Andrew Klavan joins me to talk about his new novel, The Good Thing, a mashup of hardboiled fiction and fantasy. He talks about how he came up with the idea for the book, and why he decided to write a novel. He also talks about why he thinks he might have a brain tumor, and how he thinks it could be the key to solving one of the greatest mysteries of all time: who is the Great Thing? And he explains how he got to where he is now, and what it means to be a writer. Thanks to our sponsor, HelixSleep, for offering up to $125 off all mattress orders. You get 10 years worth of warranty on your mattress for free, and you get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free, so you really have nothing to lose. Plus, you get a chance to try out Helix's new mattress for a chance at a discount of $125 or more. That's right, $125 OFF your mattress order! You can get a free night's worth of free overnight rest and relaxation with Helix Sleep's new pillow and blanket. If you like what you hear here, you'll get 10% off your entire purchase when you take their 2-Minute Sleep Quiz! Just go to helixSleep.co/BENGuest and enter the discount code: BONUS to receive $125 when you book your first book recommendation. Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special! BenGuest: Ben Shapiro: The Great Thing Subscribe to the show and get $25 off your first month of the book and get 20% off the course, plus an additional discount when you buy a copy of his next book, a lifetime membership when you become a member of the show starts shipping in the next month, and get an ad discount, plus a free copy of the course discount starts shipping starts in two months, plus two months of Audible, shipping starts start-up shipping starts, shipping free, shipping and shipping starts starts, plus all other options, shipping anywhere else gets $25, plus they get $5,000 shipping starts get $50, and they get a discount, and more, they'll get the best experience in the world, including VIP access to the best deal, including a lifetime, plus free shipping, and all kinds of perks, and a lifetime of VIP membership, plus I'll get a personalized course, and an ad-only deal, and I'll also get a $25 promo code, and so on, and much more!
00:00:20.000This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special with special guest Andrew Klavan, who you may know from such things as me pitching membership at the Daily Wire.
00:00:27.000We'll get to all of that, but first, let's talk about your quality of sleep.
00:00:30.000So, there is nobody on the planet like you, so why would you buy a generic mattress built for someone else?
00:00:38.000They use the answers to match your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress.
00:00:42.000Whether you're a side sleeper, you're a hot sleeper, you like a plush or a firm bed, with Helix, there's no more guessing and no more confusion.
00:00:48.000Just go to helixsleep.com slash bed and guest.
00:00:50.000You take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they will match you to a mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life.
00:00:55.000For couples, Helix can even split that mattress down the middle.
00:00:57.000It can provide individual support needs and feel preferences for each side.
00:01:41.000It's a story about this kind of little schlub, a nebbish in Hollywood, who's come out to be a big filmmaker, had a little bit of success, and it all melted away.
00:01:52.000He knows, he can see he's going down that road where he's never going to quite make it, never going to pull away.
00:01:57.000Hollywood is filled with people like this.
00:02:00.000And everything is just kind of going wrong in his life.
00:02:02.000And one day, he opens a door, walks through the door, and he finds himself
00:02:07.000In a locked room, in a medieval castle, a dead body on the floor, and a bloody dagger in his hand.
00:02:13.000And the guards kick down the door, grab him, drag him, throw him into a dungeon, and tell him he's going to trial for his life.
00:02:21.000And he thinks he must have a brain tumor.
00:02:24.000And the weird thing that keeps happening to him is every now and again, he'll go through another door, he'll be back in Hollywood, like a minute later, a second later, there's no time passing.
00:02:31.000And in Hollywood, he finds that people are hunting him all of a sudden.
00:02:36.000And so these two mysteries are unfolding in two completely different worlds, and yet somehow this one character, this nobody, this guy that nobody's ever heard of, nobody ever would hear of, is somehow holding these two worlds together, and holding these two mysteries together, and has to find the answer before he gets himself killed.
00:02:53.000So how do you come up with the ideas for these fictional worlds, especially this one?
00:02:56.000Normally you've been doing hard-boiled fiction, and this one is hard-boiled fiction slash fantasy, which is a really interesting mash-up.
00:03:02.000This one, you know, I only recently realized how this book came to be because it's happened so organically.
00:03:09.000And looking back on it, it's actually a big experience.
00:03:29.000I didn't even notice it was happening because I was continually writing short stories.
00:03:32.000I wrote a couple of books that I didn't publish, that I threw away.
00:03:36.000And only looking back on it did I realize that writing that memoir, I had finally put down all the stuff that I had been thinking about and had worked out all the problems that made my fiction tick.
00:03:46.000Because you're always, as a novelist, you're actually writing beyond what you know.
00:04:08.000And I realized, now I've answered all these questions that powered all the stories of my youth, I didn't have anything else really to say.
