Kathryn Paige Harden - Original Sin: On The Genetics of Vice, The Problem of Blame, And the Future of Forgiveness

29:05It's not your fault that you have these genes. And it's still your responsibility to decide how you're going to behave today. And there is a parallel between give us this day our daily bread and one day at a time, which is what you get in recovery communities. So this immediate focus of, and in some ways, I think taking away the fault and the blame and the shame actually allows people to take more responsibility because they're not being drugged down by that self-recrimination, which can be so, you know, such an obstacle to then taking responsibility. I love this point you're making because I had this in my notes because it didn't come in your book.

29:50So and again, like if you're if you're a young lady or a woman reading this book, you're going to eat this up because you speak such an awesome voice from a female perspective. I just got to give you a lot of credit. Thank you for saying that. Because you're talking about like Eve, like what's it like for Eve to go through this? Right. To go through the fall. OK, now I'm sitting there like, OK, this is the fall. What the hell is Adam doing? it's like it's like so i and this is this is like it's a poor way of putting it but i look at the fall as again like let's just say of all mankind right adam is you know it's you know the the original of mankind eve was created from him i'm like well wait the king of humanity quote unquote with his queen he's sitting there watching his queen have a relationship with a serpent and he's like sitting in a chair in the corner of the room just watching this all go down and so to your point here's why i say that is you're talking about this idea of responsibility responsibility.

30:45Adam didn't take any responsibility. So are we surprised that in ourselves, collectively as humans, that there are times where we abdicate responsibility? No, we see that in that context, right out of the gate. So I think that's a deeply important question to your point. Yeah. And in my book, I describe this, the work of this guy, Alan Watts, who's a complicated figure. He was one of the first popularizers of Eastern thought in the UK and then US and was briefly an Anglican minister. But, you know, the whole chastity monogamy thing wasn't really his shining behavioral achievement. And so I think he was defrocked at some point in time.

31:28Yeah. But an incredibly interesting thinker. And he gave a lecture once where he talked about the end of the garden story where God says, you know, what's happened here, guys? And Adam tries to pass the buck to Eve. It was like, well, the woman that you gave me. He took no responsibility. Took no responsibility. But then Eve says, well, I was tricked by the snake, and she passes the buck. And then in Alan Watts' retelling, the snake winks and says, I'll be the one to take responsibility, Satan being an angel. And I just think that's such a fascinating meditation or story. Fable is a word that I use a lot in my book about you can engender compassion for yourself and for other people by thinking about how their behavior has been caused by forces outside of their control.

32:36And I think that's really important. I don't want to lose sight of that. I agree. I agree with you. And at the same time, responsibility requires then that not being the end of the story. And you see this kind of this fallibility in Adam and Eve where they're like, they did it and they are incapable of just owning up to the fact that they did it. Right. And I think that's part of what pisses got off in that story is that they don't immediately take responsibility for what they do. And also, one thing I do want to, you know, I, you talk about this idea of consciousness after this, right? So she has this consciousness.

33:14You're using a lot of your story as a mother and birthing in this that, you know, again, I just commend you for, you know, storytelling of yourself. You know, the only thing I was like, well, I know sex was there prior to the fall because like Adam pretty much goes out and does this like lovely poem. And he's like flesh of my flesh. But I mean, it's like two naked people. And the guy's just like, I can't think about anything else other than herself. I was like, okay, that was all present before the fall. I think the other thing too, and I had my notes just like you were saying, no one really took responsibility.

33:47There was no responsibility. And again, you talk about your children. And I thought a lot about this. And again, as you become a parent, you just think about things very differently because you go from being this, they wronged me, it's their fault, et cetera. Now you're in this responsible position. right you have the responsibility of this other human and you have to decide at times okay when do i provide the idea of grace when do i which you talk about and and let if you want to go there we could but this idea of grace versus what is discipline and what's appropriate discipline and trying to shape this person into you know what you call um having a constitution which i love that term.

34:30You don't hear people say, well, I want you to have a constitution. In other words, a basis and a fundamental being that allows you to go out and experience this world. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that speaking about and reflecting on how this has played out for me, these questions have played out for me as a mother, that really emphasizes the point that I was trying to make at the beginning, which is that when you say justice or accountability or blame or punishment or fault or responsibility, those can feel like very abstract issues. But in fact, we do have to have some sort of working definition of them in order to be a parent.

