194. Searching for God within Oxford and Cambridge | James Orr & Nigel Biggar

[0] Hello and welcome to Season 4, Episode 48 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] In this episode, my dad hosted two of the UK's finest scholars in philosophy and religion, Dr. James Orr and Dr. Nigel Bigger.

[2] They discussed identity -focused culture, nationalism, human rights throughout history, ideology, theology, and more.

[3] Also, things are going great in the Peterson household.

[4] I don't think I've been able to say, that for five years.

[5] Things are going to get crazy this year in a good way.

[6] I hope you enjoyed this episode.

[7] This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.

[8] Sleeping comfortably is so important.

[9] It's the key to setting a good tone for your whole day.

[10] I just moved to Nashville.

[11] I'm so excited.

[12] Technically Franklin, Tennessee, and I need a new Helix mattress because the one I had in Toronto.

[13] I loved it.

[14] Helix sleep has this quiz you take in about two minutes and it matches you with your perfect mattress depending on your body type and needs.

[15] Helix knows that everyone is different, so that's why they offer variety like soft, medium, firm mattresses.

[16] Mattress is great for cooling you down.

[17] Mattress is great for spinal alignment to prevent morning aches and pains, and even mattresses for plus sized sleepers.

[18] Helix was awarded the number one best overall mattress pick of 2020 by GQ and Wired Magazine.

[19] Helix has been recommended by multiple leading chiropractors and doctors of sleep medicine as a go -to solution for improving sleep.

[20] Also, the mattress is shipped to your doorstep so you don't have to go to a mattress store.

[21] Ship for free.

[22] They have a 10 -year warranty and you get to try it out for 100 nights risk free.

[23] They'll even pick it up if you don't love it.

[24] Helix even has financing options and flexible payment plans so a great night's sleep is never far away.

[25] Just go to helixleep .com slash Jordan.

[26] Take their two -minute sleep quiz and they'll match you to a customized mattress.

[27] Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners at helixsleep .com slash Jordan.

[28] This episode is sponsored by ReliefBand.

[29] Check out reliefband .com.

[30] You may be living in places where it's getting warmer and because your areas have been reopening, hopefully.

[31] You're going to finally be able to start doing things with your friends and families, swimming, camping, water parks, maybe even amusement parks.

[32] Nausea in any one of those circumstances will ruin your fun.

[33] It ruins everything.

[34] Our producer recently used it while flying.

[35] It's all natural and you just use it as a wearable device.

[36] No sedating anti -naugia meds necessary.

[37] So for those of you who worry about nausea, I have good news.

[38] It's called relief band.

[39] Reliefband .com.

[40] How it works is relief band stimulates a nerve in the wrist that travels to the part of the brain that controls nausea.

[41] Then it blocks the signal your brain is sending to your stomach telling you that you're sick or nauseous.

[42] Relief band's the only over -the -counter wearable device that's been used in hospitals and oncology clinics to treat nausea and vomiting.

[43] Relief band is the number one FDA cleared anti -naugia wristband that has been clinically proven to quickly relieve and effectively prevent nausea and vomiting associated with motion sickness, anxiety migraines hangovers, morning sickness, chemotherapy, and more.

[44] If you know someone who's suffering from nausea or going through chemo or morning sickness, relief ban can make a great gift.

[45] People don't know about it.

[46] It's really useful.

[47] The product is 100 % drug -free, non -drowsy, and provides all -natural relief with zero side effects for as long as needed.

[48] Right now, relief band has an exclusive offer just for Jordan B Peterson listeners.

[49] You go to reliefband .com and use promo code JbP.

[50] You'll receive 20 % off plus free shipping and a no questions asked 30 -day money -back guarantee.

[51] So head to reliefbAN .com, R -E -L -I -E -F -B -A -N -D .com, and use our promo code J -B -P for 20 % off plus free shipping.

[52] Hopefully this helps people who are suffering from nausea.

[53] Hello, everyone.

[54] I'm pleased to have two of the UK's finest scholars here with me today, Dr. James Orr and Dr. Nigel Bigger.

[55] Dr. Orr is University lecturer in philosophy of religion at Cambridge.

[56] He's director of Trinity Forum Oxford and Trinity Forum Cambridge and a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the Critic magazine.

[57] Formerly MacDonald postdoctoral fellow at Christchurch, Oxford, Dr. Orr holds a PhD in M. Phil in philosophy of religion from St. John's College, Cambridge, and a double first in classics from Belial College, Oxford.

[58] He's the author of The Mind of God and the Work of Nature, 2019, and co -editor of Neal Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature.

[59] That's 2022 at Routledge published out.

[60] Dr. Nigel Bigger is the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, where he also directs the McDonald's Center for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life.

[61] He's also an Anglican priest, and his professorial chair at Oxford is tied to a canonry in Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford.

[62] He holds a BA from Oxford, a master's in Christian studies from Regent College, Vancouver, and an MA and PhD in Christian theology and ethics from the University of Chicago.

[63] Before his current post, he occupied chairs in theology at the University of Leeds and at Trinity College, Dublin.

[64] Among his many books are the recent What's Wrong with Rights, Oxford 2020.

[65] Between Kin and Cosmopolis, an ethic of the nation, 2014, and in defense of war, Oxford 2013, as well as behaving in public, how to do Christian ethics, 2011, provocative titles.

[66] Well, thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today.

[67] James, why did you want to have this discussion?

[68] Well, my first reason for wanting to have a discussion with you and together with Nigel, is that I felt that you were developing a voice and a kind of acuity in the public square on questions of religion, of meaning, of transcendence.

[69] And those were the kinds of questions that drew me first to the Academy out of the law, but the kinds of questions that I think have never been more urgent or more salient to individuals in the West, to society in the West.

[70] And so I thought this is an extraordinary opportunity to talk with you a little bit about your views on religion and to hear Nigels too.

[71] Of course, we've talked a few, we've had many conversations over the years and Nigel's been a great mentor to me and I had a few happy years with him in Oxford.

[72] But yeah, this is a, it's an amazing platform that you've carved out for yourself and I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

[73] So what makes you think it's so urgent and salient now?

[74] Well, I think that questions of identity, questions of belonging, questions of significance, both as those are kind of answers to them are kind of positively expressed, but also negatively expressed, the sort of sense of crisis in the West at the kind of level of individuals, but also trying to work out where it is we're going as a society, particularly now that we've slipped a lot of our moorings that used to anchor us in, as it were, a stable, normative universe.

[75] We told certain stories about where we'd come from, where we're going.

[76] But broadly speaking, we're not believed by everybody, but broadly speaking gave us the kinds of parameters, the kinds of guardrails, the kind of coordinates, nation mechanisms, even the kinds of stigmas that helped us to pursue the common good together for all of our different disagreements.

[77] So you offered an implicit description of identity there, essentially, and that's quite interesting because so much of the current political discourse centers on a theory of identity, but it's not a theory of identity that's based on identification with the central set of stories, and that's something that's very, very different.

[78] You also mentioned a, in some sense, a collective view of the future.

[79] That's right.

[80] Yes.

[81] I mean, so I think the fact that we're all talking about identity now in a way that we simply weren't before is not a sign that we all know what it means, but actually a sign that there's a kind of dislocation.

[82] Identitas in Latin doesn't mean anything at all.

[83] It just means it means sameness.

[84] And I think you don't really start talking about something until it starts to dislocation.

[85] I think it's Hegel who says at one point that the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, by which he meant, this is in the introduction to the philosophy of right, by which he meant, well, lots of disagreement about exactly what he meant.

[86] But it seems to be the case that it was, philosophy only starts to take a proper appraisal, a proper diagnosis of what's happened after it's happened and really at the point where it's too late to do much about it.

[87] Right.

[88] The question doesn't arise when everyone is in implicit agreement.

[89] I think that's right.

[90] I mean, this is the old David Foster Wallace commencement address joke of the goldfish going for a walk one morning in the goldfish bowl.

[91] And another goldfish turns to him and says, how's the water?

[92] And the goldfish says, what's water?

[93] Well, we're now saying, what's your identity?

[94] Even 25 years ago, that would have been, in a sense, a meaningless question.

[95] What are you talking about?

[96] What is identity?

[97] I had a student the other day who, who came to me and said, I want to look at identity in Augustine.

[98] And I said, well, what do you want to do that for?

[99] And he said, well, everybody's talking about it, the university's talking about it, the culture's talking about it.

[100] I thought I could go and read the confessions and the detrinitatte and the city of God and try and work out what Augustine has to say about identity.

[101] And I had to tell him that Augustine would have been mystified.

[102] if you'd asked him what he meant by identity.

[103] It meant something technical and really rather trivial and an empty.

[104] So these are new ideas, but they're very dominant ideas and they're ideas that we don't really have the answer to, but we're happy to project onto the canon, to project back into the past.

[105] Reminds me, my Nietzsche's statement about the question of morality, said that, well, when you're embedded in a culture that has a single morality, the question is what's right and wrong within that structure.

[106] But then when you're subjected to the onslaught of many morality, the question of what is morality per se starts to arise.

[107] And so the questions get deeper.

[108] And maybe that's a consequence of the intense cultural intermingling that characterizes the world now.

[109] And I mean, that's very rich.

[110] And it's enriched all of us.

[111] But it's also deeply unsettling.

[112] And it raises questions.

[113] and, of course, technological transformation does the same, not least when it involves reproductive technology, let's say, and changes the relationship between the sexes.

[114] I'm going to switch to Dr. Baker and ask him the same.

[115] Could I just make comment on this business of identity, Jordan?

[116] Because, I mean, I do think, certainly in some cases, identity is hooked into some kind of grand narrative.

[117] I mean, I guess I think of human beings as we live our little lives, and we often need a bigger story to identify with, to give ourselves a significance that by ourselves we just don't have.

[118] Now, that may not be the case everywhere, but I'm thinking particularly of nationalism.

[119] I'm Scottish -born.

[120] I identify as British because I'm both English and Scottish.

[121] I oppose Scottish separation from the UK.

[122] But when Scots people say, you know, I'm Scots, I have a Scottish identity, I want to say, well, okay, that's fine, but can you give an account of it?

[123] And it seems to me that one can hold identities to account in this sense that when I claim an identity, I'm identifying myself with something.

[124] So when I say I'm Scottish or British, I have in my mind a certain set of stories, a certain, of heroes, a certain set of values that I claim as my own and identify with.

[125] And it seems to me that insofar as the stories and the heroes and the values have moral content, they are morally accountable and can be morally criticized.

[126] So identity is not a kind of, that's not bedrock.

[127] Okay.

[128] So that raises another question as far as I'm concerned a couple is, first of all, you know, we might not identify with who we are.

[129] We might identify with who we would like to be or what the ideal is.

[130] And when you talk about, you know, our finite mortality and our longing for something greater, I would think of that as part of the religious impulse, essentially, that guides us toward the ideal that we're attempting to manifest.

[131] And so there has to be something beyond us that we identify with.

[132] And then I would wonder if it's not abstractly beyond, let's say, in the form of a religious notion, then it gets truncated into something like nationalism, or something political, that then gets inflated in significance to divine status because the proper target of identification is locking.

[133] What do you think of that?

[134] Yeah, I think that's a danger, isn't it, that the grand narratives we identify with, we divinize them, we give them an absolute status.

[135] And nationalism at its worst does that, of course, so the nation becomes God and the fact there was, was it Ernst Cronon talked about, or was it, you know, it's Fichter, I think, talked about the nation being immortal, but the member of the nation, of course, is not, but you gain a kind of vicarious immortality by belonging to the nation, which always continues, which actually it doesn't, but never mind, but there is a, there's a, there's a, religiousity to that, but I don't think that, but all that ended is have to absolutize themselves in that way.

[136] So I identify as British, I'm married an American.

[137] I could have lived and worked in North America all my life.

[138] I chose not to because I felt commitment to this country.

[139] Does that mean that I think that the UK is eternal and absolute?

[140] Not at all.

[141] I mean, it didn't exist before 707.

[142] It may not exist if Scotland separates.

[143] But you have a place for the relationship with the absolute in your life.

[144] And so it's conceivable that the nation didn't have to expand for you to fill that gap.

[145] I mean, I know in Quebec, there was a very interesting poll.

[146] You know, Quebec was the last Western country in some sense to undergo the transformation from deep religiosity, almost feudal religiosity, to secular status.

[147] That didn't happen until the 1950s.

[148] And then Quebec abandoned Catholicism at a rate that was just absolutely staggering.

[149] But the Gallup organization indicated that if you were a lapsed Catholic, you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist.

[150] Ah.

[151] Right, right.

[152] A piece of information I was looking for for years.

[153] Just on that, I mean, I've noticed, and there's no proof here yet, but I've noticed that the rise of Scottish nationalism is correlated with the precipitate decline in membership of the Church of Scotland.

[154] Now, so I'm wondering, is there a kind of transparency here from from Presbyterian religion into Scottish nationalism, I suspect there is.

[155] That reminds me of another central Nietzschean idea, which was that a couple of ideas was that as a consequence of the death of God, which is, of course, something that Nietzsche decried, he thought it was a murderous act, that we would become prone to either nihilism or a form of radical communitarianism.

[156] He identified that essentially with communism, or at least with the spirit of communism at that point.

[157] And then I would say that the rise of fascism, in my interpretation, these are fundamentally replacement religions, except that they have pathologies associated with them that a genuine religion, and we could talk about what that might be at some point.

[158] It was one of the questions you guys proposed.

[159] They have pathologies that genuine religions in some sense manage to skirt.