00:04:15.000And when I was becoming a Christian, one of the repeated thoughts that was going through my mind was, oh Lord, don't let me become a Christian novelist, because you know what they're like.
00:04:32.000And so I didn't want to do that, and I wrote two novels that were essentially Christian novels that I didn't like.
00:04:40.000And one of them I tried and tried to rewrite, and I tried again and again, and I was sitting at a table in my living room with a manuscript on the coffee table and this notepad trying to fix it, and I realized, I'm going to have to throw this book out.
00:04:53.000I've been working on this book for years.
00:04:55.000I'm going to have to throw this book away.
00:04:57.000And almost simultaneously, another kingdom went bang, just dropped into my mind.
00:05:04.000And my process is usually I get a little idea, I put it away for six months, it comes back, it's bigger, it gets bigger over the course of a year, it finally fleshes out.
00:05:14.000And when I sat down to write it, I thought, oh my god, the entire story is there.
00:05:18.000And so, I really didn't realize what had happened, but I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth, and I just started writing the story out, and it came very organically.
00:05:57.000It should show life so honestly that a nihilist can look at a work by a Christian and say, like, yeah, I understand that.
00:06:05.000He thinks he's Christian, but the story's not, all this stuff.
00:06:09.000And I needed to get beyond that, and I think the thing about Another Kingdom is because it works on two levels.
00:06:14.000Because it's a very realistic thriller story, very gritty, kind of noir thriller story, and also this very almost old-fashioned medieval, you know, fantasy story.
00:06:26.000It's these two levels in my own mind talking to one another.
00:07:07.000Because non-fiction is me expressing my views and exploring philosophy.
00:07:10.000But fiction, it's like, well, am I supposed to be veiling the idea or am I supposed to be telling a story?
00:07:14.000And if I tell a story, why am I getting bored with my own story?
00:07:17.000How did you bridge that gap between now you have a set worldview but still being interested in the fiction that you're writing yourself?
00:07:22.000Because it seems to me that's sometimes the number one barrier of being a writer is being interested in what you're doing on a daily basis.
00:08:51.000And what I now try to do is I try and do it a little bit every day, because it's just so excruciating.
00:08:56.000I mean, it's just the one part of the job.
00:09:00.000I love my work, and I really do love it, but it's the one part of the job I just think, ah, I gotta do this, I gotta work it out.
00:09:06.000So what's your schedule on a day-to-day basis?
00:09:07.000Because you come in here, you don't get a lot of sleep, you come in here, you do your podcast, and then you're writing hours and hours a day.
00:09:14.000First of all, how do you clear the time?
00:09:15.000And second of all, take me from you wake up to you go to bed, basically.
00:09:20.000What's your schedule during a normal day?
00:09:27.000And the first thing I do, I say hello to my wife and I grab my iPad and I start reading the news, you know, what's going on, catching up on everything.
00:09:34.000And I do that pretty solidly until I start to prep the show, which, you know, I'm prepping the show by around
00:11:07.000That was the one thing when I was a little kid, Thomas Edison was my hero and he took catnaps.
00:11:13.000I think I modeled that on him, so that really helps.
00:11:16.000Okay, so let's go through some of your faith journey because, you know, obviously that's shaping how you're seeing the world in terms of your fiction writing.
00:11:23.000And you have a pretty interesting faith journey.
00:11:25.000Obviously, you and I ended up in very separate places.
00:11:28.000But you started off, you were born into a Jewish family.
00:11:30.000I've said to you before, we've had this conversation, but you were born into an extraordinarily secular Jewish family.
00:11:36.000And now, obviously, you're religious Christians.
00:11:37.000How do you get from point A to point B?
00:11:39.000Well, the weird thing about my family was that it was secular, but it was also committed to—my father, at least—was committed to the traditions.
00:13:16.000Which is very flattering to the intellectual mind, because you can analyze everything into dust.
00:13:22.000No matter how small the point is, you can break it up into even smaller pieces, because you don't have that bottom line of there has to be meaning, there has to be morality.
00:13:31.000The problem was, when I was 19, I read Crime and Punishment, and it convinced me that the moral world existed.
00:13:39.000It convinced me that Kant was right, there was a starry sky above and the moral law within, and that was
00:13:47.000And because of that I kept circling around, where does this morality and meaning come from?
00:13:51.000And I'm not, I wasn't satisfied with things I hear from guys like our pal Jordan Peterson, the Italian philosopher Marcello Pera, you know, they live as if they were a god.
00:14:02.000I think to live as if there were a God is essentially to want the conclusions of a syllogism whose premises you don't accept.
00:14:43.000And at that point, which would have been the smart point to seize hold of God like a piece of driftwood floating by in the ocean, I thought, well, then I'll never believe because it'll always be this thing I did because I was weak, because I was down on my luck, because I was broken.
