Paul Kingsnorth is a distinguished writer, environmentalist, poet, and environmentalist who writes about globalization and cultural identity. He is an Orthodox Christian, baptized into the Romanian Orthodox Church, but I actually live in the UK, so I know one Romanian Orthodox church on Fleet Street in London. In this episode, we talk about his journey from atheist to Christian, and his views on the culture war and gender identity.
00:01:38.000Not always taking the Eucharist or communion, because sometimes there are ecclesiastical, liturgical, there are reasons not to.
00:01:46.000Today's one of those days, because I'm speaking with Paul Kingsnorth, who is an Orthodox Christian, baptized into the Romanian Orthodox Church.
00:01:57.000Seems extraordinarily particular and specific, but I actually live in the UK, so I know one Romanian Orthodox Church on Fleet Street.
00:02:05.000I'll be interested to talk about that.
00:02:07.000In addition to letting you know why it is that I'm so fascinated to speak with Paul, I started reading Paul's journalism during the pandemic, and it was an almost uniquely insightful take into some of the metaphysical connotations of what was happening during the pandemic.
00:02:23.000As well as the way that many of the unfolding narratives were masking what appeared to be an ulterior desire to acquire and implement Then I learned more about Paul, and it's this quote that I like about Paul, who's a distinguished writer, environmentalist, poet, and environmentalist, and writes about globalization and cultural identity.
00:02:48.000It's this quote that perhaps will help you understand why I'm fascinated with Paul.
00:02:52.000After years of atheism, I went searching for the truth.
00:02:55.000I found Buddhism, then witchcraft, and eventually Christianity, a sort of a journey that I can somewhat...
00:03:12.000Like, this week I've been talking a lot about...
00:03:16.000I'm just off the back of talking about, for example, Trump signing an executive order to protect women's sports, right?
00:03:25.000And then, like, J.K. Rowling's sort of positive response to that.
00:03:32.000And I feel like, isn't the cultural war in some of its most lurid manifestations an indication that we are all looking for some kind of supreme moral authority upon which to rely?
00:04:53.000My position on it, not just as a Christian, although it is a Christian position, but as...
00:04:58.000I mean, this is how I felt before I was a Christian, is that not being a fan of Donald Trump particularly, but he's absolutely right on this, and the people who want to protect women in women's sports are absolutely right on this as well.
00:05:11.000You have to draw a line and say, here is what physical and biological reality are, and here is what the impact of denying them is.
00:05:22.000But it gets interesting, not just because you have the wider question of tolerance, like what do you do with people with gender dysphoria who've got real issues?
00:05:30.000What do you do with people who identify as a different gender?
00:05:32.000Because, you know, there's some real distress there.
00:05:34.000But there's the bigger issue of what is reality and what is the ground that we're standing on, which is what we're coming down to, right?
00:05:42.000And I don't just mean in terms of biological reality, because it's the reason that this has been such an enormous flame war is that it is actually...
00:06:21.000The more liberal position, the individualist position that leads to gender ideology would be you can identify yourself pretty much as whatever you want to identify yourself as because it's a social construct.
00:06:33.000So, for example, your gender identity will override your biological sex and that's the thing that you should take seriously because you get to self-define that.
00:06:52.000And if they're immutable, where do they come from?
00:06:54.000And that's why this is such a big thing, because gender is at the kind of spear tip of the whole kind of liberal individualist project to effectively give us the opportunity to redefine reality.
00:07:21.000If I want to recreate myself, if I want to define myself differently, if I want to merge with my machines, if I want to effectively move beyond embodied reality, then I can do that because I identify as that.
00:07:35.000And if technology can help me to be what I want to be, then that's where we go.
00:07:38.000So as much as anything, it's a question of limits.
00:07:49.000So it's right at the tip of something.
00:07:51.000But because nobody speaks of it in these terms, we all speak of it as if it was just an issue of women's rights, for example, which is important, but actually the big thing is much deeper than that.
00:08:13.000And who among us has the authority to make such a declaration?
00:08:18.000And would I be rightful in saying that from a Christian perspective...
00:08:25.000None of us has the authority to make an absolute claim about the nature of reality because we are created in God's image and we are therefore creatures and inhabitants of a reality created by a supreme being rather than ourselves, authors and instigators of reality.
00:08:45.000And isn't a requirement of new human authority precisely the annihilation?
00:08:50.000of that supreme authority and indeed isn't that why the entire argument's taking place even if that aspect of the conversation is as you say obfuscated behind more superficial yet significant arguments about the rights of women and various other arguments that themselves by the way wouldn't I can see
00:09:22.000now why, as you said, there's so much, why it's such a conflagratory issue, because there's a lot of energy in it, not all of which is being correctly explored or even explained.
