In this episode, we re-unite with Gio and Oren to talk about postmodernism and what it means to be postmodern in the post-modern age. What does it mean to be a "postmodernist"? How does it relate to the modern era? And what does it have to do with the postmodernist movement?
00:04:35.280Yeah, I had a point, actually, about, like, how, like, the right wing, like, has been accused recently of, like, lifestyle stuff and how, like, that's a sign of, like, a fully integrated ideology that's sort of, like, you know, underneath, like, the lack of a political project.
00:05:11.800Post-modernism, like, it's one of those, like, catch-all terms, as we all know, that's sort of, I feel, like, even, like, back in the 1990s when a lot of, how shall I say it?
00:05:24.280A lot of, like, popular, like, critique was getting, like, pop-ified, right?
00:05:46.280So the best way to describe it, like, that most people consider, quote-unquote, post-modernism is the lack of metanarratives, the sort of, the eclipsing of, like, one world civilizational picture that constitutes the majority view of reality.
00:06:05.300Not, like, reality in terms of the real, but also the way that we construct a picture of what a civilization or truth or reality or so forth, so on and so forth, looks like.
00:06:17.240That's, like, that's, like, much more of the leotard post-modern condition take.
00:06:22.500Like, I tend to like Frederick Jameson's work if you read, you know, post-modernism, logically capitalism.
00:06:30.700And I think that there is a critique to be made in terms of, like, his emphasis on a lot of, like, his old school class dialectic Marxist type of stuff.
00:06:40.060You know, he's much closer to certain writers of Compaq than he is about, well, he's actually best friends with Slavu Zizek.
00:06:49.140But Frederick Jameson, he talks about how because of the rise of print media that leads into techno capital, that leads into newer telecommunications technologies and sort of, like, newer forms of media, you have what he calls, like, the collapse of the high and low distinction in culture, right?
00:07:07.140Like, that's another big facet of post-modernism.
00:07:10.900And that's the reason why I bring up, like, pop culture and how even the critique itself becomes, like, popified.
00:07:17.240That's very much, like, the hallmark of at least the classic, like, 80s and 90s, you know, definition of post-modernism.
00:07:26.120Where now it's, like, something that is very highbrow is mixed in with something.
00:07:30.640And, of course, something very lowbrow is taken up into, quote-unquote, high culture and the distinction is sort of erased.
00:07:37.820So, like, what would be a good example?
00:07:40.700The millennial video essayist that talks about Marvel films as if it's, like, as if it's, like, Baudelaire critiquing Poussin, right?
00:08:03.740Like, all these, in my opinion, all of these things are sort of very fluid and in together with each other.
00:08:10.640And to say, like, there was this point in time where we entered post-modernity as opposed to modernity or, like, high-modernity and low-modernity, like, you know, higher or later-modernity, right?
00:08:20.840Like, there's not really a clear-cut distinction.
00:08:23.580There is, you could say, with modernism where certain artistic and cultural and philosophic trends around the turn of the century basically culminated into what we know is modernism.
00:08:36.140But post-modernism is, like, one of those slippery things that, like, there was no, like, ground zero for post-modernism.
00:08:43.400I was going to ask, Gio, is there any way to, like, to put a historical moment on it?
00:08:50.160Like, I don't know if you would consider sort of, like, the fall of the Soviet Union as sort of the last kind of global meta-narrative to topple liberalism.
00:09:02.400And with the death of communism, you sort of have liberalism giving birth to post-modernity.
00:09:08.840Yeah, well, I would say that, like, it's funny you mention the Soviet Union because a few months ago, last year, before Christmas, me and my old man, because, you know, he's a boomer, right?
00:09:19.800Like, he's a younger boomer, and I was showing him the newer documentary by Adam Curtis, A Trauma Zone.
00:09:28.160And if you look at it, like, if you look at the subtext, the fall of the Soviet Union was very much, like, it very much was, like, a post-modern descent into, like, a dystopian, like, post-ideology society.
00:09:41.820It very much was, like, the weaponization of a meta-narrative collapsing.
00:09:46.360I think even, like, last stream, we alluded to it, right?
00:09:49.620But, so, yeah, the Soviet Union, I think, like, equally as, like, certain international relations people, they would say that, no, I'm not saying this for certain.
00:09:59.520I'm not saying, like, this is a hard, like, academic consensus.
00:10:02.480But I am saying that a lot of people do consider that the death of, like, that final meta-narrative that, like, pulled the rug from under a sort of, like, multipolar, not multipolar world, but sort of, like, a world in which ideological lines were pretty much set, right?
00:10:18.940Because the Soviet Union and the United States were incredibly ideological societies.
00:10:22.920Even the United States, I know Americans don't like to hear that, but it's true, obviously.
00:10:27.300So, you could say that the death of the Soviet Union ushered in at least an awareness of the fact that we no longer live in a world constituted by massive ideologies that inform all aspects of life.
00:10:42.340Now, we do live under an ideology that basically informs all of life.
00:10:48.060We live in global liberalism, obviously.
00:10:50.220But it's tricky because liberalism proclaims to be the terminus point of ideological and cultural battles.
00:10:58.600And so, that is, in a way, a weaponization of post-modernity, even though it adheres to a very strict set of, like, metanarrative assumptions that it basically is now inflicting upon the rest of the world, right?
00:11:12.640And so, post-modernity, again, is, like, one of those things that you can't, like, as soon as you try to grasp on it, it's, like, it just pours out of your hands.
00:11:22.480But that's basically the picture, yeah, more or less.
00:11:26.180Quick rabbit hole that has nothing to do with our topic, but now you've said something that made me interested.
00:11:31.140So, Schmidt identifies this as a function of liberalism way back in, you know, whenever he's writing concept of the political.
00:11:37.860So, were we already going through that process?
00:11:42.080Was the weaponization of liberalism already something that was working on Western consciousness even well before any of these conflicts and collapses of narrative that you're talking about?
00:11:55.520I mean, you could make an argument that it was inevitable in the sense of, like, the given cultural, technological especially, and other political developments that happened in the 20th century that culminated in that moment.
00:12:10.420But, I mean, I know Schmidt would say that it's an impossibility because, by definition, you need that distinction of the other to really truly create a political, basically a cult of power, if you will, right?
00:12:24.220But that's the funny thing about global liberalism is that it really purports that there is no such thing as an outside, right?
00:12:31.680So, it goes beyond Schmidt, or at least it tries to.
00:12:34.400But we know that in, you know, political theology that Schmidt writes about, like, we know that's impossible.
00:12:40.740So, that's always going to be the contradiction.
00:12:43.500It's sort of like, I would almost read in, like, to bring Schmidt into it's a very good observation because he definitely was a modern thinker, right?
00:12:52.860He definitely saw that there still was a sort of a political project there that could be built upon.
00:13:01.900But I think that maybe there's, later on in Schmidt, there was some inklings there that, yes, there will be a sort of order of things.
00:13:11.780And I say order of things, not just explicitly in ideology, because liberalism very much is an order of things in terms of its all-consuming nature of, you know, basically all of life, right?
00:13:21.500So, in Schmidt, it's very funny that he probably did see that eventually these ideological contradictions would come to, you know, come to heed, and that there would be a sort of sun setting of these other alternative systems.
00:13:34.960And that eventually you would have to basically centralize all of these, you know, ideological quabbles into, like, one giant superstructure.
00:13:45.760Whether that's an impossibility or not, I mean, we're seeing right now that there's always going to be resistances within that order.
00:13:52.280So, yeah, that's a very good question.
00:13:58.040But I don't know, you probably have thoughts on that word.
00:14:00.740Well, you know, I just, I wanted to hear yours, because, yeah, I think that he did see that while liberalism would try to do this, it would ultimately fail.
00:14:09.520Because I think that was kind of his whole point, is that while it purports to do this, it's really just obfuscating something that has to exist.
00:14:16.160And so it's just, it's redefining, and like you said, trying to bring everything under kind of its particularities, but it can't.
00:14:23.320And so all it can really do is hide the ball on what it's doing.
00:14:26.940But we could go down that rabbit hole forever.
00:14:28.960So we'll try to stay on topic here a little bit.
00:14:34.260You had proposed this talk because you wanted to address the idea of postmodern traditionalists.
00:14:39.880Now, obviously, this is, for many people, a contradiction in terms.
00:14:43.620How can you possibly look into something like traditionalism if you've already moved beyond kind of this definition of what a tradition would be?
00:14:52.600Or many ways people look at postmodernism as a rejection of history and tradition.
00:14:57.900So when we talk about postmodern traditionalism, what do you have in mind?
00:15:04.220Or what do you think people are proposing when they talk about postmodern traditionalism?
00:15:23.020No, the reason I showed him that one is because he remembers some of that stock footage from back in the day, like in the 70s and 80s, watching it on the news.
