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Ep 12 - Gabriel Rossman, UCLA - What Social Construction Means And Why It's Not As Stupid As You Think
92 Plays1 month ago
On this week's episode of the Sphere Podcast, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Publisher of Sphere Media, interviews Gabriel Rossman, Professor of Sociology at UCLA. They talk about what sociology is, what the concept of social construction means and why it's not the nonsense that people typically assume it is.
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Gabriel's latest article in City Journal: https://www.city-journal.org/article/academia-conservatives-universities-ideological
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Transcript
Introduction and Contextual Jokes
00:00:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Low Productions Value Sphere podcast, which is shot from my hideout in Syria. But apparently Gabriel is also ah coming to us from an undisclosed location in front of his car.
00:00:15
Gabriel
Yeah, well, I mean, it's this is my revolutionary Islamist flag right here.
00:00:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:00:19
Gabriel
you know you said You thought it was a green screen, but you were mistaken.
00:00:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:00:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. We're all getting radicalized these days by the internet.
00:00:26
Gabriel
The chair is just blocking the script that says death to all infidels, but starting with Pascal.
00:00:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, that's that's usually how it goes.
Gabriel's Background and Sociology Misconceptions
00:00:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um yeah so Gabriel, I wanted to have you on because you're one of the smartest people I know, one of the funniest people I know.
00:00:41
Gabriel
Thank you.
00:00:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah and
00:00:44
Gabriel
That's flattering given that I know you know some very smart and very funny people Like a lot of people would be like, okay, who cares but you know
00:00:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But by day, you're a professor of sociology at UCLA. um And sociology, so I come from France, which is the land of Auguste-Cant and Émile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu.
00:01:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And so if you ask a French person,
00:01:13
Gabriel
my undergrads and they' invariably call him pure Bordeaux, and I always have to tell them Bordeaux was a wine, Bordeaux was a sociologist.
00:01:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and yeah Yes. ah Pierre Bardot. um And if you ask a French person about sociology, you're going to get either one or two answers, depending on whether you're interlocutor is a Marxist or not, which is either sociology is this wonderful discipline, which teaches us, you know, which scientifically proves that ah Rich people are evil and that the reason why some people have more money than others is because rich people are evil. Or if you're speaking to a non-Marxist, he will say, well, sociology is a bunch of claptrap funded by my tax monies to ah to justify stealing my money. ah So somewhat provocatively, I told you that I wanted to start the podcast by asking you to justify the existence of your discipline.
00:02:11
Gabriel
Yeah, so, I mean, one way would be to kind of question that. I mean, I think the best way to, it's like ah by their fruit, you shall know them kind of thing. Like, has sociology come up with insights that are valuable to tell us something about the world?
00:02:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
Bourdieu's Class Analysis
00:02:26
Gabriel
And one of them I'd start with is to kind of like take your more populous version of the man on the street and this idea ah the idea that sociology just tells us rich people are evil.
00:02:36
Gabriel
um I mean, a lot of sociology does claim that, um but here's the interesting thing. you know We were talking about Pierre Bordeaux, right? That Bordeaux shows us that ah Educated people are also evil, you know, or at least educated people were also snobs ah You know, I mean he he he has a lot of insights right? he He did some very good gift on gift exchange but um The thing is most well known for in sociology as compared to anthropology where he's known for gift exchange But in sociology is most well known for his class model which is really you know, it's like if
00:03:14
Gabriel
Populist types gave a shit enough about coming up with like, oh, I have a citation for that to prove that I'm right.
00:03:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:03:21
Gabriel
Bordeaux is who they would point to for all their stuff about the elites, right? Because when a populist talks about the elites, they're not really talking about rich people.
00:03:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:03:30
Gabriel
They're more talking about people with college education and powerful or better yet, graduate degrees and ah laptop jobs who think they know better than everybody else.
00:03:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
Education as Cultural Capital
00:03:40
Gabriel
And Bourdieu was the first person, well, he wasn't the first, but he was the most important person to talk about how that really is a distinctive social class that has a certain amount of class power, class identity, etc.
00:03:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, so that's actually very interesting. I did not expect this conversation to go there, but that's why I had you on. So just to explain for the audience who are not familiar with Bourdieu, one of his key ideas was precisely you know sort of complicated, this sort of Marxist notion that it's all about money.
00:03:59
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:04:10
Gabriel
yeah
00:04:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And and he had this theory that education the way it and sort of especially classical education and the way it's it's traditionally done was the point of it was not so much to actually educate people but to sort of like give you this this card that says you're a member of the elite and so you know oh you can quote Cicero in conversation of course now it all sounds extremely quaint because nobody can quote Cicero in conversation
00:04:37
Gabriel
Yeah. Mm hmm.
00:04:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah But the idea is you know we're going to teach kids Cicero, not because we believe Cicero is intrinsically ah valuable, but because the children of a certain case will be allowed well be able to sort of justify their privilege by saying, oh, I learned about Cicero.
00:04:55
Gabriel
Yeah, that's right. So it's it's in part an argument. ah I mean, this he called it cultural capital, but right? So Marx was obsessed with capital. you know Famously, his three-volume book was Das Kapital. And what Bordeaux points out, ah I mean, in some extent based on Gary Becker, um James Coleman, ah Glenn Lowry, you know American scholars, um but there are more forms of capital than just you know dos cappital right Das Das Kapital means wealth and it means productive machinery.
00:05:28
Gabriel
right So it basically means owning a factory.
00:05:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:05:30
Gabriel
And um you know obviously, Marx was interested in stuff like that. And the Marxists thought that that was the only source of class power that really mattered in modernity. And what we're due points out is that cultural capital is extremely important.
00:05:44
Gabriel
And it's interesting that he, in America, when people talk about education, like American social scientists, if they they don't want to just say education, they'll call it human capital.
00:05:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:05:53
Gabriel
And human capital implies that education makes you more productive.
00:05:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:05:58
Gabriel
And that's probably a good model for something like imagine getting a degree in chemical engineering. You or I wouldn't know the first thing about how to refine gasoline.
00:06:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:06:08
Gabriel
you know
00:06:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:06:09
Gabriel
Whereas a chemical engineer, what's that?
00:06:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well,
Classics vs Practical Education
00:06:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
speak for yourself, Rossman. Rossman.
00:06:14
Gabriel
Exactly, yeah. I mean, I don't know what you're doing there in the in the in the bunker, but although I hope it's well ventilated if you're ah refining gasoline. Anyway, so um so if you get a degree in chemical engineering, you actually will know valuable things that you didn't know before you got that degree in chemical engineering.
00:06:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:06:33
Gabriel
Now, um if you get the degree in classics, Assuming you're in the vast majority of humanity who has never been sent back to ancient Rome via time warp, it's not really that valuable in terms of like actual skills that you can accomplish.
00:06:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
00:06:50
Gabriel
um It's more just a way to show off. um you know and And I say this, by the way, as somebody who, um I don't speak Latin, but you know as the meme goes, I am a man and therefore I am obsessed with ancient Rome and I have you know three meters, you know like 10 shelf feet of books on ancient Rome and I've read them all. you know um and But there is a meaningful extent to which it is just kind of like an arbitrary shibboleth of class status.
00:07:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, I mean I have like a whole rant about classics, but I'm not going to put it there because it's it's beside the point, ah but yeah.
00:07:18
Gabriel
um and
00:07:27
Gabriel
Well, actually, let let's get into it a bit.
00:07:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
that's the
00:07:28
Gabriel
I mean, at the at the risk of throwing off your, you know, the agenda you set first, I think actually, so when the right, and I'm not sure whether this is also true in Europe, but in the United States, there's kind of an implicit right wing theory of how to solve education, which is great books and classics.
00:07:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:07:44
Gabriel
And I think that doesn't hurt. But I also think it's kind of dumb, like we, but you know, it's like, it's like, Let me put it this way.
00:07:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, give us the conservative take against the classics.