00:09:42.000Yeah, we're all kind of, I suppose, to a degree fascinated by that subject because it does lead back to who has authority.
00:09:51.000What is reality is a pretty big question.
00:09:55.000Earlier I was saying that as you interface with politics and the culture as an individual, you start to understand and recognise What might be innate or adhered but could be inculcated principles within you.
00:10:17.000I feel like when it comes to, for example, the rather potent and significant matter of raising my children, I feel deeply protective and angry about any kind of interventionism.
00:10:33.000I can't envisage an authority other than God's authority that would be able to adjudicate or intervene when it comes to me and my kids.
00:10:43.000And a really obvious prosaic example of that is I feel like if I want to drive around in my car without having seatbelts on my kids, there is no external agent that has the right to intervene.
00:11:29.000And if the culture war is anything, isn't it the kind of unfolding, unfurling and disintegrating of that authority as a result of post-enlightenment values?
00:11:40.000Whether it's take this injection, stay in your house, pay this tax, 15-minute cities now, Labour are going to...
00:11:50.000Tax you in this way, even though they said you...
00:11:52.000Isn't the crisis we're experiencing the loss of any supreme authority other than state authority, which is by its nature questionable?
00:12:20.000And since the Enlightenment is a Christian project, a European project rather, that's really an attempt to abolish the church and to abolish Christianity and to undermine it as any kind of way of seeing.
00:12:55.000Now, there's a few problems with that.
00:12:57.000Firstly, in the pre-modern period, for better or for worse, the monarchies that existed, or the power centres that existed, claimed, whether it was true or not, they claimed that they derived their power from God, and they somehow represented God.
00:13:11.000Now, there's all sorts of problems with that, but at least it's a claim.
00:13:15.000So we completely strip out the divine layer at the top where authority, at least in theory, gets its power from and brings it down to the people.
00:13:36.000But even if we did, where would that power be emanating from?
00:13:40.000And then you can look at objective science, and if you want to talk about the pandemic, we can have a good chat about how objective the science was there, but it's much wider than that.
00:13:48.000How much of reality can science actually tell us about?
00:13:51.000It can tell us about a small sliver of it, the material layer, but it can't tell us about anything else.
00:14:31.000Seems to me we're coming to a point where having...
00:14:35.000Attempted to replace God with objective science and democracy, however flawed the previous systems were, and they were, we found that both of those things have jammed up.
00:14:47.000Either they don't work or they don't work at this level or they've been corrupted, whatever it was.
00:14:51.000And we look around and we say, OK, what's the source of meaning?
00:15:24.000That's what's usually happened in human history.
00:15:27.000I think it's quite a unique place that we're in culturally because before the modern period, everywhere on earth, whatever the different religion or culture was, every culture thought that they owed something to God or to the gods.
00:15:40.000They thought they owed something to the realm of the divine which was real and which was intertwined with their life.
00:16:31.000And as you say, who has legitimate power over you?
00:16:35.000I don't think there's ever been a human society that hasn't had power wielded in some form.
00:16:39.000But if you think the power is legitimate, you're more likely to accede to it, right?
00:16:44.000I'll follow these rules because they seem like fair rules and I trust the rulers and that seems to be part of my community and the power is coming from above, so maybe the rules are legitimate.
00:16:52.000Now, why should we do anything these people tell us?
00:16:54.000We don't see where their power or authority comes from.
00:16:57.000So I think that's a kind of cultural crisis that's spiralling out across the West.
00:17:01.000And when people ask that question, where does this power come from and who is legitimate?
00:17:05.000They're not finding a good answer anymore.
00:17:08.000Because of the sort of bait and switch and sort of gradual placeboing out of the divine, it's kind of as if now we've caught up to what's happened.
00:17:23.000Okay, we're replacing God's power with the power of a mandate derived from consensus and an objective purview derived from science.
00:17:32.000But as you rightly point out, Paul, that's precisely the offering that the serpent offers to the first man and woman.
00:17:48.000That there's only a slither of reality that can be analysed by science, the material and measurable aspect of reality.
00:17:57.000I sometimes get this slightly numinous, vertiginous sense that the claim of Scripture to be outside of time and space, I feel it somehow, that the garden is happening now.
00:18:15.000Like Melville wrote, Noah's flood is still upon the earth.
00:18:18.000I feel like we're making that choice now.
00:18:21.000Like the perfect scripture is beyond allegory and beyond history.
00:18:26.000That it's precisely within the realm of a kind of inverted commas, unknowable reality.