00:15:30.520He's like, oh, my God, I don't know they actually did that in the Soviet Union.
00:16:13.960But it kind of occurred to me to write to to to Oren and pitch this as a conversational topic after I caught him on Benjamin Boyce speaking with vocal distance.
00:16:28.400And I'm not overly familiar with with vocal distances work.
00:16:32.540And I can't even or you might be able to do a better job of sort of summarizing what the the crux of the conversation was.
00:16:39.840I wouldn't categorize it as a debate or an argument per se.
00:16:42.440But it seemed to me that vocal was defending and advocating this somewhat amorphous idea that that the West needs to return to the logos to logo centrism.
00:16:58.420But was very, I think, unable to provide specific details about what precisely that looks like or programmatically how that is is undertaken.
00:17:13.420And I think you are taking up the side of Christianity as sort of the the traditional belief system of the West, Protestantism specifically within within the context of the United States.
00:17:27.740And I witnessed this phenomena several other places.
00:17:32.060And I'll say that I think that it's something that that appears to me to be kind of creeping into dissident spaces, although it's something that I I originally kind of noticed within the IDW.
00:17:44.420And I think it concerns me a little bit that it's it's it's representing itself over in our circle, you know, and it goes under many guises and many names.
00:17:55.140I think Jordan Peterson talks about this and it's I mean, it typically goes under when people talk about it, there tends to be a lot of kind of hyphenated terms.
00:18:06.000But, you know, when when you hear someone like Jordan Peterson talking about how the West needs to return to a low fidelity, ambient consensus of the good or, you know, I was listening to an interview with with Mary Harrington a while ago.
00:18:24.060And that's somebody that's somebody that I really admire.
00:18:25.980But she was talking about how that we need to reassert natural law.
00:18:32.140And yeah, there have been a lot of examples where people maybe frame this in a lot of different ways.
00:18:37.920But fundamentally, I think that what they're talking about is returning to the function, but not the form of some sort of religious and spiritual tradition.
00:18:50.320And I say all of this, my criticism, I should I should mention, you know, I say all of this as a a thoroughly postmodern person.
00:18:57.900I am not I am not embedded within a tradition.
00:19:02.100I I suffer under my postmodern condition quite mightily.
00:19:07.400It's part of what drives me to do my videos.
00:19:09.720But I I think I more often than side with, you know, or I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I I think you would too would be a bit of a skeptic when it comes to these projects.
00:19:20.900I hesitate to call them projects because postmodern traditionalists don't really have a lot of practical wisdom when it comes to this stuff.
00:19:30.760But I find myself a lot more sympathetic to the people that are kind of trying to reassert established traditional communities, faiths, etc.
00:19:44.520Because I don't I don't have a lot of I don't think that the post postmodern traditionalism has ever really fully presented itself as a coherent idea.
00:19:55.500But I I see people grasping for it all over the place and in a lot of different conversations.
00:20:03.360And the name I tagged that with is postmodern traditionalism.
00:20:07.160And I think, you know, I know there are I think academic agent may have be even been one of the first people that kind of coins that phrase.
00:20:14.600He might I don't want to put words in his mouth.
00:20:17.300He may identify as a postmodern traditionalist.
00:20:22.520But that's yeah, that's what I've I've come to observe.
00:20:25.860I don't know if you guys have have been picking up on that as well in our sphere or if you feel like it's it's becoming kind of a more common phenomena these days.
00:20:35.180Yes. You want to go for a story or yeah, just I'll just put the context on the local distance conversation.
00:21:20.120But but but I think all traditionalists at this point are exactly that just due to our moment.
00:21:25.840But the specific phenomenon you're talking about last things is very real, because I think there is an attempt by many in the IDW sphere.
00:21:35.300And even some guys like local who might not count themselves in it, but but are some somewhere outside of it to to rescue liberalism through this kind of disembodied form of Christianity.
00:21:48.060Yeah, where where we can we can kind of take the Christian ethos and unmoor it from its tradition and use it as a binding agent to revivify liberalism.
00:22:00.140And I think that's just doomed to fail.
00:22:04.840Our first discussion particularly was really heavily focused on was that you have to have more moral particularity.
00:22:11.160This is what binds a culture is what creates culture.
00:22:13.620This is what binds a civilization, what creates people group and what makes a faith something that's lived in and allows people to draw meaning from it.
00:22:23.020Not some kind of disembodied notion of the metaphysic behind it.
00:22:29.840What I think a lot of these people want to do is they don't want they realize that like the religious function is essential.
00:22:38.260Now they've kind of they kind of you know, you still got some Sam Harris is out there, but but most of the IDW types have realized like, no, we're going to have some kind of religion.
00:22:46.740And Christianity actually turned out to be a pretty good one, but they really don't like Christianity like pre enlightenment, particularly.
00:22:55.060And so they really want to return to some form of like loose, you know, the fumes of Christianity.
00:23:02.200They want to go back to the part where society was like profitably sucking the blood out of Christianity and using kind of the the the cultural momentum from it to to kind of coast through this this loose thing that would bind everyone together and would still keep some guardrails up.
00:23:21.680But without actually imposing any real limitations, any kind of real particularities onto the culture.
00:23:28.140They want to do that for a couple of reasons, one, because it keeps liberalism alive and two, it keeps their coalition together, right?
00:23:35.760That they want the right to be a coalition of atheists and everyone else who wouldn't necessarily sign on to some kind of traditional Christianity, but doesn't like progressivism.
00:23:48.860And so their project is to kind of do this.
00:23:52.060This is why Peterson has a hard time really buying into faith, but he likes all the things that faith gave.
00:23:57.940So he's trying to find a way to take biblical truth and make it, you know, psychological or whatever the best terminology is for that.
00:24:31.120Like there were people in like, I don't know, like people in like countercurrents in 2014 talking about it.
00:24:37.720I remember back in the day, a lot of like even NRX people that I followed, people that I wrote with in places like Thermador Magazine were talking about it.
00:24:48.480Even before us, like, I mean, even I believe in Joe Sobran wrote something that talked about explicitly about postmodernism and not like a typical paleocon like condemnation way.
00:25:00.860Like, I mean, ironically enough, like you could say paleoconservatism is like another, you know, selective critique of certain like liberal metanarratives of society.
00:25:10.500But the whole like logocentrism thing, like, again, this is like one of these things where, again, I don't want to make any enemies for you, Oren, but a lot of these people like in the intellectual dark web, they take like the surface level of the word and they kind of know like the academies of it.
00:25:33.260But they're like, no, actually, it's a good term. So, Pronomi and Chomsky asks, is logocentrism the sensible center? No, it's not.
00:25:43.540Postmodern traditionalism is sensible centrism. I'll tell you why.
00:25:47.120In academia, specifically, it came from Clogus, right? Ludwig Clogus, but later was basically popularized by Jacques Derrida, the term logocentrism.
00:25:56.320Now, he calls it the metaphysics of presence, where words, in terms of a logocentric worldview, which is what he thinks that the West was basically built up on, you know, since the days of Plato, is that words have a distinct and inherent meaning, or rather they correlate and connect to a meaning that is in the presence of yourself, that is direct, that is accessible, that correlation laws equals causation, so on and so forth, right?
00:26:24.960But he's saying that words actually, in his sort of textual universe model, if you will, they don't necessarily correlate to a signifier, right?
00:26:37.580Sorry, a sign, right? Words can only be signifiers, meaning that they can only refer to themselves.
00:26:43.420Words can only refer to words, and therefore, because of the intertextual nature of language,
00:26:48.820There is no, like, hard and fast metaphysical correlate that connects the sign, or have the signifier to the sign, to the thing, to the materiality, right?
00:27:00.540Whereas, that's what logocentrism means.
00:27:03.240Now, I believe that local distance in most people, what they mean is, like, we need logocentrism, meaning we need, like, a logos in society that comes from Christianity, but the eternal logos in Christianity is different, right?
00:27:14.460So, they're jumbling these academic terms, but if you were to get, to be totally fair, though, Peterson and local distance and, like, James Lindsay, they do want to go back to a world where the word, the signified, means the signifier, right?
00:27:33.120Where the word correlates to the reality of something, the horizon of something, and the connotation that we have actually means something, right?
00:27:43.480So, to their credit, that's probably what they mean.
00:27:46.200They probably, like, I know James Lindsay, like, whole class says that, like, you know, Derrida was like a wizard of academia that was just spouting nonsense, more or less.
00:27:56.840It was sort of like free jazz, but in, like, you know, academic terminology.
00:28:02.100So, when it comes to postmodern traditionalism, though, it's interesting because you have a world where a lot of the correlate towards what a word means and what is the truth, we know is complicated.
00:28:52.880Now, do you know for a fact how many blue-yellow troops have been sunsetted and how many Russian troops have been, unfortunately, have passed, right?
00:29:04.500No, like, you can't put a hard figure on it, right?