[160] Do you think that that's a viable hypothesis?

[161] I mean, it's sort of predicated on the idea that we do have a deep religious instinct.

[162] It's associated with the necessity for us to adopt an identity.

[163] Yeah, so when people desert kind of mainstream conventional religion, they kind of, the religious incident gets displaced.

[164] And so in the case of Nazism, most obviously, you get quasi -religious rituals.

[165] Yes, which the fascists were particularly good at, and those were non -verbal, so they were harder to critique.

[166] Yeah, but they created a sense of the, transcendent.

[167] So, yes, I think that that is a close of all hypothesis.

[168] The question of what kind of religion resists that is an interesting one.

[169] I guess religion has always had a problem with degenerating into idolatry.

[170] That's to say, the identification of something human, a piece of sculpture, a temple, a nation.

[171] concrete.

[172] As divine.

[173] And that, that, of course, is a form of religion that monotheism, be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim has been against because God, God is God, and God is transcendent, and God is barely understandable by human beings.

[174] And there's a big gap.

[175] And there's an insistence on that.

[176] I mean, part of the insistence, well, the present -day insistence in Islam of not making images is, I believe, it's a variant of the same doctrine that you see.

[177] in the Old Testament against making idols.

[178] And I think it's an attempt when it's working properly to protect the concretization of the absolute.

[179] And that is this psychological barrier against idolatry, which I think ideology is a form of, and I suspect, although don't know, that it's etymologically related as well.

[180] And so, you know, you paused right at the beginning, Nigel, that we're destined in some sense to search for something beyond ourselves, that that's part of our actual nature.

[181] I guess I would wonder, too, if that, you know, Pige, the developmental psychologist, posited the existence of a messianic stage in late adolescent development.

[182] And he didn't believe everyone hit that stage of cognitive development, but that many people did.

[183] And that that was the point at which radical inculturation should take place.

[184] But it involved the turning outward to broader world concerns and the desire to join a conversation.

[185] cause, and maybe you can see that really intensely between the ages of 17 and 25, something like that.

[186] And then, so university students are primed for that, and then they're offered ideology now, I think, instead of, well, instead of what it is that we're trying to lay out, what the alternative to that might be.

[187] Yeah.

[188] So I wanted to ask you guys, James, did you have something to say about all that?

[189] Well, I mean, other than to say that, you know, this, there's sort of obviously good, good nationalism and bad nationalism, and often the distinction is made between patriotism and nationalism, and Nigel's written very well about this, but it's often overlooked.

[190] I mean, I think that a lot of the problems today, certainly as we've, has been part of the debate in the, in the UK in the last few years, has been this question of the, are you a citizen of anywhere, or are you a citizen of somewhere.

[191] And a lot of the deep divides in our society flow from that basic distinction, the distinction that the sociologist David Goodhart drew a few years ago.

[192] And a lot of the differences that we are having apparently a lot more trivial flow, really downstream of that of that basic distinction.

[193] So there's a, there's an idea that Murcia Elliott had about the the continual disappearance of God, because he looked at Nietzsche's pronouncement and said, well, God has vanished into the stratosphere of abstraction many times throughout history.

[194] This isn't a one time only.

[195] The danger of an abstract God that can't be represented is that he becomes so detached from human affairs that it's as if he's not there.

[196] And so the Catholic Church maybe produces saints as intermediaries and priests to sort of link the absolute to the proximal.

[197] But I wonder, too, is what happened with Brexit in the UK.

[198] I mean, I thought of that in some sense as a Tower of Babel phenomenon is that people felt that their representation in Europe was so abstract that they were no longer connected to their land, to their town, to their community.

[199] And so the distance between them and the central authority became too great.

[200] And there was a longing for return to something like the concrete, which I had some sympathy for.

[201] But it begs a question, too, is like maybe there's a rank order of identity.

[202] And so you are a patriot to your land, but that's nested under an affiliation to something that's absolute, that isn't associated with nationalism.

[203] And I talked with Stephen Fry a little bit, for example, about the utility of having a monarch.

[204] It's sort of analogous to that, is that the monarch is an abstract figure, but exists.

[205] and you can have affiliation to her like the prime minister does and still be in charge of the state.

[206] And it's like there's a hierarchy of identities and the hierarchy has to be structured properly or the parts start to contain the whole in a way that's pathological.

[207] Yes.

[208] Yes, I mean, I was just thinking as you were speaking that certainly the way a lot of the arguments for thinking of one's love of country as a form of piety in the, tradition and moral theology, start from the most intimate and the most immediate.

[209] So it's love of, love of parent, your biological parents.

[210] You didn't choose your parents.

[211] It's as it were, you're thrown into this relationship with him, but it's the most intimate relationship there is.

[212] And similarly, the thought is that you owe your loyalty, your loves, your affections to your community, and so on and so on in ever expanding concentric circles.

[213] But I think, both Aquinas and somebody very different, somebody like David Hume later on in the 18th century, stressed that there's, as it were, there are diminishing returns as the concentric circles move outward, and there's certainly a limit, and it's not, as it were, it may be not an ideal limit, but it's simply a function of our finitude and our fragility and in the Christian tradition our fallenness, that we can't, as it were, love every single human, but we can't love humanity in the abstract, and nor can we love every single human being with the same sort of intensity.

[214] So that might be a more positive way of thinking about why we ought to owe what Augustine calls our common objects of love, or we treat our common objects of love as broadly proximate, but organized by the horizon of a kind of transcendent orientation towards towards the source of love, which, of course, in the Christian tradition is God himself.

[215] Jordan, I feel I agree with you that we inhabit kind of a range of identities, some more local, some more regional, national, global, and then religious.

[216] And each thing we identify with gives a certain meaning to our lives and a certain significance.

[217] just wondering in terms of your encounter with younger people, at what point does religious identification begin to gain traction?

[218] Well, I think there's a variety of answers to that.

[219] One is that one pathway in is the diagnosis that the desire for deep meaning and also deep responsibility is there and valid and in every.

[220] everyone and to be encouraged and recognized.

[221] So there's that.

[222] And then there's a serious discussion about, I would say, about love and truth and the and the pragmatic utility of both and both as expressions of faith, you know, because you can't say, well, there's evidence that love in the broadest sense is the most effective manner in which to orient yourself in the world.

[223] You could make a counter case that it's power for a example and you can't prove that speaking the truth is for the best and partly that's because people get into trouble for speaking the truth all the time but you can say you can stake your life on those two things and see what happens and that there's an adventure in that and and that appeal to adventure that that's really attractive to you especially to young men but to young people in general and then there's one other element which is part of it has to be the removal of rational objections.

[224] It's like when I did my biblical lecture series, I said I was going to stay psychological about it except when I had to become metaphysical because of the limitations of my knowledge.

[225] And so I was trying to make sense of it.

[226] How can you have a relationship with this book that makes sense so that you're not crucifying your reason, but using it alongside of you?

[227] And so that it's not mere, let's say, superstitious foolishness with regards to your axiomatic presuppositions of the form that the rational atheists criticize so well let's say so effectively so i you know i said well i brought reverence to the to genesis i said this book's been around a long time and there's possible there's the possibility that there's something in it that i that i don't understand that's appealed to people across history and let's approach it from that perspective and see what we can make of it and that that seems to have proved extremely popular, like sort of unbelievably popular, and so...

[228] So when you mentioned this desire for a deep desire, in a sense, for a sense of being responsible.

[229] Yeah, for seriousness.

[230] And the truth.

[231] Both of those, to me, as it were, something that is given an objective to which we are accountable.

[232] It reminds me of what your compatriot Charles Taylor once wrote, and his best shortest, broke and grab the say the ethics of authenticity, he said, reflecting on authenticity as being the kind of universal popular value we all recognize.

[233] He said, authenticity only makes sense when there's a wider given horizon that gives it significance.

[234] So choice only significance within a context that gives it significance.

[235] Otherwise, choice is caprice.

[236] It's whimsy.

[237] It doesn't matter at all.

[238] And so I suppose seeing this through Christian eyes as I do, what we have here is a recognition of the need for, if you like, a given moral order within which we are, you know, we have freedom and the freedom is what makes us responsible and makes our decisions and choices really heavy with significance.

[239] But there is something that is given and we didn't create it.

[240] And a large part, not the only part, a large part of the affirmation of the being one God, is that there is not just a physical coherence to created reality, but also a moral coherence.

[241] One God, okay, so a couple of things I want to talk about there.

[242] So, you know, if I look at authenticity from the psychoanalytic or the psychological perspective, talk about Carl Rogers and the humanists.

[243] Now, Rogers, who I admire greatly and who taught me a lot about listening, technically.

[244] He was a humanist, but he was a Christian seminarian to begin with, and a wannabe missionary.

[245] And so his psychology of human possibility is secularized Christianity, right to the core.

[246] Now, his talk about authenticity, so he thought if you wanted to be a good therapist that you had to be integrated.

[247] And so he talked to, he's making a case for something like this hierarchical identity that we just discussed.

[248] So imagine your identity.

[249] is probably properly structured hierarchically with the utmost at the top where it's supposed to be.

[250] And with everything in its proper place, that constitutes you in the broadest sense.

[251] And then you speak in some sense from the center of that.

[252] And so there's a kind of alignment that goes along with truthful speaking that represents that authenticity.

[253] And I think that's equivalent to, well, it's equivalent to Trinitarian phenomena in my estimation.

[254] You know, when there's this emphasis in the Gospels on the possibility of the spirit of God inhabiting a group or an individual, especially in terms of their relationship with one another, their dialogical relationship with one another.

[255] And there's really something to that.

[256] Like, it's not a, and it seems to be, you can enter that space when you're authentic in the psychological sense, but it also means that the words that you're using spring up from the depths, from the integrated depths.

[257] And that is associated with, that's associated with, with, with being possessed by the ideal at that moment.

[258] It's something like that.

[259] And you can call that forth out of people, right?

[260] If you're engaging in a serious and honest dialogue with them and you trust and you want the best from them, then they step up.

[261] And then you can have that kind of conversation.

[262] And it's ennobling for everyone.

[263] And everyone experiences it that way.

[264] Can I just suggest that, I mean, we're using the word authentic.

[265] But as listening to Nigel and listening to you now, Jordan, it seems to me that you've actually expressed two very different and opposing sides of how one understands authenticity.

[266] So Nigel offered the idea that authenticity, as it were, requires presupposes or requires an author with a capital A, should we say, some sort of given objective framework that we We don't script our own narrative.

[267] We have to, as it were, deal with the world as it's given.

[268] You have elaborated beautifully, and I'm not saying that the two can't be brought together.

[269] I think this could be a very interesting next phase of the conversation.

[270] You, in drawing on Rogers and talking about the secularization of the sense of authenticity and the sort of the currents of neumatology and the spirit in the New Testament at the beginning of acts, are taking a more, shall we say, self -scriptive.

[271] self -authoring idea, account of authenticity.

[272] And this goes right back, I suppose, in the 20th century.

[273] So I have some ideas about how those might be mediated.

[274] I mean, I don't think you're not speaking with your own voice when you're authentic in some sense because your proximal concerns are not relevant.

[275] All you're trying to do is to state what you believe to be the case at that moment.

[276] And in honest response to the surrounding, it isn't agenda driven, at the highest levels of that hierarchy.

[277] So the agenda might be love and truth, right?

[278] But it isn't anything proximal.

[279] It's not like, so for example, if I was trying to argue against you and defeat you, that's Philo Nike, which I just learned, the love of victory, if I was possessed by the spirit of the love of victory and was attempting to defeat you, then I wouldn't be speaking in a fully authentic voice.

[280] It might be a more authentic voice than being cowardly, but it's not as authentic as one that would be, inspired by the highest possible motivations.

[281] And my sense has been that it's something like truth nested inside love that constitutes that highest level of ethical striving.

[282] And so that speaks from within you, perhaps.

[283] And it's strange that that would also be associated with authenticity, because in some sense it's not you.

[284] Because your definition of authenticity, which really, in a sense, it's you expressing your grasp of the truth, but it's not just you expressing yourself, whatever that means.

[285] I mean, the common understanding of authenticity is self -expression.

[286] Whenever someone says that, I think, well, you know, how do we know yourself is worth expressing?

[287] How do I know myself is worth expressing?

[288] But your way putting it ties authenticity to my grasp of the truth.

[289] So there is something apart from me, which I'm relating to, which gives it a kind of objectivity and seriousness and lack of caprice.

[290] So, okay, so a couple of things off that.

[291] I mean, this insistence by the radical left on lived experience, and it's validity, well, it might be a stumbling towards something like that.

[292] Okay.

[293] Right?

[294] Okay.

[295] Well, then the next thing, so let's leave, I'll put that up.

[296] But then the next thing I'm thinking about is I've really been struck constantly by some of Jung's descriptions of Christ as a member of the Trinity because Jung makes much of John's sense of Christ, the logos that's there across time, which I read something as something like the creative consciousness that's involved in the bringing to awareness of being, something like that.

[297] So it's maybe identical to consciousness itself, at least in its higher stages.

[298] It's very abstract.

[299] But then there's Christ, the carpenter, who lived in a particular time and place, which is kind of a mystery because everyone asks, like in the movie, Jesus Christ, superstar, you know, why that time and that place?

[300] And the answer is, well, it has to be some bounded time and place.

[301] And so if we're, if what Christ is, is a representative in some sense of what a human being is, is that there's a divine.

[302] aspect to us, which is this creative consciousness that's very abstract, but it's also localized intensely, you know, in an arbitrary throne to use the existential phrase historical context.

