The Ben Shapiro Show - Unraveling The Mysteries of The Ancient World | Spencer Klavan

00:00:00.000 Obviously, to me, the route forward lies instead in a recovery of our uniqueness as opposed to these machines.

00:00:07.000 What are the things that we do that they don't?

00:00:09.000 Like experience, like see colors, like feel love.

00:00:13.000 I mean, for a long time, we've thought of ourselves as the smartest things in the world.

00:00:17.000 That may be changing.

00:00:18.000 But one nice thing about the Bible is it actually never defined humanity as the smartest entities on Earth.

00:00:25.000 It defined us as being in the image of God.

00:00:28.000 And that to me is a better route forward for recovering what we are and how we can kind of survive and even grow into this age of AI and all the other stuff we're discovering.

00:00:38.000 Spencer Clavin is an associate editor at the Claremont Institute, host of the Young Heretics podcast, and a scholar of ancient Greece.

00:00:45.000 Clavin's astute political commentary ranges from critiques of the modern left to philosophical explorations of the ancient world.

00:00:51.000 His articles are routinely featured in outlets including The Atlantic, Newsweek, The Federalist, City Journal, and The Daily Wire, as well as Claremont's review of books and The American Mind.

00:00:59.000 Most recently, Clavin's expertise is on full display in The Daily Wire's new series, Foundations of the West, where he sits down with Jordan Peterson to discuss the enduring relevance of classical ideas.

00:01:08.000 In today's episode, we explore Clavin's latest book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World.

00:01:12.000 Clavin rejects the popular notion that science and religion are incompatible, and instead forecasts a future where scientific discovery leads to a religious resurgence.

00:01:20.000 We also discuss the symbolic relationship between Athens and Jerusalem, as well as the religious observations of great scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.

00:01:27.000 From the origins of the West to the shortfalls of AI, don't miss this exceptional conversation with Spencer Clavin.

00:01:32.000 Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special.

00:01:34.000 Spencer, thanks so much for taking the time, really appreciate it.

00:01:48.000 Ben, it's a pleasure, thanks for having me.

00:01:49.000 So let's talk about your brand new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, which is all about the relationship between science and faith.

00:01:56.000 So obviously the way that many people are taught in public school or have come to believe because of the

00:02:01.000 media is that science and reason are completely opposed

00:02:05.000 to faith and religion.

00:02:07.000 And these two things have been in conflict forever and sort of the key story that everybody is told

00:02:12.000 is the story of Copernicus.

00:02:14.000 And the basic idea is that anybody who is in any way, or Galileo rather, that anybody who is in any way religious

00:02:21.000 is obviously opposed to science and reason.

00:02:23.000 You're telling the opposite story in this book.

00:02:27.000 And I think that conventional wisdom that you just described is a real disservice to people.

00:02:34.000 Just everyday people who go through our schooling system and get sold this bill of goods about the opposition or even the war between science and religion.

00:02:44.000 Because it makes people feel like in order to be smart, in order to be rational, in order to live in the real world, they have to abandon The most important thing to all of us, which is the life of the soul and the life of the spirit.

00:02:58.000 And so what I'm arguing in this book is that that narrative about the divide or the war between science and religion isn't just pernicious, it's not just wrong, it's also wildly out of date when it comes to the science itself, which is now starting to reveal these fascinating Facts about the material world that we live in that starts to sound more and more like the world as described in the Jewish and the Christian scriptures.

00:03:26.000 So I think we really need just a hard reset on this whole idea.

00:03:30.000 I wrote the book in order to take people through the real history of science and reveal how religion has always motivated the best scientific discoveries and how science as it is currently unveiling the natural world can reveal to us the glory of God.

00:03:46.000 And just to take that barrier away from people who feel as if in order to be rational

00:03:52.000 or to believe in science, they have to throw out all their traditional ancestral

00:03:56.000 faith and belief in the creator of the world.

00:03:58.000 Well, it is a wonderful and necessary task because as you say, this is the biggest barrier

00:04:02.000 that's now thrown in the way of people who are traditionally religious 0.99

00:04:05.000 is the idea that you're an idiot if you're traditionally religious 1.00

00:04:07.000 because how could you believe all of these ridiculous miracle stories 1.00

00:04:11.000 when you have right in front of you a phone The phone is filled with technology.

00:04:14.000 Do you have to believe the dinosaurs weren't real in order to believe that the God of the Bible is real?

00:04:20.000 Why exactly would you believe in these miracle stories but somehow you know You know, suggest that you can still operate in the real world.

00:04:27.000 And of course, the reality is that science can't prove itself.

00:04:31.000 This is something that scientists are constantly attempting to sort of ignore, but science as a process is not a provably true process.

00:04:39.000 And in fact, the very idea of an absolute truth is a faith principle because evolutionary biology, as I've said many times, does not point to truth.

00:04:45.000 It points to adaptability.

00:04:47.000 And so you can say that perhaps an idea is adaptable, that perhaps it helps us in our evolutionary fitness.

00:04:53.000 But you can't ever make the claim that it has an absolute level of real truth.

00:04:58.000 That is a faith principle.

00:04:59.000 And in fact, virtually all of science is rooted in faith principles like that.

00:05:03.000 That's absolutely right.

00:05:04.000 And I would add to that and say that whenever you are confronted with a crisis in science, which happens all the time, a question that seems to have no logical answer or a contradiction, a paradox that, for example, physicists are now facing when it comes to the relationship between relativity and quantum mechanics.

00:05:23.000 Whenever you come up against one of those roadblocks in the progress of science, in order to proceed, you have to have, even if you don't admit it, you have to have a kind of religious faith, which is a belief that our human minds, our little monkey cantaloupe brains that evolved on this planet, are connected.

00:05:43.000 To a logic that runs throughout the entire created universe.

00:05:47.000 There's absolutely no materialist reason to believe in that.

00:05:50.000 And the pioneers of the scientific revolution didn't think that.

00:05:54.000 Galileo is actually a perfect example.

00:05:57.000 When he was being challenged to defend his observations with the telescope, one of the things he said is, I don't want to insult God by believing that my reason has a hard stopping In other words, if it's true that human reason only extends so far and no further, that's an insult to religion.

00:06:16.000 The religious point of view at that time, or one at least of the most passionately faithful points of view, was that because we're made in the image of God, that classic Judeo-Christian idea, our minds are little microcosms or templates for understanding the whole rest of the natural world.

00:06:34.000 If you take away that religious conviction, you have no reason to believe that or to expect good answers to the questions that science teaches us to ask.