00:29:07.620I mean, you maybe can guess, depending on what ideological persuasion you are, if you're pro-Ukrainian, you have one number.
00:29:16.400It's like, you know, the Ukrainians, they've only lost like 20,000 men and the Russians have lost, I don't know how many, a million, right?
00:29:21.160Or the other side, it's like, no, the Russians are like giga-chads and it's like they can, you know, they've lost no men.
00:29:32.820So, in other words, we have a world in which the access to information and recording technology and live streaming of events is more powerful than ever.
00:29:43.600Like, you can hook up to Starlink and a soldier can put a GoPro cam, I've seen this, go to Telegram and you'll see this, right?
00:29:50.980Not that I would encourage people to do so, it's terrible.
00:29:53.500But theoretically, you could do that, yeah.
00:29:58.300The point being is that we can't agree upon what we see in front of our lying eyes.
00:30:04.600And this is what the postmodernists are saying, that in terms of, like, no, like, listen, throw out all these pop culture terms that the media has been using since the age of Trump, which is post-truth or truthiness or, like, okay, there's something to that.
00:30:21.600But, like, ignore what the media has fabulized in terms of, like, the post-truth era.
00:30:26.560The point being is that there's always going to be an ambiguity in terms of what a word or what a narrative or what a phrase or what an ideology purports to be the real in front of us and what we actually know to be real.
00:30:52.760There's always going to be the ambiguity.
00:30:54.280And as we increase our ability in terms of the sort of techno-communication apparatus we live under, as our ability to record and track and view reality increases, it seems like our ambiguity in terms of what we know to be true has gone even deeper.
00:31:14.280If we, like, if we lived in the world that James Lindsay or Jordan Peterson wanted, then, I don't know, I guess, like, 1990s, like, 2000s, I don't know, like, we would still be debating creationism and they'd still be, like, BTF-ing the, you know, Venom Fang X or whoever.
00:31:32.620Like, we would still live in a world in which, like, civilization more or less agrees upon everything and, like, the world will go in a certain direction and people will more or less agree in, like, what is prudent or pragmatic.
00:31:48.720I mean, listen, I'm just ranting right now.
00:31:50.180But the point I'm trying to make is that post-modernity, you can't think of it as, like, this is an ideology that a group of people scheme together to inflict upon us.
00:32:00.900Post-modernity is not, like, it's not an ideological position per se.
00:32:07.260It's rather a critique and it's a way of viewing the world and it's a way of viewing a particular moment that we're living through rather than, like, I don't know, like, Jacques Derrida and, like, the Berkeley staff in the 60s got together and, like, you know, oh, we're going to, like, tell people that the reels aren't reels anymore.
00:32:28.680We're feels, you know, feelings over facts.
00:32:31.140We're going to tell people feelings over facts now.
00:32:33.340And it's, like, everyone's going to be, like, their brains are going to, like, turn to mush and we're, I don't know, or something, right?
00:32:39.500Like, it's not, this is the problem I feel with a lot of right-wing discourse that has, not right-wing discourse, I mean, like, normie-level conservative discourse that a lot of people on the outer edges of the right wing have critiqued and said, well, actually, the reason we kind of look foolish, you know, granted, our enemies are equally foolish for their own
00:32:58.680assumptions, right, obviously, but the reason we kind of look foolish is because we think that there is an intentionality to the, like, okay, is there an intentionality to a lot of things that we live through?
00:33:10.440Yes, obviously, like, no word of doubt, it's true.
00:33:13.340But in terms of, like, something as all-consuming as a postmodern condition, it's not necessarily something that you can, like, go together in a smoky room and, like, inflict upon, like, the world, more or less.
00:33:27.400It's something that have just, that has culminated through the development of a particular mode of thinking in a particular form of technology and the way in which we've gone as a civilization as a whole.
00:33:42.680It's not like, when all these, you know, intellectual dark web people, when they, it's almost as if the way they're talking about it, it's if something like, if we just give people the right information, then all of a sudden, like, I don't know, we'll go back to high modernism or something like that.
00:34:00.580Like, it's, I don't know, it's like the way they frame the discussion is kind of infuriating, in a sense, because it's not something that, like, has that hard and fast intentionality to it.
00:34:13.380But we're getting, like, yeah, go ahead, last thing, because I'm just, I'm great.
00:34:16.240Well, I think something that I, that I noticed that I think can kind of, kind of fairly define the position, regardless of, of who's, who's talking and what, what name it's, it's going under is this.
00:34:29.100It's sort of putting literary criticism before literature, or putting the, putting the critique of the narrative before the narrative itself.
00:34:39.480I think, in some ways, it's like, we don't need the Bible, we just need Jordan Peterson's videos about the Bible, you know, because there's.
00:34:48.760Well, that's a very postmodern, right?
00:34:50.380That's, that's taking away the textual nature of something for the intertextual nature of something.
00:34:56.320So it's like, you can have the video essay instead of the actual book, right?
00:35:01.860Yeah, no, and I mean, I, I can roll my eyes on that at the same time as I think it's, it's actually, in fact, very challenging to, to, to simply, you know, for, for us postmoderns to just kind of.
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00:35:48.000Read the Bible or take it, take in the Bible without, without taking in ourselves, taking in the Bible.
00:35:55.200You know, I mean, I'm, I'm somebody who's been, uh, kind of experimenting with, with Catholicism lately.
00:36:01.240I've been doing the rosary, uh, most every day, trying to break my way into, to some level of non-postmodern authenticity here.
00:36:10.340But I, um, I, I, I observe myself, observing myself when I, when I'm, when I'm, um, doing the rosary.
00:36:17.460It's, so it's, it's, it's more easily said, said than done, but it does seem like this, um, yeah.
00:36:24.040Once you, once the meta-narratives have kind of crumbled, it's hard to, you know, put the baby back in the bathwater.
00:36:31.640Um, so, so to speak, it's, it's hard to, um, regain a certain kind of innocence or sincerity in, in your approach to things like that.
00:36:42.840I think another, I, yeah, one of the main reasons.
00:36:45.540No, viewing yourself, viewing yourself, that's a perfect, like, that describes it.
00:36:49.380You're viewing yourself trying to get at that source of authenticity, whereas in previous generations, it just came, like, not that it just came to you,
00:36:58.300but there was a very specific set of, like, cultural and, like, civilizational assumptions that brought you to that moment,
00:37:05.740rather than you having to, like, re-engineer it.
00:37:08.720And then also having that sort of, like, that postmodern irony, like, I'm watching myself doing this.
00:37:19.620I was going to, I'm curious to get your, your take on this.
00:37:22.540Um, I, I've heard academic agent discuss this a number of times, so I don't, I'm not bringing anything up that I wouldn't feel fine talking about or talk about with him.
00:37:32.620But I know he's mentioned on a few streams that, um, he's been bringing his daughter to a lot of, um, I think Anglican services.
00:37:41.740Um, like, he's been going to Sunday, even though he, I mean, he's kind of expressed that he's, he's not really a believer.
00:37:49.020He's, I don't think he'd call himself an atheist, just because atheism comes with a lot of specific political baggage at this day and age, but maybe technically he, he, he is that.
00:37:59.560But I think he still sort of feels compelled to, um, give his daughter the experience of this ritual and have it be an element of her childhood.
00:38:11.400So that it kind of, she might have a certain nostalgia for it, or at least remembrance of it.
00:38:18.520Um, even if he's sort of in, in some sense, engaging in it cynically, or at least not, not participating in a sort of naive, uh, pre-modern faith tradition.
00:38:31.480And, um, yeah, I'm, I, I'm not judging him for it.
00:38:37.500I suspect that, cause I've, I've considered doing the exact same type of thing with my kids, quite honestly.
00:38:42.180If there's a way that I could be confident that I could kind of re-mystify or re-enchant the world for my kids or, or, or set up the next generation to have some, some form of subjectivity that is not this, um, you know, hyper.
00:38:59.760Or, uh, this, this, this postmodern, um, uh, subjectivity, I, I, I do it.
00:39:07.460But what I suspect would happen in that scenario is kids kind of catch onto these things more quickly than a lot of adults realize.
00:39:16.460And I think sooner or later, AA's daughter is going to kind of say like, you know, daddy, you, you, you behave kind of differently from a lot of the other people in the congregation.
00:39:25.200Or, you know, do you like, how do you really feel about, um, this claim to truth in, in, in, in, in, in the Bible?
00:39:33.780You know, I, I, so I'm curious, Gio, what I was going to ask you is just, do you, do you find that, how, what would you think about academic agents tactic in that, in that scenario?
00:39:50.520Or it's, it's, it's really something that I've, I've considered, even though I don't think I'm, I'm in a place quite yet where I can sort of, you know, I haven't been baptized.
00:39:58.500I couldn't accept communion, but I'm, I'm, I'm tempted to sort of, um, baptize my kids, even if it's not, even if it's something that I can't, um, can't fully commit to quite yet.