35:13Everything we do as a parent is living out some implicit working definition of what is fairness and what is responsibility and what is fault and what is child development and one of the two of the ideas i'm trying to pull apart in my book that often gets smooshed together is this idea of blame and accountability sure so when i say that someone's to blame for something i'm often saying that um they they could have not done it they chose to do it they um and they did it anyways and they deserve to be punished for it and if we think of blame as synonymous with accountability and then we're when then we have a five-year-old child in front of us and we can see that they kind of have free will but they can't you know they kind of and their brains are not fully formed their brains are not fully formed it can feel to parents like I either have to blame and punish my kid for this thing or I have to have no accountability for this behavior at all.

36:29And that's a terrible choice, right? And I mean, I think we see this a lot in the very confused parenting conversations in our culture between, you know, so-called gentle parenting, which just like it can come across is no accountability versus like, I'm an old fashioned disciplinarian, but there's a lot of blame and shame and harsh punishment there. But if we separate those, and we think we can have accountability without blame, we can set up our structures and rules and routines on our house, such that there are consequences that protect other people from this behavior. Like one of the things I say in my household is all feelings are welcome.

37:14All behaviors are not welcome. But that doesn't mean that I'm imputing like a bad will to the child that's doing it. And it doesn't mean that I need to add blame and shame and punitiveness on top of it. And again, those can sound like such abstract issues. But when you actually in the moment have to figure out how am I going to respond to my kid that's violated this rule? How am I going to hold them accountable for the order of our house without blaming them for things that they have imperfect control over? I think those abstract issues start to become concrete problems really quickly. So let me ask you, because a lot of the, you know, again, to your point on the genetic testing, you know, a lot of these issues are running into these common threads.

38:04So, for example, like drugs and alcohol, it's a common thread in a lot of the research you've done, et cetera. So I'm going to like throw out like an idea to you. So did I do drugs in college? A hundred percent I did. OK. Now, the question is, was it good for me and was it good for the people around me? It's a whole separate question. OK. And so when I say drugs, for the record, it was marijuana. which was fine for the time, I guess. So here's my question. We're in a society that has kind of gone from a 50-year-ago view that like, hey, drugs are just not good for us, so we need to not have them.

38:40And at one point we had like a war on drugs, et cetera, to where now it's like very accepted. But yet if you look at the studies on mental health and things of that nature, things are not improving. and yet we're not stopping and saying like, hey, time out for a second. We need to get at the core issue here. I look at drugs as they're not causing the problem inherently, but they're sure not helping it either. Is that, as you look at, you know, with people that have genetic makeups that are predisposed for issues, parenting issues that have caused that to be further, things of that nature, how do you look at drugs in those, you know, kind of the discussion of those processes and occurrences?

39:22I mean, I think the United States' approach to drug use mirrors the dynamics that we've seen over time in parenting. It is the macro to the micro of what's happening in the environment. So just to back up, all humans use drugs. I'm drinking tea right now. and you know where cultures differ is in terms of which drugs they think of as fine tolerable not that destructive to the fabric of human relationships and which are not and I think our classifications of drugs don't really match scientifically their harm potential right so you know psychedelic like no one gets really addicted to LSD but that's like a schedule one drug whereas is like nicotine is still legal and that's an incredibly harmful to your health.

40:18So just as a backdrop, like consuming substances that change how your neurons communicate with one another is something that essentially all humans have done throughout human history. That being said, there are forms of drug use that in terms of the drugs and how they're being obtained, how they're being manufactured, how the compulsiveness of their use is getting in the way of people's ability to fulfill their roles in life, you know, to work and to be a parent and to, you know, just function in terms of basic health. Like there clearly is problematic drug use. What we saw for a long time is that the state approached drug use the way a classic, like, boomer parent approached parenting, which is a tendency to think that making consequences harsher and that punishing more was going to change the behavior.

41:20And in fact, support for corporal punishment in the home and support for harsher sentences for drug users, they're correlated within and across time. And it really is this attitude of if we want to maintain order and we want to have accountability, we have to make sure that there's really harsh sentences, harsh punishment for violating those rules. And that's why you saw mandatory minimums. We saw the war on drugs. The problem is that it doesn't work. So harsher sentences for drug crimes do not predict a decline in drug crimes. Spanking your children does not predict them behaving better. Whether we're talking about state punishment or in-home punishment, simply making consequences harsher doesn't change behavior.

42:14And that isn't just humans. That's not human animals. We can see that in the lab. It kind of gets into a really basic thing about how do humans learn and what they learn from. So then you have this pendulum sling the opposite direction, where you have people saying, the problem is that punishment doesn't work. And so therefore, we should have no consequences and no attempt at control. And we also see that that doesn't work either, that people don't behave their best either in the home or in the state when they have, you know when they have a completely permissive structure sure well my friend to fall on that real quick i agree with you because your parallels it fits even city structures i'm originally from seattle and when you go look at rampant drug use it also like private property rights and things that nature actually follow that pendulum where you have people living on property they shouldn't be on and using drugs that we might have once called illegal or still do but yet the willingness to do anything, even down to even writing you up or anything.