00:06:43.000 I don't know if you saw Ben the Three-Body Problem show on Netflix that made such a splash, but what's amazing about that series and the trilogy of books that they're based on is that's a science fiction work that genuinely takes place in a universe Without the ordering principle of God.

00:07:00.000 And it's a universe of chaos.

00:07:01.000 That's what the three-body problem is.

00:07:03.000 It's a problem with no rational solution that you can write out in an equation that the human mind can grasp.

00:07:09.000 And as Liu Qishan, the author, takes that story further and further out, you realize what a nightmare horror world it is to live in when you can't believe in that. But he's

00:07:19.000 the only guy that's taking the atheist point of view seriously in science and

00:07:24.000 showing what a disaster it really is. Most of the time we tend to blithely

00:07:28.000 assume that science is going to keep working without the underpinnings of God

00:07:32.000 and I just don't think that's going to fly.

00:07:34.000 And again this holds true for a wide variety of these premises.

00:07:37.000 So, one that you mentioned there is the premise that human beings have a capacity to have a mind that actually reflects truths in the universe, which is a really arrogant point of view, and yet it also happens to be true.

00:07:48.000 And it's not arrogant when you realize that God made us in his image.

00:07:51.000 As soon as God says it, it's no longer arrogant, it's just an accurate depiction of the way The world works.

00:07:56.000 Another one that scientists are frequently fond of ignoring when it comes to themselves, but they'll spread the reverse for everybody else, is the basic idea that they have agency in the world.

00:08:06.000 That scientists are sitting around, they're making discoveries, that what they do matters, that it has importance in the world.

00:08:10.000 Nowhere in a logic that suggests that we're meatballs aimlessly wandering through the universe does it suggest either that those meatballs have force of their own, that they can be self-directed, or that that has any importance in a cosmic scheme.

00:08:20.000 And yet, every scientist that I know and that I've ever met ignores their own perspectives and philosophies when it comes to how they act in the world.

00:08:28.000 What's hilarious about that determinist point of view that you're describing, that we're just the product, the outcome of a series of basically physical interactions, stuff bumping up against other stuff.

00:08:39.000 What's really funny about that attitude is that it almost always comes accompanied with an instruction to act in a certain way.

00:08:46.000 You are simply the product of evolution.

00:08:48.000 Therefore, don't worry about this or that.

00:08:52.000 spiritual concern.

00:08:53.000 Well, if I'm just the product of evolution, why should I take your advice?

00:08:57.000 How can I take your advice?

00:08:59.000 Why should I listen to you?

00:09:00.000 What do your words have to do with anything besides the product of chemical interactions in your brain?

00:09:06.000 A lot of this comes from, of course, we can blame the French, and I tell this story in the book. 0.99

00:09:13.000 A lot of this comes from the French interpreters of Isaac Newton.

00:09:16.000 Newton, of course, one of the great geniuses in physics, in mathematics, in science generally, comes up with these clear and simple rules for describing physical motion as we typically encounter it throughout the universe.

00:09:30.000 And that was one of those barriers, one of those roadblocks that had been broken down.

00:09:34.000 It was called the superlunary and the sublunary realm, the idea that different rules applied beyond the moon.

00:09:39.000 Then apply here.

00:09:40.000 And Newton shattered that barrier, revealed that you can describe planets and dewdrops and billiard balls with the same set of equations.

00:09:48.000 So the French took this and thought, oh, I can use this to disprove the existence of God.

00:09:54.000 Newton would have been appalled at this.

00:09:56.000 He believed, of course, that what he had done was revealed the glory of God.

00:09:59.000 A lot of the Enlightenment era French interpreters of Newton were keen to use this as a description

00:10:06.000 of a universe that needed no God to continue on working.

00:10:11.000 And the major advancer of this idea was this guy Pierre-Simon Laplace, who lived through

00:10:16.000 the French Revolution, served under Napoleon, huge luminary of French physics.

00:10:24.000 And he writes this essay on probabilities, which is really an essay on the idea that

00:10:29.000 there are no probabilities, only certainties.

00:10:32.000 He says if you can conceive of a mind that would take in the physical location of every particle in the universe and its initial momentum and conditions like that, you could tell the story of past, present, and future in one And of course, he's talking about the mind of God, but he's proposing that humanity can achieve that kind of perspective and know past, present, and future through an equation, through central planning.

00:10:56.000 I mean, the consequences of this are all over modern bureaucratic government and communism, etc.

00:11:03.000 But the joke here, the punchline is, Laplace was dead wrong.

00:11:07.000 And that's the major advance that physics, particulate physics, has made in the last hundred years.

00:11:12.000 It begins with the discovery that particulate motion actually can't be fully determinist.

00:11:18.000 So even at the atomic level, this idea, which has taken hold in so many people's mind, is scientifically false.

00:11:24.000 And that's one of the things I point out in the book.

00:11:26.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment.

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00:12:29.000 Yeah, so let's talk about that because obviously you get deep into in the book Light of the Mind, Light of the World, you get into The modern discoveries with regard to quantum mechanics, and of course it's been stated that if you actually understand quantum mechanics, then that just demonstrates that you don't understand quantum mechanics.

00:12:44.000 It is a bizarro world, it is almost impossible to truly understand what the hell anybody is talking about, because it really is about wild levels of indeterminacy, things spontaneously popping in and out of existence and such.

00:12:57.000 What does that have to do with the exploding of certain Sure.

00:13:06.000 Well, Albert Einstein said what you were just describing in another way.

00:13:10.000 He said that this system of quantum mechanics, which was then emerging, looks like the ravings of a highly intelligent psychotic.

00:13:17.000 In other words, the kind of like schizophrenic that hijacks your email list with a long Comic Sans description of how everything fits together.

00:13:25.000 That's what quantum physics can kind of look like.

00:13:28.000 And as I said, it begins really with the The earlier work of Ludwig Boltzmann, who kind of inspired these guys like Max Planck and later pioneers, who discover, as you say, that at certain levels of the material world, we're not actually looking at a bunch of billiard balls clattering together.

00:13:46.000 We're not looking at these lumps of matter colliding.

00:13:50.000 We're looking at something much more mysterious and strange.

00:13:55.000 The best description of this that I know of that's ever been given was given by Niels Bohr, who was one of the great lights of this time, and he was the founder of what's now called the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics.

00:14:08.000 And what he basically says is the reason this stuff looks so weird to us is because we're

00:14:13.000 beginning for the first time in mathematics to approach the threshold of the world outside

00:14:20.000 of our observation.