00:07:54
Gabriel
That market is oversaturated. the the market is oversaturated and
00:07:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:08:01
Gabriel
and really the The human capital deficit is you need people who actually know how to do things. And I understand that the whole idea of great books and classics and everything is like it teaches you how to think. It exposes you to all these great thinkers, et cetera. There's also a certain pessimism in that, by the way, in that implies that you can't trust any thinker who you know ah put Quill to paper less than 200 years ago. um and like Unless they were Hayek, right? He's like the 120th century exception. but um
00:08:32
Gabriel
But they I mean, I think ultimately, if you if you want a movement to have power, it needs people who knows how to know how to do things. And that would include things like data science and stuff like that.
00:08:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right Right.
00:08:44
Gabriel
So I actually I have a piece that will be coming out eventually in City Journal on how um you know the marginal human capital development dollar for right wing philanthropists would not be in great books education, but it would be best spent on basically encouraging conservatives to go to graduate school in the quantitative social sciences.
Critique of Holistic Admissions
00:09:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, I i i actually pitched some right-wing donors, let's put it that way, on creating like a right-wing MIT.
00:09:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So i I get your point. i was I was making a much more specific point about the classics, meaning Greek and Latin.
00:09:20
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:09:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And you've heard me say see that before, which is that dead languages, and I guess in theory, you could use Sanskrit instead of Greek and Latin.
00:09:25
Gabriel
Sure.
00:09:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But dead languages is the only non-scientific discipline where there's an objectively correct answer and an objectively wrong answer to the test.
00:09:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And therefore, it's the only non-scientific answer with a discipline where there's very little room for BS to improve your grid.
00:09:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And I'm not i'm not saying that the other...
00:09:56
Gabriel
Well, I don't know. I mean, there are objective answers in other fields.
00:09:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
are BS. I'm just saying, you know, I was a college student and the humanities, like you can, you know, you can, you can sort of BS your way through some stuff, right?
00:10:08
Gabriel
but you But you can't BS your way through dates.
00:10:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I'm not saying it's completely BS, but there's, there's a measure of BS.
00:10:13
Gabriel
So like i mean when did when did you all and ah invade England?
00:10:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Whereas, what?
00:10:17
Gabriel
if you say ten six when When did you all invade England? If you say 1065, it's wrong.
00:10:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
1066. Yes.
00:10:22
Gabriel
And if you say 1067, it's wrong. 1066 is the objectively correct answer.
00:10:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, but if if you're, if you're doing a BA in history you're not answering quizzes about ah the Norman vision of you're not answering multiple choice questionnaires.
00:10:32
Gabriel
That's right.
00:10:35
Gabriel
that Well, that's in part because historians now are almost exclusively social historians, which can be really interesting.
00:10:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
but
00:10:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. but
00:10:44
Gabriel
I mean, i most of those aforementioned classics books were actually social histories of Greece and Rome.
00:10:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. I mean, the point is, if you're translating a Latin text, there's there's an objective answer grid in the way that there is on a mass test. And I mean, ah unless you're saying that you think it would be better if, you know, history and literature degrees were graded with like s SAT t style multiple choice questionnaires where there's like an objectively wrong right or wrong answer.
00:11:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And so, and, you know, we can, this was basically why Latin along with math was like the the king and queen of disciplines in the traditional French education system of the third Republic, because this was, they were sort of doing Borgia before Borgia. There were the two disciplines that allowed like a poor kid to excel in the way that history literature didn't.
00:11:45
Gabriel
That was also true in the US in the early 20th century. um So like ah ah i mean took a kind of a stylized history of US elite education in the early 20th century is it used to be that they had a system of recruitment from prep schools.
00:12:01
Gabriel
And then they dropped their Greek requirement and only had a Latin requirement and also did an early version of the s
00:12:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
Demographics and Affirmative Action
00:12:06
Gabriel
SAT.
00:12:06
Gabriel
t And then they found out that a ton of Jews from New York City were getting in ah to the top colleges.
00:12:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right. So they stopped.
00:12:14
Gabriel
Well, they started worrying about Gentile flight ah and the the the the other Ivy's would say like, we don't want to turn into the next Columbia because apparently Columbia had this catastrophic number of Jews um that would make it unappealing for you know elite Gentiles to attend.
00:12:31
Gabriel
And so they introduced a system, and ah they experimented with explicit anti-Jewish quotas and they thought it was more subtle to go to a basically a well-rounded holistic admissions criteria and they'd give points for regional diversity like it was easier to get in if you were from Montana because, you know, in part because they knew, yeah it was DEI for wasps, yeah.
00:12:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, it was DEI.
00:12:51
Gabriel
the the They knew that Montana was entirely Gentiles, you know.
00:12:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So the woke people in my in my Twitter mentions are right, which is that there's been DEI for white people in America.
00:13:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:13:02
Gabriel
Yeah, no, that's right.
00:13:04
Gabriel
and And also, I mean, you can see this in that when, okay, so in the, to carry it forward into the late 20th century, right? So that was the early history of it.
00:13:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:13:14
Gabriel
In the late 20th century, you had ah the activist Ward Connolly get a bunch of ballot initiatives in different states, starting with California, banning affirmative action and state university systems. And there was like a five-year period where they just you know did the old system where there was a lot of weight on s SAT t and grades.
00:13:34
Gabriel
um Because if you're admitting these massive ah freshman classes, it's very labor intensive to go through you know the but things one by one and have alumni interview people and stuff like that, like the private schools do.
00:13:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
00:13:46
Gabriel
so they They just did that, and then they got admissions cohorts that were ah highly white and Asian. And then after about five years, they switched to ah an entirely holistic admissions system.
00:14:00
Gabriel
So the but the state university systems in the post-affirmative action era basically adopted the same system
00:14:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:14:09
Gabriel
in circa the year 2000 that the Ivies had adopted circa the year 1930, that they were both to solve a demographic a perceived demographic problem. In the
French vs US Education Systems
00:14:20
Gabriel
1930s, the perceived demographic problem, 1920s, 1930s, the perceived demographic problem was too many Jews and not enough wasps.
00:14:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:14:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:14:29
Gabriel
And then um in the um circa 2000, the perceived demographic problem was too many whites and especially too many Asians.
00:14:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right, right. I mean, i I think that's interesting because the idea of holistic admissions is something that sounds good in theory, but in practice, it's just it's just like,
00:14:46
Gabriel
Mm-hmm. Well, when you make things fuzzy, you you give discretion.
00:14:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Trying to do shenanigans.
00:14:53
Gabriel
It's one of those, what is it, the will of the sovereign? decide you know It's like, when you um when you make when you increase discretion, you increase power.
00:14:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:15:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:15:04
Gabriel
and and And when you make things fuzzy, you increase discretion.
00:15:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:15:07
Gabriel
And that's part of the whole point.
00:15:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:15:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:15:09
Gabriel
And likewise, I wrote an article for NR, I don't know, six years ago.
00:15:14
Gabriel
where the top prep schools in America were trying to abandon grades and go to like a holistic evaluation packet.
00:15:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:15:21
Gabriel
And the the very explicit point was that they didn't want to have class rank because they didn't want admissions officers to be able to compare their students because then only two of them could get into Harvard, whereas all of them should get into Harvard.
00:15:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right,
00:15:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right right, right, right. Yes. ah the This is why ah also my alma mater strongly resists um ah giving um equivalent of ah cum laude and so on, on the degree because they want all of the degrees to have the same value, which is very good for me, by the way.
00:15:48
Gabriel
Well, the the joke in the US is that they keep having to readjust that yeah because you the the ah the missing data we can impute as you know the bottom quartile.
00:16:00
Gabriel
But but but in the US, they keep having to readjust what counts as cum laude and magna cum laude and summa cum laude because grade inflation is so ridiculous. So at UCLA, I think the the median grade
00:16:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:16:13
Gabriel
the mean grade the meat I think the median GPA for graduating senior is something like 3.7, which is an A-.
00:16:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah, no, they did ah I mean, this is, this is i I have grown so much more appreciative of the French education system over the past, you know, 20 years of interacting with the American culture.
00:16:38
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:16:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Because, uh, yeah, we, we, well, first of all, it's a competitive merit based XM to get in. Um, and then you're graded on a curve and it causes a problem because, uh, uh, my alma mater introduced letter grades, except they did it properly. Uh, so it's very hard to get an A and a B. Um, and so they actually, if, if you want to apply to an American university.