43:20It just kind of vomosis. Yeah, yeah. And then, so there's a philosopher, Hannah Picard, whose work I really like. And she calls this the rescue blame trap. And it's basically, you blame someone and then it activates all your retributive punishment instincts. And then the opposite side of that pendulum is, here's all the ways that drug use is shaped by factors outside of people's control. Sure. I, I, the bond to punish the harshness isn't working. Really? We need to treat them as victims and we need to rescue them. And then we're all the way there. Yeah. And it doesn't, that doesn't work to change behavior either.

43:59My friend Jen Doliak is an economist and she has a book out. It came out the week before mine. She'd make a great, you should interview her. It's called this, it's called the science of second chances. And it's basically like, okay, well, this sounds great in theory, but what do you actually need to do from a legal perspective to neither be trying to war on drugs your way out of drug crime but also not complete you know anything goes your way out of drug crime either like what are the ways to incentivize sobriety to meet people where they are and make positive steps forward. And it's a very forward looking approach.

44:44So it's not you've messed up, this is how much you deserve to be punished. It's given where you are now, what incentives do you need in place today to get you to a better place tomorrow? And I think that that's like, Like that is, you know, I think the general. It's a here forward. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, and again, it's a, it's an emphasis on how do we hold people accountable without assuming that just making our punishments ever harsher is going to work for us. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management.

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46:02I think this has come up, and just so you know, full disclosure, I'm an ex-degenerate. I use ex regularly, et cetera. But one of the arguments that's been made out there in, I'll call it, the stratosphere of the internet, the idea of the insane asylum, which was very present, and then has been something that has become less present society as a percentage of population, things like that, is that something that is very needed that is missing? Because your point, that really deals with the person individually, their needs, et cetera. It's like saying there's a mental health issue and we need to get at that versus it being you've committed a crime, but the underlying reason isn't met.

46:44The crime will be continued based on your research. Yeah. And I mean, I think people, so just to back up the individualized, people's reasonings for how they end up in a persistently, you know, problematic drug using life are very heterogeneous, right? Like, is this poverty? Is this trauma? Is this not just drug use, but a persistent inability to learn from negative consequences? And it's very hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution to something that's very individualized. I mean, what you're picking up on is bigger than addiction, which is that, you know, we used to have resources and institutions for the long-term psychiatric care of people.

47:34And then in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, there was this massive move towards deinstitutionalization. And the idea was that rather than being in long-term psychiatric hospital, the people with mental health issues from addiction to schizophrenia to bipolar disorder to any sort of PTSD, significant mental health issue, would live in their local communities rather than being in a hospital-like setting. and would get their needs met from community care centers. Except those community care centers were never funded. They never materialized. And so a big part of why we now have the homeless population that we do and then also as many people in prison that we do is that they are the largest housers or un-housers of people with serious untreated mental health problems.

48:28This is a really tricky issue. Because people also have basic civil liberties. And so how do you honor that? But also, are they really at liberty if they have schizophrenia? You know, what does it mean to consent or not consent to treatment if someone has unmedicated psychotic disorders? And I think increasingly you're hearing people who are family members say, I am desperate to get my relative into, you know, long-term care. Sure. And I don't think the voluntariness means any. I don't think they're capable of really making a voluntary decision. But I mean, I think this relates to a much broader issue, which is like there just isn't the infrastructure.

49:15There just aren't the beds. There just isn't the mental health treatment resources for this right now. But it does get back to our question of what is good for the community might be good for the individual, and the community might be in the position to determine what is at better – I mean, it's a very philosophical question. Yes. Yes. It's very – and again, so it's because the other place that this comes up, you talk about like Dylan – I think it's pronounced Claybold, the Columbine shooter in 99. I went and saw Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine, which came out when I was in college and, you know, or should say it came out in high school, I want to say.

49:52You talk about this idea, like, was he hardwired? Were his parents to blame for this? You know, the other thing, too, you talk about conduct disorder or what you refer to a CD. It's the proportion of men that are subject to this is much larger. If you look at our prison system, it's men. I mean, it's like a lot of these things are it's a gender biased issue. I mean, men tend to dominate. I was even thinking higher level, like in the history of the world of despots, what sex do they come from? Men. And so we're back to this, like, who's responsible? It's in an awkward way showing up in men far more often women.