00:14:23.000 We're always having to describe the results of our observations, the results of our experiments,

00:14:27.000 but what we're trying to get at in quantum physics is what happens when our backs are

00:14:31.000 turned.

00:14:32.000 And it stands to reason, Bohr thought, that without human perception, things don't follow

00:14:39.000 even the most basic categories that we apply to the world, like motion through space and

00:14:45.000 These things that we think of as kind of hard-coded into reality are actually brought into being by the human experience, by human observation and perception, by conscious minds.

00:14:56.000 And what I think this really means is that the world of Laplace, which is this pure machine described so beautifully by the Newtonian equations, this world that we think of as a kind of dead object with no human involvement, no human will as part of it, is actually something that we are co-creators of.

00:15:15.000 The world needs us to take the shape that we experience the world in.

00:15:20.000 And that actually is the reality, the situation described in Genesis, as you alluded to, man in the image of God, a creation that has to be seen in order to be brought into being, a creation that is the product of language and communication.

00:15:35.000 All of these things are at the heart of what quantum physics suggests and leads us to discover about the world, and it totally upends this idea that we're meat robots living in a metal machine.

00:15:47.000 You know, what you're talking about also has a sort of corollary for religious people who have bought into this binary as well.

00:15:55.000 So we've talked about scientific materialists who have bought into the binary that you can't be a religious person and still believe in science.

00:16:00.000 But there have been a lot of religious communities that have responded to that binary by saying, fine, we just won't buy into science.

00:16:06.000 Alright, so if you're telling me one of these things is false, then I pick science is false, and the Bible is true, and it's literally factual in every respect, that there's no metaphor, there's no poetry, it's not a bunch of different forms of literature, that everything is to be taken absolutely Literally, that the Earth is actually some 5,000 years old, that the dinosaurs did not exist, that they were planted there by God.

00:16:27.000 How do you respond to people who are religious and take the Bible seriously, so seriously that they say that if the words of the Bible seem to be in conflict with the discoveries of science, then science must just be wrong?

00:16:39.000 Well, you know, I have a tremendous respect for people that are so firm in their faith that they want to make sure that nothing attacks or destroys or undermines it.

00:16:51.000 I know that this is something we cling to as the core of what makes us virtuous, what leads us into the truth, what shapes our lives to be good and upstanding.

00:17:03.000 And I have no desire to take that away from anybody or to attack it even, really.

00:17:08.000 But I do tell a pair of stories in the book that I think speaks to this.

00:17:12.000 And the first one is the story of Albert Einstein, whom we've mentioned already, one of the great geniuses of the 20th century, who begins as a boy with a deep and abiding love and fascination for the Bible and for his Jewish upbringing and teaching.

00:17:29.000 And at around the age of 12, says Einstein, he finds out about paleontology.

00:17:34.000 He discovers dinosaurs.

00:17:36.000 And he basically says, I gave up my Bible for my science textbooks because I was looking for truth and I concluded that here was truth.

00:17:45.000 Now that's a person who has accepted an understanding of truth that was effectively invented in the wake of the scientific revolution, that unless something is telling you materially verifiable facts that can be measured and observed on a graph or a chart, then it has no truth.

00:18:04.000 At all.

00:18:04.000 And of course, Einstein weighs the Bible and religion in the balance and finds it wanting.

00:18:09.000 The other story I tell is Charles Spurgeon, who says exactly what you say.

00:18:13.000 This is the great preacher, Charles Spurgeon, and he says, some people are confronting me with this evolutionary theory.

00:18:20.000 And I say that my grandmother has more sense than the evolutionists because she knows that every new development and idea that comes along doesn't need to distract her from her faith.

00:18:30.000 And I think that that's a totally understandable response to the situation that we've been seeing.

00:18:37.000 But I think it has proven really ineffective as a response.

00:18:40.000 And one reason why is I actually think it's the opposite side of the coin from the mistake that Einstein made.

00:18:48.000 So Einstein has basically been sold this bill of goods that if it's not materially true in a verifiable dates and facts kind of way, then it's not true at all.

00:18:58.000 Spurgeon is accepting the very same thing and playing the materialist's game.

00:19:05.000 And there are certain branches of biblical fundamentalism that I actually think, without realizing it, give the game away before it starts by refusing to admit the possibility of metaphor, of storytelling, Of course, there are historical facts recorded in the Bible, but there's also a much larger and richer vision of humanity that's conveyed in all these other different ways, traditionally throughout the history of the Church.

00:19:30.000 And the last thing I'd say is, if we're going to toss all of that out, if we're going to get rid of the possibility that the Bible has more to reveal to us about our humanity than just the deadening ideas of materialist science, then we're abandoning a whole bunch of people, smart Well-intentioned people to Einstein's fate and I don't think any evangelist with an ounce of heart should do that.

00:19:54.000 I think we should be able and willing to speak to the people like Einstein who are seeking in all sincerity for truth.

00:20:02.000 And what we should be telling them is not the truths of science aren't true.

00:20:05.000 What you can see with your own eyes aren't real.

00:20:07.000 What we should be telling them is there's so much more that you can understand about the world,

00:20:13.000 about yourself, about your place in the universe, than only science and only matter can tell you.

00:20:18.000 And that's what's contained in our scriptures and our wisdom traditions.

00:20:21.000 So, this conversation has already sort of taken us to a series that you and I filmed together with Jordan Peterson

00:20:27.000 called Foundations of the West.

00:20:29.000 The first couple of episodes are out right now.

00:20:32.000 My episode with Jordan was in Jerusalem and it was very much about sort of the faith principles that we've talked about, the individual made in the image of God, the changes that the Hebrew Bible makes to ancient texts In order to obtain these moral lessons.

00:20:45.000 If you look at old ancient texts, what they always talk about is the king is made in the image of God, but the people are completely different.

00:20:50.000 The people are never spoken of as in the image of God.

00:20:53.000 The Bible takes that and universalizes that and says, no, every single individual is made in the image of God.

00:20:57.000 Just take one biblical principle.

00:20:59.000 These principles are revelatory principles.

00:21:01.000 These are not things that you can reason your way to.

00:21:03.000 That despite what the founder said, that these are self-evident truths, they're certainly not self-evident.

00:21:08.000 They are self-evident to Christians who are living in the 18th century.

00:21:11.000 They are not self-evident to people who are living in 1000 BC.

00:21:15.000 And so the Bible's description of the relationship between humanity and the divine,

00:21:21.000 that does require a revelatory touch.