[303] And then each of us is unique in that manner, but there's something universal about each of us, too, that enables us to reach out to each other.

[304] And also gives each of our individual lives a larger significance that otherwise they just wouldn't have at all.

[305] Well, yes, and the significant, you know, one of my students once asked me a brilliant question is like, well, if all stories have the archetypal structure, why not just tell the same archetype over and over?

[306] And I thought, well, isn't that so interesting?

[307] Because what you want is you want old wine and new skin, so to speak, right?

[308] You want the universal story particularized.

[309] And then I thought, well, that's exactly what Jung said about the figure of Christ, is it's the universal story particularized.

[310] And both of those, like both the particularization and the universality, it's the intersection of those two that produces the meaning.

[311] And it also produces, like I guess you say meaning, I would say human dignity.

[312] Because on the one hand, there is individuality.

[313] No one quite grasped the truth or speaks the truth in my time and place like me. So in a sense, everyone is a unique profit and has a unique responsibility.

[314] But we are commonly subject to a universal order, universal obligations, universal calling, which endows our little lives with the larger significance.

[315] I mean, this oscillation that you've been describing so beautifully between the universal and the concrete, the general and the particular.

[316] You touched on it earlier, Jordan, when you were talking about the iconoclasm of Judaism and Islam relative to the shocking acceptance and indeed embracing of particularity in the form of the second person of the Trinity, incarnate as a human being.

[317] And so the sort of shocking Christian claim is that God leaves his authenticating signature, not just on the processes of history, but on this particular, this particular carpenter in first century Palestine.

[318] This is what gets Hegel and others just so excited that it seems to be this final synthesis where everything, as it were, come to a resting point.

[319] But as also, as Nigel says, it also underwrites the dignity and, as it were, the value, the intrinsic value of human beings and others have written about the...

[320] Well, that's another major question, you know, and this is something I think the new atheists don't take into account at all, because they have this enlightenment orientation, and they attribute the idea of human rights.

[321] It's like their historical sense is truncated at 400 years ago.

[322] And that's really odd because so many of them are biologists, you know, and they should be thinking across the millennia.

[323] Now, that can be a problem for religious thinkers, too, because it isn't obvious that the worldview of the Bible is a 13 billion -year -old cosmos.

[324] But, you know, I don't believe that our notion of rights is an Enlightenment product.

[325] I think the Enlightenment articulated an implicit Judeo -Christian view of man and expressed it brilliantly in many political documents, but that the roots of that explicit construction were mythological and ritual and centuries or millennia or or or or or or or were far past that old and I actually don't think that's debatable.

[326] I think the idea that you know that the the the dignity of the human being and the rights of man emerged in the Renaissance let's say in the enlightenment and out of nothing is a completely absurd proposition.

[327] It's much more reasonable historically to look at the at the narrative.

[328] precursors to that idea.

[329] No, I agree entirely with that.

[330] I mean, it has been established that the notion of natural human rights can be found in the 13th century in the medieval period.

[331] And Larry Seedontop recently wrote a book called The Origins of Individuality, where he locates the notion of the value of the human individual in a biblical Christian narrative.

[332] I mean, the kind of archetype of the individual is the prophet.

[333] The one who, who in respond to the call of God, is called out from the mass of people.

[334] And indeed, poor old Jeremiah is called out to speak against his people alone.

[335] And it's that, it's the relationship between the individual and the call of God that, in sense, creates the individual and draws them out of the mass. Right.

[336] Well, and you see that, often in the Genesis stories.

[337] I mean, Abraham's a classic example of that too.

[338] I mean, he's a failure to begin with.

[339] I mean, he's like 80 years old and still living in his dad's tent.

[340] And he's called by God.

[341] And so this lowly guy who's a non -starter is called by God.

[342] And all that happens to him for the first section of the story is one bloody, awful catastrophe after another.

[343] And you think, well, do you believe these stories?

[344] Well, here's the question is, what's not to believe about that?

[345] It's like there you are, you're a dismal failure and you're not living up to your potential.

[346] And then you're inspired by something that forces you outside of your proximal self and makes you feel guilty and ashamed if you don't manifest it and enthusiastic, which means it possessed by God if you do manifest it.

[347] And then you do and then like it's one catastrophe after another.

[348] It's like, who doesn't believe that?

[349] How is that not life?

[350] I mean, it seems like there are at least sort of three possibilities.

[351] There's a kind of the Enlightenment creationist account of dignity, just coming out of ex nihilo, coming out of nowhere with Kant and others, that says, which gives a kind of universalist basis to rights and a kind of cosmopolitanism that is based on pure rationality and nothing else.

[352] and we don't believe the city stories anymore.

[353] Okay, so here's something that's interesting, James.

[354] So let's say that's true.

[355] Well, then why not postmodern critique that rationality out of existence?

[356] If there's nothing behind it that is more fundamental than a mere proximal European rational construction, why can't we just blow it away?

[357] First of all, attribute it to the West, which I think is a big mistake because I don't believe that's true.

[358] But then also just replace it with another rational construction.

[359] construction.

[360] If there's nothing transcendent about it, nothing deeper.

[361] Well, I think a quick answer to that is to say we didn't need to wait for the postmodernist.

[362] We simply needed to wait for the 1790s and the reign of terror that was orchestrated, of course, by devotees of the cult, literally devotees of the cult of reason that was set up in Notre Dame, proclaiming liberty, equality, and fraternity, even as the bloods and the heads were running in the streets.

[363] Right, and in the cathedral, as you point out, which is so symbolically relevant.

[364] Indeed, indeed.

[365] This episode is also brought to you by Basis.

[366] If you guys have been listening to the podcast for a while, you know Basis by the company Elysium is a perfect way to save the time of NAD infusions and the cost and still get the benefits.

[367] NAD is found in every single cell of your body and is responsible for creating energy and regulating hundreds of cell functions.

[368] The body doesn't have an endless supply of NAD.

[369] and the levels decline as you age.

[370] Basis also works on biological factors such as enhancing mitochondrial function and age and improving DNA repair.

[371] Many basis customers also report experiencing higher energy, less fatigue, and more satisfying workouts.

[372] You can also increase NAD by eating healthier too, more meat.

[373] Dad and I received NAD infusions in the past when he was quite ill, and I saw results like improved mood and energy levels.

[374] The big drawback was that the infusions took eight hours and they were kind of physically painful, the IV version anyway.

[375] The pills are way better.

[376] Basis works by increasing your NED levels and activate something known as Sertuans, or our longevity genes, which scientists say optimize the way we age.

[377] Getting more NAD is pretty easy.

[378] Just take two capsules a day to promote healthy aging.

[379] Listeners can get one month free on a subscription to BASIS.

[380] That's the equivalent of $45 off by visiting trybasis .com slash Jordan.

[381] and using the code JbPBASIS.

[382] That's tribasis .com slash Jordan.

[383] promo code JbPBASIS for one month free.

[384] It's a great deal on a groundbreaking supplement.

[385] This episode is also brought to you by Canva, my go -to for social media posts.

[386] I'm not a graphic designer, but I love creating.

[387] There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes of my dad's social platforms and podcasts a lot.

[388] And when it comes to creating graphics or visuals, it's tricky without a good app.

[389] I found out about Canva Pro and it's been saving our team so much time.

[390] They can create anything they want using whatever device they're on.

[391] It's a super cool design platform that helps you create content in a few clicks instead of spending hours on a computer.

[392] Canva Pro has a huge variety of tools in their library.

[393] You can find anything you need to create the perfect content for you or your brand.

[394] Features like premium fonts, photos, videos.

[395] Creating things with Canva Pro has never been this fun and you can create whatever you want from scratch.

[396] It's really simple to use.

[397] You can also work on team projects, so no more losing files since everything's in the same place.

[398] It gets better, though.

[399] You and four teammates can unlock everything on Canva Pro for just $12 .99 a month, allowing you to share, edit, and comment in real time.

[400] Design like a pro with Canva Pro.

[401] Right now, you can get a free 45 -day extended trial when you use my promo code.

[402] Just go to canva.

[403] to get your free 45 -day extended trial.

[404] That's C -A -M -E -S -P -E -S -Peterson.

[405] Canva .coma .coma -me -slash -Peterson, enjoy the rest of the episode.

[406] So the question then is that, you know, what we now can't take seriously, the Kantian claims to universal reason, and we can't really take seriously that, and I think the post -moderners would have some, there's a force to what they have to say, that deracinated reason that tears us away from any kind of locality, any kind of the sort of messy contingency of human development and human upbringing.

[407] I mean, it's not an accent as some people like to point out that Kant never had children and never went further than 10 miles of Kernigsberg and yet had this extraordinary impact.

[408] I think it was the German poet Heineer who said that Kant was far more deadly than Robespierre, because whereas Robespierre simply decapitated a king, Kant decapitated God.

[409] That is to say, it would be helpful, I think, for the audience, for you to talk a little bit about Kant, because they're not going to be familiar in that way.

[410] So, I mean, just a kind of a 90 -second digester, I mean, Kant, 1724 to 1804, known as the kind of the sage of Kernigsberg, which is Kaliningrad, now Prussia.

[411] Broadly speaking, he has had an enormous impact.

[412] Subterranean influence these days, I think, because he's just so darn difficult to read, German is really only just becoming a philosophical language.

[413] A lot of his early writings are in Latin.

[414] But the explosion occurs in 1781 with the critique of pure reason.

[415] And what's so fascinating about that is that it's a critique that of reason, That is to say, critique of reasons, tendency always to overreach itself, beyond what could possibly be given in sense experience.

[416] And so he's got the metaphysicians and the rationalists, Leibniz and Descartes and so on in his sights there.

[417] Is that allied with Milton's warning about the dominance of Satan, just out of curiosity?

[418] Because I always saw Milton Satan is always trying to transcend God.

[419] Yes.

[420] And he's the light bringer, right, and the spirit of rationality.

[421] Some real sense.

[422] Yes.

[423] Yes.

[424] Well, there are some who would characterize Kant's impact like that, certainly.

[425] But in that period, 1781 to 1790, he's just, as it were, it's the critical philosophy.

[426] He starts to get more interested in 1793 with the notion of evil.

[427] And suddenly evil comes back in something that was inexplicable within the terms of the critical philosophy.

[428] He suddenly realizes that there's something that can't be reasoned.

[429] And it's interestingly not.

[430] it's not the good, which is tended to occupy Plato and Aristotle and minus, it's evil.

[431] And perhaps he was affected by reports of what was going on in Paris in the early 1790s.

[432] Who knows?

[433] But his impact is enormous.

[434] When we talk about the turn to the self in the Enlightenment period, there are many important figures.

[435] But I think Kant is the paradigm.

[436] He's the archetype.

[437] He's the point of no return.

[438] There are very few philosophers in the history of philosophy.

[439] where, which as it were, you can describe with the adjective pre and post.

[440] There's Socrates, everyone who comes before Socrates is a pre -Socratic, even though there were some very fine philosophers before Socrates.

[441] And similarly, we talk about pre -Cantian and post -Cantian philosophy.

[442] So his impact is enormous in terms of this turn to the self, the primacy of reason, confidence in cosmopolitanism, and a certain very coherent account of the role of subjectivity in aesthetics and a account of the moral life and ethics, just obligation, not the good, that is entirely sealed in to the sphere of practical reason, ethical reason, and he then wields God back in.

[443] Okay, so you know, you started this, or at least to some degree, with a discussion of what happened in Notre Dame Cathedral with the elevation of reason.

[444] And so, and I thought about Milton at that point.

[445] and so is this, is it reasonable to point to Kant and say, Kant is the philosopher who in the West and the Enlightenment figure who elevated reason to the position that God once occupied?

[446] I think that's a fair summary of how a lot of people would interpret Kant's impact.

[447] Some would take a positive view of that.

[448] It's the birth of secularism.

[449] We don't, and it's not so much a, an antipathy to religion and to God, there's also a sense of hope and optimism.

[450] Well, and warranted.

[451] I mean, look what happened when everybody became able to think.

[452] I mean, our technological mastery is part and parcel of that process.

[453] It's not all negative, but it's still a matter of getting everything in its proper place.

[454] I read Milton as a warning that when reason is elevated to the highest place, that hell follows quickly behind.

[455] And I think about that, for example, there's nothing more rational than Marxism.

[456] All the axioms are wrong, but all the logic that flows from the axioms is perfectly rational, perfectly logical.

[457] And I mean, that's why Solzhenitsyn was able to make the case that what happened under Stalin was true communism.

[458] It was the axioms playing themselves out.

[459] They were arrayed logically.

[460] And so rationality, I've been talking to some cognitive scientists recently, too, you know, and they're interested in artificial intelligence.

[461] and the development of independent thinking machines.

[462] And the people who are really working hard on that are very, very interested in the idea of embodiment because they're not convinced that intelligent systems, abstract systems even can exist in the absence of embodiment, that embodiment is tied to.

[463] And so there's an element of embodiment that's sort of something like the proximal concerns that you were talking about that seems necessary for proper cognitive operations to take place.

[464] One of the interesting things about Kant, and I think he's onto something here, is that one of the things that haunted him was the idea that what can be given in sense experience and our understanding of what was then a fully Newtonian physical universe didn't fit in, couldn't accommodate what really mattered, rationality, the soul, freedom and God.

[465] And this worried him.

[466] He was trying to develop a way of understanding.

[467] and making room for these notions.

[468] And I think with AI and cognitive science and so on, I mean, my worry is always, well, first of all, I want to ask the cognitive science, the scientists, have you cracked the mind -body problem?