50:32I think we're kind of back at the Adam and Eve thing. It's a guy problem. He was at fault. Even if he wasn't at fault, he should have been held accountable and responsible because we continue to see this in these mental disorders and the damage that are caused. They flow a lot through men. And so you mentioned that we were involved with an organization that did a lot of work in homelessness. They probably have got more people clean in the history of Seattle, a group called Union Gospel Mission. and the the biggest danger in those communities for example back to this idea of men being the problem is it's usually a husband or a boyfriend that drags you know a relationship and children into those communities and the problem is guess who is ultimately going to get the most harm it's not the guy it's those children and that woman and that to your point we're just it's like it's elongating the stretch of problems that are inherited, created, allowed for, and really still it's dominated by men in society.

51:35Yeah. I mean, this is kind of a loose response to what you were just saying, but I think the thread that you're picking up on here is that the line between the individual and their community is much fuzzier than we'd like to imagine. None of us is an island, none of us is a fortress, and that means our individual choices reverberate and have implications for other people. And they're structured by other people's choices in this way where, you know, the inside of our body and the outside of our body is a lot less clearly demarked than we would imagine. I write about this when I talk about, you know, there's a so-called nature nurture debate.

52:19And if you ask any scientists, they'll be like, the nature nurture debate is dead. Like it's always nature and nurture in combination. And that also, even the division between nature and nurture is really artificial because your nurture changes your body. It changes the expression of your genes and your nature by shaping your behavior is then providing that nurture to other people, right? And I think that example you just gave of if you have a man who is predisposed towards antisocial behavior because of his genes, but then he's passing on both those genes and the environment that he is shaping to his children, it's nature-nurture.

53:02It's one combination. I think the other thing is just as a geneticist, I see that all of us are just a few genetic mutations away from being profoundly different people with different capacities and different. It is just by the luck or the grace of whatever that you didn't have that experience. And also that DNA strand that runs through them is 99 % 99.5 % the same as mine. And so I really think genetics has given me this profound appreciation for no one is a monster. people can behave monstrously but they're doing that in part because of genes and environments of natures and nurtures that run through all of our experience like I have mostly the same DNA as someone who's who has committed the most atrocious act that you can think of And that goes a long way to undercut that, both the separation between the individual and the community, but also the separation we might feel from someone who's behaving in this really abhorrent way.

54:28We are connected in the same tree of life to that person. Sure. You talk about the MAOA gene and you talk about how, you know, when that is altered or changed in people, how you just get these vastly different people, vastly different situations. We get a lot of problems out of that as you lay out in the book. And then you also talk about this idea. And I love this also. You use the term thin places. I've only heard that in very rare times. It doesn't come from academics. just so you know, so I appreciate you using it. But I argue that it's a thin place where bad luck and bad behavior effectively collides.

55:13I found it interesting because when you go, let's just say someone goes on right now and Googles thin places, they're actually going to very commonly find biblical references. But I think you're right in that when we see, let's use Columbine example. I remember when that happened, that was dark. It was very dark. Immediately, you have this overwhelming sense of like, this is not good. Something is wrong. And I think you touch on that idea of thin places. It feels deeply spiritual to anyone, regardless of your background, your upbringing, etc. It's just not a good place. And so I guess my question is like, why did you use the word thin places?

55:55Because like thin places is like where Moses runs into the burning bush. That was a thin place. That's weird. Yeah. So I think of thin places. So a big part of the book is each chapter is really written around a binary, an either or that people might take for granted. And then trying to complicate it or weird it or break it down a little bit. So nature versus nurture, being caused versus being an agent.

56:36and when I think of thin places I think of places that feel profound or that feel eerie or that feel spiritual and what that feeling is is a sense that the boundary that we usually have erected or are contained by is, again, becoming thin, is being dissolved. So when Moses encounters God, it's when this boundary between the natural world and the spiritual world is coming down and he's encountering God in a tree, right? And something that we think of as even less lower down in the order of angels than humans, and yet God is inhabiting it, right? So we have these lines between the divine and the human or between the human and like the animal world and the plant world.

57:32And God being indwelling in a burning bush is collapsing all of the boundaries that we have around like how we – and hierarchy of higher order and lower order. and you know um we see this in scripture and we see this in you know spiritual stories but we also see this in horror movies you know a trope of a horror movie is the evil child or the clown the evil clown or is it a machine or a human or is it a man or a machine you know or an animal And we have these boundaries between innocent and guilty, between alive and thing, between man and animal. And most horror movies, what they do, the reason why it's not just disgust but horror, that kind of dread and eeriness, that uncanniness, is because it's erasing or thinning this boundary.