00:40:12.940Well, it's a good thing. I mean, I, I feel like any, any faith, like any foundation of it can be, you know, um, can be, can be approached, even if it's not like totally sincere.
00:40:24.360Um, I think like a lot of people that generally do like struggle with these, like, it's much different than someone like, I don't know, like, you know, again, I don't want to bash him too much, but like Peterson or like Elaine de Botton saying like, well, we have to get like the useful parts of religion.
00:40:43.260Uh, if you generally try to make a go of it, I think that's different, but it's sort of like one of those things, like speaking of post-modernism, it's sort of like one of those things that, um, that Mark Fisher talked about.
00:40:54.820And, uh, I believe he got this from Frederick Jameson as well.
00:40:58.200We talked about the like cultural exhaustion and like, uh, it was, it was part of his essay that became a lecture right before he passed.
00:41:05.820Unfortunately, uh, it was called like the slow cancellation of the future.
00:41:10.180I don't know if you've ever heard of that or, and I think you've heard of that, right?
00:41:18.200It's like now Lana Del Rey can like sell an album where it's kind of like fifties exotica music or like some like SoundCloud rapper can take a sample from like entheo jazz or whatever.
00:41:30.960And like, you know, it can make some, in other words, like you're always haunted by the past because there's this incredible eclecticism going around.
00:41:39.860And this is what Jameson said as well in the postmodern, in, in, uh, postmodernism, the book, you know, logically capitalism is that eventually the reason culture goes towards exhaustion is because at the same time, you have this glut of like everything of every epoch, meaning like the dead, no longer buried the dead.
00:41:58.040Now it's like ever presently, like that's what hauntology.
00:42:04.160And as, as that happens, like the future sort of like becomes an eternal present, right?
00:42:09.520Now the reactionary and Jameson, he actually did have in his book, this was, he wrote this back in the eighties.
00:42:15.680He said like, Oh, I'll let you finish the last bit really quickly.
00:42:19.680He said that, you know, actually a lot of these reactionary people, they could also like come and say like, well, actually now that there's no, uh, no consensus on truth, we might as well.
00:42:29.820So literally treat society as if it is like an aesthetic project.
00:42:35.920And we kind of know that there was that certain regime, certain painter of Austrians in the 20th century in Germany that tried to treat all of life as a work of art.
00:42:51.680So I think like the, the reason a lot of liberals are so threatened by post-modernity is because it's like the people on the left and like Jordan Peterson, they hate each other, but they're both like, you know what?
00:43:03.600Post-modernism that can lead to the Austrian landscape painter.
00:43:08.140And even in the left now, you're starting to see like a lot of like new sincerity.
00:43:14.140Like this is another thing too, is like the left, they're not, they're not even post-modern themselves.
00:43:19.160They, they have an incredible and nuanced level of belief in things to almost a metaphysical level.
00:43:26.420It's just that they tend to like weaponize relativism.
00:43:31.560It's like, they'll do a little bit of it here and there just to demoralize the chuds, but actually they still have like a very solid grasp of what belief is on a very high level and a very deep level.
00:43:47.280The political, the current political level.
00:43:50.860Oh, well, yeah, I was, I realized as I was speaking, Gio, you know, I set up this elaborate, you know, moral scenario with that, you know, baptizing my children or academic agents.
00:44:00.500And I, but yeah, I mean, you, I mean, you yourself, I think are maybe the best kind of subject for this, because I know that you are, you are a devout Catholic and yet you are simultaneously a, a, you know, a lion of post-modern theory or, you know, this is your, this is your line.
00:45:10.820What, what was, is there a question there last things?
00:45:13.940I mean, uh, I guess, um, yeah, the, yeah, I can try to frame it as, as a question, um, has that, um, how have you weathered the post-modern critique and maintained your, um, your, your religious identity?
00:45:36.040Cause I mean, I guess I should, well, so I guess, sorry, this should be the question I should begin by asking, do you consider yourself to be a post-modern traditionalist in any sense of that phrase?
00:45:46.100Well, traditionalist is a very funny term.
00:45:48.260It's a term that's come under a lot of heat recently, but I, more or less, I mean, post-modern right would be like a broad catch-all that I think is very apt.
00:45:58.740But the reason I square that circle is because I feel like post-modernity is not relativism.
00:46:04.460It, it, it's, it's a critique of a certain epoch.
00:46:07.660It's not like, it's not saying that there's no truth.
00:46:12.020It's just saying that how, as truth as it's experiential is perspectival.
00:46:18.440So recently, um, there was a great article and he's a fiction writer.
00:46:23.060It was one of his first, um, nonfiction, uh, works essays.
00:46:27.220Um, my good friend, please call me Christ.
00:46:31.220That's, uh, PFC Christ on, on Twitter.
00:46:34.460And he wrote this book, sorry, he wrote this essay called, uh, Cthulhu's Room's Right, where he talks about this specifically.
00:46:41.500He talks about how, as the right wing or the contemporary right or the E-right, as it realizes itself as more of an, how should he call it?
00:46:50.780An aesthetic avant-garde, if you will.
00:46:53.960Meaning that the sort of like coherent political project is something very complicated.
00:47:01.840Something that is like, even just to think of terms as a political movement.
00:47:05.940Even, like, back in 2017, there were, like, writers that said, like, well, the whole, like, mass political movement thing is kind of, like, a construct that isn't viable for, like, whatever reason at this particular moment.
00:47:21.780They've waged, I don't know, can I say, or can I say the word insurgency on YouTube?
00:47:26.140Yeah, yeah, they've waged a cultural insurgency.
00:47:30.580That's what the frogs have done, right?
00:47:32.680And so I highly encourage people to read that article.
00:47:35.740It's called Cthulhu Swims Right, where he talks about this.
00:47:39.520He talks about the development of the fact that if we do live in a postmodern condition,
00:47:44.720then the possibilities of tradition itself can come in through the back door.
00:47:50.580Because now the field is open to embrace truth that is not, like, beholden to particular claims of, um, how shall I say it?
00:48:03.180Like, not beholden to, like, particular claims of, like, warrant, not warranted true belief, but rather, like, hard and fast distinctions that are agreed upon.
00:48:10.840And so, like, the medics that we've seen since, like, even before 2016, right?
00:48:16.300Like, I know it's, like, a meme now, right?
00:48:19.300There was this video going around, you know that song, you know, It Won't Be the Same When We Meet Again?
00:48:26.480And it was, like, all the people from Gamergate in 2016.
00:48:29.660And our good friend Carl Benjamin was, like, front and center.
00:54:06.860It might be the only thing, you know, that, that can get you through.
00:54:10.520And I think that shakes you completely out of your, your postmodern condition.
00:54:14.820When this is the only thing that can kind of bind your, your reality together.
00:54:19.600And, you know, C.S. Lewis, you know, to, to butcher one of his quotes said something like the, you know, the, I don't actually love my fellow man, but God commands me to love my fellow man.
00:54:31.240And then I act like I love my fellow man.
00:54:33.820And sure enough, over enough time, I find that I actually love him.
00:54:38.460You know, it's, it's the doing, it's the embodiment of the action that eventually brings about the completion.
00:54:44.500You might be faking it the whole time, but by living it, eventually it becomes part of you, becomes part of your lived reality.
00:54:51.060And then it's true because it's become true through, through action and through lived experience.
00:54:57.120And so even if you feel like a fank, even if you feel like a phony at first, I think it's really essential to put yourself in a position where you can believe.
00:55:07.360Even if you don't right now, because one day it will be really essential and you'll, it'll be there for you when you need it.
00:55:14.440That's yeah. Thank you, Warren. That's all, that's all really well said.
00:55:19.200And I, and I will say even the act of kind of faking it till you make it is still sort of, you know, I think a, a, a more of a true engagement than this kind of constantly observing of oneself.
00:55:35.580You know, it's at least you're, you're, you're, you know, you're playing a sport, you're kicking the ball.
00:55:42.000You're moving forward as opposed to just kind of observe, observing yourself, even if you don't really feel quite yet, like you know how to play the, play the sport.
00:55:52.000Um, so I think that's, um, that's all very, very, uh, well said and I appreciate it.
00:55:59.200Um, you know, one other thing I wanted to, to talk about, I, I just, some of the reasons why I'm such a skeptic or, um, uh, I, I kind of roll my, my eyes around a lot of these more postmodern traditionalist projects or, or talking points.
00:56:17.260And, you know, or, and I think you said all of this a lot more politely than I did in your, in your conversation with, with, with local distance.
00:56:24.560But I mean, if I could kind of boil it down and be much more grug, grug brained about it, I think that the questions that one needs to ask for any kind of, I don't know, no traditionalist spiritual project is, you know, one, can it be taught to a dumb person?
