00:07:15.820that we're not really used to in the age of museums
00:07:19.420and according to the codes of how to behave in a museum,
00:07:21.700you'd be quickly ushered out by the guards. You're supposed to imbibe art in ways that are,
00:07:28.220you know, one might say chilly, even cold. It's a private experience. It's non-ecstatic.
00:07:33.820It is not done with others. And there's a sort of limit to what we're allowed to expect
00:07:38.500from a work of art. It's both meant to be extremely important and nothing to cry about,
00:07:44.220or indeed dance about. And that strikes me. And I'm intrigued because all societies, I mean,
00:07:49.820take the ancient Greeks who had some fascinating rituals. So once a year, there was the festival
00:07:54.800of Dionysus. Dionysus, the god of wine, the god of night, the god of folly. And he's got his
00:08:02.020ritual moments. And the whole citizenry, especially women, exit the city during the0.85
00:08:08.520festival of Dionysus, dance in ecstatic ways to the beating of drums. And of course, our friend
00:08:14.860Nietzsche here is very interested in this. What's going on here? What are the ancient Greeks
00:08:19.020knowing? What do they know about us that we seem to have forgotten? And I'm not the first person
00:08:24.300to point out that there has been a huge increase, at least in recorded incidents, of what we call
00:08:31.020mental illness, mental unwellness. And one of the ways of thinking about that epidemic of mental
00:08:37.100unwellness is that the extreme emotions, the untenable emotions that manifest themselves now
00:08:44.120privately were, have been in different points in history, marshaled around common rituals,
00:08:52.860which one might say handled them pretty cleverly, quite intelligently. You know, for the ancient
00:08:59.620Greeks, the concept of going a little mad once a year, or perhaps more often, was taken very
00:09:06.120seriously and was not seen, was seen as different from actually being mad. Going mad is something
00:09:13.860that you do because, you know, there's divine madness in each of us. Being mad is a more
00:09:19.100permanent state, often to do with denying the fact that there is divine madness in us. And so,
00:09:25.400you know, the Greeks rather cleverly had these two characters, Apollo and Dionysus at the center
00:09:29.620of their culture. Apollo, interested in reason, in calm, in order, balance, symmetry. And Dionysus,
00:09:36.540very interested in other things. Again, I'm less interested in the specifics of these gods.
00:09:41.340We might find other gods. We might find other festivals. We might look at things differently.
00:09:45.640But there's a methodology there. There's a way of structuring experience, which modern society
00:09:51.220doesn't have. And I'm very interested in drawing attention to that.
00:09:55.160Well, that's very interesting. I think I want to just explore all of that terrain again a little more systematically, just because I'm interested to discover if there's anything we disagree about. I think you and I have been thought to have disagreed. I think your book, Religion for Atheists, came out. When was that?
00:10:16.7602012. So, yeah, about the same time as you were very prominent on what looked like another side.
00:10:22.320I was the foreheaded atheist along with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. And yeah, I think people thought you and I fundamentally disagreed about a few things there. And I'm hearing echoes of that suspicion in what you just said, but I'm not sure I disagree with any of what you said, but I just want to try to figure this out.
00:10:42.680So I think I can completely sign up to the set of claims that I thought I heard, which is that one, secular culture is uncomfortable with ecstasy, right?0.69
00:10:56.580We don't have a frame in which to think about it and integrate it and normalize it and even prioritize it.
00:11:04.900And ecstasy might even be the wrong noun.
00:11:08.140It's more that there's a positive end to the continuum of human well-being that has
00:11:13.800not been well explored, especially in Western culture and especially of late.
00:11:18.960And I very much like your use of the word ecstasy.
00:11:33.400And, you know, even if you think of the nightclub, the nightclub, there are nightclubs all over
00:11:37.760the world, they don't have very high cultural prestige. There's no psychological meaning
00:11:43.320appended to them. There's no transcendental function. They are in the world of fun,
00:11:48.960of recreation, which I think is a real pity. And I think one of the things that the modern world
00:11:54.420does is it misses out on drawing from things like the nightclub, the themes the previous ages
00:12:02.400would have mined in them. So just to add a few pieces to this puzzle for you to work with,
00:12:08.020I think what you're arguing for is that secular culture needs a conception of profundity and the
00:12:15.060sacred that traditionally only religion was able to give us. Totally, totally. That's absolutely
00:12:21.660right. And even, you know, take the concept of the planetarium. So all around the world,
00:12:26.740planetariums, you go and look at stars. How do we justify planetariums? It's overwhelmingly
00:12:31.920to do with scientific explanation rather than or, or A-W-E. In other words, you know, you go to
00:12:39.680planetarium and they're very keen to tell you about the precise dimensions of, you know, Kepler 32b
00:12:44.060and, you know, the rings of Saturn, et cetera, rather than what I think would be an equally
00:12:50.500apposite point, which is how small we are in the universe, you know, ego reduction, which has
00:12:56.720traditionally been one of the functions that religion has taken on very effectively. You know,
00:13:00.640in Zen Buddhism, there were moon viewing ceremonies on platforms. Poetry was read,
00:13:06.140rice cakes were eaten, or still are in some parts of Japan at some points. In other words,
00:13:10.720the moon is being used not as an astronomical phenomenon, but as a sort of psychosocial
00:13:17.560phenomenon, as a tool of culture. And that's very helpful. So if we look at, you know,
00:13:22.800the nightclub, the planetarium, et cetera, there are lots of things that secular culture has,
00:13:28.560but isn't properly connecting up with some of the themes that religions were pretty good
00:13:34.380at bringing to the fore. Well, now, as you, I'm sure, are aware, there's this resurgent interest
00:13:41.000in psychedelics, both on the research end and on the so-called recreational end. And granted,
00:13:48.360there are two very different moods with which one can approach this project. It can be the nightclub
00:13:54.360mood of just having fun or the more contemplative mood of actually trying to understand something
00:14:02.040deep and durable and profound about the nature of your mind and your capacity for
00:14:07.040overcoming the unnecessary suffering of which you referenced at the beginning here.