58:34And I think that science can do that too. I think science – I mean, what is science doing? It's saying I can have you spit in a tube and then I can send your spit over to a lab and then it's going to read something about DNA that's in your cells. Yeah. And it's going to predict potentially whether or not you've ever stabbed your boss with a pitchfork. Like that is wild. that is back to Pinky in the Rain. That almost feels like science fiction or science horror because it is collapsing these boundaries that we usually have between men as spiritual humans, as spiritual creatures, as agents, and men as physical things.

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59:54Investing involves risks, including loss of principal. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. Let's go to your gene editing. You tell the situation of like this Chinese scientist who was trying to gene edit to get rid of HIV in effect in these offspring. Okay. Which is like, okay, we can all understand why you'd want to get rid of HIV. that that may but again we're now in the realm of like okay where are we like who is responsible what is the accountability can you kind of just explain that a little bit yeah so to back up a second so there's a technology for editing genomes it's called crisper cas9 and it has I think, really potentially amazing applications.

1:00:53So for instance, if you have Huntington's disease, or you have sickle cell anemia, you know, there's a variety of diseases that are very difficult to treat, that are caused by single gene mutations. And the idea that we could go in and edit the human genome to cure that disease is a fantastic possibility. You know, most of the applications that are being pursued for that are not editing embryos and also are, you know, editing, editing genes that cause diseases that might be, that would ordinarily be life-threatening, right? So there's a clear risk benefit involved in them. And also, you know, we're talking, about editing the human genome in ways that are potentially inheritable, the ethical guidelines around that are pretty strict.

1:01:53So there was this Chinese scientist who went rogue, who basically just ignored all the ethical guidelines, legal guidelines in his country, international scientific norms. And he attempted to use CRISPR-Cas9 to edit at an embryo form two girls so that they would have a mutation that makes a person naturally resistant to acquiring an HIV infection. I think their dad was perhaps HIV positive, and that was the use case in this family. And it didn't, it's unclear whether he was successful, and there might have also been what are called off-target effects, where other parts of the genome were also affected, because this is not a perfected technology.

1:02:38But also it might be like Newton's third law. For every action, there's an equal and an opposite reaction to your point. Yeah. So there's a lot of debate about gene editing. And will it potentially be more, you know, if we work out the technological kinks, could it go more mainstream? What are the acceptable use cases of it? Like, okay, you could CRISPR your child to not have sickle cell anemia. Could you CRISPR your child to have blue eyes? Like what are the, what is it just diseases or enhancements on the table? At the same time, there's, and this is not a future technology, this is a technology that's available now, is embryo selection.

1:03:20So you're creating embryos and you're not editing their genomes directly, but you are measuring their genomes and calculating their genetic risk to develop diseases or potential behaviors. years. There was an ad for one of the companies that offers this in the New York City subway last month. And their tagline was, have your best baby. So have your best baby, meaning do medically unnecessary elective IVF, score the embryos, rank them in terms of their most likely to have optimal outcomes, and then have the child that way. And I think that that brings up so many ethical and political and values issues around, you know, it's a different way of reproducing.

1:04:14It's a different relationship between a prospective parent and their child, if this is something that is designed and selected versus conceived with that role of chance that usually is there. And I think these issues around both CRISPR-Cas9 and polygenic selection are just going to continue to escalate as these technologies become more advanced and also more available to consumers. Well, and I remember, and I'll use my own personal experience. I'm sure you had this as well. So, you know, we go in, my wife's pregnant. Great. Awesome. This is fantastic. You know, you do, you do all your regular pregnancy check-ins and everything like that.

1:04:54And during the process, they ask you, would you like to test for certain things. And obviously Down syndrome is one of those. And you talk about this in your book. We never tested for that, just so you know, because we looked and said, you know what, regardless of the outcome of the child, we are terribly excited for this life. And therefore, you know, we will just seek to meet the need then, right? It's from here forward, right? Kind of that same idea. But you point out what that does. I mean, there's many people that as soon as they find that out, the life is aborted at that point. But you point out one of the real dangers and harms in this.

1:05:31And I really love this because you talk about your garden and you kind of use that as a story for understanding what's going on in your garden. And it's a great way of thinking about it. Like if you were the master of the universe or the master of your own family, you're building a garden. It's like you want diversity. You want differences. That's kind of the human beauty of it all. And what you really argued was that we eliminate that biodiversity, we're actually limiting the choice. And secondly, we're limiting things that might help us at a later date, if that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I think that I think the trade offs here and the tensions here are really real, especially as you move from, you know, down syndrome, you can also definitively test for.