00:56:42.920You know, can it cut, can it talk, can, can this be grokked by somebody who's like just, uh, you know, 100 IQ normie to, can it be, can it be, um, adopted by just kind of an unreflective person, you know, somebody who's not particularly interested in, who's not going to pick up CS Lewis.
00:57:05.220Who's not going to read, who's not going to watch the Jordan Peterson videos.
00:57:09.180Um, just somebody that's either because if that's their nature or they're too busy in their daily life.
00:57:14.540And the third is just, can it be taught to a child?
00:57:18.440You know, and I think that's what makes me honestly lose my patience with a lot of these postmodern traditionalist projects.
00:57:25.380Um, as quickly as I do, because, you know, I mean, my, my, my, my son is now, is now five and I can tell you about, he is, he is not a literary critic.
00:57:37.820He's very charming and smart, but what he, but what he does love is narratives, you know, and it's, it's very interesting because I can see him, you know, he's, he's obsessed.
00:57:48.100Uh, and it made something that makes me feel kind of guilty for not getting him involved and invested in a, a faith tradition at this point, because, you know, Lego Ninjago has become his religion and he can talk about all the different ninjas, uh, the way that somebody could talk about the apostles.
00:58:06.940But, um, you know, that, that, the, and I'm being, I'm being kind of glib here, but at, at the same time, I'm, I'm, I'm really not.
00:58:16.440I think that, um, the, one of the great failures of postmodern tradition, postmodern traditionalism is that it, um, it's only available to a certain kind of, it's only available to a certain IQ.
00:58:31.880It's only available to a certain disposition and it's only available to a certain, after a certain age and a certain kind of, um, well, go right ahead, Gio.
00:58:45.560Um, well, just a certain, a certain level of, um, you know, of the kind of subjectivity that we've been talking about here tonight, a certain amount of like self-consciousness.
00:58:59.180Like, you have to be aware of the fact that you're living in something to like embrace an antecedent of it, but not really because, okay.
00:59:06.940So I, so I, I realized I didn't answer, I didn't answer the question, but Oren, uh, you brought it like really to the foreground where you said it became a matter of survival.
00:59:16.260And so I, I think of like faith similarly in that it's not that the truth of a faith disappears, right?
00:59:25.840It's just that what postmodern and postmodernity refers to as a particular set of, um, a particular condition in which the sort of modernist reliance on a very particular form of reason that has guided the West since like the post enlightenment is being called into question.
00:59:49.120So I find it kind of funny how people say that postmodernism puts faith into doubt when really there were a lot of like artistic and literary movements and even philosophic movements that would be considered postmodernism that in a way allows for a form of anti-modernity by embracing this critique of reason.
01:00:12.200Um, so that reason also brought faith in the West into doubt.
01:00:18.700So when Jordan Peterson said, or like, you know, whoever, right.
01:00:24.800I didn't want to mention Sam Harris, but you know, like when, when they talk about how postmodernism or like whatever postmodern Marxism, blah, blah, blah.
01:00:37.200That same reason also was if you follow like the critique of people also undermined faith in like a collectively held belief, right?
01:00:48.680Like the sort of instrumental reason that came from the enlightenment that informed like even the minigery, like the liberal minigery, like the liberal minigery,ism that we're living under right now is very much like a product of that same reason.
01:01:00.320So the way I would say, like the way I would frame it is like postmodern traditionalism is the full recognition of that critique of reason, right?
01:01:11.120And from there, you can say that even though faith, particularly Christianity, no longer has a significant, like the same significance in terms of it being that which instantiates the picture of reality to the Western world, that truth is still there.
01:01:28.080It's like, it's rather the truth of the world that postmodernity is dealing with.
01:01:33.120So I think like, that's the way at least I think of it.
01:01:37.580If anything, it gives me more room for faith.
01:01:40.820Like that's even what Kant said, right?
01:01:42.180In the absence of reason, there's room for faith, right?
01:01:44.080I mean, you mentioned something differently, but like, yeah, go ahead, Orin.
01:01:50.660I think that's exactly what it is because it's funny, so many religious people, because these rationalists are currently opposing wokeness, have been convinced that postmodernism is an attack on religion or is something that religious people need to be worried about.
01:02:10.360Funny enough, it's actually just something that rationalists need to be worried about.
01:02:13.920And the reason they're freaking out is that it might create space for many things, including the return of mysticism or religion like you're talking about.
01:02:22.660And so instead of being something that the religious person needs to fear, they might need to understand that the people who are most scared of postmodern thinking are those that are worried about their God of reason being displaced more than they are about, you know, the tearing apart the American tradition or the Christian tradition or something like that.
01:02:53.460Yeah, no, because, no, what you said is like really spot on that the rationalists have something to worry about, because like, if anything, even like the entertaining, the entertainment of like an anti-modernist thinking within postmodernism, I mean, even in the work of art, like, this is how you get, like, even in modernism proper, you have people like Gauguin, right?
01:03:16.000Very, like, going back to something that, at least in his mind, was very ancient within the human experience and through the work of art.
01:03:25.480So even within modernism, you have like the seeds of a critique of modernism.
01:03:30.300Like, you have to realize that postmodernism comes about through the exhaustion of that, like, Western tradition, right?
01:03:37.620So secular instrumental reason can only deliver you to, like, it can only give you so much before it just strips the human condition of, like, anything that really matters, right?
01:03:51.380And so postmodernism is just a recognition of that.
01:03:54.280You know, but to lead to your point, Oren, to lead to your point, let me give you a funny little anecdote.
01:03:58.900This is something that Jordan Peterson would find crazy, okay?
01:04:02.620So Jacques Derrida, and I believe in the early 2000s, before he died, one of his students asked him about the, I believe he asked him about Christopher Hitchens, if I recall, he asked him about the new atheists, right?
01:04:15.040And they go, well, you know, in France, they have a very crazy, like, academic tradition, where most of them are, like, atheists.
01:04:25.120But they're not, like, they're not, like, North American atheists.
01:04:57.860And, of course, in academia in France, there's a huge amount of tradcasts, ironically enough, as well.
01:05:03.120Because France is, like, the society of contradictions.
01:05:07.200So Derrida says, when he talks about deconstruction, right?
01:05:12.020He goes, can you not deconstruct atheism and that lack of belief and that assurity of reason that delivers you to conclude that the world is made from nothing?
01:05:22.680Like, Lawrence Krauss nonsense, right?
01:05:25.600Lawrence Krauss was also on the flight logs, along with Steven Pinker, by the way.
01:06:28.700Because you can critique that, the sort of dialectic of, like, atheism being a rational choice, quote-unquote, because of the predicate of, like, this is the way that human evolution and, like, development of reason and so forth.
01:06:42.060Like, that Derrida, the king of postmodernism, said himself, like, actually, you can also deconstruct the other way.
01:06:50.880You could say that, well, actually, atheism is itself, like, a metanarrative that can be critiqued just as much as anything else.
01:07:00.440We have the Mo bartender meme where the, you know, comes back in at the end, he throws the guy out of the bar and the guy comes back in, but it's religion and rationalists.
01:07:22.440Have either of you, this was something else I wanted to bring up on the stream.
01:07:27.440Have either of you been reading or keeping up with Zero HP's recent essays on, I think he's titled them, Towards a Christo-Nichean Synthesis?
01:08:02.540I don't think that's his intention at all.
01:08:05.080I don't think he's presenting this, and I would not group it under one of these postmodern traditionalist examples.
01:08:11.740But I do think it's interesting to bring it up in the context of this conversation.
01:08:16.880And as you guys remember, but for the sake of our audience, he sort of goes through this kind of taxonomy of religious thought and presents these different kind of categories that present themselves in religious thought.
01:08:32.400And this is religion termed very broadly.
01:08:46.260So there's gnosis, right, which is the secret knowledge.
01:08:49.260You know, the believer or the person within this specific religion has secret insight into the nature of the world, whether that's, you know, the capitalist exploitation, if you're a Marxist, or the revelation of Christ, if you're a Christian.
01:09:08.940And then there's the nemesis, the nemesis is the kind of eternal, unvanquishable enemy that blinds the majority of the world to the gnosis.
01:09:19.520Everybody that's outside of your faith is a victim of the nemesis.
01:09:24.420And there are other, I think those are the kind of two major categories.
01:09:28.180There are other ones like taboo and ecstasy.
01:09:30.780And one thing I brought up with him in conversation privately was I felt like the one category that he had omitted was the category of the epiphany, right?
01:09:47.220Another Greek term, which is the epiphany is the.
01:09:57.340So you could get like Christ is the epiphany.
01:09:59.720And I would say that, but in the same context, in, in the, using the kind of taxonomy that, that zero HP is using, Karl Marx is an epiphany.
01:10:09.120He's an epiphany for that religious, you know, meme of, of Marxism.
01:10:19.260And I kind of, and I kind of, I joked with, with zero because, you know, this is, I don't think he's concluded this series of essays and, you know, that they're, they're brilliant and they're very well executed.