00:17:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
tell the office and they give you a special transcript.
00:17:14
Gabriel
Translated into America where they like they raised for great by like two full letter grades Wait,
00:17:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and and basically and basically um the of the line like All the season B's are turned into A's and the A's into A's.
00:17:24
Gabriel
is this your ah this is your undergrad on the matter or your your and MBA?
Historical Education Practices
00:17:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah This is my NBA, yeah.
00:17:30
Gabriel
Yeah, cuz like in America MBAs are notorious grade grubbers And so there tends to be very high GPAs for MBA programs
00:17:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. ah Well, I mean, it, it wasn't technically an MBA. It's the so-called Grande Colle system. So, uh, yes.
00:17:49
Gabriel
Sure.
00:17:51
Gabriel
Also a major feature in Bordeaux, where like in distinction, there's all these graphs where you like labels, like, you know, grande de col, and, you know, that that's where you see people saying that like tree bark is a more appealing subject for photographs and folk dancing.
00:17:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, I mean the the whole thing.
00:18:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, I mean,
00:18:09
Gabriel
it's It's you people.
00:18:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I liked about the American system was that the ranking system was more fuzzy.
00:18:20
Gabriel
among the higher education?
00:18:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Um, yes.
00:18:23
Gabriel
No, I don't know about that.
00:18:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh, yeah, I know, but like people, people take it super seriously.
00:18:24
Gabriel
Because we, I mean, we publish magazines that rank schools every year. And, and they'll put them on their website. So like, you cannot look at something at UCLA that doesn't say the number one public school in America.
00:18:35
Gabriel
Like, we're very proud of that, that we're the highest ranked public university.
00:18:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:18:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, but see, I didn't know that.
00:18:42
Gabriel
Yeah, but you know, if you were applying to ah undergrad in America, you would.
00:18:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and
00:18:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i mean i'm not i'm not you know This is not this is not too ah to to take a dig on UCLA and its beautiful campus, but like if you you know if somebody tells me, oh, I went to Michigan, I don't think, oh, that's only the second best public school in America. I don't have like a strong sense in my head or if somebody, you know goes to Harvard versus Stanford versus MIT, you know, I don't, I don't immediately rank them in my head.
00:19:14
Gabriel
Well, people in the relevant fields do...
00:19:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Whereas in France it's very clear that there's one on the top and then there's a second and there's a third.
00:19:19
Gabriel
Okay, so so actually we can get back to your original thing of like, does sociology have anything to offer? Like, you know, justify our existence, because apparently you're the St. Peter of academia. um So the...
00:19:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I was hoping to be the atoll of the Hun, but
00:19:33
Gabriel
Yeah, okay. You know, if we if our sins were not so great, God would not have sent you against us. Or was that Genghis Khan? some guys horses with a bow yeah yeah okay so anyway yeah but it was Attila who was called the scourge of god i think so so one expressed himself in that way and the other so basically both of them in some sense were scourge of god anyway so uh back to like the
00:19:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I think that one was Genghis Khan. Betilla is the one where ah the grass doesn't grow back on the ground that his armies have tread.
00:19:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Yes.
Impact of Rankings on Education
00:20:06
Gabriel
findings yeah that's right um
00:20:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I'll take Genghis Khan. I'm an open-minded guy.
00:20:11
Gabriel
Larger harem too. Uh, you know, like you don't, you don't hear about, you know, 4% of all men alive today have Genghis, uh, have, uh, told the Hunsway chromosome, you know, or whatever the number is.
00:20:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, one reason is we have basically no sources on Natilla. We don't even know what he looked like.
00:20:29
Gabriel
Yeah. I mean, we just know that he was from somewhere Northeast of Rome, but we don't know how far Northeast.
00:20:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, yes, we actually know very little about the Huns, much less than about the Mongols.
00:20:36
Gabriel
Yeah. yeah
00:20:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And so presumably he had a large harem. It would be surprising if he didn't, but we don't know anything about it.
00:20:45
Gabriel
Uh-huh. Who knows? Maybe it was celibate, you know. ah you know yourere You're a rare aesthetic step warlord.
00:20:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Maybe, maybe that's where I'll end your game.
00:20:54
Gabriel
right so ah Anyway, so but so back to ah justifying my discipline's continued existence, and this will kind of anticipate the other things that we want to talk about later.
00:21:06
Gabriel
um One of the really interesting findings lately is uh... what was sometimes called market information regimes which is the idea that you know as if you just break it down right it's like
00:21:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay.
00:21:17
Gabriel
Markets are ruled by information like systematic structures for information control how markets work and the canonical example of that is um law schools because law schools are ranked by US News and World Report and there's this, you know, they publish a ranking every year and it's a highly salient piece of information for um People applying to law schools and law schools really care about their rankings because if you're
00:21:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Yeah.
00:21:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Yes.
00:21:48
Gabriel
Yale, and you're competing with Stanford for the very best students, you want to make sure that in 20 years that Supreme Court justice has a Yale degree, not a Stanford degree.
00:21:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:21:59
Gabriel
And then if you're the University of Buttfuck, and you're competing with Buttfuck State, you want to compete just to get more tuition. And so you really care not if you're number one or number two, but you want to care if you're number 67 or 68.
00:22:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:22:14
Gabriel
And because for any given student, that's a relevant choice set.
00:22:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:22:17
Gabriel
And so while schools really care about this, and there's been some good work showing that on a day-to-day basis, law school deans basically go through their day thinking not what is going to make us the best law school, but what is going to make us the best law school as measured by US News and World Report.
00:22:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Yeah.
00:22:31
Gabriel
And to the extent that um US News' measurements are only loosely coupled to actual quality, it's um it's the perception or the measurement that matters more, not the reality.
00:22:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:22:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, yeah yeah i I mean, I'm not i'm not saying that they're totally irrelevant, ah but ah well, one sociological fact, ah which I thought was very interesting, I saw it on the internet, therefore it's true, although it's old and would be interesting to see if it's changed.
00:23:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah If you look at students who were admitted to both Harvard and Yale, ah the ones who pick Yale over Harvard is about 30%.
00:23:06
Gabriel
Mm-hmm.
00:23:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
If you look at Azure CNSEC, which would be the equivalence, the ones who are admitted to both and who choose the number two, it's 3%.
00:23:21
Gabriel
Wow. Okay. So there's more of like a strict ranking, yeah.
00:23:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and so you Right. and so if you And so if you meet a kid and who's like, well, I got into Harvard, but I chose Yale because there's this professor or this thing, you you don't immediately think you're crazy.
00:23:28
Gabriel
Wait, which one is number one and number two?
00:23:33
Gabriel
Uh-huh. Yeah.
00:23:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
if If you run into a kid who says, oh, I i got into SSI, but I chose SSI, you think, oh my God, you you made the biggest mistake of your life when you went when you were 20 and now you're 20.
00:23:48
Gabriel
Oh, so you did go to the number two.
00:23:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, I went to the number one.
00:23:52
Gabriel
Oh, OK.
00:23:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah and
00:23:55
Gabriel
I honestly didn't know whether HSA was number one or number two.
00:23:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i
00:23:58
Gabriel
I mean, I know it's a good school, but uh-huh.
00:23:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, it's absolutely number one, um and as acknowledged by everybody.
00:24:05
Gabriel
So you're talking about this issue ah so this issue of how often does somebody pick this one versus that one?
00:24:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So i I do think the hierarchy is stronger.
00:24:15
Gabriel
um And presumably, let's say that, ah I'm sorry, what was the second school besides HSA?
00:24:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's called Essek.
00:24:23
Gabriel
Okay, so let's, okay.
00:24:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
which sounds suspiciously close to Echek, which is failure in French. And we like to remind them that.
00:24:31
Gabriel
Okay, so um yeah your metric of how much how often people choose HSA versus SX, this is like a, you could use this to say that there's a strong preference for this and then you could say, how often do they choose SX over,
00:24:45
Gabriel
um and see it right And so you could then so you could have like all these pairwise, you could basically imagine doing like a hot or not type thing for business schools where you like put up two business schools and you have people who are interested in that sort of thing clicking on which business
00:24:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:24:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
Understanding Social Construction
00:25:01
Gabriel
school they choose if they were admitted to both.