00:14:59.000It'll always be this crutch that I seized hold of.
00:15:01.000It just shows you how stubborn I was about things making sense.
00:15:04.000And so instead, by the grace of God, I found a shrink who cured me.
00:15:16.000Within the course of two, three years of talking to this guy, I was a completely different human being.
00:15:21.000And it was only then, when I felt sane, when I felt certain that my impressions were correct, when I felt certain that I was not living a delusional life, that it seemed obvious to me that there was a God, because of my moral stance.
00:15:34.000The stance that if everybody on Earth... There was a time, there was a time when everybody on Earth believed that slavery was right.
00:15:48.000And once you say that, you're screwed, God-wise.
00:15:50.000I mean, you cannot get away from the idea that somewhere there is this moral base, this base of meaning.
00:15:57.000And this is the thing that's become fascinating to me now, because there are guys like you and me who actually believe, but we're kind of anomalies in the world of the thinking man.
00:16:09.000Right now, the world of the thinking man is divided by
00:16:49.000I think that Harari is at least more intellectually honest than Pinker.
00:16:52.000I mean, I think that Pinker does this whole routine where the Enlightenment will save us and everything is going to continuously get better and you can carve away the foundations of Western civilization, nothing will crumble.
00:17:01.000And Harari is basically like, well, maybe civilization sucked in the first place, right?
00:17:03.000Maybe if we just go back to living in fields and we were happier when we were eating grass and all this kind of stuff.
00:17:10.000And he has this kind of Vulcan idea that we're all living in a delusion.
00:17:15.000The problem with him is he says the most unique, his phrase, I would never say the most unique, but he does, he says the most unique thing about sapiens is the fictions we create.
00:17:24.000So we have a fiction that there's a god.
00:17:26.000We have a fiction that we have human rights.
00:17:58.000And because Harari is a Vulcan who doesn't accept that there is a human life that matters, he thinks it's all being created by fictions, but the fictions are being created by that internal life.
00:18:07.000Well, let's talk some more about this.
00:18:08.000But first, let's talk about your investing.
00:19:57.000Are you going to tell me that because the climate was slightly different in China than it was in Europe, that that's what generated these massive differences in human rights and belief in the individual that occurred over thousands of years?
00:21:10.000And why should I care whether humans flourish or not as long as I get mine?
00:21:15.000You know, all of these guys have failed to deal with
00:21:18.000What to me is this immense elephant in the room, which is the elephant of narrative.
00:21:23.000And, you know, I frequently talk about the fact that George Washington was a massive hero of liberty, a man who essentially gave the airy nothing of liberty a local habitation in the name by turning down the kingship, by doing what he did.
00:21:38.000But he didn't understand why his slaves didn't work hard.
00:21:41.000He didn't understand why his slaves, when he treated them well, would escape.
00:21:44.000And you think, well, how is that possible that this hero of liberty didn't understand the desire for liberty?
00:21:49.000That is what the kind of atmosphere of value that surrounds us all that we don't even know is there.
00:21:57.000The left makes the mistake that they think that narrative is fact.
00:22:01.000They think if you control the narrative, the facts will change.
00:22:04.000The right makes the mistake of thinking that facts will always triumph over narrative, and that's just not true either.
00:22:09.000And the thing is, we are living, and this is the
00:22:13.000One thing I agree with Pinker on, although he wouldn't think I was agreeing with him, we are living in what I call the Enlightenment narrative.
00:22:19.000Rome fell, plunged into darkness, the church held us in this superstition, then hurrah, their classic works were rediscovered, we were reborn in the Renaissance, we moved into the Enlightenment, people got rid of Protestantism for deism, deism fell apart as science marched on, now we're free to march into the heavenly world through atheism.
00:22:40.000Listen, I think there's a lot of truth in that.
00:22:42.000You know, it's true that when Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod, the churches were still ringing the bells to chase the demons away when lightning came, which didn't work out well for the bell ringers.
00:23:18.000The invention of science as we know it happened because Christian members of the church, almost all of them, deeply believing Christian men, started to think, well, if the world makes sense, if God made us in his image, it must be through the connection of reason.
00:23:34.000Let us use our reason to understand the starry heavens that God has put in front of us.
00:23:39.000All of this was built into Judeo-Christian thought.
00:23:42.000And so, you know, when Jesus said, not only will you do the works I've done, you'll do even greater works, that may well have been what he was talking about.
00:23:49.000He may have said, think like this and the world will open itself up to you.
00:23:53.000And that's, I think, the narrative that we have got to start to tell because this narrative has got people, I think, like Jordan and Perry and Marcelo Pera, it's got them in its grip and they can't get out of it.
00:24:06.000In the same way that Washington couldn't see his slaves should be free, they can't see that God has given them everything.
