Parenting, Faith, and the Future with Ex-Muslim Activist Sarah Haider

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

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

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

[00:00:00]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simone Collins: contractors.

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

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

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

One and the other. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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