00:25:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:25:03
Gabriel
and and um colleague at Princeton matt sogennick actually developed this algorithm where he said one way to collect data on rankings is that you just basically give people hot or not.
00:25:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:25:14
Gabriel
where you You give them paired choices.
00:25:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:25:16
Gabriel
then um When you do that, you can treat that as a social network. And then you put it into a um asymmetrical centrality metric, like a Bonacichen Lloyd alpha centrality or page rank.
00:25:31
Gabriel
And then you can use that to ah measure status. And status is, of course, a key sociological concept, very active area in the literature.
00:25:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:25:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:25:40
Gabriel
I've done work similar to that on measuring who's the biggest movie star. and you know then validating it.
00:25:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:25:48
Gabriel
It started out as a lecture, but I published it in kind of an informal, it's like a social magazine, all those technically peer reviewed, but I actually did this with the Iliad, where if you look at who, going back to classics, right?
00:25:59
Gabriel
If you look at which warrior defeats which warrior in a fight, and then you then you say like, okay, well you know ah Odysseus beat Trojan number 47, who gives a shit?
00:26:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:26:13
Gabriel
Whereas Achilles kills Hector. I apologize for the spoilers, but you know, it's 3000 years.
00:26:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:26:20
Gabriel
You've had to read it, right? If Achilles kills Hector, Hector kills Patroclus, but Patroclus.
00:26:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, ah all of my viewers have read your classics. If not, get out the window.
00:26:25
Gabriel
Yeah. Yeah, Patroclus kills a fuckload of anonymous Trojans. that That's how you know that Achilles is the biggest badass in the Iliad. It's not because he kills most people.
00:26:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:26:36
Gabriel
There's actually several warriors who kill more people than Achilles does. It's because he kills Hector. And Hector's a badass because Hector kills a lot of people, including um killing Patroclus, who kills a lot of people.
00:26:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:26:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Patrocles.
00:26:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Yes. Okay.
00:26:53
Gabriel
So it's the same basic idea for ranking business goals as for, you know, ranking, ah yeah, Clayos Aptiton.
00:26:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh, right, right, right, right, right. No, yeah, it's a, it's a cool algorithm and you said a lot of math things. So we, I am therefore judging sociology, uh, a worthy discipline.
00:27:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Um, I, I, I will, I will tell Elon to cut your funding by only 90%.
00:27:09
Gabriel
Okay.
00:27:13
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:27:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Um,
00:27:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh, let's talk about social construction.
00:27:20
Gabriel
All right.
00:27:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh, you had a, so way back in the day, you had a very funny blog post about this and I've probably sent it to a million people over the years.
00:27:28
Gabriel
Mm.
00:27:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh, and you were also writing an article about this. And so basically, okay, great.
00:27:31
Gabriel
Thank you.
00:27:37
Gabriel
Yeah, that article should be out soon and compact.
00:27:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Um.
00:27:41
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:27:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Basically, the the way I think about this is what when people talk about social construction, there's like three things people can mean. There's like the popular version.
00:27:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
there's i i I wrote it in my notes as the Steelman-Lib version. So I'm going to ask you to steelman the bad version of social construction.
00:28:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And then there's what social construction actually means in sociological theory.
00:28:09
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:28:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
so
00:28:11
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:28:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
What, first of all, what would you say is the popular version of it?
00:28:16
Gabriel
Well, I'd say the popular version of it is kind of like, um, you know, oh, that's just a social construct, man. Like it's.
00:28:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:28:25
Gabriel
the the it's It's almost hard to express verbally because you need to imagine the exhalation of cannabis smoke as you're saying it, right? It's like this idea of like, well, have you ever realized that's just a social construct?
00:28:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
oh
00:28:38
Gabriel
And I think like bad versions of social construction almost always inappropriately include the word just. I think there are things that where you can appropriately use the word just and social construction in the same sentence, but it's, so here's my simple rule.
00:28:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:28:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, outlawing alcohol and not ill outlawing cannabis or vice versa is absolutely a social construct.
00:29:01
Gabriel
Well, i wouldn't I wouldn't call that a social construct. I would say that we can um we have socially constructed
00:29:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Or viewing viewing one as licit and viewing the other as illicit.
00:29:12
Gabriel
I would say that deviance is socially constructed and um that that includes what social associations we have with different chemicals. Now, that's actually a good example because alcohol has an objective set of properties on the brain.
00:29:26
Gabriel
So does THC, right?
00:29:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:29:28
Gabriel
These are these are things that if you go to a neurologist, you force rats to consume these substances, whatever, you you can scientifically measure these things.
00:29:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:29:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:29:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:29:35
Gabriel
So it's not as if um we,
00:29:38
Gabriel
We could just imagine that, I don't know, seltzer water. like you like You could imagine a society that considered has a moral panic about seltzer water.
00:29:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:29:49
Gabriel
um but But that would be a dumb thing to imagine because seltzer water is basically harmless.
00:29:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:29:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:29:56
Gabriel
And it certainly doesn't have sight.
00:29:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
You know what else is objectively, medically prove proven to exist? Genitalia. And yet.
00:30:04
Gabriel
Well. I mean, um i I don't want to hurt myself, but wasn't it Hume who said, ah about Berkeley, I refute it thusly by kicking a rock? You know, it's like both of us that are in position to punch ourselves and refute it thusly.
00:30:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:30:17
Gabriel
So. um Yeah.
00:30:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
so Okay, so, all right, so let's, let's stop joking around. You know, if I say, for example, ah ah opening marriage to same sex couples is totally fine because even though it's unprecedented in human history, marriage is just a social construct.
00:30:32
Gabriel
Mm hmm.
00:30:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
What am I saying?
00:30:41
Gabriel
Well, marriage is a sin.
00:30:47
Gabriel
So that's implicit in a lot of the claims about things being social constructions, which implies very often there's the implication that if this thing is somewhat arbitrary, if this thing is not completely determined by the laws of nature, like the periodic table of the elements, then we can change it any way we like.
00:31:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:31:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:31:06
Gabriel
And I don't think that necessarily follows.
00:31:09
Gabriel
um because so the the whole idea ah First of all, there are some social constructions you can imagine that don't follow the laws of nature as well as others. um so you know The idea that um there could be a social problem around alcohol use or the idea that there could be a social problem around cannabis use, these are somewhat plausible beliefs.
00:31:31
Gabriel
beliefs because these actually are psychoactively chemicals.
00:31:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:31:33
Gabriel
like That's objectively true.
00:31:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:31:34
Gabriel
There is a material reality to cannabinoids, opioids, alcohol affecting specific neurotransmitters, et cetera, et cetera, in various ways that are just like objectively true, and you can replicate them in lab animals, um which would not be true about, say, chewing gum, where
00:31:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:31:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:31:53
Gabriel
you know You could imagine people saying chewing gum creates unattractive litter. It gets stuck to your shoe, something like that. But nobody's going to think you know people ruin their lives by becoming chewing gum addicts.
00:32:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:32:04
Gabriel
Like, oh my god, the first thing that when that guy wakes up, he has a piece of chewing gum. What a fucking loser. you know Nobody's going to think that in the same way that they would about a wake and bake stoner or somebody who drinks before noon.
00:32:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:32:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:32:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:32:16
Gabriel
so
00:32:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So explain what social construction means to serious sociologists. And then maybe we can talk about how it became memed into this sort of You know, first why it's a valuable concept in sociology and then how it became memed into this instrument of social destruction.
Race and Social Constructs
00:32:41
Gabriel
Sure. So um ah social construction um really hit it big in sociology with ah Berger and Luckman's, I think it was 1967 book, The Social Construction of Reality. um Interestingly, for the way people have associations with this, Berger was actually a political conservative. And he wrote a column for a conservative magazine until very close to his death around 10 years ago.
00:33:03
Gabriel
um but ah So the basic idea is that there is a material reality. We all have perceptions of materiality material reality.