00:18:34.000Unknowable at least within the limits of our human power.
00:18:38.000Before you mentioned Genesis, I was thinking about Babel.
00:18:43.000You know, this attempt to reach the territory and heights of God led to this kind of collapse and everyone living within their own individual ideological ecosystem, incommunicative.
00:19:02.000And sometimes I feel, Paul, that the goal of technology, if such a broad thing were possible, were to lay claim materially to that which is only meant to be achieved ethereally, like that communication through technology is kind like that communication through technology is kind of like a telepathy, that we're trying to instantiate and manifest, transfer holy power into human hands.
00:19:40.000Since becoming Christian not so long ago, April the 28th, and a journey that's not identical to yours, but somewhat comparable, pretty interested in mysticism, new age, psychedelics, psychiatry, psychology.
00:19:52.000I'm not an academic person, but nevertheless, I've sort of looked into some areas that seem somewhat familiar from your story.
00:19:58.000The first bit of scripture that no one pointed me to, but jumped off the page and punched me squarely in where my third eye might once have been prior to the ascent of a new...
00:20:13.000What struck me is that it comes when the disciples are returned with gentle hubris from casting out demons and serpents when it was 72, not 12, being sent out.
00:20:32.000And I thought, why is our Lord saying that then?
00:20:35.000Why is he at that point saying, I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning.
00:20:39.000You will move amongst serpents and scorpions because your names are written in heaven.
00:20:44.000And my feeling and sense was, I am like Satan.
00:20:58.000And it's interesting when we're talking about the culture, we started talking about an ancillary expression of the attempt to lay claim to God's domain by the culture, i.e.
00:21:12.000Even something so diffuse, grand and global as that can be mapped onto my apparently subjective individual experience in so much as I want to be in charge of reality.
00:21:28.000I mean, perhaps even in my earlier example of I don't want anyone telling me what to do with my kids other than God.
00:21:34.000And I'm negotiating that power, negotiating that power, and for it not to be a kind of, and it's weird because someone like Jordan Peterson would never acknowledge this, that when Foucault sort of equates power with violence, a lot of them post-structuralist, post-modern arguments start a lot of them post-structuralist, post-modern arguments start to sort of make sense in this context too, that there is only, power is I've got the power to force you, That's the only power it is.
00:22:08.000Otherwise, I won't wield that power well, let alone that power amalgamated and conglomerated across hundreds of millions of people.
00:22:17.000They're making the claim that they're wielding power on behalf of hundreds of millions of people, and now with the project of globalism that seems temporarily disrupted on behalf of an entire planet.
00:22:30.000I wonder what you think about that verse and your own interpretation of it, how you map that, and then I suppose somewhat, Paul, the relationship between individual sovereignty and sovereignty beyond that.
00:23:07.000So certainly in the Orthodox Church, the teaching is one of the greatest mistakes you can ever make is to imagine that you're doing anything on your own.
00:23:14.000You're doing everything you do with God's permission or without God's permission.
00:23:19.000And that's your choice all the time, which is why you always have to refer back to him.
00:23:22.000So when you become a Christian, certainly for me, since I became a Christian, I've had this...
00:23:26.000It's a strange thing, because in one way I feel the same as you.
00:23:29.000I feel like only God's got authority over me.
00:23:32.000But on the other hand, I feel like I'm paying far more attention to myself than I ever did before, because before I was a Christian, I assumed that the world was in human hands.
00:23:43.000So I was an environmental activist, right?
00:23:45.000So I was spending a lot of time trying to save the world, because I thought that humans were in control of it.
00:25:13.000And here's how you take the Eucharist.
00:25:15.000And here is the teaching of the Church that tells you how to take these understandings from Scripture and actually practice them in your life.
00:25:24.000So you get a spiritual path, and the spiritual path has containers on it.
00:25:28.000So one of the things that I find most useful and terrifying is confession.
00:25:34.000I can go to my priest before the Eucharist, and I can tell him all the things I've done since the last confession that I shouldn't have done.
00:25:41.000Which is usually depressingly the same list of things.
00:26:08.000So even though the church to some people on the outside looks like this tyrannical authority, it's not that at all on the inside.
00:26:14.000It's a structure that helps me to actually walk the path.
00:26:19.000And that is an authority that I've chosen to recognize because I think it can help me to do that because I think that's what Christ created it for.
00:27:10.000You know, you become baptized, you go into the Christian life, you don't suddenly become a saint, sadly.
00:27:15.000But if you turn around and look at where you were a year ago, and then two years ago, and then five years ago, you think, actually, something's happening here.