00:24:11.000Well, it seems like a soft form of the argument that you hear most people make about why they became irreligious in the first place, which is not that they stopped believing in God, but because people suck.
00:24:21.000So what they'll say is, they'll say, I stopped being religious because I saw all these religious people who are acting like jerks.
00:24:28.000That's a referendum on human beings sucking.
00:24:31.000This goes back to Another Kingdom, which is the thing that I realized as I was looking back on it, not while I was doing it, I was looking back on it, is the reason you can't write a good Christian novel is that people believe up, not down.
00:24:44.000You don't explain to them, Aquinas said this, and then they say, ah, now I see, there must be a God, and therefore I will believe.
00:24:51.000They get to God, they climb to God on the ladder of being, you know?
00:24:54.000And that ladder, the first step of that ladder is that life is good.
00:24:58.000Not your life, not my life, but life itself.
00:25:01.000When Hamlet says, to be or not to be, that is the question, that is the question.
00:25:06.000Once you decide in favor of being, then you start to say that life is good.
00:25:09.000And just like you were saying before that their sentence makes no sense, we must work to get better, the sentence that life is good makes no sense unless you have at the top of that ladder an actual referendum on meaning and morality, which turns out to be God.
00:25:23.000Yeah, I mean, this is what it says in Deuteronomy, right?
00:25:25.000Choose life so that you and your children may live.
00:25:28.000I mean, the most important sentences in human history, for all the crap the Bible has taken, all of the most important sentences in human history are in that book.
00:25:35.000I mean, to me, the single most important sentence ever written, whether you believe it was by God or by man, doesn't really matter for this point.
00:25:41.000When you say that man is made in God's image, that is the single most important sentence ever written, because all of human liberty, all of human rights, all of individual equality,
00:25:50.000All of that is based in that, in that root belief.
00:25:52.000And that is something you have to take on faith.
00:25:54.000And this is where the Enlightenment thinkers, you know, make me crazy because I think that, first of all, I think that there's a false, a falsification of Enlightenment history when you suggest that all of the Enlightenment thinkers were basically militant atheists who had decided to reject church.
00:26:11.000And even Voltaire was smart enough to recognize in his own kind of Petersonian fashion that, well, I'm not somebody who deeply believes, and I certainly hope that my servants are, right?
00:26:20.000Because he doesn't want them stealing the silverware.
00:26:22.000So the difference between the English Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment, the American Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment of France is that the Enlightenment of France basically said, right, there is no God, there is no moral system, and using the pure light of human reason, we can recreate any moral system that we choose.
00:26:39.000And folks who are kind of neo-enlightenment thinkers pick that up, and they say that that's the stuff that created the modern world, and I just don't understand that.
00:26:46.000What created the modern world is this common law-believing, solidly religious community that had as its fringe enlightenment thinkers, all of whom recognized that without a moral and religious people, all of this would collapse into dust nearly immediately.
00:26:59.000This is the thing that, you know, I don't understand this either.
00:27:04.000Jonah Goldberg, who I love, I think he's a wonderful writer, but he does it in his book, is they pick on the romantics, and they say, oh, the romantics, they want to go back to feeling, which is, I mean, these were some of the most brilliant men who ever lived.
00:27:15.000They weren't sitting around going, oh, my feels, you know?
00:27:16.000They were actually thinking about something.
00:27:18.000What they were thinking about was that without religion, matter and meaning had become irreparably separated.
00:27:24.000How do we bring them back together, knowing what we know now, you know?
00:27:28.000And the thing is, they saw the French Revolution.
00:27:43.000They did just what they do to conservatives today.
00:27:46.000They were writing poems about what a jerk he was.
00:27:48.000Robert Browning wrote this thing about how he sold out by becoming the poet laureate, a position he turned down like three times before he finally took it.
00:27:59.000And so he said, like the second level of British romantics, guys like Coleridge and Keats and Shelley, they saw something had happened, you know, that this wasn't working.
00:28:12.000Guys like Pinker, it's like it never happened.
00:28:58.000I think there's the one side, the Patrick Tinian, why liberalism failed, which is taking the leftist premise, or not the leftist premise, but this kind of neo-Enlightenment premise, that the Enlightenment was atheistic and individualistic without any regard for virtue, and that's what's destroyed the West.
00:29:12.000And then you have people like Pinker taking the other side, saying, well, that's what built the West, is that individualistic, Enlightenment, no virtue, we're all just
00:29:19.000Kind of mandevillion bees, and we bounce off of each other all the time.
00:29:24.000And the reality is that what built America was the conjunction of virtue and rights.
00:29:29.000It was a deep belief on the part of every single founder, including founders who considered themselves deists.
