The Auron MacIntyre Show - February 15, 2024


Navigating America's Moral Wasteland ｜ 2⧸15⧸24

Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
The Lost Ritual and the University ｜ Guest： Johann Kurtz ｜ 2⧸14⧸24 Conservative Identity Crisis ｜ 2⧸16⧸24

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

142.51

Word count

1,128

Sentence count

78

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Great Seal of the United States bears the Latin phrase E pluribus unum. Out of many one. But we can t become one if our fundamental ability to discuss moral truths has broken down. A crisis of moral discourse has seized our nation, and until it s resolved, the endless culture war that rages in every corner of public and private life will continue to tear us apart.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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00:00:30.000 On the surface, Americans all value the same things.
00:00:33.940 Life, liberty, equality, the rule of law, the pursuit of happiness.
00:00:38.100 These terms form the basis of our shared moral language.
00:00:42.400 If a nation is to forge a shared identity, it must share a moral vision,
00:00:47.360 an understanding of what they will be as a people.
00:00:50.400 To arrive at that moral vision, a people must speak the same language,
00:00:54.960 not just in the literal sense of speaking English,
00:00:57.780 but they must all mean the same thing when they use specific terms.
00:01:03.340 Without a shared language with which to discuss basic truths,
00:01:07.180 no unity of identity or purpose is possible.
00:01:11.180 The Great Seal of the United States bears the Latin phrase
00:01:14.440 e pluribus unum, out of many one.
00:01:17.060 But we can't become one if our fundamental ability to discuss moral truths has broken down.
00:01:23.220 A crisis of moral discourse has seized our nation,
00:01:26.440 and until it's resolved, the endless culture war that rages in every corner of public and private life
00:01:31.960 will continue to tear us apart.
00:01:33.520 Imagine, if you will, an advanced civilization that experiences a disaster so severe
00:01:47.440 that its wealth of scientific knowledge is wiped out.
00:01:51.800 Laboratories, universities, and scientific texts all vanish,
00:01:55.560 leaving the people without the accumulated knowledge upon which they had previously relied.
00:02:00.200 A group of politicians who blame science for the tragedy that devastated their civilization
00:02:06.140 zealously crush what remains of the scientific community.
00:02:10.480 After a few decades, these politicians are removed from power and society begins to rebuild.
00:02:16.360 All the actual scientists are gone,
00:02:18.780 but those who are old enough to vaguely remember a world where science existed start a new movement.
00:02:24.480 They attempt to resurrect science, but their understanding is seriously lacking.
00:02:29.100 These men were only children when their civilization still possessed a mastery of science.
00:02:35.520 The leaders of the new movement have no formal training or real knowledge of what science entails.
00:02:41.420 They lack the necessary equipment and texts.
00:02:43.960 They don't truly understand the theories involved.
00:02:47.540 The concept of science that this post-apocalyptic society cobbles together
00:02:52.200 is built on fragments, the faded memories of people who never truly understood
00:02:56.920 what science was in the first place.
00:02:58.960 This movement becomes vital to the culture of our imaginary civilization.
00:03:05.200 Adults can be found arguing about scientific theories they don't really understand.
00:03:09.640 Children learn to recite pieces of the periodic table as if they were sacred,
00:03:13.780 but no one understands the context of this knowledge or how to apply it.
00:03:18.480 The citizens refer to this knowledge as science.
00:03:21.660 They treat their understanding of the subject as if it were very important,
00:03:25.980 despite it being tragically disconnected from what science actually does.
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00:04:00.720 This broken and impoverished notion of science is treated as common cultural knowledge.
00:04:07.500 Scientific terms like photon and chlorophyll enter common use,
00:04:11.760 but no one understands their original meaning.
00:04:14.240 No one understands that they're using the words incorrectly.
00:04:17.100 Eventually, rival factions develop with entirely different interpretations of scientific knowledge.
00:04:25.160 Society divides along these lines as each faction argues for competing interpretations
00:04:30.460 of this central cultural ideology.
00:04:34.140 The factions don't realize that their civilization will never be able to resolve these competing claims
00:04:40.000 because they lack the critical information involved in the original concept of science.
00:04:45.020 By now, you can probably figure out where this is going.
00:04:49.520 Alasdair MacIntyre is asserting that this is how our current civilization understands morality.
00:04:55.800 We have a hard time perceiving that our own understanding of morality is broken
00:05:00.360 because we are ourselves moral creatures.
00:05:03.780 We all need a concept of morality to function,
00:05:07.520 so even if our own understanding of morality is broken and limited,
00:05:10.940 we're required to treat it as if it's complete because we don't know how to function any other way.
00:05:17.680 Even the radical who thinks the current system is completely broken
00:05:20.640 must act as if our society has the fundamental language necessary to understand morality.
00:05:27.780 MacIntyre writes,
00:05:28.740 For the modern radical is as confident in the moral expression of his stances
00:05:33.720 and consequently in the assertive use of the rhetoric of morality as any conservative has ever been.
00:05:41.340 Whatever else he denounces in our culture,
00:05:43.680 he's certain that it still possesses the moral resources which he requires in order to denounce it.
00:05:49.560 Everything else may be, in his eyes, in disorder,
00:05:52.960 but the language of morality is in order, just as it is.
00:05:56.520 That he too may be betrayed by the very language he uses is not a thought available to him.
00:06:03.700 End quote.
00:06:05.260 It should be clear why a civilization that can no longer collectively define the words man and woman
00:06:10.520 would have a similarly difficult time defining shared concepts like justice or liberty.
00:06:17.080 When progressives destroyed the shared Christian culture of America,
00:06:20.900 they destroyed the foundational axioms of our language that allowed for moral discourse.
00:06:26.520 That foundation is so shattered that Christians in the modern United States 1.00
00:06:31.340 often have difficulty communicating these concepts to each other.
00:06:36.000 Where there's no shared moral language, there's no shared moral vision.
00:06:41.160 And where there's no vision, the people perish.
00:06:44.740 Thanks for watching, guys.
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00:07:21.940 Thanks for watching, guys.
00:07:22.860 And as always, I'll talk to you next time.
00:07:24.940 Thank you.