[469] That is to say, do you think?

[470] They're trying hard.

[471] They're trying hard.

[472] And in a sophisticated way, you know, as far as I can see.

[473] Well, but the question of the mind -body problem is whether or not, not a complete science, the most sophisticated science that it was possible to generate, could fathom the mysteries of consciousness.

[474] That is to say, could purely physical causal processes generate reason, intelligence, and consciousness?

[475] Yeah, well, I think the answer to that is, yes, but when that happens, our notion of matter will be radically transformed, right?

[476] Because it sort of assumes that we understand matter and we don't understand consciousness.

[477] It's like, no, we don't understand either.

[478] And when we understand both, both will be radically different.

[479] Well, it's certainly the case that in Anglo -American philosophy, what was unthinkable is now a live option in the philosophy of mind, and that is this doctrine of pan -psychism.

[480] The idea that the concrete material universe somehow exhibits mind -like or conscious properties.

[481] And that's Okay.

[482] Okay.

[483] So I'm going to make a segue from now.

[484] So I had been playing with some ideas here recently that if you guys don't mind, I'd like to run by you a bit.

[485] And I've been thinking about what people might mean when they talk about God.

[486] And I want to tell you how I got to this point first.

[487] So there's this idea that's coming out of this postmodern and Marxist critique of the West, that the primary organizing principle of West, first of all, that social institutions in the West are structured according to West.

[488] axioms, that's the first one.

[489] And the second one is that they're structured according to the arbitrary expression of power.

[490] And we'll start with the second one.

[491] I think that is antithetical to the truth.

[492] And the reason I think that is because when I've met men of goodwill who are successful in functional organizations, they're creative and productive and honest and generous and kind and mentors.

[493] And they might deviate from that when their desire for power overtakes them.

[494] But that's a deviation from the genuine spirit.

[495] And so then I was thinking, I had this vision at one point, and it was an ancestral vision.

[496] It gave me some insight into ancestor worship.

[497] And I had this vision of all these men that had had an influence on me in my life.

[498] I could see them all.

[499] And it was like the positive elements of them were the same.

[500] And then that sort of extended back into history a bit.

[501] I was thinking about historical figures and this spirit shining through.

[502] And I thought, well, the spirit that shines through the ancestral figures, that's equivalent to the Old Testament God.

[503] That's the animating spirit of civilization.

[504] Now, I'm not making a metaphysical claim here.

[505] I'm not.

[506] I'm saying that, you know, we already talked about the fact that when we're in a deep conversation, there's something the same about us that's operating.

[507] And I would say, like a biologist like Ewell Wilson would agree with that, we wouldn't be able to communicate with one another if we were talking about something that was fundamentally human because we wouldn't understand our axiomatic presuppositions.

[508] So we have to be speaking from the particular to the universal in order for us to communicate.

[509] So the question is, what's the nature of the spirit that inhabits you when you're doing that?

[510] And then I think of it as this benevolent spirit that operates through history.

[511] It's responsible for the golden, thread of philosophical conversation down the ages.

[512] And that would include the spirit that wrote and arranged the Bible operating in different human beings.

[513] And that's a nod to the notion of its divine inspiration.

[514] And so I was thinking, these aren't attributes of God that the atheists consider because they reduce it to a set of relatively absurd axiomatic presuppositions.

[515] But there are experiential elements to this.

[516] And so I think we exist within a hierarchy of values and that that selects our attention because you pay attention to what you value and there's a unifying tendency in that hierarchy of values because it it has to be unified because otherwise you exist in contradiction with yourself and everyone else so there's a tendency towards unity so that's part of this paternal spirit i think there murcha eliad made much of the war of gods in mythologies it's a very very common theme and what happens is the god's war and one god comes out as superior He's the dominant God.

[517] And I thought, well, that's associated with the moving together of tribes.

[518] Each tribe has its own narrative, and it's represented by a set of deities.

[519] And when the tribes unite in conflict and cooperation, their religious stories fight in abstract space.

[520] And there's this proclivity across time for that to organize itself into something like a unity.

[521] That's the origin of monotheism.

[522] And that's the spirit of God as well.

[523] And then I thought, I won't go through all these attributes, but because I can.

[524] bring them up one at a time.

[525] But then another one is, I was thinking about this common trope in American sports movies.

[526] And I'm pointing to them for a particular reason.

[527] When you're engaged in a sport, you're trying to hit a target.

[528] And if you do it well, then everyone celebrates you.

[529] And that's the opposite of Hamartia.

[530] That's the opposite of missing the mark.

[531] And so there's this collective celebration of the tendency of excellence in cooperation and competition to hit the mark.

[532] And everybody celebrates, that's worship.

[533] Everyone worships that.

[534] They don't even notice it.

[535] That's the same spirit.

[536] And then there's this movie theme, and the Americans are very good at mythologizing this sort of thing.

[537] So you imagine that the victorious quarterback is carried out of the stadium on the shoulders of his teammates, supported by his school and the town in triumph, and the cheerleaders are waiting for him.

[538] And you think, well, why would men elect one of their.

[539] members to be the most attractive.

[540] And the answer to that is because that's how you see the path.

[541] It's something like that.

[542] And that's a manifestation of the same spirit.

[543] That's not power.

[544] And so this thing that we read, and then I'll close with this, one of the things that really hit me when I was doing my Genesis lectures was the realization that the word Israel meant those who struggle with God.

[545] And I think that's a way better definition of belief, true belief, than reliance on an axiomatic set of explicit presuppositions.

[546] It's like, this is something you contend with, right?

[547] It's like, what's the ideal?

[548] Is there an ideal?

[549] If there is an ideal, of what nature is it?

[550] Is it a personality?

[551] How does it manifest itself across time?

[552] We don't know the answers to this, but we can definitely wrestle with the, we wrestle with that.

[553] And that's, that's the right pathway, I think, is the wrestling rather than the dogmatic insistence that a particular story, well, that's a lot.

[554] John, can I wind you back to you earlier impassioned statement that you're not making a metaphysical claim here?

[555] Because it seems to me that the phenomenon pushes in a metaphysical direction in this sense that you're talking about all these people who have shaped you.

[556] for the good, and in a sense it's as if they've been animated by a kind of spirit, a benevolent spirit.

[557] Well, if you're going to, as it were, remain strictly secularist or naturalist, then in a sense, the spirit is simply a product of these people.

[558] But I suggest that the lived experience, if you like, or the phenomenon of the spirit as experienced by these people is not that they possess it, rather than it possesses them.

[559] Absolutely.

[560] It obliges them.

[561] So in a sense, the phenomenon pushes toward something that is metaphysical.

[562] Okay, so let me add another wrinkle to this that's related to something that James said.

[563] Well, we talked about consciousness per se, right?

[564] And this is where the metaphysical starts to become interesting, is that this spirit that calls and impels and judges as well, and is in part the voice of conscience and all of that, I can't distinguish it from the active action of consciousness per se.

[565] And we don't understand the metaphysical status of consciousness.

[566] Now, one of the things I've been thinking, for example, I wanted to talk to Richard Dawkins about this, and I'm afraid he'd slash me into ribbon, so I'm somewhat hesitant to do it.

[567] But, you know, Darwin talked about natural selection, a lot.

[568] But he also talked about sexual selection a lot.

[569] And until recently, last 30 years or so, biologists tend to concentrate a more on natural selection.

[570] But, you know, women are hypergamous in the extreme.

[571] They mate up and across hierarchies of competence or power.

[572] I think competence fundamentally.

[573] And that means that our whole evolutionary history was shaped by the selection of consciousness.

[574] And so, like, the, the mechanism that generates random variation and allows for the menu from which the selection is made, that might be random, but the selection process is bloody well, not random.

[575] And it looks to me like men's consciousness elevates men to positions of status and women's consciousness selects those men.

[576] And they're not selected on the basis of power.

[577] That's not true.

[578] That's not even true.

[579] chimpanzees, by the way, and they're more violent and much more primitive than we are.

[580] So like that deep ethic that we're talking about, that doesn't run itself out.

[581] It's certainly not only Western.

[582] It doesn't even look like it's only human.

[583] And Franz de Wall, who I'm going to be talking to at some point on this podcast, has made very much of that, you know, that there's this natural ethic that you see emerging in chimpanzee behavior in their hierarchical behavior within troops.

[584] So he said the tyrannical chimps get torn to shreds by their subordinates who band together.

[585] You can dominate the group with power, but it's very unstable.

[586] Well, if I could just chip in here, I mean, well, it's obviously the case that there are behavioral patterns that can be described as certainly altruistic and that we, as it were, can describe as ethical.

[587] and it's certainly the case, Jordan, that you can, as it were, theorize that what's going on in, say, sexual selection is the operation of consciousness.

[588] But don't forget that somebody like Dawkins is going to say that there simply is no such thing.

[589] There is no such thing as consciousness.

[590] If by consciousness you understand some element of reality, some ontological ingredient of reality that is somehow not fully reducible to underlying neurological states.

[591] I read Dennett's book on consciousness, which was aptly criticized as consciousness explained away.

[592] It's by no means the best book I read on consciousness because I don't think it wrestles with, because the ontological significance of consciousness is equivalent to the ontological significance of being.

[593] Because the mystery question is, how is there anything without awareness of it?

[594] And good luck, good luck solving that issue.

[595] And even if it is reducible to the material, my answer to that is, well, just make material transcendent in a way that we don't understand.

[596] So you can't say you have omniscient knowledge of the structure of matter and consciousness is reducible to that.

[597] It's like, no, you don't.

[598] You don't know anything about matter at the fundamental quantum level, let's say.

[599] It's so mysterious and peculiar.

[600] Absolutely.

[601] But what we can at least say, and this is a very Kantian thought, that it's a condition of the possibility of any successful empirical or scientific inquiry into the way the world is, that we are a subject, that we exercise our consciousness, we exercise our reason, and we exercise the laws of thought.

[602] So I agree with you.

[603] I mean, I think the problem with the new atheists is not so much their atheism, it's their a priori commitment to the doctrine of metaphysical naturalism, which is roughly the idea that all truths are scientific truths or reducible to scientific truths.

[604] And it's a non -starter that.

[605] It's a non -starter the far more interesting golden thread that you talked about earlier, sometimes known as the perennial philosophy.

[606] Yes, exactly that.

[607] It is the thought that being, capital B being, is the fundamental metaphysical question.

[608] And once you start approaching deep philosophical problems in that way, then you do start to see a remarkable convergence between Abrahamic monotheism, Vedanta and Upanishads, the question of whether Brahman and Atman are one, that is to say, being and mind and the self are one.

[609] We see it.

[610] Those sorts of questions are also not particular to religious systems.

[611] So think of somebody like Heidegger.

[612] You know, Heidegger is supposed to have spawned the kind of the great atheistic tendencies he's in 20th century existentialist and phenomenological philosophy.

[613] He says, the fundamental question is why is there something rather than nothing?

[614] Absolutely.

[615] Why being?

[616] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[617] So, okay, so there's the metaphysical, so part of what this hinges on is the metaphysical status of consciousness and you can make a case that that's equivalent to this question is, well, what, I mean, David Chalmers, who's maybe the most, the most well -known cognitive scientist studied consciousness.

[618] you know, he's, he, he, he, he has one set of the hard question, you know, the hard question about consciousness, but for me, the hard question is the question of being itself, because I can't distinguish between being and awareness.

[619] You can think, well, there's an objective world without subjectivity.

[620] It's like, well, try to think that through and see how far you get.

[621] It just, you just run into problem after problem with it.

[622] And, I mean, there's technical problems at the level of physics as well, but there's certainly metaphysical problems.

[623] And so, so then the question is, well, what is the cosmological significance of consciousness?

[624] And that's a central question, right?

[625] Maybe that's the central question.

[626] And when I look at the inside of a Christian cathedral, and I see the logos spread out against the sky, because that's what the dome is, affiliated with the sun, there's this proposition that consciousness is what engenders reality itself and that we partake in that.

[627] And let's say we abandon that notion.

[628] It's like, okay, well, then do you have any dignity as an individual.

[629] And then we get into the postmodern question is, well, are you there as an individual at all?

[630] Or you just, this is part of the identity issue, are you just one of your immutable physiological characteristics, right?

[631] Your sex, your gender, your race.

[632] That's matter, man. And there's no individual soul there.

[633] Well, why can't I just reduce you to that?

[634] What are you going to use as an argument?

[635] Well, just a very quick thought, if I may, I don't, I don't want to sort of keep butting in too much, but a very good line for Dawkins and others to remember, and you should remind him of it if he comes on your podcast, is that metaphysics always buries its undertakers.

[636] That is to say, every time there's an attempt to say, we can, all of that mumbo -jumbo that was being talked about by those clever philosophers or those stupid religionists, that's all, that's all gone now.

[637] That's a warning sign.

[638] It's a sign that there's actually total, total confusion and all sorts of kind of fragmentation and the quest for meaning and the quest for the answer to the question of the meaning of the meaning of being.

[639] Is that the abandonment of the perennial philosophy?

[640] It's an attempt certainly to reject it.

[641] And I mean, if you look in, say, Vedantic systems, you look in Indian philosophy, there were materialists.

[642] There was a school of materialism, but it was, but it was a relatively small and short -lived belief system.

[643] You see materialism in the Greek or Roman world.

[644] You see it in Democritus.

[645] Democritus is atomism.

[646] You see it in Epicurus, of course.

[647] But it is, it is, it is a minority report.

