Today's guest is the legendary journalist and New Yorker staffer Lawrence Wright. He is the author of Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief; The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; and The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid.

Wright talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about The Human Scale, his new novel set in the war-torn Middle East, and why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict keeps burning even as most of the 20th century's conflicts have cooled. They also go deep on Wright's exposés on the war on terror, satanic panics, and how our craving for belief can lead us to madness. Then they turn to Texas, Wright's home state and the place he says is the future of America. What exactly does it mean that we're all becoming more like Lone Star State?

This discussion took place at a live event in New York City.

0:00 — Introduction

1:20 — Texas: the future of American politics

3:17 — 'The Human Scale'

5:38 — Why the Israel-Palestine conflict endures

12:12 — 'Thirteen Days In September' and the Camp David Accords

23:37 — America as both egocentric bully and colony for the rest of the world

26:17 — 'Remembering Satan' and the 'recovered memories' panic

33:29 — How abortion anxiety may have fueled a moral panic

37:07 — Insurance companies ended the panic by denying quack psychiatric treatments

39:15 — The will to believe often overrides logic and evidence

40:55 — Wright's teenage religious fervor led to interest in Scientology

42:19 — How Scientology seduced Hollywood

47:26 — 'Going clear' and Scientology backlash

50:03 — Getting Paul Haggis on the record about Scientology

52:55 — Texas in American mythology

Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

All right, Lawrence Wright, late of the Texas Monthly, currently with The New Yorker, and I guess you live in Austin. Do people punch you in the face when you walk down the street because you're at The New Yorker?

Lawrence Wright: Austin is not the usual Texas town. You know, it's a very, very blue city with a recent influx of California libertarian billionaires. 

Uh oh.

So, you know, it's changing a lot.

I'm two of those things. I've lived in California, and I'm a libertarian. So the third will follow. 

Just one more step.

But I was joking about Texans' attitude toward New Yorkers. I remember the old Pace Salsa ads, where they would make fun of salsa that was made in New York City. Austin—and Texas more broadly—is very cosmopolitan these days, isn't it? Or getting there. 

You know, it's the second-largest state, and by 2050, it's projected to be the size of New York and California combined. 

Wow.

So, whatever you think of American politics, it's going to be Texas politics from now on out. And I can tell you, speaking from the belly of the beast, we Texans are not ready for that.

We haven't educated our kids, we haven't got the infrastructure—there are a lot of problems we have. We don't take care of our citizens' health. But all that aside it's the hot spot on the map, and there doesn't seem to be anything that's likely to change it unless we run out of water. I think if there's one thing, one real vulnerability that Texas has, that's what it is.

We're going to come back later in our conversation to talk about Texas—not only Texas' future but Texas as the future of America. But let's start now. You have a new novel out. It's called The Human Scale. It is a police procedural that's set in the Middle East, in the occupied territories mostly, right? In Hebron. It follows Tony Malik who is half Irish and half Palestinian. And I thought, as a half Irish, half Italian, I had problems.

But he's an American FBI agent who is investigating the murder in Gaza of an Israeli police chief. Tell us, what prompted you to write this novel now—and as a novel, as opposed to nonfiction?

Well, I've written about the Middle East for much of my career. And, you know, I was always puzzled by what made this conflict so durable. I mean, I'm the same age as Israel. It's a young country. But in my lifetime, I have seen apartheid end. I've seen a black man elected president. I've seen the Soviet Union dissolve—all these things that were never going to happen until they did.

I've seen Vietnam, Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan—all these are past history now. But this keeps going and going. One of the reasons I decided to do it as a novel is that, you know, you can talk to people, you can look them in the eye, but only a novel allows you to go through the eyes and see the world through your characters' own perspective. That would allow me, I thought, to try to get closer to what are the elements that make this war go on and on.

And it's not just Israel and Palestine. It's infected our own politics. We're in the streets, we're on the campuses. The whole Western world is absorbed with this argument, which has been going on for as long as I've been alive.

So what do you think? What's the root of it—or what's enough?

Well, there are several obvious ones. One is God. If you look at the Torah and the Old Testament, God promised this grant of land to Moses—twice, as a matter of fact—but they're different parcels. The first one is a little more generous. It goes from the Red Sea to the Euphrates, which would take in Jordan, the West Bank, parts of Lebanon, a little bit of Saudi Arabia.

And then the next time he gives the promise of the Promised Land, it's more like modern Israel, with the West Bank in it. And then, when Moses dies and Joshua takes over, God commands him to go into Judea and Samaria and kill every living thing. And so that's how the Holy Land was birthed, according to the Bible.

So if you're Jewish and you see this as God's promise to you, then, you know, you don't have to hear anything else. The Quran also agrees that God gave Moses this gift but that the Jews lost the birthright because they turned against God and He took it away from them. That's one of the main problems.

Another real dilemma—I was in Gaza in 2009. It was right after Operation Cast Lead, which was one of those periodic, what the Israelis call "mowing the lawn." In this case, Hamas had kidnapped this young Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit, and they were still holding him when I went to visit. He was held for five years. The Israelis never found him. They finally exchanged him for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

And I got to wondering: In what scale do you measure the value of a human being? How does one person get to equal 1,000? This disparate valuation of people's lives is evident right before us—1,200 Israelis have been slaughtered, and yet 50,000 Palestinians have been killed so far that we know of. At what point does the scale get balanced?

There's one other thing that I was really curious about. I thought I had figured out the way to peace—many people have. It's like the illusion of water in the desert or something like that. But I read this book by David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Ben-Gurion was Israel's founding premier, and Ben-Zvi was its second president.

They were living in Manhattan in 1906 after being kicked out of the Ottoman Empire. They wrote this