00:21:23.000 It requires some finger of God touching man at some point in time

00:21:28.000 in order to bring these principles down.

00:21:31.000 And those principles become sort of the seedbed for Western civilization on the one hand.

00:21:36.000 And then episode two, you took Jordan to Greece.

00:21:39.000 Why don't you talk about what that was like?

00:21:41.000 Well, I would suggest, Ben, just that the truths of the Declaration are self-evident only in the sense that once you see them, you cannot unsee them.

00:21:50.000 That's right.

00:21:50.000 And I think that's kind of what they meant, but we now have this impoverished, almost progressivist idea that self-evident means just lying there on the ground for us to pick up because we're so smart and so brilliant that we're able to effectively discern them.

00:22:07.000 Perfectly, and not only perfectly, but better than our ancestors who taught them to us, right?

00:22:12.000 In a way that is more pure, more just, more virtuous than all the many people who had to sweat and bleed and die to figure this stuff out.

00:22:21.000 And I love what you say about the Bible as revisionist history in your episode, right?

00:22:27.000 That there is this Whole literature, pre-existing the Genesis story, at least in its present form, that describes the world in a different way.

00:22:38.000 And Genesis is actually saying, no, all these idolatrous religions are wrong. 1.00

00:22:42.000 Man is made in the image of God.

00:22:44.000 It's a universal principle.

00:22:47.000 On the other side, not of the world itself, but of the known world, on the other side of the West, you have Athens, which is developing, fascinatingly, kind of a separate tradition.

00:23:00.000 It doesn't have this revelation, doesn't have some of the truth that you can only learn through scripture but is becoming a hotbed especially in the 5th century BC for the stuff that you can gradually work your way to by logic or what the Greeks called Logos, the reason that threads through all creation.

00:23:22.000 So what Jordan and I talked about when he came to Athens is just how that Human tradition was built up century by century until it reaches this kind of pinnacle, I think, in classical Athens and would then await the coming, really, of Jerusalem to meet up with it, to touch it from on high through the spread of Christianity and the Roman Empire and all of that is a story that we tell in the rest of the series, which I'm really excited for people to see.

00:23:50.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

00:23:51.000 First, after the assassination of Hezbollah's senior military commander and the assassination of the head of Hamas, the terrorist-supporting nation of Iran has now promised retaliation against Israel.

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00:25:18.000 God bless and thank you.

00:25:19.000 So, let's talk about what, you know, it's a question that I ask in a book I wrote, you know, now years ago called The Right Side of History.

00:25:26.000 You know, what exactly does Athens need Jerusalem for and what does Jerusalem need Athens for?

00:25:30.000 Because again, this goes back to sort of that science reason versus religion divide.

00:25:35.000 if you are a devotee of Greek thought then it's easy to say okay well we don't need any of this

00:25:40.000 Judaic nonsense merging and becoming Christianity we don't need any of that sort of stuff. 1.00

00:25:44.000 You know we've got a self-contained philosophy that self-contained philosophy has created

00:25:48.000 democracy has created extraordinary military power because obviously Greece is a military

00:25:53.000 power that is springing from a very small and relatively you know insular region of the world.

00:25:58.000 What do we need Jerusalem for if we start in Greece and what is what does Jerusalem

00:26:03.000 need Greece for why isn't that just a self-contained system?

00:26:06.000 Yeah not only is it really easy to ask that question lots of people did.

00:26:11.000 In fact, people asked it from both sides of this equation, right?

00:26:13.000 Tertullian, what hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?

00:26:17.000 And in the episode that I did with Jordan, we talked about the Sermon on the Areopagus, which is where St.

00:26:25.000 Paul, in his missionary journeys, ends up in Athens, and he ends up in really the oldest site of political authority in the city, not the Acropolis, the big famous one with the Parthenon, but this rock essentially, Mars Hill.

00:26:40.000 And at that point, the author of the account in Acts tells us that The Athenians were busy engaged in doing nothing other than hearing whatever new idea could come to them.

00:26:54.000 And this is why they summoned Paul as well.

00:26:57.000 At least this guy's got news.

00:26:58.000 At least he's got something interesting to say.

00:27:00.000 And I think that speaks to the condition of The classical world and pagan philosophy, by the time Christianity showed up on the scene, by the time Athens met Jerusalem, that might give us a key into the answer to your question.

00:27:15.000 What does this beautiful, perfect system of philosophy need that the philosophers can't already tell us?

00:27:22.000 And the answer is that Hellenistic philosophy, Greek philosophy after the pinnacle of that civilization, It had kind of reached a point like the point in Ecclesiastes where it says vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

00:27:35.000 They described and catalogued everything in the known world, come up with beautiful thought structures for organizing and understanding what they had experienced.

00:27:45.000 But what they didn't know or what they could only guess at was the trajectory of us, of humanity.

00:27:52.000 Beyond this self-contained material world that they had described.

00:27:57.000 And so, in some ways, what they needed is the same thing that science needs in order to function.

00:28:02.000 Like we were just talking about earlier, they needed some kind of message from outside of the self-contained natural system that they had described.

00:28:12.000 And that's what Paul came bringing.

00:28:14.000 As you say, that's what Scripture, both Jewish and Christian scripture, the Judeo-Christian tradition claims to offer.

00:28:21.000 And some people, the Bible says, accepted this, some people didn't.

00:28:25.000 But if there was something that Greek philosophy needed, it was that motion forward, which transformed the rest of history.

00:28:32.000 Because instead of this idea of stasis, you have this idea of the coming of the kingdom of God.

00:28:38.000 Which will lead, in time, to the abolition and discreditation of slavery.

00:28:43.000 It will lead to all sorts of revolutions in the ideology of the Democratic Republic.

00:28:50.000 It creates, really, the nation that we live in now.

00:28:53.000 It forms those self-evident truths in the minds of the founders, and it ends us up here today.

00:28:59.000 So we're really talking, I guess, in this series about stuff that you have to know in order to understand where we are and who we are.

00:29:06.000 One of the things that I think you could say about what Jerusalem does is Jerusalem provides a value system that allows you to balance between the sort of tyrannical impulses that you see in Greece and the freedom impulses that you see in Greece, which they're constantly battling with one another.

00:29:21.000 You have this obvious freedom impulse, you have democracy to a certain extent, obviously.

00:29:25.000 You have freedom of speech to a large extent, unless you violate, in which case, you know,

00:29:29.000 theoretically they can bring you up and poison you.

00:29:31.000 But they have these principles that don't exist in other parts of the world.