00:33:14
Gabriel
So far, this is just Plato's allegory of the cave, ah Paul's metaphor of the dim mirror, et cetera.
00:33:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:33:20
Gabriel
um so But what makes it distinctly social is it's not just that I have perceptions and you have perceptions, it's that we have shared perceptions. So looking in the background of your photo, I see the French flag.
00:33:35
Gabriel
Now, objectively, that is not the French flag. Objectively, that's just a piece of cloth that's in three colors.
00:33:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:33:43
Gabriel
But you and I agree that that represents you know La France.
00:33:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:33:48
Gabriel
So we we have this symbolic association with it.
00:33:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:33:52
Gabriel
um You can imagine somebody who doesn't know that. right it's It's very easy to imagine somebody who's never seen that flag doesn't know what country it stands for, et cetera.
00:33:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:34:01
Gabriel
um But because um you know ah very large numbers of people recognize that flag, know what it stands for, um it has these set of associations that are completely arbitrary.
00:34:12
Gabriel
right You could imagine a counterfactual France where the red is on the left and the blue is on the right, and it would substantively be the same country.
00:34:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:34:20
Gabriel
And so it's completely arbitrary, ah which
00:34:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
In fact, during the revolution, there were many different versions of this sort of tricolor.
00:34:27
Gabriel
That's not surprising, right? um you know and sometimes And that is a thing that when symbols develop, you sometimes see a certain you know ah diversity that then gets kind of honed in on as people recognize it.
00:34:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
great Right.
00:34:40
Gabriel
So the key concept that Berger and Luckman talk about is intersubjectivity, which is that it doesn't matter what I believe or what you believe, it matters what we believe. And once enough people believe something, it is for all practical purposes a material fact.
00:34:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:34:53
Gabriel
Now, I'm not saying that in the sense of like the hippies thought that if they all concentrated really hard, they could make the Pentagon levitate. right i'm not I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that if we all agree on something, we have magical powers.
00:35:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah,
00:35:03
Gabriel
But I am saying that there's a sense where if I walk around with um like Let's say that I wanted to impersonate a French soldier for some heist I was doing, and I had a flag on my arm that had the ah the red on the left and the blue on the right.
00:35:21
Gabriel
I would quickly be spotted as an imposter because we've all agreed that the French flag has the blue on the left and the red on the right.
00:35:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right. Right.
00:35:28
Gabriel
and likewise um you know Money is the ultimate example of a social construction. and you know like Why is a dollar valuable?
00:35:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:35:36
Gabriel
For that matter, why is silver valuable? and it's It's not so much because the intrinsic i mean a dollar is worthless. It's just a piece of high cotton paper.
00:35:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:35:46
Gabriel
It's not even a full A4 sized piece of paper.
00:35:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:35:49
Gabriel
so um But it's valuable because we all agree that it's valuable. um And so the inter intersubjectivity is what makes it matter.
00:35:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:35:58
Gabriel
um Now they further talked about things like institutions and roles, which is basically when these things become highly typified, they get worked into like concrete things. um so and And we had one example of this, by the way.
00:36:10
Gabriel
Earlier, we were talking about um market information regimes. So rankings matter, prizes matter. right If you're a book publisher in France, you really want to win the Goncourt because it raises your sales.
00:36:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right. Right.
00:36:24
Gabriel
It's not quite as true as it used to be, but if you're a film studio in America, you really want to win the Oscars because it raises your sales. So so um these ways of structuring information
00:36:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:36:36
Gabriel
can have concrete effects on how markets work.
00:36:41
Gabriel
Karpik, who's, I forget which, I think he's at the mine school, ah the ground to coal mines, their business school.
00:36:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:36:48
Gabriel
Anyway, so Karpik has done very good work on market information regimes.
00:36:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, so I guess my next, qui so I guess I have two questions now. ah Number one. i i I agree with everything you just said.
00:37:04
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:37:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It seems very nice and fine, but like, why is this interesting? It seems like a banal observation about the world. Like, oh, you know, the blue, white, red, there's nothing intrinsically about it that makes it French.
00:37:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It so it only represents French.
00:37:18
Gabriel
Well, yeah, that that's a very tried example.
00:37:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, but you know, that's true, but it's true in the sense that the sky is blue. It's not an interesting fact about the world.
00:37:28
Gabriel
Well, it's actually not true in the sense of the sky is blue, because the sky is blue in a way that if we a imagine, it's hard to imagine a plausible alternate universe where the Earth is fit for human habitation.
00:37:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:37:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, I mean i mean it it's the same – it's a truth that is banal in that sense.
00:37:40
Gabriel
And the sky's not blue.
00:37:47
Gabriel
Yeah, so I'm willing to say that this the simple signifier thing is a banal truth, and it's not worth having an entire discipline that is largely organized around ah exploring it.
00:37:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i
00:37:59
Gabriel
I think market information regimes is a non-trivial insight. you know The idea that the way information is structured in markets matters a lot. and that On a day-to-day basis, what actually matters in markets is not quality of goods, but quality of goods as measured by highly salient pieces of information that rank the goods.
00:38:20
Gabriel
A restaurant being a good restaurant may matter less than whether it has Michelin stars or a good Yelp rating.
00:38:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
Gender Identity and Social Constructs
00:38:28
Gabriel
And if there are things that you can do to get Michelin stars or to get a good Yelp rating that are only loosely connected to how good the food tastes, then you're gonna see restaurants focusing on pleasing the Michelin people or courting ah encouraging ordinary people to file positive Yelp reviews.
00:38:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:38:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:38:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:38:49
Gabriel
So so so that's one non-trivial insight.
00:38:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Okay.
00:38:51
Gabriel
I think there's other ways also where it can be a good sensitizing concept to recognize that um kind of plausible counterfactuals about the way we understand things, um some of which can be based on historical comparisons, some of which can be based on cross-cultural comparison.
00:39:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:39:09
Gabriel
So, um you know, in the in the compact article, um you know, I give the example of the social construction of race, where, you know, people like to say race is socially constructed
00:39:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:39:20
Gabriel
And this is also a good example of like where do you get to the hippie example, right? Somebody says race is just a social construct.
00:39:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:39:26
Gabriel
That's obviously dumb because you can look at me and you can tell that my ancestors are from Europe. And you know um and and it's not like you're just imagining that.
00:39:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:39:36
Gabriel
um so <unk> So there's a way in which, you know, and, um you know, and I've spit in a tube and mailed it to 23andMe and gone on Amazon and paid them $100. And it's like, you know what, they they were able to figure out exactly where my great, great, great, great grandparents lived 500 years ago, like with amazing precision, like they know exactly where my ancestors came from. um And it wasn't because I told them.
00:40:01
Gabriel
you know All I did was spit in the tube and you know pay them $100. So there's a sense in which race is a material reality, um you know which is especially demonstrated by 23andMe.
00:40:13
Gabriel
But there's also a sense in which it's um it socially constructed. um And because there are other plausible ways to understand how people are
00:40:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:40:26
Gabriel
um how to categorize ancestral variation other than the way that we do it in, say, the United States.
00:40:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:40:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:40:34
Gabriel
So the best example of these are Latino and Asian, both of which are relatively recent ah racial categorizations.
00:40:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:40:42
Gabriel
So Latino is just a total mess, right? I mean, you can find Latino people who are mostly black. You can find Latino people who are um you know mostly white.
00:40:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Taylor than you and me.
00:40:51
Gabriel
they used They used to be called Criollos in Latin America. um You know, ah you can find people who are mostly ah Indian, you know, mostly, ah you know, American Indian ancestry, you can find people who are, um you know, you're you're so your, your typical Mexican who, by the way, is very good at making sandwiches, um contrary to your expectations.
00:41:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:41:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
a
00:41:16
Gabriel
I know you're a torta denialist, and I will not stand for it. ah so um the Your average Mexican is something like, I don't know, half Indian. and
00:41:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
for the For the audience, this is like an inside joke between ah Gabriel and me.
00:41:27
Gabriel
if yeah Well, it started out as an inside joke, and then you you offended me so much, you realized that you decided to offend all of Twitter with it, and you were the main character for like a day.