[648] There is, it's a quite a, it's a strange superstition in ancient thought.

[649] Well, I mean, just to take it apart a bit, James, because you mentioned earlier that among, I think it was cognitive scientists that you were discussing, that discussion of panpsychism has become non -heretical because there's notion that there's a mystery and matter.

[650] See, it isn't materialism exactly that's the fault.

[651] Perhaps it's deterministic clockwork materialism that's essentially Newtonian.

[652] And we know that's not right.

[653] I mean, it's proxomily right, but but beyond that, it's not.

[654] right.

[655] Matter is very deep mystery.

[656] And I can't see how you can get rid of the problem of consciousness by positing a materialist substrate when there's no way that you can get rid of the metaphysics of matter.

[657] Very quickly, I mean, you mentioned David Chalmers.

[658] As you say, this brilliant young philosopher who in 1994 published his PhD thesis, The Conscious Mind, which brought back onto the table that what he called the hard problem of consciousness.

[659] And he parsed that in different ways, that there's something absolutely irreducible about qualitative experience.

[660] But the problem that then opens up, that then I think leads him towards taking panpsychism very, very seriously, this is just really in the last 10 years, I think, is the idea, well, okay, we've got consciousness.

[661] It's a hard problem.

[662] We just can't get rid of it.

[663] And yet we can't get rid of matter either.

[664] We can't get rid of the truths of the physical sciences.

[665] But we can't work out how on earth these fit together.

[666] They couldn't be laws of nature.

[667] They could.

[668] wouldn't be psychoanalytic or psychological laws.

[669] The laws of thought are fundamentally different from the laws of nature.

[670] So how do we fit these two together?

[671] And panpsychism at that point, though it might seem crazy to the person on the street, suddenly start to seem quite an attractive account of the nature of ultimate reality.

[672] And I suppose just as a quick footnote to that, once you're there, materialism, Dawkinsian materialism is Dickensian and long gone.

[673] And the dialogue between the perennial philosophy and Anglophone philosophy of panpsychists is back on.

[674] So elaborate on that.

[675] That's what stopped me exactly, because now I'm trying to figure out, well, there's this, we should define panpsychism again for the audience.

[676] But then, okay, so what sort of dialogue does that open up as far as you're concerned?

[677] Well, my view is that panpsychists, it's early days, and at least in its modern contemporary iteration, I think you can say that Aristotle, if you read the De Anamba, Aristotle's treatise on the soul, there's soul all over the place, the plants have a nutritive soul, animals have a perceptual soul, and human animals have both of those and a rational, rational soul.

[678] So as it were, all of organic life is minded.

[679] If you move to the basic framework of Abraham, monotheism, then look, if it follows very naturally that if you've got an axiomatic commitment to mind at the bottom of the universe, as it were, the creator is a minded being, is ideal, is not material, and everything, all of reality distinct from God is created and including, as it were, space time, then the idea that it's, that the universe as we discuss, it, as we come upon it, is shot through with mind, is legible to mind, to the minded inquiry that happens when cognitive scientists are trying to unravel the mystery of the brain.

[680] It's suddenly you've got an isomorphism there between consciousness.

[681] Does that mean that there's this insistence in the Judeo -Christian tradition that God is outside of the material world and outside of time and space?

[682] And what that does in some sense is deaden material.

[683] Deadens matter.

[684] And then when God disappears, we're left with dead matter.

[685] So where's the dialogue between the advocates of the Judeo -Christian tradition and the panpsychists?

[686] Well, there's only one time that Aquinas ever loses his cool in about 10 million words that he wrote.

[687] But one is with this poor guy called David Adinon, who dared to suggest that God might, might be a material being, to which Aquinas said, Queerest Idiotus, which is simply stupid.

[688] So the idea that the creator could be somehow bound up with his creation was a simple logical impossibility within Abrahamic monotheism.

[689] Is there any difference between the mind -body problem and the God, the spirit, and the material world problem?

[690] Are they the same problem them on two different planes?

[691] Jordan, that's an extremely acute question, and it's one that has puzzled me for a long time, or at least attracted me. I think you're absolutely right to say that there are all sorts of interesting structural, metaphysical and theoretical parallels between understanding and fathoming the God -world relation and, as it were, the mind -world relationship, the human mind.

[692] Or the soul, or the soul -world relationship, right?

[693] Because, you know, it, I mean, it could be that we're the contact point between God outside of time and space and the material world.

[694] But then that does make the question, the panpsychism question, which is a very interesting one.

[695] So that's precisely the claim of Christology.

[696] I don't know what to say to this discussion, but just two points.

[697] Jordan, a moment ago, you talked about, you know, in the Deo -Christian vision, God is other and absent and matter as they're deadened.

[698] Of course, that's not quite true, is it?

[699] Because in the Judeo -Christian tradition, the spirit of God is present in the world.

[700] And also, you have the incarnation.

[701] So even if one doesn't want to say, one doesn't want to be stupid as Aquinas thought and say that God is material, we don't want to say that.

[702] Certainly, it's not true to say that God and the material world are divorced, they're not.

[703] I wouldn't say that.

[704] I wouldn't say that.

[705] I wouldn't say that.

[706] I'm thinking about it.

[707] I'm trying to think about it with regards to the idea of this, this animating spirit.

[708] Let's say that part of, see, one of the things I've thought is that at minimum what Christianity is is a thousands of years long discussion about what constitutes the human ideal.

[709] It's a purely psychological viewpoint.

[710] Now, I understand the metaphysical.

[711] implications, you know, that, and I don't want to dispense with them, but it's best to start with what's simple.

[712] So there's this discussion of what constitutes the ideal, and we're exploring it and discussing it, and we explore it and discuss it in all sorts of interesting ways, right?

[713] Because it's not merely rational.

[714] Bach writes this soul -inspiring music, and that makes us feel a particular way, and that's a hint as to the nature of the ideal.

[715] And then there's these great cathedrals that are built all across Europe and their awe -inspiring masterpieces of stone and light, right?

[716] So opposites conjoined and they bring the primeval forest into the city and they provide color and the music is set in there.

[717] And then there's the invocation of the ancestors and and the and the dogmatic formulations that that Christianity consists of that go back centuries as well.

[718] And and all of that.

[719] And that's all part of this exploration.

[720] And to me, it's the expiration of that central animating spirit.

[721] And when we're debating the postmodernists who say everything is power, this is the sort of thing that needs to be pointed out as a rejoinder.

[722] It's like, no, it's not.

[723] We're doing our best to manifest this ideal that we're discussing.

[724] We're flawed and fragmented and ignorant.

[725] And we don't know.

[726] So, for example, you asked me earlier, Nigel, what sort of things I had to discuss in order to make people attracted, say, to a discussion of Genesis.

[727] And what it is is that, I try to get the wheat from the text.

[728] And in the chaff, I think a lot of that's my ignorance.

[729] It's not necessarily chaff, but I'll leave it be because I don't have the intellectual wherewithal to make sense of it.

[730] So I just leave it be without despising it because I can't understand.

[731] It doesn't mean there isn't something to it.

[732] Now, you know, we're still stuck because we have problems like, well, the idea of the resurrection, you know, which is obviously a very big problem.

[733] in a very fundamental sense.

[734] And I leave that be, except to say that I have seen, you know, in my studies of mythology, that there are stories of dying and resurrecting God's throughout history.

[735] And the idea of Christ seems to be of that type, although it's not only that, but it's something I can't touch, and that's a problem.

[736] But that doesn't mean that there isn't this investigation that we're all undertaking, including us in this conversation, of what constitutes the ideal and how we could manifest.

[737] if we could only understand it.

[738] And I think that's unbelievably compelling to people.

[739] And it's not only compelling, they die without it.

[740] Because we can't live with only knowledge of our limitations.

[741] We have to be moving towards an ideal.

[742] Well, I mean, just a quick, quick thought there.

[743] I mean, certainly within the Christian tradition, the claim is that God's decision to become incarnate incarnate is not accidental.

[744] He chose this particular human being, not just because he had to choose some human being in order to become a human being, but he chose a human being and as it were exhibited the qualities that he wanted to, as it were, disseminate as a kind of moral exemplar that were profoundly countercultural to the values and the exemplars of the time.

[745] So you think of the kind of the weakness of Christ in some contexts, the sort of the, obviously the sense of self -sacrifice, the radical openness to those on the margins, the poor in particular, the ceremonially unclean and of course to women.

[746] And so it's as if this is completely subverting the kind of the sort of power narrative that dominated first century Palestine, particularly in the form of the the sort of the Roman legions and the Roman Imperium.

[747] And so I think that's a quick thought.

[748] Could I say something very quickly on the resurrection and dying and rising gods point?

[749] I mean, it's a, I'm not a specialist in the sort of the history of the kind of mythology.

[750] But I think that, you know, a lot of those myths are in the first instance, effectively myths and understood as myths by devotees of the various mystery cults of the period.

[751] So there are certain claims made about, is it, Osiris and Attis and others.

[752] And there's some evidence that they were kind of fertility gods.

[753] But if I think if you dig deep into the stories, they're very, very different from the kind of narrative, rather shocking narrative that you have in the Gospels that stress the physicality of the resurrection.

[754] Yeah, well, there isn't the union.

[755] Like, if you look at the story, the story of Osiris is one that's really fascinated me because so the Egyptians, this goes back to our discussion about rationality.

[756] So that Egyptians were trying to understand what the most fundamental principle of sovereignty.

[757] They were trying to understand the fundamental principle of sovereignty.

[758] So that would be something they were trying to understand in opposition to the presumption that it was merely power.

[759] So let's say you were the Pharaoh.

[760] Well, what justified your existence as the Pharaoh.

[761] And the answer was, you were the reincarnation of the union of Osiris and Horus.

[762] And so then the question is, what were those things?

[763] Well, Horus isn't, Horus is more like Christ, more like the individual.

[764] Osiris is the father.

[765] And Osiris is the state.

[766] In fact, the provinces of Egypt regarded as parts of Osiris's body.

[767] So it's the body of the state.

[768] Like the body of laws, that's another way of thinking about it.

[769] And Osiris was willfully blind, archaic, anachronistic and what he was particularly willfully blind to were the machinations of evil and that's why he died because his evil brother overthrew him and so that's that's a cautionary story about the consequence of the blindness of the state now he's reanimated by horace and horace isn't logic or rationality horace is the eye and the eye pays attention and so there's something different there's something very radically different between attention and rationality.

[770] Like attention is allowing things in in some sense, right?

[771] It's opening yourself up to the world.

[772] And Horace is the falcon who can see everywhere.

[773] Falcons have extremely acute vision.

[774] And he journeys to the underworld where, and Osiris is down there dead and reanimates him.

[775] So Horace is the hero who rescues the dying father from the underworld.

[776] And so that's part of the birth, the rebirth resurrection story.

[777] there.

[778] It says what is the resurrecting principle?

[779] And the resurrecting principle is live attention acting on dogmatic certainty.

[780] It's something like that.

[781] It's a theory of consciousness in some sense.

[782] It is.

[783] I mean, of course, there are lots of different versions of the story of the Cyrus.

[784] I think the most popular one has it that he's, you know, he's ripped into 14 pieces and his sister ISIS tries to sort of put him back together.

[785] But you're right.

[786] It does end with him in the underworld, in this sort of shade.

[787] shadowy, semi -conscious realm.

[788] He's divinized, and this generates all sorts of fascinating mystery cults thereafter.

[789] And what's interesting is that you can do that sort of mythological psychoanalytic analysis quite easily.

[790] The stories lend themselves to that kind of analysis.

[791] Whereas I think what you're getting with the early Christian attempts to grapple with this extraordinary and actually offensive, scandalous claim, as Paul talks, scandal to the Jews and craziness, moria, madness to the Greeks, is not that at all.

[792] This wasn't what was supposed to happen.

[793] He was supposed to come along and throw off the Roman yoke, not to sort of die in this horribly ignominious way.

[794] And then suddenly coming back, this was not what Second Temple Judaism was expecting.

[795] There's some evidence that there would be a resurrection at the end of time.

[796] But the idea that God would become, would be incarnate and, as it were, would, would emerge.

[797] And as I said earlier, leave his authenticating signature through this very dramatic and, as it were, plainly historical event was simply not part of their expectations at all.

[798] So I was just saying they're very, I think there are clear differences between the two.

[799] And I think a lot of the temptation to see parallels really comes from, it's Fraser, really.

[800] It's the James Fraser in the late 19th.

[801] century, and that gets picked up by some French scholars, I think.

[802] But I think the parallels, those stories are absolutely fascinating.

[803] The actual parallels with the New Testament don't really stand up to scrutiny.

[804] That's just my view.

[805] Jordan, can I take us back a little bit?

[806] You talked again about the importance for people, particularly young people, of this pursuit of the ideal.

[807] And way back, you mentioned Peuge and his theory of development and the stage of development you call the messianic stage.

[808] And I'm thinking about lots of contemporary young people who are party to the crusade for social justice over gender, anti -racist, anti -colonial.

[809] And on one hand, I want to applaud them.

[810] I want to say, yep, you've invested yourself in the cause of justice, and that's a investment.

[811] And then I observe, you know, now as in my own time when I was an undergraduate, the adolescent Messianic crusade is, of course, it's absolutist, it's intolerant, it's intolerant, it's convinced of its own rightness, it's intolerant of those who object and patient with them.

[812] Nowadays, it's social justice.

[813] In the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate, it was Marxism.

[814] But what's changed?

[815] What's changed, I think, is that it's not just adolescents who are invested in this social justice crusade.