01:10:28.980And I'm looking forward to what he, he comes up with.
01:10:33.360But I kind of joked with him, like, you know, even if you, you have the most persuasive argument on the planet for this Christo Nietzschean synthesis, we're probably going to have to crucify you before anybody buys it.
01:10:43.600You know, you're going to have, you're going to have to be martyred or, or there's going to be, there's going to have to be some, you know, messianic figure that embodies this Christo Nietzschean synthesis.
01:10:54.020And they're going to have to probably, you know, die in a very televised manner because that, that is something that, that I think is necessary to codify these systems is the epiphany.
01:11:09.660That, that person which exemplifies and personifies all of the, the, the, the key insights of that religious system.
01:11:20.300And I bring this up in the, in this context, because I, I, I wonder is part of why we are all trapped within the postmodern and what the best we can hope for is a kind of postmodern traditionalism.
01:11:32.020Because we're kind of denied that, that epiphany, you know, and, and I think a lot of talks surrounding kind of Caesarism is in some ways a longing for the, the, the, the, the epiphanic or I think we're going to be, I think the one thing that I can conceive of that would kind of, um, break the world out of the kind of the, the, the postmodern condition, um, or.
01:12:02.020Or create the opportunity for a, a, a, a more, um, kind of sincere traditionalism is that, that figure of, of the epiphany.
01:12:14.760Yeah. So I, I just put that out there. I, I thought, um, in, in leading up to this talk, I was thinking a lot about, um, zeroes work in, in, in regards to, um, those religious, religious categories.
01:12:28.100Well, that's great. That's amazing. Because Frederick Jameson talks about postmodernism being that a lot, like most historical, um, movements, cultural artifacts, um, religiosities, even all of them become a series of stylizations.
01:12:47.060Like they become kitchified in a way, right? They become, uh, I think even like talked about like the sort of like big mega church stadium, like Christianity as being like a part of that sort of spectacle, right?
01:13:00.760Like this very much is like the society of spectacle stuff. And I know ZHP in one of his threads, he talks about this, where he says that to really truly break out of it, you would need like the mix of a Caesar and a Christ and an Odin and a Nietzsche.
01:13:16.380You would need truly like a transformative world picture, um, embodiment in a human being to transform the stylization of religion into something that is like a truly living faith. Right. Cause I feel like.
01:13:32.340So we need, we need the second coming.
01:13:34.560You need the second coming. Yeah. Because you would feel that like, even like within religious, like even trad circles, I hate to say this. Like, again, I don't really like, I know to like,
01:13:46.100I'm aware of the fact that as a cradle Catholic, it's like me, like lording it over or whatever. But I do notice that there is like among like traditionalist circles on the internet specifically, it still is at the level of stylization in that the way that it's practiced.
01:14:04.480Like, okay, why am I a trad cath? Why am I a trad ortho? Why am I an Odinist? Why am I an Nietzschean? Oh, cause I want to own the libs. Right.
01:14:13.400Like that is still a stylization of faith that can have a building block towards sincerity. So I wouldn't want to like cast dispersions on anybody, but I do feel that we're still living within.
01:14:26.480And that really is, I think the essence of postmodern traditionalism is not, well, not the essence of that's kind of like a strange word, right? When it's about postpartum, but it's sort of like a definition of that.
01:14:37.880You embrace that faith will still be there, but it will have to exist in terms of worldly, it's worldly picture, not it's metaphysical picture.
01:14:48.120It's worldly picture as a form of stylization among others. Right. Cause like in, in the sort of like 2010s culture war, that's why I brought it up before is because that really like highlighted the fact that we're in this like 30 year, 30 hundred year religious war, um, where people are fighting over their own stylizations and like the past can always come back or trends could always come back.
01:15:12.880Like it can be like, I don't know. I mean, I'm a millennial, so I want to live in like Y2K aesthetic early 2000s world forever. That would be amazing, but I know we're not going to, unfortunately, you know, cause something happened when those towers fell that basically like, I don't know, no clipped us into a different world than the world that us millennials were promised by our boomer parents.
01:15:35.500So yeah. So yeah. So if, if millennials are sort of like the cynical, frustrated, like postmodern driftwood generation, that's for a reason, you know, and I hope like the conversation, postmodern driftwood generation.
01:15:49.640Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, but I hope like the less we learn is that all of these things happen for a reason, right? Like they, they, they happen because of a course of development.
01:15:59.500And, but in that course of development, that's the funny thing about postmodernism is that there's no determinism in it, right? There's no determinism. So the world that we were given by like the twin towers falling and the surge and the financial crisis and then event, who knows, eventually Gamergate, right?
01:16:20.320And everything leads back to Gamergate, but the, the world that we were given, when you think of it almost as like a time loop or a time warp that we've entered into, but there isn't a contingency, like, sorry, there's, there's, there isn't a necessity, but it's contingency that we could have.
01:16:41.940And this is what Mark Fisher was talking about as well, right? Postmodernism is the recognition of that. We could have lived in another time, right? And maybe there could be another possibility in another direction.
01:16:56.280And we see this nowadays. I mean, the internet age has proven this to us, that there is always a contingency to things that there could be another path that we can all walk down and that there actually is like the whole, like, you know, liberal Whig history, the whole like universal state that Kojev talks about, right?
01:17:18.480Like that is even equally called into question because that is another possibility among others. It's a strong one, right? I mean, a lot of the people that we interact with every day and like a lot of the things we tweet about, a lot of things we write about and talk about on podcasts when it comes to like liberalism, we have to recognize that it's brittle in one sense.
01:17:40.760And we, we all talk about how it spiritually decimates people and it deracinates people and strips them of their faith and their heritage and so forth.
01:17:49.680But at the same time, there is a lasting power to its assumptions, right? Now, if I would even be charitable to Moabug, I know I'm very uncharitable to Moabug, but if I would be charitable to him, he is correct in that, in that it is culminated into a series of assumptions about human nature and about politics that more or less have some sort of staying power.
01:18:10.760Right? Like, I know that's like an old reactionary talking point, but it's true. And that's something that we have to deal with and something we have to recognize. The only way to like truly critique something is if you realize it's power, right? And liberalism, there are signs of its weakness. Like, I don't want a black pill, but it still is a all consuming and powerful force, right?
01:18:34.240But post-modernity says that that is one among many. And there could be another thing. There could be a post-liberalism, not like, you know, the cringy, like Harvard, like Harvard, Patrick Deneen.
01:18:49.240I mean, not the post-liberal order. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Not the integralist post-liberalism, but like genuine illiberal or post-liberal thinking could come down the pipeline, right? Like, like that's the space of possibility. You know who is a real post-modern thinker?
01:19:07.240I know he'd like, maybe he'd unfollow me if he heard me saying this, but Nick Land, right? What is the outside? What is the force? Like, you want to talk about post-modernism. What is the force from the outside coming into the present, manifesting itself through the present into the future, right? Like that itself is another recognition of our timeline, of our reality being spliced open by all these other forces that we can't account for, right?
01:19:34.860Because usually like the, the, the, like reason post-enlightenment liberal picture of reality is that there is no outside that eventually we're just going to evolve. And like, I don't know, uh, the, you know, the Ayatollah in Iran is going to topple. There's going to be regime change in Russia and China and North Korea, you know, and China, China will be liberal too. You know, they'll, they'll have, uh, whatever, right? Like they'll, they'll have the United Federation of Planets. Yeah.
01:20:00.580Exactly. No, but, no, but Star Trek was incredibly, like, if you want to talk about global liberalism, like, that's why you should study Star Trek, as you know, or, and like, have you done a stream in Star Trek?
01:20:12.540I have not, but I'll, I'll put one together. We should definitely do that.
01:20:16.540Um, but, but I think we should go ahead and also turn our attention to our super checks as they are building up here.
01:20:22.840Wow. Yeah. We've got quite a few coming up here. So, uh, let's go ahead and grab the questions of the people real quick.
01:20:30.580Here. Uh, let's see. Uh, Maddie Ice here for $10. Thank you very much, sir. Postmodernism is not real in practice. No one lives it. The rejection of metanarratives is applauded by people who replaced Christ's American Revolution, the glorious dynam, slavery, and the big H. What do you think about that, gentlemen? There is no postmodernism. It's just a replacement of metanarratives.
01:20:54.560Hmm. Last things you want to go ahead?
01:20:59.880I'm still mulling it over in my head. I'm still swishing it around like, uh, some fine.
01:21:05.180Yeah. It's, it's, it's a term that like has many meanings for many different people.