00:41:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:41:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:41:39
Gabriel
you know anyway
00:41:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Well, yes. I i also i also went ah went viral on Twitter one day for saying bad things about Mexican food, which I quite enjoy.
00:41:49
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:41:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I enjoy many cases of many types of food. For example, I noticed that there are examples
00:41:55
Gabriel
In fact, we've enjoyed it together. I was thinking that was a joke pickle.
00:41:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
is on the screen, which is very bad of me.
00:41:59
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:42:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But I told you this was a Low Production Values podcast, and I really, really enjoy Russian-type pickles, which are large like this, and which are hard to find in France.
00:42:03
Gabriel
Uh-huh.
00:42:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So I found one last week, and I've been nibbling on it ever since, and I should have kept it out of screen. And now you you gave me a perfect segue to mention the very awkward jar of pickles.
00:42:15
Gabriel
ah
00:42:20
Gabriel
Uh-huh. I can think of more awkward things that could be in the frame. But as embarrassing things that happen on your webcam about Go, jar of pickles is pretty low on the list.
00:42:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh, yeah, well, I, you know, I had no comment.
00:42:35
Gabriel
and Anyway, the point is, ah you know like ah you're you're your typical Mexican person is something like half Indian, 45% European, and 5% Black.
00:42:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Um, Yeah.
00:42:44
Gabriel
you know so it's like it So there's a way in which And then you are your typical Chilean person is basically the same three ancestries, but a very different ratio where, you know, they're probably more like 80% European, you know?
00:42:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:43:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:43:01
Gabriel
So there's, a you can ask like, and then there's ah other countries like the Dominican Republic where people are like half European and half African. So.
00:43:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:43:12
Gabriel
in the United States we call all these people Latino even though they don't look anything like each other some of them look just like me and some of them um look very much like the people who are living there ah before Columbus and you know ah so but we categorize all these people as Latino and it's it was completely actually my office mate in grad school wrote a very good book on this I think it was called Creating Hispanics I remember the original title was in Spanish it was
00:43:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right. Right.
00:43:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:43:38
Gabriel
I think it was like the Muchos Unidos or something like that. Anyway, but um Christina Moore at Berkeley. So it's like, where do you get this racial category? And there's a specific story about that. But at some point now, there are some people, I mean, I think it is actually more salient now that people will think of themselves by their national origin categories, right?
00:43:57
Gabriel
People are more likely to think of themselves as I'm Salvadoran or I'm Mexican or I'm Colombian or, you know, I'm Cuban or whatever.
00:44:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:44:03
Gabriel
um But there is a sense in which if you, They don't roll their eyes when they check the box that says Latino. They they do think of themselves as Latino in some meaningful sense.
00:44:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:44:16
Gabriel
um Asian is an even better example because, I mean, in the United States, we decided, I think for the 1970 census, to put East Asians and South Asians together under the category Asian.
00:44:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:44:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
00:44:31
Gabriel
And you can look at a Pakistani and you can look at a Korean and they don't look anything like each other, right? The Pakistani basically looks like a European with darker skin. And, you know, whereas the Korean has a very different, ah you know, very different hair texture, ah different ah eyes, different incisors, right?
00:44:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
okay so how
00:44:49
Gabriel
And there's all sorts of...
00:44:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, so we socially constructed categories like Latino and Asian.
00:44:57
Gabriel
Yes.
00:44:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Sorry to, but you know, sorry to, to like stability harp on this. Why is it interesting? Why is it interesting to notice this?
00:45:04
Gabriel
It's interesting because the the bullshit categories matter.
00:45:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Why is it interesting to write about it? Why is it interesting to investigate it?
00:45:11
Gabriel
So it's interesting because when you ah treat the categories real, it becomes real in some meaningful sense. So there are institutions that are premised on the notion of Latino or that were premised on the notion of Asian. And even though those categories basically didn't exist 50 years ago, they do now.
00:45:30
Gabriel
And over the course of 50 years, things can become kind of entrenched. And so, you know, many universities will have like an Asian American Studies department. And you will see people in these departments who, ah you know, don't look like each other ah come from parts of the world that ah
00:45:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:45:48
Gabriel
you know don't ah you know So some people will broadly be within the broad Chinese cultural sphere of influence, you know um you know Korea, Japan, ah places that you know um would use Mandarin characters for at least some ritual purposes and you know have a certain amount of technological cultural overlap.
00:45:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:46:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:46:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:46:11
Gabriel
And then you also have people from South Asia who don't look anything like them, but they're all in the same departments and they they will kind of like They'll talk about the great diversity of Asians and the right to, but they'll also, like at a certain point, kind of assume that these things have something in common.
00:46:26
Gabriel
so it you know And this was basically the reason, not so much with the origins of Asian, which actually originated when South Asian small business people wanted to be eligible for small business loans.
00:46:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:46:38
Gabriel
it which which you know because it And you can't do that if you were categorized as Caucasian.
00:46:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:46:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, I mean, given the, given the service of rooftop Koreans, I think that's, uh, that's one of the more different.
00:46:50
Gabriel
Well, this was South Asians, not East Asians.
00:46:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:46:53
Gabriel
right East Asians were always categorized so separately from white people.
00:46:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well. and Haven't we just established that all Asians are the same? No, wait, was I was i not listening?
00:46:59
Gabriel
no but The census has, right? I mean, the census does assume that implicitly, especially if you've got the short-form census where it just asks you your race, it doesn't ask you your specific ah ancestry.
00:47:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
the
00:47:09
Gabriel
but
00:47:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, so all right, we've established that social construction is a real concept in sociology.
00:47:10
Gabriel
ah
00:47:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
We've established that it's interesting to look at the way things are socially constructed. How did we get from that to men in dresses ah demanding that I put pronouns after my signature?
Trans Identity and Society
00:47:30
Gabriel
Well here's the ironic thing is that um I think particularly with gender you can see cases where people who embrace the concept of the social construction of gender reject its implications and people who um are skeptical in the abstract of the concept of the social construction of gender,
00:47:53
Gabriel
um you know actually embrace certain hypotheses that are strictly speaking social constructionist hypotheses. so the the way that we treat it so so I'm not interested in what people say.
00:48:07
Gabriel
I'm interested in what they, well, I'm not interested in what shitless people adopt. I'm more interested in like what ideas people substantively have.
00:48:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:48:14
Gabriel
And um one of the emerging ideas about, well, actually emerging, it may pass its zenith, but one of the ideas that is relatively recent about gender is that people have a deep, well, recent in Western culture.
00:48:27
Gabriel
um You can actually, so here's the ironic thing. We see um the growth of trans as like a novel thing. But in many ways, there are it if you look at the broad sweep of comparative gender and sexuality, it's probably more common to have trans people than it is to have gender conforming homosexual people.
00:48:49
Gabriel
Like your typical, yeah.
00:48:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and In some cultures maybe, although i would i would I would dispute that they're trans, but ah that's that's that's a much broader and different thing.
00:48:56
Gabriel
Well, so ah and So there are, let me put it this way, there are many, many cultures, there are many, many traditional cultures that have a culturally understood category for a third gender, which very often consists of male attracted males who adopt feminine dress and feminine social roles.
00:49:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i
00:49:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Right. And the third gender is not the same thing as transgender. Right.
00:49:19
Gabriel
So
00:49:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh, no, but I, I guess.
00:49:21
Gabriel
So it's the closest analog to such people in our cultures, at least until recently, would be trans.
00:49:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Yeah.
00:49:29
Gabriel
Whereas you know um in the 1990s in the US, and I imagine also in France, there were some trans people, um most of whom were male attracted males.
00:49:39
Gabriel
But it was much more common to have um
00:49:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:49:44
Gabriel
males who saw themselves as men, everyone else saw themselves as men, they just were sexually attracted to other men, right? So the concept of a gay man in some cases, in some sense, is the weird ah concept, right?
00:49:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:49:57
Gabriel
Weird in the Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic exceptionalism thing.
00:49:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah Yes, yes.
00:50:03
Gabriel
Whereas trans in some senses, like almost like a reversion to the cultural norm.