00:29:34.000 And then you also have some pretty tyrannical overtones to, you know, Plato's writing, for

00:29:39.000 example.

00:29:40.000 Plato's Republic is a full-scale communistic tyranny that is justified by the logic that

00:29:44.000 Plato lays out.

00:29:45.000 Now, you can read that in sort of a Straussian manner and suggest that actually what Plato

00:29:49.000 is talking about here is a dystopia and that he doesn't actually mean anything that he's

00:29:52.000 actually saying in Plato's Republic.

00:29:54.000 Karl Popper would argue the opposite.

00:29:55.000 He would argue he means exactly what he's saying in Plato's Republic.

00:29:59.000 But in either case, what we're seeing is that there's a lot of tyranny.

00:30:00.000 And I think that's what we're seeing.

00:30:02.000 What Jerusalem says is, here is a higher value system.

00:30:05.000 You can apply it to these other values, and that allows you to order these values dependent on what exactly you're attempting to obtain and what the higher goal is.

00:30:15.000 Because when it comes to Greece, they're widely varying ideas of what the higher goal is, and it's very easy for that to itself devolve into a moral relativism.

00:30:22.000 I think this is where you see a sort of mirror to the openness of American society.

00:30:26.000 American society incredibly open, lots of free speech, but it's very easy to see how

00:30:30.000 if liberty becomes an inherent value rather than an instrumental value, or freedom itself

00:30:35.000 is the value, then it's very easy to see that devolve into moral relativism.

00:30:39.000 Because why exactly is freedom to do bad is an argument I have with our friend Jeremy

00:30:46.000 I've made the argument that there is no actual, in any sort of moral sense, freedom to do bad.

00:30:50.000 Freedom exists in order to effectuate the good, but you don't have freedom to do, freedom to do bad does not make things better.

00:30:57.000 Freedom as an additive to doing a bad thing actually makes the thing worse.

00:31:00.000 And so the minute you say freedom is the highest value, what you're really saying is there are no other values.

00:31:05.000 And so you end up in a sort of morally relativistic place, which is what the Bible rejects.

00:31:10.000 Fascinating.

00:31:10.000 That's such an interesting idea.

00:31:11.000 I mean, this is the idea that you don't want to have such an open mind that all your ideas fall out of your head, right?

00:31:16.000 And that definitely was a problem in the history of ancient Greece, not only, as you suggest, these sort of flirtations with authoritarianism that we get even in the best philosophers.

00:31:28.000 Like Plato, but also in some of the worst episodes and most shameful episodes in Athens' own history.

00:31:34.000 The classic event to cite here is the Melian episode in the Peloponnesian War, which the historian Thucydides talks about this as a moment when Athenian love of ideas and debate and discussion and weighing different possible values against each other Turns its shadow face toward the world and reveals the corrupt version of this which is pure relativism and the words that Thucydides puts in the mouth of the Athenian delegate is the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must.

00:32:10.000 And something that Aristotle himself would have told you is that That every human good has a corruption and a shadow side, and the better the good is, the worse the fall of the corrupted version.

00:32:21.000 So for Athens, which had engaged, embarked upon this kind of glorious adventure into discovering that there were absolute truths, that they could be known, at least in part, by human minds and approached.

00:32:35.000 And that the way to do that was through this tradition of isegoria, the kind of open debate and discussion and isonomia, the equality of rights or equality of the law, I guess we would say.

00:32:47.000 You know, the ugly version of that is, well, if everything is permitted, then nothing is true and all courses of action are equally valid.

00:32:57.000 So you just end up effectively in a battle of And you're right, I think it's one of the avenues that Jerusalem closed off was this idea that you could just go on having this discussion forever.

00:33:16.000 Which is kind of the fate, if you'll recall, of the Greek philosophers in Dante's Inferno.

00:33:21.000 They're not in hell, they're just at the gates of hell and they're having this conversation eternally with no hope of ever reaching a conclusion.

00:33:28.000 And Athens says no, there is actually a highest good.

00:33:32.000 And it does it by creating what you describe, or rather this is Jerusalem, ends up doing what you describe and establishing this hierarchy of goods and saying it's not just that Everything is as good as everything else, but rather that you can have some things that are good, like freedom, as a route to things that are higher, like excellence, virtue, beauty.

00:33:53.000 And you need freedom in order to get there, but if you prioritize freedom over the thing that it exists to create, then you're going to end up standing on your head, and that's not good for anybody.

00:34:04.000 And it does feel as though, you know, we are sort of doomed to just recreate these debates over the course of time, because it feels as though the West is sort of late-stage Athenian.

00:34:13.000 The West, having now run its course in terms of Christianity, according to the church statistics, that as people run away from churches and synagogues and traditional religion, that what you're ending up with is this radical

00:34:26.000 polarization on the planet more generally between a sort of religious fundamentalism that rejects

00:34:30.000 everything Athens related, which would be probably Islamic fundamentalism, and then you and

00:34:35.000 then the the sort of weakness of and moral relativism that you see predominant in Europe,

00:34:40.000 which is is basically destroying itself on the shoals of this moral relativism, and also at

00:34:44.000 the same time opening its door to the fundamentalist to actually invade it, which is which

00:34:49.000 is a fascinating turn of events, because as Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out, I mean, the

00:34:53.000 real histories for about a thousand years at least has been that the West is the has

00:34:58.000 had the upper hand and that during the Roman Empire, the West also had the upper hand.

00:35:01.000 So there's a brief period of time in which the West did not have the upper hand, and you would actually see, for example, Islamic invasions of Europe.

00:35:08.000 Basically, since about 11-1200, that's not been the case.

00:35:11.000 The West has been in the ascendancy, in the era of powerful and self-confident Christianity. 0.94

00:35:20.000 And as that begins to fade, you're actually starting to see You're starting to see a reversion to what would be more historically a sort of foreign policy dark age, where you have an invasion of people who are coming from places that fundamentally disagree with any enlightenment ideals, and they're creating massive problems inside the West, and the West has no systemic immunity to fight it at all. 0.78

00:35:42.000 Well, this would not totally shock, I don't think, some of the great Greek historians and theorists of history.

00:35:50.000 In some sense, what you're describing is anti-psychosis, the cycle of regimes.

00:35:56.000 And in our modern day, you hear it kind of in meme form as, you know, hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times.

00:36:08.000 And there's no Off-ramp, as far as I can see from that reality, this side of paradise.

00:36:16.000 I do think that as humans, we're always staving off disaster one more day.