00:14:11.400Yes. I mean, I think psychedelics are very interesting. I've explored this theme. I mean,
00:14:16.700if we look at, you know, you mentioned these two functions. Absolutely. I mean, if you,
00:14:20.780you know, one of the functions of psychedelics, MDMA, et cetera,
00:14:24.360is socially to remind us of what we have in common with other people. You know, when people say,
00:14:30.620I took this substance and I loved everybody. This is, of course, one of the feats of kind
00:14:36.020of spiritual development in all religions, that it is through kind of meditative activities and
00:14:42.380also ecstatic activities that you discover that the barriers between humans are, let's put it
00:14:48.460gently, exaggerated in normal life. In normal life, we focus on the differences, but how
00:14:54.280interesting and how nice life would be if we focused on the similarities. And we may need a
00:14:59.080substance and a setting in which that can more easily be accessible to us. And then, you know,
00:15:04.240you mentioned self-exploration. Well, exactly. I mean, the Freudians, bless them, and I'm very
00:15:09.420indebted to the Freudian tradition, they understand that one of the main obstacles to thinking about
00:15:14.620yourself is fear, that there are resistance based on a fear of all sorts of deeply uncomfortable
00:15:20.800things about oneself, like, you know, one's sexuality may be more complicated, one may have
00:15:25.660aggressive urges, where one's supposed to be merely, inverted commas, nice, etc. And that
00:15:30.360a substance like MDMA might lower the defenses, enabling one to achieve insight. And again,
00:15:39.300you know, what a serious mission for something which for too long languished in the lane called
00:15:45.160fun. Have psychedelics been part of your process? I mean, have you taken the various drugs?
00:15:52.560I don't know if I'm going to be arrested for saying so. I don't know. But yes, I have. I have
00:15:57.880taken MDMA and psilocybin in sort of clinical or pseudo-clinical settings. In other words, for
00:16:04.220these ends of self-exploration more than so-called fun. And they've been tremendously helpful in
00:16:10.240essentially, you know, my problem with drugs and alcohol was always that these things were
00:16:17.540not being used seriously. It's not the substance itself that I didn't have any problem with. And
00:16:21.800again, religions have been wonderful at reminding us. I mean, you know, what is Dionysus responsible
00:16:27.620for? He's responsible for the God of wine. He's a God of wine. And how interesting to put wine
00:16:32.760right at the center of, you know, ritual and psychological development. And we too often
00:16:39.300fail to do that. Yeah, well, the Greeks, as you know, had the Ellicinian mysteries for a couple
00:16:44.840of millennia. And, you know, those who partook came away saying that this was the foundational
00:16:52.040few days of their lives. And to some degree, at least if we don't blow it and recapitulate some
00:16:59.520of the errors of the 1960s here, what the current moment promises is a more sober, more methodical,
00:17:07.500more scientifically informed, but yet nonetheless profound kind of reintegration of that kind of
00:17:14.000ritual, you know, the pharmacological ritual in culture.
00:17:18.240I mean, you know, I'm thinking about why people are boring. All human beings have very complex
00:17:22.820lives, but we all know some people who, when you come into their vicinity, you yourself feel that
00:17:28.900you have an awful lot to say to them and around them. And there's a lot of feeling. And other
00:17:33.380people, we feel, you know, they are saying, what have you been up to lately? And the mind goes
00:17:37.680completely blank, largely because I tend to think that this is a function of how much they've
00:17:42.580explored of themselves. A so-called interesting person is generally somebody who's been very
00:17:47.840interested in themselves, not in a narrowly egocentric way, but they've opened a lot of
00:17:52.160doors. And I think one unconsciously senses that when you come into contact with them and then you
00:17:57.180have a lot to say. I would immediately put you in that category, Sam, which is why people enjoy
00:18:02.280talking to you. And I think that one of the things that psychedelics allow people to do is more
00:18:08.120easily explore bits of their minds, which when they are outside of the substance, continues and
00:18:14.360gives them a kind of space, which they allow to other people to, you know, explore their own
00:18:20.520minds. And so one ends up, you know, having a more interesting time and a more, if you use a
00:18:26.160hackneyed word, compassionate time, where there's a lot more on the table to discuss and to feel.
00:18:31.320Well, let's talk about the attenuation of the ego, because it strikes me that there's a normative, optimal, entirely desirable version of this. And it's one that I've thought a lot about and spoken a lot about. But there's also pathological counterfeits, I would say. And they relate to the discomfort we referenced a moment ago around ecstasy and secular culture and its political implications.
00:18:58.500I mean, when you're talking about, you know, the Dionysian attitude and what that looks like at the level of a crowd, I mean, it looks one way in a rave or, you know, other nightclub setting.
00:19:12.600It looks another way in a political context, you know, that, you know, one could argue that at a large political rally, you know, Nuremberg looking or otherwise, there is a kind of self-overcoming of the individual.
00:19:26.980There's this kind of fusion to some larger end that amounts to people kind of losing themselves in shoulder-to-shoulder contact with their brothers and sisters.
00:19:39.300And the pathology of all of that is all too obvious when you just read any bit of history.
00:19:46.900How should we think about the success and failure of what lies beyond the ego?