1:06:19You can say this child will definitely have Down syndrome. They have three copies of chromosome 21. And I write in my book, in some countries, screening and selective abortion for trisomy like Downs is near universal. I think it's something like 96 % of women in Denmark, their pregnancies are screened for Downs and nearly 100 % of those pregnancies are terminated such that there's almost no Downs births anymore. And most of them are to women who did screen and got a false negative. It's like an error in the test. Sure. And there's long been what in disability justice they call the expressive critique of that practice, which is what does it say to people who are living with Downs and their families about the value of their lives if people are almost unanimously in some circumstances terminating pregnancies because they would lead to downs.

1:07:23Sure. So far in our culture, that debate has been really limited to discrete disorders that we can definitively test for. Sure. But what if we're now doing that around polygenic scores that predict likelihood of going to college or risk-taking genotypes that are associated with a higher rate of substance use or autism spectrum disorder genotypes. And also those are highly polygenic traits. They're traits that are influenced by many, many, many genes. And genes don't just do one thing. As another example, some of the genes that are associated with developing schizophrenia, so a serious psychotic disorder marked by seeing things that aren't there, believing things that aren't true, seriously impairing.

1:08:16If you have some of those genes, but not enough to make you schizophrenic, you are more likely to be an artist. You're more likely to be in a creative profession. You're more likely to be an engineer or a musician. So what does it do? Anything that attempts to optimize, I mean, we see this in plastic surgery too. Anything that attempts to optimize also risks homogenizing and standardizing and is at odds with, or at least as intention with, the value of genetic diversity as such. And also the like, I think of as the inherent value of every human life, regardless of their genotype and phenotype.

1:09:00So I think those, you know, those, those 10, those values are in conflict. So two of my children have dyslexia. To your point, would I sit down and plan my life to say, you know what? I want all my children or one of my children or whatever in between that to have dyslexia. I would not. Yeah. Yeah. I would not because, because the brain is wired to read and for dyslexic folks, their brain is wired differently. It's just a, it's a different. And it's a lot of effort now that reading is necessary to be included in society. Yeah. Correct. Now, to your point, what I've had a lot of conversations with my oldest daughter over is what are you going to do in the future?

1:09:43And where are you going? And what's the purpose of this? There's a purpose. The question is, we got to find that purpose. And to your point, we're limiting the purpose, if that makes sense, of what these people were created in the way they were to do what they're going to do with their constitution that ultimately often be a blessing to us. I mean, no one would have sat down and ran into Elon Musk and been like, this guy is going to be wicked smart and do all these things. And he's going to have 200 wives and, you know, I mean, all this stuff. Like no one would have predicted that. But that's kind of the point is we're not good at predicting outcomes.

1:10:16We can just kind of study and look and say, here's what we know. Also, like even after children of birth, would we sit there and score them and be like, okay, we're going to put these ones over here. We're going to put these ones over here. No, because we know that things are more random than we know. Yeah, yeah, there is this. And I think this is a really important part about the for people to understand with genetics is, you know, there are there are disorders where we can say pretty clearly, like this, this outcome is going to happen. Like if you have a Huntington's disease gene, you are going to get Huntington's.

1:10:50none of the things that psychologists usually work out that way there's we can think in terms of trends and patterns we can think in terms of risk you know it's probably a lot like investing where we can say like things generally go up here and they generally go down here that's a far cry from being able to say like at 7 a.m on the on a tuesday the price in japan is going to be x you You know, like there's a level of unpredictability to an individual human life from their genome that we should never make the mistake to think that we, again, that we have a crystal ball. We don't. There's no foretelling people's fates here.

1:11:30There are risks, though. I mean, so I think this is where I probably differ from you, which is that I tend to be pretty classically liberal when it comes to my stances on legalized abortion, at least early in pregnancy. and if I'm taking that position, it's very hard for me to say like a fiat that women should not do this, right? Like if you have schizophrenia in your family and what's going to make you feel safe to start a family is to minimize your child's risk of schizophrenia, I really understand that as a motivation. And also the wide-scale adoption of this technology does change reproduction.

1:12:12for everyone. Sure. When I was I give you a lot of credit. I mean, you know, to your point, what you just said about your own views on say abortion. And I think I meant that mentioned to you before, but you rarely ever hear someone say that and say, Oh, by the way, Margaret Sanger, like hung out with eugenicist leaders. People don't mention that in the same sense. So like, I feel like your book is so intellectually honest in that regard where it's like, Oh, Oh, thank you. It's not well-defined. Everyone's messy. This whole situation's messy. And I think the takeaway people should have in your book, it's so messy.