00:36:21.000 And I would also agree with you that wherever we are in that cycle of history right now, it's clearly a crisis point.

00:36:30.000 It's clearly a point when we've lost a lot of our civilizational mojo.

00:36:36.000 The confidence has kind of drained out of What was in the 20th century the heyday of Western liberal democracies, now there's all this confusion and even outright denial about the ideas that kind of gave rise to that flowering.

00:36:51.000 And, you know, one of two things I think is going to happen.

00:36:54.000 In this moment, we are either going to go the way of every decadent empire ever, and it'll be hundreds of years of darkness and sorrow and suffering until the next one gradually comes along.

00:37:05.000 But given the option, I would prefer rather instead a revival, a renaissance.

00:37:10.000 And those sorts of things also have happened without total calamity in the history of the West.

00:37:17.000 Renaissance that we all know and love in the 16th century and slightly before of visual art isn't the only Renaissance that we've been through.

00:37:27.000 There have been these revivals of the great ideas of the West because not only do we have this Athens side of the coin, but we have this Jerusalem side which in its Christian modality includes the idea of resurrection, that it's actually possible for one person, one culture to persist and live Through death and a kind of birth to new life.

00:37:49.000 And I think if there's anything that what you and I are doing here and talking about here, Ben, if there's any point and purpose to it, it's to try to clear the way for that sort of revival and resurrection.

00:38:02.000 It'll begin with recovery, but it won't end there.

00:38:05.000 carry this stuff forward into the future, into a world that includes science and computers and quantum physics and the internet and all the stuff that we are now grappling with.

00:38:15.000 But the first step, I think, is to clear away some of the garbage that has accreted over time that teaches us we can't look back to our ancestral truth, our religious traditions, in order to steer us forward to, hopefully, a future that doesn't involve, like, total civilizational decline. 0.52

00:38:32.000 And one of the things that you talk about in the book is this sort of transhumanist movement, this sort of bizarre desire to move beyond humanity itself.

00:38:40.000 And you do see a lot of this in the AI community.

00:38:42.000 I mean, if you've spent any time in the tech bro community, yeah, I have a lot of people there who I really like.

00:38:46.000 They're very interesting thinkers.

00:38:47.000 But there is this desire for almost AI to act as a deus ex machina.

00:38:52.000 That AI is going to solve all the problems because it is going to be Laplace's machine.

00:38:56.000 It's going to take in all the data, it's going to pump out all the data.

00:38:59.000 All the data are going to be more accurate about our own desires, wishes, and wants than

00:39:03.000 anything that was put into the machine.

00:39:06.000 And that it will essentially be able to govern our lives for us.

00:39:09.000 And that will inherently change humanity in new, variegated ways.

00:39:13.000 The tech optimists would say in good ways.

00:39:16.000 I think that people who have more of a religious bent would say in some pretty unforeseeable and maybe terrible ways.

00:39:21.000 What do you make of AI and where do you think humanity is going as a philosopher?

00:39:26.000 Well, hey, I have a great idea.

00:39:28.000 Let's build a machine that has the outward appearance of a human being.

00:39:34.000 Then let's attribute to it consciousness and allow it to rule our lives.

00:39:40.000 Nobody has ever come up with this idea before.

00:39:43.000 Oh wait, that is the literal description of how idols are built in like Psalm 115, right?

00:39:50.000 So this has been a tendency, you might even say the central kind of gimmick or tick of the human heart forever.

00:39:58.000 And every time it happens, the excuse is the same.

00:40:01.000 It's, oh, this time we actually have the tech, though.

00:40:04.000 And I'm pretty sure they probably said that about, like, the brick and mortar that they used to make the Tower of Babel. 0.92

00:40:10.000 It's like, oh, this time we've got brick to put together, and now it's, well, this time we've got this hyper-powerful code, which, let me say up front, I think is awesome.

00:40:20.000 Like, I think it's kind of amazing that we've created these large language models, that they do something no computer has yet been able to do, that with all this stuff, all these applications that we have yet to discover in, like, You say medicine, and I've talked to scientists who use it to kind of model deformities in genes that might help them to come up with new cures.

00:40:40.000 I mean, the list is endless.

00:40:43.000 But in order to use any tool rightly, you have to know what it's doing.

00:40:49.000 And what struck me about the advent of A.I.

00:40:52.000 and the moment of peak A.I.

00:40:54.000 is how wildly disconnected the reality was from what people were saying about this technology.

00:41:01.000 What A.I. 0.89

00:41:02.000 is doing is it's basically taking a bunch of words or images off the internet, scraping them into a big black box, churning them up into slop and taking the average, which is why so much of the poetry that ChatGPT writes is such trash.

00:41:15.000 It's because it's the mid, it's like functionally, definitionally mid.

00:41:19.000 A ton of great uses for that.

00:41:20.000 That's not the same thing as human thought.

00:41:23.000 And even people that study neuroscience are aware that there's no isomorphism between what that machine is doing and what our thought is doing.

00:41:32.000 We can certainly trick ourselves into believing that it's thinking.

00:41:37.000 And, again, people have been doing that since they had to carve statues out of wood and name them Ball and bow down before them.

00:41:45.000 But that's the thing that's going to bring disaster.

00:41:48.000 Not the machine running out of hand and figuring out how to turn us all into paperclips, but us, in our dead-end philosophy, with no better idea than to outsource our humanity onto machines, believing that this object is going to be ours.

00:42:05.000 That's a dead end that we've just got to get over.

00:42:08.000 It's, again, sort of why I wrote the book and why I wrote it the way that I wrote it and why I spend some time on AI in there is because when people make these predictions, it says nothing about the technology and everything about the people inventing and using the technology.

00:42:21.000 And insofar as what they think they're doing is building a human being or a god, they reveal themselves to know less than nothing about philosophy, theology, or our humanity.

00:42:33.000 And obviously, to me, the route forward lies instead in a recovery of our uniqueness as opposed to these machines.

00:42:40.000 What are the things that we do that they don't?

00:42:42.000 Like experience, like see colors, like feel love.

00:42:46.000 I mean, for a long time, we've thought of ourselves as the smartest things in the world.

00:42:50.000 That may be changing.

00:42:52.000 But one nice thing about the Bible is it actually never defined humanity as the smartest entities on Earth.

00:42:59.000 It defined us as being in the image of God.

00:43:02.000 And that, to me, is a better route forward for recovering what we are and how we can survive and even grow into this age of AI and all the other stuff we're discovering.