00:29:35.000That if you did not believe in at least a Greek theological version of virtue, if you did not believe in natural law, then none of this mattered in the first place.
00:29:42.000That's the part that's bewildering me.
00:29:43.000I don't know how you read any of these Enlightenment thinkers or the foundations for either British Enlightenment or American Enlightenment and the way they talk about natural law and not see that that has some sort of connection to, you know, the 2,000-year Christian history of natural law.
00:30:07.000I mean, it's just, he, I really like Sam as a person, but he's never answered, at least to my satisfaction, the simple question as to why he and I hold the same values.
00:30:17.000Like we have, we have 95% of the same values.
00:30:19.000And I said to him, you know, where are these values coming from, Sam?
00:30:21.000And he said, well, you know, I studied Buddhism and I studied philosophy and when I was at
00:30:25.000I think it was Berkeley or Stanford, and I studied all this stuff.
00:30:29.000I said, right, but I didn't study any of that stuff.
00:30:37.000One of the most telling narratives of the American founding is the moment when Benjamin Franklin rewrote a portion of the Declaration, and Jefferson had said that our rights were sacred.
00:30:51.000And Franklin said our rights are self-evident because Franklin was a scientist, right?
00:30:55.000If you think about that, what Franklin was saying is we now know enough to deduce our rights.
00:30:59.000We now know enough that we, you know, we don't always know that much, but we now have enough information.
00:31:28.000But it wasn't self-evident 2,000 years before that.
00:31:31.000And I think that that was a great advance in our knowledge.
00:31:34.000In the same way I was talking about how I wrote my memoir, I got to that point where I could now contain what I said.
00:31:39.000I think the Constitution and the Declaration are just that.
00:31:42.000I think that is European history saying, here's what we know so far.
00:31:45.000Here is what we know about governance.
00:31:47.000It didn't just pop out of, like, Cicero's mind.
00:31:50.000It actually was shaped and formed—the Greeks and the Romans—shaped and formed by these 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian thought, which made it what it is.
00:32:14.000That's because it's actually kind of hard to buy.
00:32:16.000You have to work out what you need, and then you do the research to find the best quote, and then you hope that you don't get swindled along the way.
00:32:22.000It's not a good way to shop for anything, let alone life insurance.
00:32:24.000So Policy Genius has made the whole process a lot easier.
00:32:27.000PolicyGenius compares quotes from the top life insurance companies and they find the best policy for you.
00:33:19.000Policygenius, the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
00:33:24.000So I get the feeling right now that there is a crisis of conscience happening in the West, a crisis of meaning.
00:33:29.000I see it particularly among young people.
00:33:31.000I think that it's manifested itself in this new attempt to
00:33:35.000By young people particularly, claw their way back to some sort of philosophy that provides meaning for them.
00:33:42.000And you're seeing people clawing in every direction.
00:33:43.000So you're seeing a lot of folks who are redounding to Jordan's worldview that there is something worth fighting for here.
00:33:50.000And while he and I and you and he may disagree on
00:33:53.000How far that goes, we agree probably on eight of the ten steps that you need to get to, the final two being you need to believe in God and you need to believe a moral system springing from God.
00:34:01.000But he may disagree with that, although he's never been like incredibly clear on that.
00:34:06.000And then there are people who are clawing their way back to meaning through partisan tribalism, which is I'm just going to find the group that believes most like me and I will find meaning in my life by clubbing the crap out of people who I don't like.
00:34:20.000A problem that actually did exist in the Enlightenment, and that was that the Enlightenment didn't necessarily want to discard God or Judeo-Christian morality, but it ended up doing so.
00:35:04.000Where were you getting all of these ideas?
00:35:06.000And folks who don't believe in a Judeo-Christian foundation for our civilization, I don't know how they answer that question.
00:35:11.000And I think most people don't know the answers.
00:35:13.000And so what we've fallen into is sort of either a passionate rejection of the question itself
00:35:19.000As in, the Bible's stupid, all this is stupid, I don't really care, so your question's stupid, so I'm just going to do what I want to do, and I'll ignore the question.
00:35:26.000Or, engaging with the question, which inevitably takes you to nihilism if you actually can't find meaning anywhere.
00:35:30.000It seems to me that's sort of the split.
00:35:32.000I think that one of the problems, too, is that nobody is engaged with the question of whether, and this is what I believe, I believe atheism is obsolete.
00:35:39.000I believe it actually made sense after Newton.
00:35:42.000You know, one of the reasons the Romantics hated Newton is they feared that by the logic of his science, he had taken the fantastic and the beautiful and the spiritual out of life.
00:35:52.000And the Romantic poets Wordsworth and Keats would toast long life to Newton and confusion to mathematics because they didn't, you know, they thought that he was taking the enchantment out of life.