01:21:10.240Sure. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I would say that we do live in a form of hypermodernity. Definitely. Um, people don't live as if they're postmodern. Yeah. That, that, that is a good critique, but I still would say that like, uh,
01:21:21.560if you don't believe in postmodernism, postmodernism maybe, no, I'm not going to do that. But man, it's true. Postmodernism believes in you. Um, no, I, I think that, yeah, it's true in that specifically when it comes to the political left, they don't act as if they're, they're postmodern whatsoever. They, they have a very, like Gloria Steinem was a CIA operative. So, um, she had a very specific set of beliefs that she was trying to instrumentalize and weaponize.
01:21:47.560Uh, you knew that, right? They gentlemen, you knew that she was being paid by the CIA. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the first time I've heard about Steinem, but a lot of the feminists were bankrolled. So, oh yeah, she was the, not all feminism, but I mean, she was, uh, the, the pop feminist that, uh, was receiving the glow in the dark, the, the checks glue, the, you know, had the glow in the dark ink on him.
01:22:13.640She had enough sex appeal to kind of get the, yeah, she wasn't Dworkin, you know, I was about to say, I don't think Dworkin was on the paper.
01:22:25.860Sorry. Sorry. Uh, Maddie ice here again for $5. A mentioned once they replace a story of birth with a story of death. We'd be better to highlight this more in my opinion. Uh, so just continuing off of his first super chat there. I mean, I think there is truth in, in,
01:22:42.760in what you're saying, Maddie ice, there is, uh, it's like, uh, people who are hardcore determinists until, you know, they then tell you to stop doing whatever you're doing that they don't like. Um, no one actually, no one actually acts as if people are not responsible for their decisions, even if they, uh, their worldview dictates a hundred percent that they are. Uh, so, but I think there is also, as Gio has pointed out,
01:23:08.540I think pretty adeptly a real, a real, uh, collapse of the meta narrative that is, that is a part of kind of our world today. So I think there, I think, uh, you're right that no one truly acts as if there's nothing. Of course, to be fair, I don't think most people, if you walked around and like bumped at the average progressive, I don't think the first thing they'd say is like, I'm a postmodernist. Like, I don't think they describe themselves like that at all. So to be fair to the left,
01:23:34.480I don't think most leftists walk around and then announcing, I am a dedicated postmodernist. So I don't know how much of a critique that would be of their own self-description so much as it is a critique of those who apply it too liberally to, to those on the left.
01:23:48.920I think like, that's another, like another point would be a lot of people in the political right. They don't realize that the left truly believes in this. Like they, they don't, um, a lot of like the argument that postmodernism, I don't know, led to like, um, drag time story hour.
01:24:04.480Whatever. Like you can make a case obviously for that, but it's more of like, it's not that they're like, Oh, well actually now that we know that there's no such thing as like a commonly held reality. Now I can become like, I can change. I can basically create my life as a work of art and become like, I mean, there's certainly academics that think this way, but the average, like run of the mill, like liberal, affluent liberal woman that like takes her kid to a drag show.
01:24:30.500They're not thinking of it that way. They actually genuinely believe that no, if you state that your identity is as such, it is as such, it's an iron law. So it's not like, Oh, there's an ambiguity about identity. They're like, no, if you, you know, so I, I feel like that's unfortunately a lot of like people in the right wing or I'm like, you know, normie conservatives.
01:24:52.040They tend to think of everything being like, this is relativism. It's not really relativism in the sense that they don't think of things as being relativistic.
01:25:02.280They think they have a genuinely, they genuinely believe that that Mulvaney person is like, I've only been a woman for six months. It's like, she, you know, she's only been a woman for six months.
01:25:14.180Yeah. I mean, it's true. It's one of those kinds of asymmetrical warfare issues that I think articulates a lot that post-modernity hamstrings the right a lot more than it does the left.
01:25:28.120Like I'm what's that. Um, uh, quote from speaking of the second coming Yates, like, um, the good do nothing. And the best lack all conviction. Yeah.
01:25:39.820Yeah. The best last, the best, the best lack all conviction, because I do think that a lot, especially like, you know, I don't know, very like, you know, neurotic, smart, um, right.
01:25:53.740And dissidents probably do tie themselves in knots thinking about issues of, of moral relativism.
01:26:01.580Yeah. And that's not something that, that, that causes a single skip in the step of the mother on their way to drag queen story hour or, or the drag queen for that matter.
01:26:10.960Yeah. It's not like they wake up in the morning and they're like, Oh, there's no truth anymore.
01:26:15.120Or ergo, I'm going to be a different gender. Like it doesn't work that way.
01:26:19.120I think it's really important for a lot of people who were very invested in the idea of cold rationality, defining the world to believe that there was some kind of convoluted ideological mechanism that moved people towards what they see as something that's wholly irrational.
01:26:37.460Rather than realizing that evil exists in the world, then people are capable of holding evil beliefs.
01:26:43.040Yeah. I think it's, I think it's, I really, it really is. It's, it's, it's a very simple, it's one of those things where if you spend, uh, you know, uh, many, many years and write enough doctoral dissertations, you can talk yourself out of the obvious, which is.
01:26:58.940That something really nasty has taken hold of your civilization. And most people around you no longer believe in truth, uh, because of it. So don't make me tap the sign. They actually do want to, you know, sometimes it's not rocket science. It really is. All, all the really complicated explanations of the world are sometimes far less illuminating than.
01:27:23.380What an Urgagor you've unleashed upon the world. I'm sorry. I, I dream of a, I dream of a world where the sign never needs to be tapped again. That's, that's, that's beautiful.
01:27:34.720Um, creeper weirdo for $5. Do you guys hear about this list of scary far right media? One of the books was Leviathan. They're onto us boys. Yeah. I don't know if you guys have seen the, uh, the couple lists of, of possible far right books. I think it's, yeah. Things like Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan and John Locke's treaties.
01:27:52.580Whoa. I thought they were talking about Sam Francis Leviathan. No, no, no, no. Yeah. I, I could at least in some ways understand that though.
01:28:03.880Leviathan and its enemies is, is in no way, not really far right, but yeah.
01:28:08.200I love how you have like, uh, Francis Parker, Yaki Imperium right next to, um, John Locke's like, you know, or Tokyoville is like, you know, on America, like right next to Imperium. That's amazing.
01:28:21.620Um, yeah, that is a pretty wild, uh, creeper weirdo again here for $5. Is it like Christian nationalism where we hack at an idea? We don't fully understand, uh, how to implement or what it means.
01:28:33.140Uh, yeah, I think that, um, it's very true that a lot of, a lot of people grasp onto this language without fully understanding as I think Gio did a really good job of kind of succinctly putting that together where they understand the technical academic definition, but they don't understand its, its usage and kind of real conversation.
01:28:57.140And then they conflate it with other terms and you end up in a situation where, you know, conservatives or, or, or opponents of progressivism are attacking straw men they've constructed out of academic, uh, you know, cloth and thinking that that kind of will, will lead people to the truth there.
01:29:15.960Sure. Yeah. Uh, let's see. Uh, courts ZZ seven for five Canadian. Thank you very much. Sorry about Canada. Uh, how postmodernism is Marshall McLuhan. He hated the words.
01:29:29.900Yeah. I don't, I don't know. I don't have the context for that one Gio. I don't know if you can answer that at all.
01:29:35.020Oh, well, actually the context is I was recently on my good friend, uh, Tyler Hamilton theme star show, uh, EBL. It was, uh, me and the boys. We talked about McLuhan's book understanding media. So you can find that, uh, theme stars channel, uh, that came out, uh, yesterday. Uh, no McLuhan, he definitely was a modern thinker. Um, he said the postmodernism is like just another label, like in the beginning of understanding.
01:29:59.900He says it doesn't really grasp, um, what he was trying to get at, but he does. I feel like reading McLuhan, you could very easily understand the foundation of the way in which the development of media and sort of like the post Gutenberg galaxy world culminated into a postmodern condition, but he himself is not a postmodernist. Uh, he thoroughly was in a sort of like modernist tradition because he viewed, um, he wasn't like a black
01:30:29.900black mirror skeptic. He wasn't like a Lule. He wasn't like, certainly wasn't like uncle Ted or Lincola. He wasn't like anti-technology. He very much had the modernist disposition of having a sort of like, not utopianism, but seeing like a sort of futuristic potentiality within like a fully, um, telecommunication, uh, like tech media saturated world.
01:30:55.560And he said, like, that's just the condition we live in. And there's possibilities of something great within it as well. It can also, um, he, he would say like, as much as it can hinder the human spirit, it gives the human spirit unique possibility. That's very much a modernist thing. So I wouldn't consider him a postmodernist. No. Um, yeah. Gotcha.
01:31:14.560All right. Uh, Maddie ice here at 10 again for $10. Thank you very much. I like the philosophy, but in many ways, democracy would be good enough, but in a society where the tremendous effort to manipulate public opinion, a real democracy enemies would agree, but not reform. Yeah. I don't know if you can avoid that big if though there, right? Like that's, that's kind of the problem is that the cathedral assembles itself.