1:12:46Easily cut lines along rote rules. It's just such a false pretense to ourselves, our community, the folks around us. I want to – so you have kids. So I got to ask you this. So you've been married. I'm married. Like one of the things that – I'm going to throw out an idea that's not in your book. but it gets on your idea of grace that you did touch on the book. And we talked a little bit about earlier. I think our real superpower, regardless of what our talents are personally and individually, I think our real superpower is faith. Now, what I mean by faith is like, okay, let's say you're not religious.

1:13:23You marry someone. You are exhibiting a huge amount of faith, a huge amount of faith. I agree. Maybe the most human faith you can undertake with the second to that would be the faith to have a child, right? I totally agree. Because you're talking about these mothers who come from these bad family situations and they still, despite that, have the faith to go out and bring a life into this world. And it's like, wow, this is like mind blowing, okay? And so I think of our human power, it's our ultimate human power is the ability to exhibit faith in others. That's, I think, our real superpower. And I think society is really built on that.

1:14:03Like you do business with someone, you are showing faith in them. You're showing a level of trust that you're exhibiting. I think that's what our humanness does at its best in a way. But I think of like, you know, with that comes like this idea of grace with your child. You gave really good examples where like your son was hurt and wronged by a kid at school. And he like is spitting fire pretty much at this kid. He's like, oh, he's a serpent. And you're sitting back as a mother. It's like, well, he's just a kid. Yeah, yeah. And the people that you have faith in, you tend to give grace to, I guess is my big idea.

1:14:37I think I agree with you. I mean, I think there's nothing more optimistic than bringing a child into this world. I mean, even a marriage you can get out of, but like bringing a kid into the world. You can't get out of that. You can't get out of that. Like even if you don't have a relationship with them anymore, they're still your child. And you still, you know, as long as both of you are on that planet, you're going to exist with the knowledge that this is your child. Um, and I, I, there's faith and also faith, faith that to, so faith in other people and faith that today, tomorrow is not necessarily going to look like today.

1:15:17There's this line from the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin where she says, if you run any scenario out to its logical end without any deviation or swerve or creativity, it always ends into dystopia. And so if you're imagining a future that's not a dystopia, it can't just be today on repeat for forever. We have some optimism that some things are going to change, which requires some people to change, I think to get out of bed in the morning. And so to bring that to your most intimate relationships, you have to have faith that my therapist is always telling me, stop just prognosticating into the future as if everything can only get worse.

1:16:10You know that children are different this year than they were three years ago and you have to have faith in their continued development and their continued evolution so that's just kind of a way of agreeing with you i do think that there is um and also to treat people with grace which is to treat people better than you think they deserve which is the ultimate sign of love because love is by definition giving something to someone that they don't That is like love by definition in my mind. And we all, I mean, gosh, if we were all treated the way we deserved, that seems like hell to me. It's treating people better than they do be deserved.

1:16:53It's treating people how they are entitled to be treated just by virtue of being human, I think. But it's a lot easier to do that when you can have some imagination that who they are as people is not reducible to the worst thing they've ever done. who they are as people is not reducible to how they're acting in this moment, that there's a richness and variety to who they could be in the future. I think that makes it easier to then respond to them with less, less kind of mean spirited accounting about what they deserve. Yeah. I want to, I, you know, again, I think this, I, just your, your, your discussion of like your children, everything like that.

1:17:34I just, I just like, as a parent, again, it's, it's also back to the idea of faith. Like we have this problem in Western society today. It's we're not having children. Now, what is the core issue? We lack faith in some form or another. I know it sounds crazy because it's also like you go to these same people and say, hey, are you optimistic about the future? And they'll often say for people that aren't childbearing, they'll say, you know, I'm actually really worried about the future. In other words, it's like this idea of like their faith informs their path in a way. Right. And so, again, why is that there?

1:18:06There's various reasons like you've talked about. It could be everything from their parenting to their experiences and many of these things. But it's like still the core issue is like, is there faith or not? You've exhibited some faith. Like you said, you've had children. That's faith. That requires the immense faith. It is. Yeah. I totally agree with you. It's also faith in a community in a way, right? I mean, especially after you've had one, to have another one, knowing what it demands of you is, there is an implicit faith that I know I can't do this on my own, but I know I'm not alone. And I do wonder how much the atomization of our culture, this sense that everyone has to make their way on their own, corrodes the faith in each other necessary to create a new human life.

1:19:01when also I think of other things as you say that like kids used to be like let go to be more free in society at one point right so like oh hey just go down to johnny's house two miles away I don't care go ahead like we had faith in our society now we had faith in our kids too we had helicopter and it's like well we give them no rope and so therefore what are we doing we're exhibiting a lack of faith not only in our children but also in our society in a way right Right. Yeah. So that's true. Let me ask you this. And again, you just explained so much about your own life. You know, we were talking about a little bit about before I have a simple question, but it gets back at a lot of things we've talked about.