00:36:03.000It's like baseball fans who hate Bill James.
00:36:08.000But the thing is, that made sense at that point to think like, ah, well, here he's gotten logic for this, so eventually we're going to have this clockwork universe where everything is going to hold together.
00:36:17.000But in fact, along the way, if you've paid attention, that clockwork universe has started to get a little weird.
00:36:22.000You know, we have effects at the quantum level that don't make any sense at all in terms of clockwork, interplays between consciousness and reality that really do, to me, suggest an idea of consciousness at the very beginning of creation.
00:37:06.000But this is religion, a science of the gaps.
00:37:09.000And there's that, and then there's this other thing which essentially is faith, which is the idea that we're living in kind of a computer simulation, which just means that God is a little nerd sitting there somewhere.
00:37:19.000I always put a hundred pounds in my hands.
00:37:22.000And so it's actually that our narrative has not caught up with our knowledge.
00:37:25.000I think our knowledge has gone beyond the fact where we have to deduce an atheistic clockwork world.
00:38:04.000The Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, which was the last time that civilization was at this pinnacle.
00:38:10.000I mean, just an amazing pinnacle that it had never been at before in England, but in Europe throughout.
00:38:15.000And they asked the poet Kipling to write about it, and he wrote that famous poem, Recessional, where he said, you know, Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget, if we leave God behind.
00:38:27.000And he was no great believer, Kipling, but he said if we leave God behind, we'll collapse.
00:38:33.000Now that's the kind of prediction that Pinker laughs at.
00:38:36.000But 17 years later, which is nothing, 17 years later after this pinnacle of civilization, 30 years of absolute total war took place that wiped the high culture of Europe off the map.
00:38:48.000The high culture of Europe ends in 1914 to 1945 with one of the worst cataclysms of evil that has ever taken place in the history of humankind.
00:38:58.000Followed by, because of this anti-Christian philosophy of Nazism, followed by these decades of mass murder in the name of this atheist philosophy of communism, that suggests to me that the Enlightenment narrative is not quite everything that it cracked up to be.
00:39:13.000And so, I think this is a serious crisis.
00:39:16.000I think that, personally, I think that Immanuel Kant, at the very beginning of the Enlightenment,
00:39:22.000saw it coming and gave us a roadmap to a different way of thinking about religion, a different way of thinking about both Judaism and Christianity, which is the way that I think about it, is almost in terms of language and storytelling, that yes, we are flesh and blood.
00:39:41.000Yes, we are a flesh bag of chemicals, but you're also bent.
00:39:44.000And you are the language that speaks to me and to you of Ben.
00:39:49.000You are a word, like your flesh, your body is a word, meaning Ben.
00:39:53.000And Ben is as real in the noumenal world, or in the mind of God, if you want, as this flesh and blood.
00:40:00.000Everything about the words coming out of my mouth is physical.
00:40:04.000My brain is sparking, my lungs are pushing and all.
00:40:07.000But the ideas that I'm expressing aren't physical at all.
00:40:10.000And they're either true or they're false.
00:40:11.000And they're false whether I speak them or not.
00:40:13.000And all of that is really, to me, what the Christian story is.
00:40:18.000It is the life of God becoming seeable, realizable, which I think each of us is at some level.
00:40:25.000And I think it's why Jesus spoke in parables.
00:40:28.000It's not because of necessarily the meaning of the parables.
00:40:32.000But the mechanism of the parables, once you accept the mechanism that I can tell you a story, a man's son ran away and then came back and he welcomed him back, I can tell you that story and you hear moral meaning in it.
00:40:54.000When Moses stands before the burning bush and he sees this eternal thing of destruction and creation, you know, the growing bush, and he says, I am, I am an am, I am an I, you know, that to me is what this is all about.
00:41:16.000You don't have to make up, you know, magic stories about lost bunnies.
00:41:20.000You don't have to do anything like that.
00:41:21.000To understand that this world that we're living in is a world of morality and meaning, and it cannot be that way without the God we know.
00:41:28.000Well, how do you deal with the folks like Sam Harris, who spent a lot of time just clubbing the Bible like a baby seal?
00:41:34.000And when I had Sam in the room and we were talking about this, he spent an awful lot of time trying to pick out parts of the Bible that he didn't like, to which my statement was, well, the reason you don't like it is because you've been living in a world that has been shaped by that document that you really don't like very much.
00:41:51.000And the statement that I made to him with regard to the evolution of morality is that
00:41:57.000There are certain things that God says that are predicated on an eternal, unchanging human nature.
00:42:01.000And then there are certain things that God is saying to people of a time, because God still has to speak a language to a human being, and human beings aren't capable of understanding language that's to be written a thousand years from now.
00:42:11.000But still, how do you deal with all the skepticism of religion these days?