00:43:12.000 I think that's such a deep point, especially because one of the big questions that arises from AI on a very practical level is, what do you do with your day?

00:43:19.000 I mean, if the idea of AI is that it's going to, you know, take up all of our work and it's going to essentially be the Star Trek replicator machine.

00:43:25.000 It's going to be able to make whatever you want at any time.

00:43:27.000 It's going to have a 3D printer and you're going to have an idea.

00:43:30.000 It's going to make it for you in five seconds flat.

00:43:31.000 What do you actually do with your day?

00:43:33.000 And the traditional answer would have been you spend it with your family and you spend it with your community and you spend it at your church or your synagogue and that you learn about God and that you actually connect with your fellow human beings.

00:43:44.000 And we've gone so far astray from that.

00:43:46.000 It's hard for people to even picture that as a possibility for a thing to do with their life.

00:43:51.000 Yeah, that's a great point.

00:43:52.000 I mean, this is, Marx had this vision of what the world would be like without work.

00:43:57.000 And it's interesting that even Marx, you know, he had yet to see the disastrous consequences

00:44:02.000 of his ideas in practice.

00:44:05.000 But he has this idea that, yeah, we're going to do fishing in the morning, we'll spend

00:44:08.000 time with our family in the afternoon, and maybe we'll write poetry criticism in the

00:44:12.000 evening.

00:44:13.000 And you now see people kind of developing, casting about for schedules, things to do,

00:44:17.000 how to live, if indeed our machines do get good or even better than us at certain tasks

00:44:24.000 that we currently, you know, do at work.

00:44:28.000 And in order to give an answer to that question that does not, unlike Marx's, devolve into

00:44:33.000 totalitarianism and repression, you have to have an idea about the point and purpose of

00:44:39.000 your humanity, which I think is to glorify God and to know him continually.

00:44:42.000 And in order to understand that, you have to get over your allergy to talking.

00:44:47.000 Those terms so we really may be in fact reaching as you sort of indicate we might be reaching a crisis point where it's either that or a sort of abjection and despair which I think is what you're seeing in a lot of civilizations that are even further down this road than ours I mean I think of Japan a country for which I have enormous Affection and some affinity with the culture and language but they're still more childless than we are and their technology really has kind of taken this terrifying replacement level structure. 0.92

00:45:25.000 That's an example of a place where you've lost sight of what your humanity was for to begin with.

00:45:31.000 It's a gift and it's a special charge that nothing can replace, but to recover that you really do have to, I think, believe in some sort of higher power.

00:45:40.000 So I want to move from here to some vulgar politics, because obviously it's election season, and when it comes to, you know, the vulgar politics, it's always so funny to talk with people who are deeply read in philosophy about politics, because everybody sort of goes, what are you, like, what is the relationship between A and B, right?

00:45:55.000 You're sitting around reading Greek philosophy, and then you look at the presidential race, and it's Donald Trump, who certainly has not read Greek philosophy, versus now Kamala Harris.

00:46:03.000 What are you saying, Ben?

00:46:05.000 I'm sorry, I forgot he speaks Greek.

00:46:06.000 Yeah, no, it's true.

00:46:08.000 You've never seen him recite the Iliad?

00:46:09.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:46:10.000 So you've got Trump on the one hand, who is certainly no, I would say, philosophical scholar.

00:46:16.000 And then you have Kamala Harris on the other hand, who they will portray as a philosophical scholar,

00:46:20.000 but certainly is also no philosophical scholar.

00:46:23.000 And so what you end up doing when you read philosophy or spend a lot of time with these thoughts,

00:46:28.000 is you end up sort of arguing over the very, very tip of the iceberg.

00:46:32.000 It's like everything that's happening on the surface.

00:46:34.000 And you have to explain to folks that what's happening at the very tip of the iceberg

00:46:37.000 has extremely deep roots.

00:46:39.000 So to take an example, the Democratic National Convention

00:46:41.000 opened with a land acknowledgement.

00:46:43.000 And so everybody sort of now takes this as rote, as though this is not a big deal.

00:46:46.000 Why would you make a big deal out of this?

00:46:49.000 But it actually says something quite fascinating and quite dark about the Democratic Party, that they decided to open the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago with a land acknowledgement effectively suggesting that the United States, that Western civilization is illegitimate, that it stole the land of Chicago from the natives, and that the natives are the true owners of the land.

00:47:10.000 And that should say something about whether or maybe you should vote for a party that actually opens its proceedings with a land acknowledgement.

00:47:18.000 I think that we are so fond of sort of picking up the sort of Very diluted version of the crap that's taught at universities, that if you spend time at the universities, you know exactly what the thing is. 0.97

00:47:30.000 You can smell it, and you know that it's bull. 0.57

00:47:32.000 And if you're not, and you smell it, and you're like, I'm not sure exactly what that is.

00:47:36.000 I don't know exactly what I'm looking at here.

00:47:38.000 Maybe you can talk about what politics is in the modern day and how it's tied into these deeper philosophies.

00:47:45.000 Yeah, that's a great point.

00:47:47.000 I mean, they say that if you're explaining, you're losing in politics, which is bad news for those of us that really love not only explaining, but having things explained to us.

00:47:57.000 And I would say that this is half true.

00:47:59.000 It's true on the campaign trail, and it's a good reason why I'm not running for office right now.

00:48:04.000 Right?

00:48:04.000 I mean, if you're explaining in a stump speech, something's probably gone grievously wrong.

00:48:10.000 And the other part of this is that if you're having fun, you're probably winning.

00:48:14.000 And one of the most effective dimensions of Trumpism and MAGAism for a while in its best forms has been the fun, the dancing, the rallies, which, as always, the Democrats do this with everything.

00:48:27.000 They've now taken that, hollowed it out, drained it of its life and worn worn it as a skin suit and they're trying to pretend that 0.97

00:48:32.000 Kamala is basically like the female version of Trump dancing to the YMCA song. I don't 0.90

00:48:39.000 know how long that's going to work, but it shows you what kinds of dynamics are at play and the

00:48:44.000 comparisons to like President Kamacho in Idiocracy and the Monster Truck Rally version of

00:48:49.000 American politics are becoming more and more apt by the day.

00:48:53.000 But there's a way in which explaining is not losing.

00:48:57.000 And that's when we circle up among those of us that basically agree that the country's in dire straits, that the country needs rescuing, and that we need good strategies for doing that.

00:49:10.000 I'm not going to make the stump speech, but you and I in these sorts of conversations are working out the understanding that is going to help us to pinpoint exactly the weakness of a Kamala Harris.