1:19:40You know, you mentioned the story of your mother and looking at the fridge when your children were at her house. Yeah. My only question I had and I won't you know, I won't give too much of the story away because I want our listeners to go read this book and and go through your journey. but my only question is when I read that I was thinking like back to the Adam and Eve situation I was like where's your dad where's your dad saying anything in this situation well so my parents are divorced so that's a big part of the story so my parents um my parents separated this is very surprising because I you know I grew up in this you know I grew up in an evangelical household of like youth group and small group and Sunday church I didn't know parents who were divorce.

1:20:19And so my parents separated my freshman year of college. And so it was a really big disruption. I mean, it was a big disruption to my parents' social life. It was a big disruption to my conception of the family.

1:20:34And so my dad wasn't living in the house. I think a more general question, and I think this gets back to destructive relationships are almost never one individual person's contribution. It's a two-way street in a lot of cases. I think any abuse or mistreatment or just destructive ways of relating to other people also requires other people to be bystanders in that. You see that in school bullying. you see that in every relationship that um often harm is is accompanied by passivity or lack of responsibility on the part of other people i totally agree so i think that's part of the dynamic that you're getting that you're picking up there yeah and so i got one last question because again you just you perturbed me by the way next time in austin or you're here in phoenix i owe you dinner okay great no this has been a lovely conversation so my only last question so like, and because it's not your book, but again, like, I just find your whole story is so interesting to me.

1:21:43Like if I was going to ask, and I don't have this in my notes, but I just feel implored to say this. If I asked you like, who was Jesus? Was he real? Is he a story? How do you look at something like that? Interesting. You know, I, I feel like what I'm most comfortable saying is that I take Jesus very seriously. There's a book called Christ, a crisis in the life of God. It's It's written by this guy, Jack Miles, who used to be a Jesuit priest. I don't know the story behind how he stopped being a priest. Sure. But he has this lovely analogy of the Bible as a rose window, as a stained glass window.

1:22:22So you can read the Bible and try to read it as a historical document. Yeah, which people do. What can I see? And then you can see it as a divine document, divinely inspired, and many people do. But you can also see it as an incredibly powerful and enduring piece of art that still has something to teach us and to move us. And I'm much more confident in being able to say that I think of the Bible and I think of the Jesus as represented in the Bible as a rose window that I will never stop contemplating. I think it is an incredibly important story that has a lot to teach us. Um, so I take it very seriously, even if not always literally.

1:23:09Yeah, that makes sense. Um, let's see, where can, where can people follow you going forward? Do you, are you on social media? Do you regularly write outside of academic journals? So I have a sub stack. It's called the ruminant kind. Um, if you just Google my name and a sub stack, you'll find it. I'm on Instagram also on my name, Catherine Page Harden. Um, and then my book is called Original Sin. And there isn't another original sin book about President Biden. It's not that one. It's not the book about President Biden. When it came out, my book was like in manuscript form when that one came out.

1:23:46And I was so annoyed that it took my title. So if you Google original sin, page hardened, you should be able to find my book anywhere books are sold. Awesome. And I told you I was going to do this beforehand and I'm going to do it. I've never done this on the podcast, but I feel implored to pray because your book has brought up so many great questions for us, like collectively as humans. and people, whether we're Americans or we're in this world today, that we should think about. So I'm going to pray briefly. Dear Jesus, I just thank you for Paige's work. I just pray that with our own children, her and mine, that they contemplate these things, they think about these things, they think about how to apply grace, how to love others when they don't deserve it, which is the definition.

1:24:25And I just praise you for her writing this book and telling the story. Your name, amen. Amen. Catherine, your book is deeply personal. I love the questions you ask. I love the problems you contemplate. I love your interest in ultimately, like I just said a second ago, humanity. Our listeners should go out and buy a copy of Original Sin wherever you buy your books. For our listeners, if you enjoyed this podcast, go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to A Book With Legs. Give us a review. Tell others about the books and great authors like Catherine Page Harden that we have the opportunity to understand and study the world with and through.

1:25:01For our tribe, if you have a great book you'd like to recommend, email podcast at smeedcap.com. That's podcast at smeedcap.com. You can also send your suggestions to us on X. Our handle is at smeedcap. Thank you for joining us for a Book With Legs podcast. We look forward to the next episode. Thank you for listening to A Book With Legs, a podcast brought to you by Smeed Capital Management. The material provided in this podcast is for informational use only and should not be construed as investment advice. You can learn more about Smeet Capital Management and its products at SmeetCap.com or by calling your financial advisor.