00:42:16.000Because you're making a pretty sophisticated argument about religion.
00:42:19.000I think the arguments that I make about religion are similarly sophisticated, but that's not the religion that most people are taught when they're young.
00:42:25.000And so it seems like that provides easy mincemeat for cynics who can spend the rest of the day, just as you or I could, going through and cherry-picking verses that we find troubling on their face.
00:42:36.000But their argument's not fair because what Sam Harris does, and I like him too, you know, I enjoy reading him.
00:42:40.000What he does is he takes cutting-edge science and compares it to the most fundamental, literalist religion, all the time.
00:42:47.000And he says that's fair, because he says that science corrects itself, but religion is essentially fundamentalist.
00:43:22.000Because what he's saying is, if I can pray and experience God, but I can't talk theology, and I'm just a simple guy, and I just believe in this imagery, then God doesn't exist.
00:43:47.000Harris argued with some guy who just knows that God is there and has given him faith and meaning and purpose in his life.
00:43:52.000He may not be able to explain that any more than I can really explain what happens when I flick on the switch, and then the light magically comes on, you know?
00:43:59.000So the debate is not fair, and it begins... Pinker has this thing he does where he says, well, you know, the Holocaust wasn't because of genetic science, and the nuclear explosions on Hiroshima wasn't because of nuclear science, and global warming is not because of industrial science, but the Crusades is because of religion.
00:44:16.000Well, you know, you can't do all this stuff.
00:44:47.000Muslims will tell you that if you're reading the Koran not in Arabic, you're not reading the Koran.
00:44:52.000But the Bible can be translated because it was written by men to communicate what God had told them, right?
00:44:58.000There's major debate in Orthodox Judaism over this because there's the idea that God did in fact write the Torah and that it was all written on Mount Sinai by Moses as dictated by God at the time.
00:45:09.000And there was major debate for literally over a thousand years in Judaism about whether it was good or not to translate the Bibles.
00:45:14.000There is predicate for that Quranic view.
00:45:17.000At the same time, what Judaism has that
00:45:20.000I don't believe, and I don't want to get this wrong, but I don't believe chronic religion does have a lot of, is there was this common law tradition in Judaism that also sprang from the same mouth.
00:45:29.000So even people who are very fundamentalist about what they believe about the giving of the Bible also believe that, at least in Judaism, that there was an oral Torah that was given at the same exact time, which was meant to explain to human beings what exactly this text meant, which innately provides the capacity for us to understand what was happening.
00:45:50.000So, I mean, I think that this is important though.
00:45:53.000I mean, my personal belief, and this is not necessarily, you know, the orthodox belief, but my personal belief is that the Bible was written down by men.
00:46:01.000It is the story of God explaining himself to men over time.
00:46:06.000You don't have to say, you can't take any one sentence out of it and say here is, you know, it's not like a fractal where each sentence shows you the entire world of God.
00:46:16.000I mean, the Old Testament that I read is a history, a tremendous cycle of coming out of nowhere into empire and back into the dispersion of a people.
00:46:33.000Sometimes the cycle is cut short, sometimes it goes complete, but it shows you where God is at each part in that cycle.
00:46:39.000That's an amazing revelation to me, and I think that if you can't find the deep truths that have powered Western society to both moral superiority and technological superiority, I think you're missing something.
00:46:51.000I don't think you're reading the book right.
00:46:55.000Anybody can take a book and read it in a certain way and make it absurd.
00:46:59.000I can do that with Shakespeare, my favorite writer.
00:47:01.000I can take him and say, oh, this is weird if you read it that way.
00:47:05.000Like everything, you have to know how to read it.
00:47:07.000And I think that that was also one of Kant's points where he said, we don't
00:47:11.000We must not thoroughly need revelation because we know the truth when we see it.
00:47:15.000We wouldn't recognize revelation if we didn't have something in us to greet revelation.
00:47:20.000So you do have to greet the revelation of the Bible with something within yourself.
00:47:24.000And I think that that's, you know, again, I think what they do with science is they get very, very detailed and elegant in their arguments about science, which I approve of, and then get very blunt and stupid.
00:47:35.000And not one of them has read any theology.
00:47:38.000Not one of those atheists has read any serious theology.
00:47:41.000So they're always arguing with a guy on TV.
00:47:44.000They're arguing with a televangelist half the time when you should be.
00:47:47.000I mean Pinker has spent tons of ink arguing about the ghost in the machine.
00:47:51.000I don't know anybody who believes that there's a ghost in the machine.
00:47:54.000You know, that's a dead-end Cartesian belief, you know, that I think we've gotten past and actually before that we had other more sophisticated beliefs.
00:48:02.000So they're just not engaging with real religion.
00:48:06.000So you're very big on Kant, and Kant is sort of a quasi-natural law theorist, but not quite.