00:50:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i
00:50:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. I mean, what so let me let me rephrase my question.
00:50:10
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:50:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah i I wasn't asking about trans specifically. I guess my question was more how did the notion of social construction became to be socially constructed as a sort of license for delegitimizing and eventually destroying every sort of
00:50:21
Gabriel
Yeah, that's right.
00:50:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
hallowed or historic cultural institution, including the gender binary, including marriage, including whatever.
00:50:37
Gabriel
So I think they said what social construction. hey So what social construction does
00:50:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like but how what What was the conceptual shift or what was the the the the move that led to that?
00:50:52
Gabriel
So the conceptual shift is that if you recognize something as culturally contingent, It holds out the possibility that it could be arranged in another way.
00:51:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:51:06
Gabriel
um And so if you don't like the way something is currently arranged.
00:51:12
Gabriel
um Now, there's a lazy version of this, which is what I think people are doing, where they just assume that just flagging something as ah social construction means that they can do whatever they want with it.
00:51:23
Gabriel
You know, and and i in the in the blog post you were mentioning, I refer to this as the Ruby Slippers conception of ah ah social construction that's simply recognized.
00:51:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:51:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:51:32
Gabriel
So like in the Wizard of Oz, once Dorothy learns that her ruber so Ruby Slippers are magical, all she has to do is click her heels and she goes back to Kansas.
00:51:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:51:40
Gabriel
She's had the shoes the whole fucking time. It's just she only, at the end, realizes that they're magical.
00:51:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:51:46
Gabriel
so um Or at least how to use them. so This idea of social construction, some people take it as like, well, if you realize that race is a social construction or gender is a social construction, you could just do it any way you want.
00:51:59
Gabriel
And there can sometimes very often people will do this with kind of a denial of material reality, which was not present in Berger and Luckman.
00:52:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:52:07
Gabriel
Berger and Luckman were very clear that material reality exists. right that like there There is something there that like if i if you walk off a cliff, even if you don't believe in gravity, you will still die.
00:52:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:52:18
Gabriel
so
00:52:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:52:19
Gabriel
um But sometimes, yeah the lazy way that both its critics and its advocates will use social construction and is the idea that it's somehow mutually exclusive with material reality.
00:52:32
Gabriel
That if you simply recognize something as a social construction, you can do anything you want with it because it's completely...
00:52:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Right.
00:52:38
Gabriel
Well, that's not true because material reality is a constraint. there are certain ah There's limits to how much you can modify things. you know Because ultimately, material reality is there.
00:52:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:52:49
Gabriel
And some social constructions that we can imagine are more compatible with the underlying material reality than the other.
00:52:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:52:56
Gabriel
so you know So science is a social construction. So is astrology. But science is one that is a much closer fit with the underlying material reality than is astrology.
00:53:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:53:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. That's hate speech, by the way.
00:53:09
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:53:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Yeah, no, I mean, I guess I guess the. the ah this this is This is my take on it, and I haven't seen anywhere it anywhere else, even though i it seems like a perfectly banal observation, which is, you know if you if you look at something like gender, ah it's a social construction, but it's a social construction that exists not just over, but in response to.
00:53:22
Gabriel
Mm hmm.
00:53:39
Gabriel
That's right.
00:53:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
an underlying biological reality, which is that you know men and women have their different physics physically and physiologically. therere you know There are also new neurological differences, ah which is there there's a trans sidebar there too, because for decades,
00:53:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
but for a decade, I was, you know, insulted on social media for saying that there are neurological differences between men and women. And now it's been taken up by trans people to say, Oh, no, I have a female brain.
00:54:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
brain
00:54:09
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:54:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:54:10
Gabriel
well Well, this is this is the one of the interesting ironies with trans is that um in some ways, so ah people who advocate for trans will say gender is a social construct and people who will call themselves gender critical and their critics would call them TERFs will say gender is not a social construct.
00:54:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:54:31
Gabriel
But then the gender critical people will say things like um rapid onset gender dysphoria spreads as a social contagion.
00:54:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:54:38
Gabriel
And it's like something can't spread as a social contagion, unless it's social construction, right? So it's like, you know, COVID is not, well, I mean, everything in some sense, but like COVID is not in any material sense, socially constructed.
00:54:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. And yeah. Okay.
00:54:49
Gabriel
It's like you're at COVID statistics are, but the actual virus is not right.
00:54:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. The virus. by Right.
00:54:54
Gabriel
So like COVID spreads because it's a respiratory virus, whereas, you know, and so, um,
00:55:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:55:04
Gabriel
Whereas if ah the ROGD hypothesis holds that it spreads because it's a meme, you know, and it's like, well, something can't spread socially unless it's socially constructed.
00:55:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:55:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right. um That's my co-host, by the way.
00:55:20
Gabriel
yeah Yeah, yeah.
Book Recommendation on Witchcraft
00:55:21
Gabriel
So, um and ah related to this, right, the the The view that you'll see of, like oh, this is my real brain, or you know maybe thell know like you could show neurologically.
00:55:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:55:32
Gabriel
If you gave me an MRI, you'd be able to show this.
00:55:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:55:35
Gabriel
and know I don't know. Maybe for some people it actually is true.
00:55:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And by the way, studies have tried to show this and they've consistently showed that, no, that's not true.
00:55:41
Gabriel
so um
00:55:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Small samples though, the the studies I'm aware of, small samples, so it's usually like 10, 15, 20 people. ah Maybe there have been more, but like all of them have shown the same results.
00:55:54
Gabriel
I'd want to see it based on like the different causes, right?
00:55:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and
00:55:57
Gabriel
Because there's many different types of trans people and it would not surprise me if some of them, their neurology is a little bit shifted towards the opposite sex.
00:55:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Yes.
00:56:06
Gabriel
And then others are just like super typical of their natal sex.
00:56:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, that's that's possible. You should you should you should apply for an A9H grant.
00:56:12
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:56:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:56:15
Gabriel
If if any still exist. correct
00:56:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Hopefully not.
00:56:19
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:56:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah we're We're getting close to the end of our hour.
00:56:24
Gabriel
Yeah.
00:56:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
There's ah there's an amazing AI school schoolwork story that I won't be able to to tell. ah But I'm going to ask you the last question that we ask of of every guest, which is recommend a book.
00:56:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It can be any book, fiction, nonfiction, whatever, outside your area of expertise.
00:56:41
Gabriel
Oh shit, so I like I don't have anything on the top of my head I was gonna say well of course I should just recommend Peterson burger cuz it's so much better than people think like I expected to hate it when it and then I read it I'm like this is totally sensible everything makes sense um man um yeah Well, I don't know I mean I would i would have prepared this but I'm just gonna go on my Kindle account and
00:56:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:56:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, that's why it's an interesting question, because otherwise it's too easy.
00:57:06
Gabriel
And, oh, you know what? Okay, so the Kindle book I'm reading now is Greenberg's construction of sexuality. Now that is social science, it is, but I'm not a, I am not a, ah well, actually I think, okay, so first of all, he's an anthropologist, not a sociologist.
00:57:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, that's still sociology, sorry.
00:57:23
Gabriel
And second of all, I'm not a specialist in sexuality. So, but if that's still too close for you, right? If that's like, you know, if I say, what's your favorite country? And it can't be France, you say, I don't know, Belgium.
00:57:34
Gabriel
you know you know then ah
00:57:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, if you want, if you want to make that your final answer, you know, you can make that, but like, try you know, it play, play, play along.
00:57:45
Gabriel
Well, yeah, I'm happy to play it along. I just need to look...
00:57:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I've, I've socially constructed this test that so now reality.
00:57:50
Gabriel
Oh, okay, so so here's one. ah Okay, so a very good book I'm very fond of is Ronald Hutton's The Witch.
00:57:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay.
00:57:58
Gabriel
So Haunton is one of the top historians of the occult, and he in The Witch, he gives this huge overview of a comparative study of witchcraft.
00:58:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay.
00:58:13
Gabriel
And so he synthesizes 20th century ethnographies in ah Asia and Africa of modern witchcraft,
00:58:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Wow.