[816] It seems as if they're the minions.

[817] It's what?

[818] They're the minions.

[819] Yeah.

[820] So who are they, who are they?

[821] Who's driving it?

[822] And also, I mean, as a Christian looking on this.

[823] It's us.

[824] It's us.

[825] You know, it's our failure to have conversations like this that's driving it.

[826] Really?

[827] Because, well, I think so.

[828] If we were offering a sufficiently attractive alternative, then it wouldn't be so powerful.

[829] I mean, because otherwise we have to point to someone, you know, and it just doesn't seem that useful to me. I mean, to give us some credit, let's say, us speaking broadly, this is a hard problem.

[830] It's, you know, it's not like the answer is so obvious, but I think it's best to take it on as a failure of the academy.

[831] That's right.

[832] Because the kind of conversation we're having now is not the kind of conversation and having a university classroom as a role.

[833] Yes, and it's certainly not the kind of conversation that I was allowed to have at Cambridge, let's say.

[834] Yes.

[835] Yeah.

[836] Yes.

[837] So as a consequence of what we've been talking about.

[838] So.

[839] Yeah.

[840] Yeah.

[841] Let me ask you a question, guys.

[842] This is part of this spirit idea.

[843] So I've been thinking about, you know, is power the central organizing tendency?

[844] And does that imply that power is the central ambition of human beings?

[845] And then I thought, well, let's think about the people that I know and admire.

[846] Okay, so then I think maybe about my graduate student mentor, Robert Peel.

[847] And so I didn't really even know anyone in graduate school when I went to graduate school.

[848] I didn't know what it was about at all, you know.

[849] And he took me under his wing, I would say.

[850] treated me as a, I wouldn't say as an equal, but as someone who had valid things to say, always had time for me. And he allowed his administrative acumen and his wide range of resources to unite with my ability to generate creative ideas.

[851] And we collaborated.

[852] And it was great.

[853] And I never felt like I was in an exploitative power relationship.

[854] I felt that he was a mentor and then that really got me to think because all the people that I admire I think one of the things that I found that's so characteristic about them is that they love the opportunity to find people who are talented and worthy let's say and provide them with opportunities in education and advantages and a pathway to further realization and then I thought I don't think there is a more fundamental pleasure than that and that's part of that animating spirit and that's not power.

[855] It's like it's the delight in, and I tried to specify it technically, it's the delight you take when the best in you can serve the best in someone else.

[856] And that's...

[857] My response to that, Jordan, is, you know, when postmodernists talk about power, they always talk about it cynically.

[858] It's oppressive power.

[859] It's unjust power.

[860] And I want to say, there's nothing wrong with power.

[861] And in a sense, you can describe the influence of this man on you was an exercise of a certain power, a certain authority.

[862] Authority, for sure, yes.

[863] So we need to get past the notion that power or even hierarchy are of themselves wicked things, when they can be, but they needn't be.

[864] And my objection to the postmodernist view is it's implausibly cynical.

[865] It doesn't apply everywhere.

[866] It's unbelievably cynical.

[867] It couldn't, I can't see how you could possibly generate a more cynical theory about what constitutes, it's the animating spirit of civilization, then it's the arbitrary expression of power.

[868] Yeah, yeah.

[869] We all want power.

[870] Nothing wrong with that.

[871] But the trick is to use it well.

[872] Everyone wants power.

[873] No one likes to be powerless.

[874] And why should we?

[875] But we need the right kinds of power for the right kinds of reasons.

[876] Well, and when you speak about power in that sense, you want to be free, at least to some degree, of the arbitrary expression of power on the part of other people.

[877] Yeah, you're sure.

[878] And so we need to differentiate what power means.

[879] It means authority.

[880] It means competence.

[881] It means a wider range of knowledge.

[882] It means wider access to resources.

[883] It means wisdom.

[884] Like those, it means competent and productive generosity.

[885] And those are much more powerful forces than the arbitrary expression of power.

[886] And that it's only people who are failures morally that default to the use of to structure their social relations.

[887] Like, I can't see, and I haven't seen this argument put forth in a particularly coherent way.

[888] It's like, what are you saying it's arbitrary power?

[889] Like, arbitrary power is actually a weak force in comparison to these other modes of social organization.

[890] And somehow we've been taken aback in the academy.

[891] We haven't been able to make, we're guilty.

[892] I think we're guilty, and that's part of it.

[893] And so the question is then, well, what are we guilty about?

[894] And why is that undermining our moral authority?

[895] Yeah, yeah.

[896] There's that old Latin tag, Abusus, known tolitt Usum, that abuse does not invalidate use.

[897] And that just seems very obvious that there are no power -free zones and be wary of the person who claims that they are setting up a power -free anarchy.

[898] They're often the most tyrannical and power -hungry kinds of people.

[899] And I certainly, I try with my first year undergraduates, we work through Plato's Republic.

[900] And one of the ways traditionally it's understood, of course it is, a dialogue about justice.

[901] But it's about also the proper dispersal and arrangement of power.

[902] And you get this power -hungry guy at the beginning of the dialogue, Thrasymachus, who is clearly only interested in brute strength.

[903] And that is the only account of justice he will give, as it were, the power of the fist.

[904] And so I try to say that, in fact, this is the kind of idea of power that is animating figures like Foucault.

[905] But I try to also underline that this does this does not eradicate the proper use of power.

[906] And I make the sort of slightly kind of give the slightly silly example of going to the dentist.

[907] When I'm at the dentist and I'm in the dentist chair, I do not accuse my dentist of oppressing my molars.

[908] There is an appropriate asymmetry in the relationship between me and the relationship between me and my dentist, just as there is a voluntary, right?

[909] I mean, that's a huge part of it.

[910] They might be involuntary too.

[911] So one of the ironies, I think, is when we're starting to talk about the university or we're starting to talk about more sort of hard left authoritarian ideas of the market and of the state, you are paradoxically getting antidotes to the abuse of power that are in fact extremely constrictive mechanisms.

[912] So, I mean, this is a critique that comes up again and again, but whether we're talking about the markets in the way that Hayek talks about or whether we're talking about the English common law or whether we're talking about the free pursuit of truth in a thriving, vibrant intellectual culture, this cannot be imposed from the top.

[913] There must be what Hayek talks about, mechanisms of spontaneous order.

[914] Pige makes the same case, and so do the biologists who study the emergence of morality from games.

[915] It's the same idea.

[916] I mean, Panksep, Yac Panksep showed that if you rats will strive to, juvenile rats strive to play, they'll work to rough and tumble play, which you'd think would be an expression of power.

[917] And if you pair a rat with another rat that's 10 % bigger, the 10 % bigger rat will pin the small.

[918] smaller rat.

[919] And so you watch that once and you think power.

[920] But then you repair them repeatedly.

[921] And the next time they meet, the little rat asks the big rat to play.

[922] And there's ways they do that.

[923] They kind of look like the way dogs invite to play.

[924] And then the big rat will deign to play.

[925] But if he doesn't let the little rat win one third of the time across repeated playbouts, the little rat won't play.

[926] And that's like that's rats.

[927] You know, and now they have complex social hierarchies.

[928] But that's like that's a major league finding, right?

[929] Because even rat hierarchies, and they're not known for their moral nature rats, you know, there's more this element of play.

[930] And play is actually a specific mammalian circuit.

[931] And, you know, in a conversation like this, there's plenty of play, too.

[932] And that's one of the things that makes it extremely.

[933] And so that animating spirit is also the spirit of play.

[934] Right.

[935] And play is the manner in which we experiment with manifestations of the ideal.

[936] That's what play is.

[937] Right.

[938] And the point is that it's, it's organic, it's, as it were, it's spirit -driven.

[939] It's not rationalized.

[940] It's not imposed, as it were, from the top down.

[941] There's a kind of organized chaos, as it were, chaos permitted within certain parameters.

[942] And I think that's what any good driving university ought to aim to be, as it were.

[943] Sorry, that's what a walled garden is.

[944] It's exactly that.

[945] It's the bordering of a zone where chaos can manifest itself.

[946] and creatively.

[947] Well, then another way of thinking, saying it would be that the walls of the university, the walls of any thriving intellectual culture should be the walls of a walled garden.

[948] So that, as it were, that the chaos, as it were, has parameters.

[949] But there should be complete freedom for the people who the university is entrusted with research and teaching to test and to pursue their ideas.

[950] Some of them may be disastrously wrong.

[951] Others will end up being brilliantly right, and they will, over time, be a kind of precisely through this freedom, precisely because it's implausible to suppose that any, to guess that three or four brilliant academics will have all the answers to all the questions, that there's a kind of a sort of spirit of intellectual inquiry that animates that seemingly quite chaotic process, but it's what yields extraordinary.

[952] I think that is, I mean, I've had a vision of the proper father within a family as he who sets the parameters within which play can occur.

[953] So when children develop, their play is unbelievably important.

[954] I mean, that's how they found that's how they structure themselves and their social relations.

[955] And so if they're deprived of play, Panks have demonstrated this too.

[956] Rats that are deprived of play, they are prefrontal courtesies don't mature properly.

[957] And you can use attention deficits.

[958] at disorder drugs like Ritalin to combat that behaviorally.

[959] And then if you let them play, they have a burst of play and their brains develop.

[960] And so the proper paternal spirit sets boundaries which wall out too much chaos and allow playful endeavor to manifest itself within that walled enclosure.

[961] And that's part of this animating spirit as well.

[962] That's not power.

[963] And it has this spontaneity and this capacity for generation of spontaneous order that you described.

[964] Yeah.

[965] Yeah.

[966] And look, I think that's also where belief systems can help.

[967] That is, but belief systems that are not too prescriptive.

[968] And so what we're looking for are certain norms, guardrails, coordinating, that help to animate these coordinating mechanisms that are not too prescriptive.

[969] So this, okay, I want to talk to both of you about this then.

[970] So, you know, if you look at how people, describe their religious belief now, they're not going to church, and they're not admirers of dogma, but they describe themselves in the majority as spiritual.

[971] So there's this spirit dogma paradox.

[972] Now, the problem, and you see this even in people like Sam Harris, because he's technically atheistic, but he's very interested in spiritual pursuits.

[973] He doesn't want to concretize that, and maybe that's because it would then become prone to rational, critique.

[974] And he doesn't want to lose it, right?

[975] But the thing is, is that you need dogma.

[976] Like Osiris and Horus, they're parcel of the same thing.

[977] And you can't move ahead without axiomatic presuppositions.

[978] The issue is they have to be, it seems to me, and maybe this has to do with the Christian idea that you're supposed to look for the evil within.

[979] You know, so you're destined to operate with a set of axiomatic presuppositions.

[980] You can't help it.

[981] You can't make a move forward without it, but you should be cognizant at the same time that in many ways that you don't understand that you're radically wrong.

[982] And the play then is something like an exploration of that.

[983] Yes, absolutely.

[984] I didn't, if Nigel wanted to have had any thoughts on that, but yes, I think that's absolutely right.

[985] I mean, I think it was Chesterton who once said that the only alternative to the doctrine of original sin is the doctrine of original perfection.

[986] It's a kind of, what do we have a tendency towards, tendency towards the good that has been corrupted towards the bad?

[987] So I think there is a sense that certainly within most established religions that there's a kind of, generally speaking, an account of human nature that has a story to tell about what the evil within us is and what that tendency is.

[988] And I think that injects, even in the kind of worst chapters in the history of institutional religion, a certain humility, a certain healthy pessimism in the in the possibilities of human being, a sort of a kind of an estimation that there's going to be fragility.

[989] There's going to be, there's going to be a lot of mistakes.

[990] And this is very, very different from the kind of dewy -eyed.

[991] optimistic account of human nature that we get from the Enlightenment, that all that needs to be done is to clear away superstition.

[992] And then we can look forward to, as it were, the sunlit uplands of a perfect utopia, where everyone is kind and nice to each other.

[993] Well, you know, the graveyards and the concentration camps of the 20th century have certainly undercut that hope.

[994] So yes, I mean, this idea of fragility and that sense that society somehow needs those sorts of guardrails, those sorts of those parameters that will anticipate mistakes and human frailty is crucial.

[995] Governments struggle to deliver that.

[996] Well, let me ask Nigel a question here that comes out of this discussion.

[997] Nigel, you talked earlier about the idea that a religious belief in some sense could be an inoculation against idolatry and ideology.

[998] And so I want to ask you a bit more about that, but with a twist on this idea about evil, because one of the things that I don't like about the claim of oppressive patriarchy is that it identifies evil externally in the social world, right?

[999] It's that malevolence exists.

[1000] So that's kind of an original sin variant, you know, the idea that there is, in fact, malevolence and evil.

[1001] Well, where is it?

[1002] Okay.

[1003] Well, it's in society.

[1004] And then it's in this patriarchal spirit.

[1005] It's like, well, that's really dangerous as far as I'm concerned because, well, if it's someone else and they're evil, then all the restraints are lifted.

[1006] And we've seen that many, many times in the 20th century.

[1007] There's a Christian idea, I believe, and I don't think it's limited to Christianity, but it's very well developed in Christianity is that the best place to search for evil is within.

[1008] And you're likely to find plenty of it as well.

[1009] And it'll keep you occupied if you want something to do.

[1010] So is that part of an inoculation?

[1011] Yeah, I think it is.

[1012] I mean, just going back to your earlier comments about postmodernism, it struck me when postmodernists say that everything around is about power and the abuse of power, ironically, it gives the postmodernist's license to abuse power in the treatment of other people.

