to religion. He's not Christian in the common sense of the world (or in any meaningful sense), but he is just unable to give a straight answer for dead simple questions like: "Do you believe in God?" or "was Jesus physically resurrected from the dead?". His answers are "it would take me 40 hours to answer this question" and "it depends what you mean by resurrection". This is just hemming and hawing that is hard to interpret another way than intellectual dishonesty, but my opinion is that Peterson tries to convince himself as much as his audience. But even self-deception is an insufficient explanation for occasional statements like "secular humanism was tried by the Soviet Union" - as he put in a debate with Matt Dillahunty. In the best interpretation, it was a poor attempt at provocation. Otherwise, it was just moronic. A similarly asinine opinion of his that ditching religion will lead to "rivers of blood". He should look up from his books of Nietzsche and take a quick look at Northern-Europe.

In 2018, Peterson published his first book intended for the general public, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, in which, as the title suggests, he laid out his "rules" to live a meaningful life. It's a decent self-help book undergirded by the current understanding in cognitive science (so the scientists I listened to say). For me, it was a bit too long and too philosophical in places, but not a bad book at all. It gives some generally-accepted advices ("Set your house in order before you criticize the world"), some conservative ones ("Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them"), and there even are a couple of surprising items on the list ("Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street"). They are heavily supported by Biblical-stories, but this is what you'd expect from Peterson. What you don't find at all is any reference to support patriarchy, or white supremacy, or transphobia. It's a conservative book emphasizing the importance of personal responsibility, discipline, but also compassion.

The book I believe also gives a key to Peterson - which wasn't very hidden in the first place. In one of the chapters, he explicitly writes that our life exists in the thin layer of order over the depths of chaos, which is the natural state of the world. In our daily lives, we think we understand our place in the world and the rules by which events unfold in it. But a single accident or unexpected situation can push us completely out of our element into unfamiliarity and danger and suffering. We need rules to carve out a habitable space in the universe, and myths and religion contain time-proven tools and guidelines - some rare gems under their pile of rubbish - for the job.

This is the standard conservative attitude to life, which some people are probably born with, but Peterson is someone whose life almost predestines him to see the world in dark colors. As a clinical psychologist he works with people with serious issues. He has a decades long fascination with the history of totalitarian ideas. His daughter has been suffering from physical problems from her childhood, his wife has terminal cancer, and he himself is just recovering from a recent, very serious mental and physical illness - during which liberal media poured out a disgusting volume of schadenfreude.

That is one of the reasons why I find the usual criticism against him - that is, he is just a snake-oil man - unfair and unjustified. He is genuinely someone who fits the description of a tortured soul. The other reason is simply his behavior in a conversation. Peterson has always impressed me by being such an attentive listener. Even in a conversation with someone really not on his level - like with the disgraced troll, Milo Yiannopoulos - Peterson visibly concentrates on his partner's words and tries to learn from them - which is something conmen never do very convincingly. He is also very emotional, often to the point of weirdness. All in all, I think Peterson is an honest, very brave, very smart, and very articulate person. With some very serious troubles.

Having said all this above, which part explains his meteoric rise to prominence and his controversially? I think, instead of a single trait or message from him, there are multiple factors reinforcing each other - which is not a very original idea, as this is the case for most things. Nevertheless, I think the reasons for his prominance are the current cultural and political climate, Peterson's physical and intellectual charisma, the relevance of topics he engages with, and the rise of podcasts. 

We live in a highly politically polarised time, when the arguments on the Right but mostly on the Left have gone so far to the extreme, that very few people are indifferent to them. Most people are sick and tired of the idiotic overreach of political correctness, and they love to hear a fearless, charismatic, eloquent figure speaking their mind on their behalf. And Peterson is charismatic, extremely articulate, and - maybe more importantly than generally realised - telegenic. I don't say physically unattractive people can't gain followers (Hitler), but they start with a big handicap. And besides refuting things publicly that most feel need refusal, Peterson engages in other topics in a very interesting way. When he is not carried away by his own voice and the rhythm of his thoughts, he is very hard to stop listening to. 

And, most importantly, he points to a very significant issue that doesn't get the publicity it deserves, but is of interest for many - the changing role of men in society. What I have no idea about is that how many of his fans are attracted to him for his obsession with myths and religion - which seems to be the center of everything to him.

The last factor contributing to his popularity is the recent but huge interest in long-form conversations satisfied by an infinite number of excellent podcasts. I think it would be justified to recognize the notion of the "Joe Rogan number" equivalent to the "Erdős number in Academia" and "Bacon number" in the world of movie-stars. Maybe as a counterbalance to the declining attention span and constant multitasking, people crave for listening to long and deep conversations between smart people. This is a perfect medium for Peterson (he has a good voice too), and once someone made one podcast part of her daily diet, following the chain of connections, she have inevitably bumped into Peterson, or people discussing Peterson, probably many times.