00:58:22
Gabriel
and um and the Americas, um so basically you know modern ah peoples who still practice witchcraft, and then he compares that to classics and how was witchcraft practiced in Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
00:58:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Wow.
00:58:39
Gabriel
and And then he compares that to his main area of expertise, which is the um the early modern witch hunt. And he points out that some things you can find in common with all these witch scares um and witch hunts and practices of witchcraft and other things are totally arbitrary.
00:58:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:58:57
Gabriel
So for instance, in the West, we very often have this assumption that because we're basing ourselves on the model of the early modern European witch hunt, which is an outgrowth of the Protestant Reformation, um that, you know, um witch hunts were femicide, right, that witch hunts were about misogyny.
00:59:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:59:16
Gabriel
um Interestingly, by the way, the Nazis believed that too. um there There was an SS officer who put like 12 man years into cataloging every witch trial in the history of Germany with the aim of showing that it was um Semitic Christianity's final attempt to suppress, um you know, you know ah pagan survivalism as like the authentic German spirit
00:59:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh my God.
00:59:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That is high-tier German autism.
00:59:44
Gabriel
well Well, yeah, that's right. so ah i mean there There are certainly worse things that SS officers could have been doing at the time than cataloging um witch burnings. so um But the but they i mean the funny thing now is that if you talk to somebody today and you...
00:59:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i
01:00:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
There's a Norma Donald joke in there.
01:00:00
Gabriel
and Yeah, exactly.
01:00:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like I thought the worst things was the obsessive cataloging.
01:00:03
Gabriel
Yeah. so yeah
01:00:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, I thought there were
01:00:08
Gabriel
Yeah, the worst thing was Shoah. Yeah, exactly. So, and and, you know, trying to conquer all of Europe. So, um yeah.
01:00:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, and ah ah for further record, the the mass genocide of Jews and other minorities was worse.
01:00:21
Gabriel
yeah so Yeah, and I agree. So my but by so many orders of magnitude. um you know if anything you So it was a bad dissertation, but so it was just a dissertation. so But the the ironic thing is that if you talk to somebody today and they tell you like, oh, um the witch hunts were a final attempt by Christianity to suppress um you know ah
01:00:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
The ancient.
01:00:42
Gabriel
European pagan survivalism, that person is usually a feminist, usually sees themselves on the left, but you know they agree with the handler, which doesn't mean it's a, well, it is a bad idea in the sense that it's incorrect, but it that it doesn't mean that it's an evil idea.
01:00:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.
01:00:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:00:58
Gabriel
you know I'm not saying that you know um the the person, well, going to do the occult bookstore is probably not the greatest thing to do for your soul, but it doesn't make you a Nazi. So anyway, um so he talks about um
01:01:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:01:11
Gabriel
you know the early modern European witch hunt, but this idea that witch hunts were fundamentally about ah patriarchy is an ethnocentric idea um because it's premised on the idea that it's basically accurate that most of the early modern European witch hunt was accusations against women.
01:01:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:01:29
Gabriel
But that's simply not true comparatively.
01:01:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:01:31
Gabriel
There's many, many cultures where the average witch trial victim or the average person lynched as a witch is a man.
01:01:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, okay.
01:01:39
Gabriel
So um in Africa, every 10 years or so, there's a scare about penis theft.
01:01:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, okay.
01:01:46
Gabriel
um
01:01:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:01:47
Gabriel
And anthropologists call this choro, which is the Malay word for turtle, because it's the idea of like, if you imagine like a turtle pulling its head back into its shell, like, and this occurred in the early modern European, which it was a very common feature of witch hunts.
01:01:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
All right. Right.
01:02:00
Gabriel
It's not something you see when you watch the crucible performed or something like that. But there's a very common belief that witches steal penises. Every 10 years or so in modern Africa, there'll be a scare that witches, usually men, are stealing penises, and a mob will just go and lynch the person.
01:02:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
By the way, ah a quote unquote red bill ah is if you sort of semi-regularly go to Google news and just type human sacrifice Africa. There's always new.
01:02:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Anyway, go on.
01:02:33
Gabriel
Okay, yeah, I, i yeah.
01:02:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah human Human sacrifice is ongoing in Africa and and sort of regularly occurs.
01:02:42
Gabriel
Yeah, but I mean, a probably an important fact would be that it's seen as deviant locally. I don't think there's any cultures where it's seen as like a a socially accepted thing. like It may be something for like obscure cults to do or something like that.
01:02:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
it would it well you know i mean It depends whether you're talking about the the actual culture or the government, which is dependent on $8.
01:03:08
Gabriel
Mm-hmm.
01:03:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um i've ive honestly I honestly don't know. Certainly in Muslim countries, it would be considered ah deviant.
01:03:17
Gabriel
Mm-hmm.
01:03:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um Anyway, no, finish your point about the witches. I thought the point, my assumption, see, I i i was just too bathed in feminist queer studies.
01:03:27
Gabriel
Yeah.
01:03:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
My assumption was that ah quote unquote witchcraft was linked to, um, I, I forget the expression, uh, doulas.
01:03:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, it's not typically, but like women who help women over and med, who are also medicine women who are also sort of associated with occult practices.
01:03:42
Gabriel
Oh, like Manichaeism?
01:03:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And that's why it was sort of like female dominated.
01:03:52
Gabriel
So it could be. i mean there there way And that that might have been the case in early modern Europe. um yeah Now, it was definitely not the case that all, but that's part of the the, right, so in order to make the what's called the the Murray thesis, because Murray, who was an Egyptologist, but she got asked to write this thing on witchcraft for Encyclopedia Britannica, that's how this theory got popularized, although it wasn't the only reason, because like I said, the Nazis believed it too.
01:04:17
Gabriel
um The Murray thesis, in order for it to make sense, it couldn't be that these people were accused for no reason whatsoever, just like personal grudges or something like that. It had to be that they were doing something that it was superficially resembled witchcraft.
01:04:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:04:30
Gabriel
And so that hones in on the idea that these were all like traditional herbalists or folk so medicine people.
01:04:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
01:04:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
01:04:37
Gabriel
Some of them were, right?
01:04:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:04:38
Gabriel
There were some people who were ah practicing folk medicine, folk herbalism, um and those people got accused.
01:04:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And some of them were practicing something that they believed was switchcraft.
01:04:43
Gabriel
Such people were often women
01:04:49
Gabriel
Well, many of them were doing things that they believed, some of them, not all of them, believed that they were doing things which they considered to be white magic. um
01:04:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Great.
01:04:58
Gabriel
they very Very few, if any of them, well, there probably were a handful, but very, very few people who were accused in the early modern era actually believed themselves to be having made pacts with Satan to um grant themselves supernatural power over their over their neighbors.
01:05:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay. Yeah. But they were engaged in sort of occult practices.
01:05:18
Gabriel
Some of them were, yeah. So, but they saw themselves as engaging in benign ah magic that would very often include Christian prayers.
01:05:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:05:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
01:05:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Interesting.
01:05:29
Gabriel
Yeah.
01:05:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
All right. Well, see, I prodded you to come up with with a recommendation that fit the thing, and that was excellent and fascinating.
01:05:36
Gabriel
yeah
01:05:39
Gabriel
Cool.
01:05:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah All right. i Thank you very much. I want to take up more of your time, so it turns out that not all sociologists need to be thrown into a volcano.
01:05:43
Gabriel
Yeah. Go talk to you.
01:05:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's very good news for...
01:05:53
Gabriel
So now you believe in human sacrifice? but ah or or Or is it that you don't think we're people?
01:05:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, just just just retribution.
01:06:01
Gabriel
OK, I see. So so you so it's not it's not to help Pele, it's just to hurt us.
01:06:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:06:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes Yes, exactly.
01:06:06
Gabriel
OK.
01:06:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um you know Joking aside, this was all fascinating. Thank you very much for your time.
01:06:11
Gabriel
Yeah, go talk to me.
01:06:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And maybe we can do this again sometime soon.
01:06:18
Gabriel
Yeah, sounds good.
01:06:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
All right. Thank you.
01:06:19
Gabriel
All right, see you.
01:06:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Bye.