[1013] So, for example, because I'm white privileged and God help me in Oxford, nothing I say about, let's say, colonialism is taken seriously because, of course, it's only a rationalization of my social or political interests.

[1014] And so my critics never take what I say seriously, don't listen to what I say.

[1015] constantly misrepresent what I say, constantly do me injustices.

[1016] But it's justified because they're in the right and I am clearly motivated by unjust power.

[1017] Ironically, of course, they are abusing power themselves, but they don't see it.

[1018] So it's often struck me that one feature of, for one of a more scientific term, the social justice crusade is that it is a kind of Christian heresy, a heresy being kind of unbalanced form of Christianity, because on the one hand, the soldier justice warrior has certainly got the bit about the moral ire of the Old Testament prophet.

[1019] They got that bit.

[1020] And hypothetical concern for the dispossessed.

[1021] And indeed, absolutely, absolutely.

[1022] So that's all right.

[1023] But what they lack is a Christian sense of compassion for weak feeble humanity, which we all are.

[1024] We're all crooked.

[1025] And this sense that the line between good and evil runs right down the middle of every one of us.

[1026] So therefore, no Christian can regard someone who's done wrong as simply subhuman or of another kind than themselves, because we're all sinners.

[1027] And it's that sense of universal common sin that generates the obligation of compassion even for the longer.

[1028] So does that mean?

[1029] Does that mean technically then that you judge someone's character by how they treat their enemies?

[1030] That's a fundamental Christian claim.

[1031] You know, because I do believe very frequently that people who say the central animating spirit of civilization is power is a confession and a desire both at the same time.

[1032] That's interesting.

[1033] Yeah, I really believe that.

[1034] And in any case, so the issue of the enemy, so there's a couple of thoughts that are jumbled together in my mind.

[1035] So I was thinking one of the things I tried to figure out for a very long time was why the snake in the Garden of Eden was associated with Satan.

[1036] It's a very, very weird thing.

[1037] And it's outside the domain of rationality.

[1038] It's an intuitive leap of unbelievable magnitude.

[1039] It's when I think I figured it out, it just about flattened.

[1040] me. So there's an idea that the snake is the enemy of mankind, and that's a biological reality.

[1041] The serpent, the devouring serpent is the enemy of mammals.

[1042] We could say that.

[1043] It's very old idea.

[1044] So then the question is, well, we have an enemy that we have to contend with, right?

[1045] That's an adaptive question.

[1046] What is the enemy?

[1047] Well, it's a snake.

[1048] Well, it's a snake in the garden.

[1049] And that means that no matter how well you build the walls and how carefully you aggregate the territory, there's still that possibility of malevolence.

[1050] And so then the question is, well, what's the malevolence?

[1051] Well, it's the snake.

[1052] Well, maybe it's the existence of snakes.

[1053] But then it gets psychologized.

[1054] It's like, well, it's the snake in your soul.

[1055] You know, it could be the snake in your enemy.

[1056] But then even more sophisticated, it's not.

[1057] No, the ultimate enemy is the snake in your soul.

[1058] And you see that right away in Genesis with the story of Cain and Abel, because Cain is possessed by the enemy, the adversary, right?

[1059] It's an analogy of the story.

[1060] It's an analog of the relationship between Christ and Satan, more concretized.

[1061] But it's so sophisticated, right?

[1062] Because one of the things that humanity has to figure out is what's our enemy?

[1063] What can destroy us?

[1064] It's like, well, the snake, that's natural world and predation.

[1065] It's, well, what about that in other people?

[1066] well, yes, what about that?

[1067] We can demonize the enemy in no time.

[1068] But if we're really sophisticated, we think, no, no, no. The most fundamental adversary is the one within.

[1069] And then that also offers the opportunity of something like a romantic adventure, because you can tell young people overthrow the oppressive patriarchal tyrant.

[1070] Or you could say, no, you should seriously contend with the evil within.

[1071] That's a far more difficult endeavor and a far more noble endeavor.

[1072] And it seems to me that that's something a religiously inspired humanities would make that a central issue.

[1073] And that's part of the building of character.

[1074] So your point about the snake is well taken.

[1075] On the one hand, it is a kind of objectification of even because they evil lies in the snake, right?

[1076] But your point is well taken, the snake is in the garden.

[1077] No one explained how it got there.

[1078] It's just there.

[1079] It's on the inside, not the outside.

[1080] So, So here's a question to you.

[1081] That all makes sense.

[1082] And what that means is that no human enemy can ever be entirely the enemy because the enemy is also us.

[1083] And so that's a restraint on the way which we treat those of impactor enemies.

[1084] That's why I've been trying to lecture to my students about Nazism, particularly the concentration camp situation, that the best way to understand that is as a perpetrator.

[1085] or not a victim.

[1086] Oh, yeah.

[1087] But, okay.

[1088] So do your students, your students get this?

[1089] Because they, it terrifies them.

[1090] It terrifies them.

[1091] The Soviet soldiers just as worries don't seem to get it.

[1092] They're never taught it.

[1093] They're never taught it.

[1094] They don't take this.

[1095] You know, like I took the idea that there was something to learn from Nazism and what happened in the communist states seriously.

[1096] It's like the idea, there's an idea that's promulgated, promoted in particular by Jewish people.

[1097] rightly so, that we should never forget what happened in Nazi Germany.

[1098] But then I think, well, what do you mean forget?

[1099] You mean remember.

[1100] Well, what do you mean remember?

[1101] You mean understand.

[1102] Well, what does it mean to understand?

[1103] That's easy.

[1104] You're the perpetrator.

[1105] So you have to think, well, would you have been a Nazi concentration camp guard?

[1106] It's possible that the answer is no. But it's also possible that the answer is yes, because they were people.

[1107] And there isn't that much evidence.

[1108] The evidence that they were all psychopathic, that's pretty slim.

[1109] There were certainly psychopaths among them.

[1110] And so that's a terrifying thing to contend with.

[1111] It's like you weren't the victim.

[1112] You weren't the hero who rescued the Jews.

[1113] Or maybe you're all of those, you know, and fair enough, we could investigate all those possibilities.

[1114] But perpetrator, that's right up there, man. And then you could see, well, the social justice warriors are insisting upon that.

[1115] in some sense too.

[1116] Because they say, well, look at the evil.

[1117] It's like, fair enough, you know, who can dispute that?

[1118] But it's the locale.

[1119] It's because they're not, the responsibility isn't within it, becomes too easily pathologized.

[1120] That's what it looks like to me. And it, and it takes away the adventure.

[1121] I mean, this is one of the things that I've been trying to talk to Christian professors.

[1122] I don't mean professors technically, but about the fact that this, this, The adventure that's part and parcel of this ethical process is not sold enough to young people because they would buy it if it was as romantically portrayed as the opportunity to participate in the self -righteous riot.

[1123] I think you're both onto something very important that as soon as we start to project a sin and culpability onto systems and structure.

[1124] and away from individual agency, things start to go very, very badly wrong.

[1125] I know that there's a, I think they believe there's a tradition in Ignatian Catholic spirituality.

[1126] It's called the Contemplateo Locky, where you are supposed to, this is a counter -reformation idea where you're supposed to read the Gospels very, very carefully, and you're supposed to imagine yourself there.

[1127] And one common theme is that you're supposed to imagine yourself at the, at the, at the of the cross, not, as it were, as a friend or as a follower of Christ, but as part of the mob.

[1128] Much more likely statistically.

[1129] Right.

[1130] And I seem to remember that in the filming of the passion of the Christ in 2004, Mel Gibson, the hands that you see hammering the nails of Christ of the actor playing Christ Jim Cavazil into the cross were Mel Gibson's.

[1131] And so his point was that you, you, that sin is not other people.

[1132] And sin, by the way, is not a sin.

[1133] The worst sin is assumption that it's other people.

[1134] Right.

[1135] And I think increasingly now the idea that it's, that it can be outsourced not just to systems and structures, but to pathologies or therapeutic conditions.

[1136] And so the idea is that that sin is, as I said just now, that it's not so much, we don't believe in sin anymore so much as syndromes, which is profoundly disempowering, that is to say, because you're, you're medicalizing, you're, you're pathologizing, your wrongdoing.

[1137] And as soon as you've done that, you are not able to address it or overcome it.

[1138] You're not able to, as it were, develop those habits of responsibility that you write about so well, and that I think as part of the reason that young people are so sort of drawn to your ideas.

[1139] It is something that overcomes us.

[1140] When I tell young people to clean up their room, it isn't because I think the room is trivial.

[1141] I think it's because their room is way more important than they think it is.

[1142] And they can discover that.

[1143] And it's part of this localization of ignorance and malevolence.

[1144] And I think it is part of central Christian thought that it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule the city.

[1145] And that the prime place for motivation about the sins of the world is to start with yourself and how I can't see how that if it isn't yourself then it's something else right then it's something else well then it's the natural world and and resentment will rise from that or or it's the place your forefathers built right and and so so now let's talk about this idea that this movement is a heretical brand of Christianity or an offshoot of Christianity a bit it's one of the questions you guys had forwarded to me so what are the similarities we talked about a couple of them what are the differences We talked about a couple of them, too, I guess.

[1146] Is there anything else there to flash out?

[1147] No, so on the one hand, the similarity is the passion for justice and concern for the marginalized and the poor.

[1148] That's all good.

[1149] But there is this notion that the problem lies elsewhere, a complete sense of self -righteousness and therefore a complete lack of forgiveness or compassion for those whom you think.

[1150] are wrong.

[1151] I mean, I just going forward to the point you made, I mean, you said, you said, Jordan, that when you impress this on your students, you know, that the source of evil may lie inside them and that it's possible that they might through weakness have been a camp guard, not a liberator, that they're scared by this notion.

[1152] And I can understand why.

[1153] delight in cruelty.

[1154] It's not mere weakness.

[1155] It's like, don't be thinking this might not appeal in a very remarkable way to the darkest parts of your nature.

[1156] And that's a terrible thing to investigate.

[1157] But fear can be paralyzing.

[1158] So how do you move them beyond that point?

[1159] I was thinking Well, part of it is I tell them, or make it implicit too, that you cannot understand your possibility for good until you understand your possibility for evil, because you don't take yourself seriously enough.

[1160] It's like, well, you're kind of an 18 -year -old near -do -well, or maybe you're a 40 -year -old near -do -well.

[1161] What does it matter?

[1162] You're just a collection of dust in some speck -like place in the outer cosmos anyways.

[1163] It's like, no, no, you look at what you're withholding and what you're inflicting.

[1164] And unless you're going to say that pain itself is irrelevant, how can you say that your sins are trivial?

[1165] And if they're not, well, then you're not trivial.

[1166] You're certainly not trivial as a perpetrator.

[1167] So then the question is how may how non -trivial could you be as a savior instead of a perpetrator?

[1168] And so that lights a spark.

[1169] It's like, well, and all these kids, they're looking.

[1170] Who could I be?

[1171] Well, I say, you could be a perpetrator, but you could be the opposite of that, whatever.

[1172] We could start with perpetrator and we can flash out the opposite.

[1173] Yeah.

[1174] And they're on board with that.

[1175] They're there.

[1176] And no wonder because like, of course, right?

[1177] It's certainly consistent, Jordan, with some very influential accounts of how the Holocaust could possibly have happened, leaving to one side this difficult neuralgic debate about the uniqueness of the shower and so on.

[1178] I think, is it Christopher Browning or Richard Browning, that excursary book?

[1179] Christopher.

[1180] Yeah.

[1181] Where he studies that police battalion involved one of the, I think, one of the Einzats group.

[1182] And just the staggering normality of the people involved in that conscripted, they were not, die -hard ideologues, die -hard believers, some of the letters.

[1183] They weren't brainwashed.

[1184] They even objected.

[1185] They weren't punished when they objected.

[1186] Yeah, quite extraordinary.

[1187] It is.

[1188] It is.

[1189] It's a deadly book.

[1190] It's a terrifying book.

[1191] It's an incredible power.

[1192] I always thought Hannah Arant had it backwards.

[1193] words.

[1194] It's not the evil of banality.

[1195] It's the banality of evil.

[1196] It's the evil of banality.

[1197] It's the evil of banality.

[1198] Yes.

[1199] And I think that's a lovely thing to tell undergraduates, too.

[1200] It's like your life is banal.

[1201] Well, that isn't who you are.

[1202] That isn't who you should be.

[1203] It's like, this is the only thing that can justify this suffering is a great adventure.

[1204] It's, well, what's the greatest adventure?

[1205] It's ethical endeavor.

[1206] And you have to be able to say that without cliche.

[1207] And you say, well, you struggle with the adversary within.

[1208] You want an adventure and see what happens if you tell the truth because you don't know what's going to happen if you tell the truth.

[1209] Because you're agenda free, right?

[1210] It's like you're not trying to manipulate the world to deliver in the Heidegarian sense of delivering standing resources.

[1211] You're not an exploiter.

[1212] You're an explorer.

[1213] And, you know, these kids, they come into the university with a veneer of cynicism.

[1214] And it's this deep because they're only 18.

[1215] They're 19.

[1216] There's no cynicism there at all.

[1217] And then that cynicism is fed, and they get more cynical and angry because, well, they came to the place of wisdom and were turned away with more cynicism.

[1218] No, I was going to tell you guys, I talked to Yonmi Park, and I posted this video the other day, and she's a defector from North Korea, and we went through her story.

[1219] She wrote this book called In Order to Live, which is a harrowing book, although I don't think it's as harrowing to read as it is harrowing to talk.

[1220] talk to her.