01:31:40.560When power leaks in the way that democracy allows it to, especially in the modern age with different, all the different technology, allowing, allowing communication dissemination of narratives and networking. So I don't know that you can ever, you got to remember the democracy is itself, not actually that long lasting of a political, uh, kind of a form. Uh, a few hundred years, not even, I'm sorry.
01:32:09.420A few hundred years, not even. Yeah. I mean, if you want to go back and pretend like Athenian democracy is the same thing, but even then famously not exactly known for its longevity, uh, or it's actual prosperity for the Athenians funny thing about, uh, most people who reference it. Uh, but, but yeah, I don't know that the illusion of democracy can really survive the postmodern world. Uh, after, after the current narrative of popular sovereignty breaks, I don't know that you get to put it back together.
01:32:39.400In the same way you'll still get, um, you'll still get power derived from the demand of the crowd, you know, like that, that will be what shifts us into whatever moment we have post kind of post-democratic moment we have. Uh, but I, I don't know that you're ever going to just return to the idea that you just have an organic democracy that spans an entire empire. Um, I don't think people are going to necessarily, um, invest in that in the way that they have with America.
01:33:05.020Yeah. What do you two think of, uh, I know Scott Greer wrote about this, the idea that Caesar can come from the left. Do you feel like the, like the blue Caesar, do you think there'll be a blue Caesar?
01:33:17.220Uh, I haven't read countered that. I mean, purple Caesar, I hear all the time, but blue Caesar, whatever blue purple Caesar. Yeah. I would have to go Brutus if that was the situation.
01:33:26.920Well, if by, if by blue Caesar, you mean like Stalin, then sure. But then, uh, how blue is it really? Right. Um, when your communism becomes fascism, uh, to stabilize it, is it communism anymore? I mean, you know, we, you can, you can get deep in the weeds.
01:33:45.820Um, I think you meant like, out of like the current milieu of like American, like progressive politics that there could potentially like, actually like the left has a very strong will to power, like maybe not a true will to power.
01:34:00.020I mean, I was talking about this with ZHP, but they certainly have the conditions of like a populist progressive Stalinist, like a, let's call it a bio-Stalinism.
01:34:09.740If you, that could be something, um, bio-Stalinism. There's a paper.
01:34:16.700Yeah. So some, somewhere someone is launching a sub stack just to, you know, take that spandrel.
01:34:22.740Yeah. I, I, I'm honestly, I am skeptical of this. The possibilities exist. Um, but, uh, you have a lot of problems with this narrative.
01:34:33.580The first one being that Caesar is probably in some ways, a consolidation of, of type two residues outside of the ruling class. Um, that's, that's a condition necessary for, uh, Caesarism and your type, your type twos are very unlikely to coalesce around a blue leader.
01:34:55.920I don't, I don't think that's probably, I think we're, I think we're far more likely to see long-term stagnation than we are to see, uh, and just descent into, into third worldism than we are to see a coalition of type twos around a, uh, around a kind of blue leader. I'm skeptical of that.
01:35:15.980The regime will get much more authoritarian, but it will be like a third world.
01:35:25.020Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. So the, um, uh, so Pareto has the two, uh, he has seven, six, seven residues, but the main two that we talk about for ruling elites are the lions and the, uh, and the foxes, the foxes are your type one residues and your lions are the type two. And so we're, we're totally dominated by foxes right now. We're, we're totally dominated by the crafty, the, the, the combination.
01:35:51.900That's funny. Cause I, I was actually, I didn't realize, I didn't know the type type one, type two thing, but I was, what I was going to interject is that we need to start breeding lions before there is a Caesar. Cause I am familiar with that kind of, that, that part of Italian elite school theory.
01:36:08.800Yeah. Even, even, even, even Trump, as much as I think a lot of, he needed to be more of a fox than a lion. I hate to say it, but, or, or was he more of a, or was the, the, the, the issue that ultimately he was a, he is a fox. He just plays a really good line on television.
01:36:28.440That's exactly right. And when, and when the moment rose in which he needed to truly, truly roar or bear his fangs, it was, it became clear that it was, he was a fox.
01:36:39.420Yeah. Yeah. By, yeah, there, there's definitely a lot of truth to that. He, he was a, he was a fox making lion type noises and people are so desperate for that kind of leadership that even the hint of it was enough for a lot of boomers to just like swear other allegiance.
01:36:56.960Just to see a hint of it, which, which shows you that, that there's a serious appetite for it. But I think that is, I think that is the case with Trump.
01:37:05.880Yeah. Trump was never a Caesar. He was a crassus for those that know you're a, you know, Roman.
01:37:11.180Yeah. Some people say that. Yeah, it's true.
01:37:14.980All right. Let's see. Jonathan Richardson here for $10. The tradition actually says the tradition actually says for now we see through a glass darkly.
01:37:24.260And now I know in part, as well as many other statements that long ago collapsed under human narratives and pontifications.
01:37:32.900What do you think Paul wrong about this?
01:37:37.260Yeah, I think, I think there's something about that, that faith is always initially seen through a glass darkly, that there, there always has to be that struggle to, of, of clarity of vision.
01:37:47.060And I know last thing's me, you comment better on this one.
01:37:50.720Well, I guess I, I'm attempting to see through the glass and, and it, it, it maybe does describe my, my, my condition somewhat well.
01:38:02.460You know, you know, I don't, if I'm taking the comment and the spirit that's meant, I don't think that I, I don't anticipate that I'm somebody that's, that, that has the kind of personality that's going to experience religious revelation.
01:38:18.260Um, I, I, I, I do think that it will be kind of a matter of, um, of praxis more than, than any kind of, um, piercing, piercing moments of clarity.
01:38:29.200Yeah, I think that, you know, that, that passage is conveying the fact that we're, we're, we're, we never truly know the truth at some point we will, we'll be in a situation where we will, but while we're in this world, we're never going to completely understand, uh, you know, the, the truth of these things.
01:38:50.340But I think, um, I, I, I think that that's, you, you maybe speaks to the postmodern idea of like, you're, we're not going to be able to completely live in this world of logic.
01:39:02.440We're not going to completely be able to define reality and quantify everything.
01:39:06.900And so we have to make our way through life without that, you know, without that certainty.
01:39:13.400And that's where that faith comes back in kind of at the, the end of the, the postmodern tradition there.
01:39:18.700Uh, but let's see what else we have here.
01:39:48.860I mean, well, no, because you would say that Kant was very formative in that sort of like enlightenment tradition of reason itself.
01:39:56.780And like sort of reason being something that the understanding needs, like it motivates understanding to predicate like the noumena to like try to find a sort of like noumenal distinction within things of like mere appearance.
01:40:09.520So yeah, Kant is very, I mean, would you consider him a modern thinker?
01:40:29.780A foot in the door to deconstruct back to religion is to understand that a lot of scripture has a strong rational basis.
01:40:36.300Don't eat fellowship, uh, shellfish makes sense in an era without refrigeration.
01:40:40.860For example, um, actually I think that's the opposite, uh, that that's applying rational, uh, you know, like the scientific rational explanations to, uh, what are fundamentally religious, uh, dictates.
01:40:56.800You know, that's probably part of, of what the Bible is doing there, but to follow the dictate because it's what God said.
01:41:04.940And because that's, what's important about the dictate, irregardless of the rationalization behind it is really the, is really the key to the religious aspect of it to try to attempt to attach it to a scientific or rational necessity is the most modern thing you can do with, uh, the biblical truth.
01:41:26.800That's kind of revealed through the law.
01:41:34.940James Richardson again for $10 or sorry, uh, Johan Richardson here for $10, uh, in architecture, postmodernism led to humility and, uh, receptivity modernists were the critical reformers.
01:41:47.220Good Robert Venturi and Tina Brown interview here.
01:41:50.620And there's a link there with the timestamp.
01:42:09.660It led really to the, towards, uh, again, a form of eclecticism and stylization that they really like, uh, saw the flaws and like a lot of modernist architecture being like a total project.
01:42:22.700That consumed whole cities that was like a grand utopian, like Corbusier had a grand utopian, like vision of it.
01:42:31.220Like a lot of people think brutalism is like postmodernism.
01:42:34.160No, brutalism is like thoroughly modernist architecture in that it, in that it was predicated on a total vision of what living space looked like.
01:42:44.740Even Gratius with like the new stuff, the new city style, like the glass everywhere.
01:42:52.280A lot of people like, because skyscrapers are so like homogenized and standardized and like really you're a bunch of eyesores.
01:43:00.280Uh, Gratius, he thought that really like having whole cities of glass windows was a spiritual vision that it could like create like almost like an Edenic.
01:43:09.660An Edenic sort of existence where we would live through this like crystalline city who very much was a futurist.
01:43:16.960But unfortunately, uh, the international style became like the style of like city bug man, neoliberal business world, like world neoliberalism, unfortunately.