Where will the Peterson-phenomenon evolve from here? It's anyone's guess and it's not a very deep insight to assume that it will mainly depend on two factors. One is the middle-term trajectory of the cultural climate, and the other is how his personal life will unfold in the future. Being treated as a guru has never improved anyone's personality, and I doubt the public hate he receives from the other side will either.  Peterson will never be a lighthearted, happy man, but I hope if things cool down a bit, the antagonism toward him abates to some extent. If that happens, more people can recognize that he is not the monster he is often portrayed, but essentially is one of the good guys. In the darker scenario, if the polarization continues, I can envision him cocooned into his bubble of obscure mysticism and becoming the liberal boogey-man for decades to come. That would be a personal tragedy and a public loss.

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The Gadfather

I encountered Dr. Saad the first time on Dave Rubin's once-recommendable talk show (which had started as a former left-winger presenting interesting characters from the Right and gradually has slid into presenting anyone who has either something nice to say about Trump or something ugly about progressives), and I was immediately captured by the charisma oozing from the man. He conjured up the image of a gregarious, beguiling, and nefarious wizard from the Arabian Nights. The one who shares his tainted wisdom with kings and, with his oily tongue and enchanting tales, lures the young and curious onto dark paths.

I've come to believe this strange first impression was not completely inaccurate, but the real man is of course more interesting than his fantasy alter-ego. Gad Saad was born into an Arabic-speaking Jewish community in Lebanon, 1964. During the civil war, his people had few friends, and eventually his family was forced to run for their lives. He arrived in Montreal, Canada at the age of 11. He reveled in the new-found freedom and opportunities, and in his youth he had two contradicting aspirations. He wanted to be an academic and a soccer player. As it happens, an injury decided the question, and Saad went to study mathematics and computer science, then marketing, and finally evolutionary psychology. In his first book, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, he paved the way for applying tools from evolutionary psychology to study consumer behavior.

He is a popular lecturer, a prolific academic writer, and the recipient of multiple awards, but he started gaining wider attention after he testified in front of the Canadian senate against Bill C-16. He appears frequently on the internet, wreaks havoc on Twitter, and runs his own podcast, The Saad Truth. Saad is a vehement defender of Western values, freedom of speech, and scientific truth, against what he perceives is a full-scale assault of radical left-wing ideas. He takes issues with the usual SJW talking points: race and gender are social constructs, the white patriarchy is the oppressor, criticism of Islam is Islamophobia, etc... As a former refugee from a war-ravaged country, he caustically mocks Western snowflakes wallowing in victimhood, and as a Jew, he demands free speech for even Holocaust-deniers. But as a scientist, he is particularly incensed by the claim of postmodern philosophy, that is, science is just a tool of oppression and there are no objective facts. Postmodernism has already consumed Academia, and the society's defenses are eroding under its relentless attack.

The "vehement defender" qualifier is an understatement. Even though Dr. Saad possesses many noble character traits worthy of a fictitious antagonist - charisma, gregariousness, eloquence, wit -, magnanimity is not one of them. When challenged, the rotund and affable professor turns into a bloodhound. When he viciously and relentlessly goes after someone, the words "lobotomized", "moron", "imbecile", or "castrati" fly with abandon. If someone attacks him, he hits back ten times harder - as he proudly confirms.

To reach into fiction for analogies again, this time in the Victorian-era, he is both the criminal mastermind and the henchman.

His trademark combination of swagger and eloquence (or the warm joviality juxtaposed by a predilection for mischief and ruthlessness) makes Gad Saad a very entertaining performer. Like many characters on the Right (although the good professor is hard to pigeonhole in the political spectrum), he loves the sound of his own voice and is visibly comfortable in his own skin. And like many of them, he flies close to the sun. As expected from one who enjoys being a contrarian, he is not very concerned about associating with characters who live in the intellectual gray zones touching the far right. And, tripping off my personal alarm, he finds anti-Trumpism much more problematic than Trump himself, to the extent that he often seems to think that anyone very critical to Trump is an LGBTQ* propagandist. His own critics get lumped in the same category as well. Thin-skinned-ness and preference for passion over nuance might be the weaknesses not only of Social Justice Warriors, which in the case of their most ardent adversary is, mildly speaking, ironic.

In the Culture War raging today, he is a warrior-scholar who is admired as the champion of freedom on one side and passionately hated as the enabler of patriarchy on the other. Ideological wars are complex and messy businesses and their fighters come in all shades of gray. The line between the forces of good and of evil will be drawn only after the dust has settled. On which side the indomitable, vain, and fiercely independent academic will go down in history, is yet to be seen. Until then, there is a lot to learn from Professor Saad. And perhaps a lot be cautious of.

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A Man of the Book

”The easiest definition is that a fundamentalist is:  "no fun, too much damn, and not enough mental."”- Bart Ehrman

I came across Dr. Bart D. Ehrman thanks to a strange hobby of mine. I like watching public debates between atheists and Christian apologetics. It's hard to explain why I enjoy them that much, or at all. Very often the latter folk strikes me as arrogant, intellectually dishonest, or simply obtuse, and even the sincere and likable ones mount convincing arguments very rarely. From dozens of debates, I found maybe one or two where that side at least made some good points. I've never seen any they won.