[1221] But in any case, her book ends in 2016.

[1222] So I asked her, what did she do after 2016?

[1223] And she went through high school and university in South Korea, high school and all the primary school in one year, locked herself in a room, basically, and went through it all in one year, and then went to a South Korean university.

[1224] And they're hard, South Korean universities.

[1225] And then after she wrote her book, which was inspired, by the way, by George Orwell's Animal Farm, was very interesting, She went to Columbia to take a humanities degree.

[1226] And I thought, well, what a remarkable story.

[1227] This girl escapes from starvation and famine and cruelty and totalitarianism in North Korea.

[1228] Slavery in China makes her way to New York and goes to Columbia University.

[1229] She said it was the dream of her father that she'd be educated.

[1230] And I said, how was it?

[1231] She said, it was a total waste of time and money.

[1232] And I said, it shocked me. It really shocked me because we just had to talk about the ennobling possibility of literature, let's say, with regard to Orwell, and I said, it was the only time in the whole conversation that I actually saw her cynical, which is really something to say, given what she'd been through.

[1233] I said, that can't be right.

[1234] That can't be right.

[1235] Like, surely there was one professor.

[1236] There was one course that led you down the road of the perennial philosophy, let's say, or that held up that golden thread.

[1237] And she thought, and she said, when I took a human biology course, I learned about evolution, but it got politically correct near the end.

[1238] And that was it.

[1239] She didn't, she couldn't say one thing about it.

[1240] And so, well, if that's what young people are receiving when they go to an august institution like that, it's no bloody wonder their cynicism is redoubled, especially when that's what's taught to them.

[1241] We're all power mad oppressors and despoilers of the planet and then avatars of our group power.

[1242] It's like, how could you come out of that anyway, but entirely dispirited and also angry?

[1243] Well, I've got to say, just speaking in defense of my own students, or at least the system, as I've experienced it, my students have been, you know, quite extraordinary and very, very promising, and they seem to have not really picked up any of these kind of ideological pathologies.

[1244] But I think we, at the same time do have to sit back and look at the problem more widely.

[1245] And Nigel and I have spoken about this an awful lot in the last few years through his experiences in Oxford and similar experiences here in Cambridge, that there does seem to be a crisis of the university in the West, a sense of, you might call it an identity crisis, a sense that we can't any longer answer the question, what are universities for?

[1246] There's one traditional way of thinking about that, and that is to say, roughly speaking, they're for the pursuit of truth and goodness and beauty, and it's going to be chaotic and messy.

[1247] But then there are competing visions as to what the university is for.

[1248] We can certainly talk about the perennial philosophy.

[1249] I mean, that just seems to me to be self -evident, is we're having a conversation down the generations about the nature of humanity and its ideal, and that's what the university is there to foster.

[1250] So the humanities are at the core.

[1251] And then it branches out into science and the professions.

[1252] But that's the heart.

[1253] And the heart is this discussion of the perennial philosophy.

[1254] And it does, I can't understand really why that case isn't made more explicitly.

[1255] And also, in some sense, somewhat self -evident.

[1256] I mean, I presume that I can't understand why we're so weak in the face of this criticism.

[1257] It's like, what the hell's wrong with us?

[1258] Is it because we're called to be explicit about things that we don't know how to be explicit about?

[1259] You know, we're taken aback by the critique in some sense?

[1260] I think part of the problem, Jordan, might be just a structural one, that the university is no longer a university, but much more a multiversity, and that we are, as it were, increasingly fragmented, sometimes for very good reasons, into increasingly specialized silos, often even within the same overarching discipline.

[1261] And one of the things I love working, one of the reasons I love working in a divinity faculty is that it does, as it were, have a single, roughly speaking, anyway, a single organizing horizon.

[1262] And so that I can have colleagues who are sociologists or anthropologists, they work in Eastern religions.

[1263] I'm a philosopher, but they're the theologians, historians, textual specialists, and so on.

[1264] Roughly speaking, we are part of a socialist.

[1265] single ecosystem.

[1266] But that is not the case elsewhere.

[1267] And so there's a kind of fragmentation that makes it very, very difficult to have the sorts of conversations that we've been having.

[1268] It's a tower of babble.

[1269] Right.

[1270] Everybody's speaking different languages.

[1271] Yeah.

[1272] Yeah.

[1273] And what happens after that, that's after that's the flood.

[1274] It's not been my experience among my humanity colleagues, humanities colleagues that what they think they're about are the kinds of deep existential questions that the perennial philosophy raises.

[1275] I think a lot of them have lost sight of what they're doing and why they're doing it.

[1276] And I think that's part of the problem.

[1277] I mean, certainly when I studied history here in 1970s, most of it was mine boring.

[1278] It was soul destroying.

[1279] It was really tedious because apart from the few courses where actually moral questions were raised or even religious ones, it wasn't really clear what the point of this stuff was.

[1280] I mean, if I can say so, Nigel, I think we have a special responsibility as theologians or those who work within theology, which used to be, of course, the queen of the sciences.

[1281] The idea being that it was a discipline, not so much a discipline, but a kind of ecosystem of different disciplines that did at least have some story to tell about how all the different avenues of human inquiry could fit together and what place they might have.

[1282] Now, even if that's completely wrong, as it were, what would be required to displace that integrated system would be a rival integrated system that was at least comparable in terms of expanatory power and capacity to accommodate all these different approaches.

[1283] Well, so in some sense, your claim, I think, is that, you know, if that unitary principle is locking, and we talked about the unitary principle as the spirit that engenders the perennial philosophy, if that unitary spirit is fragmented and locking, then something corrupt comes in to fill the void or something partial or something limping and crippled in some sense, right?

[1284] A pathologized religion.

[1285] And then that, of course, leads to the question, well, how do you know?

[1286] when a religion is pathologized and when it's not.

[1287] But we got there to some degree there today.

[1288] We say, well, part of the hallmark of a religion that's got its act together in some sense is that it locates evil within rather than without.

[1289] And that's an interesting proposition and seems at least worthy of consideration.

[1290] And that's important because it generates humility and therefore generates a certain restraint in the way you treat other people you disagree with.

[1291] if you don't have that, you can't have a liberal space.

[1292] You have people shouting at each other.

[1293] So I think that's really, really important.

[1294] And maybe part of it, too, is the Socratic insistence upon ignorance.

[1295] It's like, I'm fundamentally ignorant and prone to malevolence.

[1296] Fix me, right?

[1297] It's something like that.

[1298] Yeah, yeah.

[1299] And who would argue with that?

[1300] Well, Socrates might argue with it.

[1301] I mean, Socrates, he does think that knowledge is key, that ignorance is, the awareness of our epistemic finitude is crucial.

[1302] He thinks malevolence and wrongdoing is just a failure of knowledge.

[1303] So that, as it were, moral failure is a kind of cognitive failure or it's an epistemic failure.

[1304] And I mean, Aristotle can't, can't handle that at all.

[1305] He thinks that there's actually something deep within us that leads us to go wrong.

[1306] wrong.

[1307] But yes, I mean, that Socratic idea, the Socratic principle of dialectical diversity, that is to say, of kind of fruitful friction between two or more positions.

[1308] I mean, I think that that model, which is at the heart of the Oxford and Cambridge model, that is to say, broadly, we do have lectures and we do have seminars of graduate students, but that sort of the idea of a tutor in a room, a supervisor with one, two, possibly three students, and as it were, that kind of dialogical, collaborative inquiry into the truth is vital.

[1309] That's what we're doing right now, hopefully.

[1310] And like I said, it's very difficult to overstate the audience hunger for that.

[1311] Especially when it's working, I mean, people are drawn to it and very pleased that it's happening.

[1312] And there's public demand for, I mean, when I talk, you know this, when I talk to Harris in, in Dublin and London, we had like 8 ,000 and 10 ,000 people.

[1313] It was a good faith conversation, you know, and when we asked the audience if they wanted to switch to Q &A or continue the dialogue, they were overwhelmingly in support of continuing the dialogue.

[1314] And we've underestimated the, we've underestimated public intelligence partly because of technological shortcoming, I think, is that there is a hunger for this and it's being fed by ideologies.

[1315] If it isn't fed properly, it's fed by ideologies.

[1316] And I don't know what to make of the ignorance versus malevolence idea.

[1317] You know, I mean, it's a little of column A and a little of column B because I do see the delight.

[1318] Like, let me tell you a quick story.

[1319] So you tell me if you think this is ignorance or malevolence.

[1320] So when I debated Slavot -Zhechek, I did a 15 -minute critique of the communist manifesto.

[1321] And there were a lot of radical leftists in the audience and they'd come to hear Zijik, you know, take me apart.

[1322] although that isn't what happened in the discussion.

[1323] We just had a discussion.

[1324] And I mentioned at one point that the communist manifesto was an incitement to bloody violence and mayhem.

[1325] And like a fifth of the audience laughed and cheered.

[1326] And it was that Freudian revelation of unconscious motivation.

[1327] They're all individuals in the crowd so they're masked.

[1328] They can manifest their darkest motivations without fear of revelation.

[1329] and it just stopped me cold for about 10 seconds.

[1330] And I thought, yeah, yeah, no kidding.

[1331] It's like, we'll go dance in the streets when things are burning.

[1332] And is that towards some higher good?

[1333] Or is it just, it's about time those bastards got what they deserved?

[1334] And it isn't obvious to me that that's a manifestation of the striving for higher good.

[1335] I mean, it's complicated, right?

[1336] Because if you identify evil, in some sense, you have an obligation to deal with it.

[1337] But then if you don't identify, the evil that's within and you externalize it, your motives are suspect right away because it's just too convenient.

[1338] And you might say, well, that's ignorance.

[1339] And I do think that's part of it.

[1340] But the convenience factor is, it can't be overlooked.

[1341] Like, first of all, your moral obligation is only to persecute those who are evil.

[1342] So that lifts a huge weight off your shoulders.

[1343] And then you get to do anything terrible you want because you've identified the adversary himself.

[1344] And it's not you.

[1345] And I, if that's an, that, if that's ignorance, it's so deep that it transforms itself at that point into a kind of willfully blind malevolence.

[1346] That's how it looks to me. Certainly that's true.

[1347] I mean, I mean, I've been reading more and more of René Girard recently and the way he describes these sort of crowd pathologies and the way that a kind of, a mob can, as it were, lose its mind through mimetic desire, through simply imitating what they take the rest of the crowd to be doing.

[1348] I find it to be...

[1349] They're imitating a central animating spirit too, right?

[1350] I mean, they're imitating something that you might think of as technically satanic.

[1351] And that animates the entire crowd.

[1352] And it's very difficult to explain something like Nazi Germany without going down that pathway.

[1353] Yeah.

[1354] Yeah.

[1355] Yes.

[1356] I think that's certainly right.

[1357] And I think that the problem in the modern context is that technology and social media in particular, of course, has kind of catalyzed that that mania, that more malevolent spirit in the crowd.

[1358] And it's escalated that the possibilities of ostracism and a kind of digital star chamber.

[1359] and cancel culture and so on and so forth.

[1360] And it's something that we're going to, as it were, the genies out of the bottle and it's very, very difficult to work out how one can come up with a clear diagnosis and a clear prescription for how we get.

[1361] I'll tell you something that's pretty interesting is, you know, when I have a conversation like this and it goes well and then thousands of people comment, the comments are unbelievably positive, And so it's possible for that conversation to be depathologized in the presence of the appropriate conversation.

[1362] I mean, if you look at that conversation with Yonmi Park, that the comments are so unbelievably positive that it's difficult.

[1363] There is positive in a shocking way as Twitter mob comments can be shocking in a negative way.

[1364] And so then it's up to people who can engage in an intense dialogue at the edge of what we, know to do so and I think increasingly to do so publicly because that the technology affords us that possibility yeah yeah yes it's not it's not all bad and it can offer forms of belonging even though it's only virtual belonging that that can really satisfy an urge for for community and a sense that atomization, the atomization that we've seen over the last few decades can be overcome.

[1365] Yeah, but it affords the possibility, too, of these dialogical investigations that might have been isolated to Cambridge and Oxford to become part of the public dialogue.

[1366] Wouldn't that be something?

[1367] I'm pretty sure both sides would benefit from that sort of exchange.

[1368] And another ground of hope is my consistent experience has been that the noisy, shouty, illiberal people are a minority.

[1369] There's a much larger majority of people who are uncertain and intimidated, but in the right circumstances could be liberated and would welcome this kind of honest, rational give and take of reason, kind of exchange.

[1370] So I think that that's a ground for hope, too.

[1371] Whatever the disadvantage is that the disinhibiting effects of social media are.

[1372] Well, maybe we could get fortunate to continue this conversation at some point at Cambridge or Oxford.

[1373] With some other people, that would be really good if we could manage it as far as I'm concerned.

[1374] And once we can travel again, and once I can travel, I'd really like that.

[1375] I thank you very much for agreeing to participate in this and it's really good to see both of you again and hopefully we'll at the right time do this again and maybe with some other people too.

[1376] So if you guys can think of some other people that would be good contributors to this, you know, we could open it up a bit and that would be, if you think it's worthwhile, that would be good as far as I'm concerned.

[1377] Absolutely.

[1378] But let's work on see each other than the flesh over here sooner or later.

[1379] Yeah, I'd like that a lot.

[1380] I like that a lot.

[1381] Good.

[1382] Thank you for having us, Jordan.

[1383] Well done.

[1384] Thank you very much for the conversation.

[1385] I really appreciate it.

[1386] I have too.

[1387] Bye.