00:48:22.000Well, what Kant was doing was, in the moment that he was... The way I read him, okay?
00:48:26.000And I'm not a sophisticated philosophy reader, but, you know, I have read a lot of it, and this is my take on what he was doing, was he saw very early on in the Enlightenment, in the new scientific world, as the Germans did, that God was in trouble and our beliefs were in trouble.
00:48:42.000But he also saw what I think is beyond question, that morality could not survive the death of God.
00:48:50.000And so he came up, because it is really difficult once you start to actually make the argument that morality doesn't exist.
00:48:57.000You know, it sounds good if you're in your dorm smoking dope at three in the morning, but in real life, you know, you can't really make the serious argument.
00:49:04.000And he saw that, so he thought, well, then there must be a God.
00:49:07.000And in order for there to be a God, there really must be sort of two planes of existing.
00:50:24.000All I'm saying is that he puts down a roadmap of understanding that I have found very helpful.
00:50:29.000It's not like I... He also has this wonderful talk about how we receive information that takes shape in our minds because our minds have a way of giving it shape, which I think has turned out to be scientifically the case, you know?
00:50:42.000That to me is really important because it's one thing to say to me, the world is not as I see it as a human being.
00:50:50.000You know, the table is really just a force field or whatever you want to say.
00:50:55.000But it is true that if I turn north at 53rd Street, I'll get to 54th Street every single time.
00:51:01.000So the world, the phenomenal world that I see, it's not
00:51:26.000Not necessarily that you could tell teleology from the universe around you in sort of the Aquinas sense, but more that by searching your own moral sensibility you could come up with the idea of God because we all have these interior moral sensibilities.
00:51:38.000So then what need is there for religion in the first place?
00:51:44.000Because I really do think, and when you read the Bible, a lot of this has to do with guarantees of the truth, the revelation of the burning bush, the revelation of the incarnation.
00:51:56.000These are things where God is saying to us, yes, I know, I know this path makes sense, I know this relativistic path can make sense, you can analyze things forever.
00:52:20.000And I think that this is sort of the Judaic perspective on Greek thought, for example, is there's this famous statement by Yehuda Halevi, who was a very famous rabbi in, I believe, the 11th century.
00:52:29.000And his statement was basically that Greek philosophy is beautiful but has no fruit.
00:52:33.000Meaning that it's wonderful to study and it's wonderful to learn about, but it doesn't actually dictate action in the same way that an implicit command to do things does, or an implicit rulebook for living does.
00:52:44.000And it's kind of arrogant of some of these thinkers to say, well, you know, we couldn't even recognize the truth if we didn't already know the truth.
00:53:20.000And I think that when you have that kind of rule, for instance, when I'm reading the Bible and it seems to me to be telling me that, oh, this guy, I can get rid of this guy.
00:53:42.000And I think it's tremendously arrogant to think that you can think your way to the light because you can think your way right off the edge of a cliff.
00:53:49.000So how do we actually reinculcate some of these beliefs?
00:53:52.000Because obviously this is, you know, the work in which you're engaged is the work in which I'm engaged.
00:53:57.000And it's daunting, obviously, because you have an entire culture that is built to believe in its arrogance that it could have created all these values, just tabula rasa.
00:54:06.000Even after a century of us slaughtering each other at unprecedented rates, it's an uphill battle.
00:54:12.000People have an easier time believing in no God than in God.
00:54:17.000I think one of the problems we're having right at this moment is that politics is the opposite of thought in some ways, that politics demands that you
00:55:41.000The thing that I think we all worry about, you'd be a fool not to worry about, is as you're moving toward the light, as you're moving toward the good, what horrors will occur.
00:55:51.000You know, I mean, you live in faith and you live each day hoping that this is not that day.
00:55:55.000So, you know, I would be remiss if we went through this entire episode and I didn't ask you, you're talking a lot about narrative and about storytelling.
00:56:01.000I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about your experiences in Hollywood, because obviously you're a Hollywood writer, you've made some money writing movies in Hollywood.
00:56:09.000Do you just not talk about any of this around anybody in Hollywood?
00:56:12.000Well, eventually, I virtually got kicked out.
00:56:14.000I mean, I got kicked out one office at a time, you know, but I still got kicked out.
00:57:52.000I think, like, you're lucky they just sent Trump.
00:57:54.000You're lucky they didn't show up themselves, because there's 64 million of them, and they would have been well within their rights to come.
00:58:00.000This is what bothers me, and it ultimately bothers me about us, because I don't need them.
00:59:24.000You know, you call up and say, here's an idea about this.
00:59:28.000And now, because everybody knows who I am and what I think, I will go into rooms now and say, there's 64 million people with 20 bucks in their pocket that you can't reach and I can.