But for one, I'm an atheist, and I naturally see the side reflecting my own opinion in a better light than the other. Secondly, the apologists start with a huge handicap. The Bible is full of historical errors, scientific nonsense, glaring contradictions, and hideous moral teachings not even religious extremists follow today. It condones slavery, misogyny, homophobia, and at places it's downright genocidal. Its failings are mostly hidden by a general lack of knowledge, even among the faithful (just ask a religious friend next time to cite the Ten Commandments), and the fact that its stories are so embedded in Western culture that they lost their power to disgust and terrify long ago (very few people stop and ponder what kind of God would demand from someone to sacrifice his own son to him as a test, or drown every single mand, woman, child, and animal in the world because he is dissatisfied with his creation). Still, in the world of modern sensibilities, its defenders fight a very steep uphill battle.

For people who were not raised in a religious environment, the belief in some blatant nonsense often seems to be a sign of low mental capacity. As it happens with simple explanations, it's not a very good one, and especially not in the case of religion. Very smart and highly educated people can be unshakable believers. Many of the most famous atheists debaters are former Christians or even fundamentalists who left the faith in their twenties. Their IQs at 22 were definitely not lower than in their forties. That's one thing I find fascinating.

And after the long-winded introduction enters Dr. Ehrman, whom I happened on in one of these debates some years ago, and I have been following his online appearances ever since.

Ehrman is one of the world's most renowned New Testament scholars and experts on early Christianity. He is also a New York Times' bestselling author with books on Christianity and the Gospels (which some might take as a proof that miracles still exist). He grew up as a Christian, but only started to practice his faith in earnest after a high-school born-again experience. He became a hard-core fundamentalist and decided to dedicate his life to studying the Bible. He went to a religious college, learned the ancient languages and studied the original texts with the firm conviction that they are the inerrant word of God. Eventually, he noticed some discrepancies first, then historical errors, then contradictions. After the inevitable struggle, he moved away from fundamentalism, then, a couple of years later, from Christianity altogether.

Nevertheless, he made a career of it. He completed his Ph.D. at Princeton, wrote or edited around thirty books since, is a full-time university professor, and takes the time to churn out 1000 words on his blog every day on the subject of early Christianity. What makes him so interesting for a layman is, of course, not his scholarly accomplishments, but his personality that comes across in his public appearances. He's an odd duck in his field where most of his colleagues are practicing Christians. He speaks with both passion and clarity. He's relentlessly rational, but also enthusiastic about his subject. At the same time, he is just a funny guy. Listening to him, one has the impression that the chronological order of the Gospels, or the question of whether Jesus spoke Greek or not, are among the most interesting topics in the world.

If there are celebrities among biblical scholars, Ehrman is certainly one of them. As a debater, he is the great white whale of apologists, the one they crave to see to get beaten. He often takes part in debates with other scholars on the veracity and reliability of the scriptures, as well. Despite that these discourses are sometimes highly technical, and not meant for a general audience, I found myself binge-watching them. If I wrote a Chtulhu campaign with some reference to ancient history, Dr. Ehrman would surely end up as the Keeper's favorite NPC.

But why did he choose to dedicate his life to the study of the sacred texts of a religion he no longer believes in? His answer is that the Bible is, without doubt, the most important book ever written. The extent of its direct and indirect influence on history and culture is immeasurable. Had it never existed, the world today would be unrecognizably different from ours.

And this is a sentiment I can deeply relate to, although in a narrow sense, and for my own quirky reasons. I'm a mild case of a bibliophile (the blue-collar version) with a thirst for non-practical knowledge and an introvert who has spent too much time thinking on the meaning of life. I'm also a great fan of fantastical fiction. If I believed that there is a book that is the inerrant word of God, that can be studied to no end, that provides answers for all the questions in the world (as one of my childhood Bible teachers said), for me, that would be not an inch less amazing than finding a grimoire with actually working magic spells. On the contrary, it would be the mother of all grimoires. (Opening the gates to eternal life would be just an extra, welcome, plus.)

Of course, as a rare specimen of agnostic experts of Christianity, Ehrman garners a lot of hate. Fundamentalists see him as a traitor who turned against the faith he emerged from and can beat them in their own game (surely with the help of the Devil). He seeds doubt and corrupts the young. You almost smell the brimstone reading some of these articles. Some atheists, surprisingly, tend to hate him even more, because he claims Jesus was a historical figure, which they think harms their cause.
You really can't please everyone.

Ironically, in another world, Bart Ehrman would have made a terrific evangelical preacher. Which partly explains his appeal. You can get the awe and delight of listening to an inspirational speaker on our great myths without the nonsense part. He might rob his subject of the supernatural but in return, makes it superbly interesting.

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