00:49:23.000 And it's through understanding the deeper roots of these things that we can kind of gather together our observations into something like a theory that makes sense.

00:49:32.000 So for instance, if you just turn on the TV and you see this like giant IUD sculpture

00:49:36.000 and you see this Planned Parenthood whatever and you see like people dancing around and

00:49:42.000 you're like Obama's on stage, it's all kind of a bit disorienting.

00:49:46.000 And this is what like Plato would identify as the shadows on the cave, right?

00:49:49.000 This is like the most distant possible emanation of something which many, many miles away somewhere

00:49:56.000 is real and authentic and true.

00:49:59.000 If you spend time in your off hours reflecting on philosophy and thinking about the deeper

00:50:06.000 history that we talk about in Foundations of the West, you might gradually start to

00:50:11.000 realize that actually the land acknowledgement and the IUD are

00:50:16.000 are profoundly connected at the roots because they both send the message, we shouldn't be here.

00:50:22.000 We're not supposed to be here.

00:50:24.000 We have no right to this country and we should probably die out.

00:50:27.000 And this is where you start to see taking shape, the vision of a culture of death.

00:50:32.000 And you see that as we start to talk about this stuff, you do get some political slogans out of it.

00:50:37.000 Like a culture of death is a chilling and terrifying thing.

00:50:41.000 And much like the, truths of the founding, once you see it, you can't unsee it.

00:50:47.000 So I think you're absolutely right when we react in the moment to these individual outrages, these

00:50:53.000 flickers across the news feed, whatever tweet we saw last, then we're running blind

00:51:00.000 because we really are just kind of reacting to the latest possible bubble at the top of a very, very

00:51:06.000 deep ocean.

00:51:08.000 But when you spend time diving into the ocean, you can start to learn, I think,

00:51:12.000 and understand how the bubbles are part of a current and how you potentially can make some sort of motion

00:51:19.000 to alter the way that things are going.

00:51:22.000 And each of us is gonna have a different role, right?

00:51:23.000 Some of us are gonna campaign, some of us are gonna talk and write,

00:51:27.000 some of us are gonna run for office.

00:51:29.000 But the thing that philosophy and history does for us, I suspect, in politics,

00:51:34.000 is it kind of gives us a second to take a breath, reorient before we get back into the fight.

00:51:40.000 And that last step is really important because it's really easy and extremely enjoyable

00:51:45.000 to just spend all your time up in the clouds.

00:51:47.000 But in the end, each of these highfalutin ideas does have a hard and fast concrete application

00:51:53.000 in like, you're gonna vote for A or B, who are you gonna go with,

00:51:56.000 of these very, very imperfect options.

00:52:00.000 And I think those questions are easier to answer from a place of high principle.

00:52:04.000 But in order to really execute, you have to descend from that place into the, like, white-knuckle boxing and mosh pit of politics.

00:52:12.000 I'm sad to say.

00:52:13.000 I mean, to look at the other side of that, you know, I think that the philosophy of the Democrats at this point has actually become pretty clear and pretty open, a lot more than it was 20 years ago when they were obscuring a lot of their messages.

00:52:23.000 Now Kamala Harris is trying to obscure some of her messages by changing her positions. 1.00

00:52:29.000 Scratch the surface for more than half a second, you can see exactly what you're talking about.

00:52:32.000 That this is a party that is effectively running on abortion.

00:52:36.000 They're handing out free vasectomies at the DNC.

00:52:40.000 That they are a party that has catered to the pro-Hamas wing of their own movement.

00:52:45.000 It's pretty obvious exactly what they are, which is a cowardly iteration of a West that is in retreat.

00:52:51.000 And that's in pretty much every iteration of every policy.

00:52:54.000 What they're seeking is effectively civilizational hospice care.

00:52:58.000 They're going to redistribute the resources of the civilization until we die out.

00:53:03.000 But in the meantime, we'll have ourselves a fairly decent farewell party.

00:53:07.000 And then you have the right side of the aisle.

00:53:09.000 And the right side of the aisle is a mess.

00:53:11.000 There's been an attempt to sort of treat Trump as Trumpism, as though there's an actual MAGA movement, as opposed to Make America Great Again, which is, in fact, just You know, an iteration of a political program that really does not have a ton of specificity to it.

00:53:25.000 A lot of it has to do with people who just love Trump's affect, who are fascinated by what Donald Trump is as a human being, because he's an inherently fascinating person, obviously.

00:53:34.000 And then there's been this attempt by a wide variety of philosophers to sort of craft a philosophy of Trumpism out of Trump, which has always seemed chimeric to me.

00:53:44.000 It's always seemed a little bit like there is no Dana-only Zool.

00:53:47.000 Like, what are you doing?

00:53:48.000 There's no Trumpism-only Trump.

00:53:50.000 You can't really craft a philosophy around a person who doesn't really have a philosophy of his own.

00:53:55.000 Trump has a set of impulses.

00:53:56.000 I think that those impulses lie at the top of a much more solid philosophy of civilization that he himself doesn't understand, in the same way that most of our impulses politically are built on top of giant substructures that we don't understand, that we haven't investigated.

00:54:10.000 Yeah, I think that's true of Trump too.

00:54:12.000 But, you know, you'll see arguments between West Coast Rousiers and East Coast Rousiers.

00:54:16.000 What does Trump mean?

00:54:17.000 Or you'll see Bronze Age mindset versus, you know, a sort of more Chris Ruffo attempt.

00:54:23.000 What do all these things mean?

00:54:24.000 When you look at the possibility of Trumpism, is there a Trumpism or is Trump just sort of the latest iteration of an anti-left movement that looks at what the left is doing and essentially says, this cannot be.

00:54:35.000 Well, I would totally agree with you that it's probably a mistake to create a philosophy of Trump, but it might not be a mistake to create a philosophy about Trump.

00:54:47.000 In other words, it's a failure of imagination to attribute to the man some kind of deep psychological situation where he's really playing 4D chess and he's got

00:54:58.000 this grand theory of the case, Trump is telling us exactly what's going on 100% of the

00:55:05.000 time, so far as I can tell.

00:55:07.000 And in order to kind of preserve their picture of him as the great savior, there are some

00:55:13.000 people that have tried to kind of repackage that as like a brilliant philosophical ploy.

00:55:20.000 I don't think that's what's going on.

00:55:22.000 I think Trump has basically always been a symptom.

00:55:26.000 He's been a symptom of the advanced stage of gridlock and decay that our political system had reached by 2016.

00:55:34.000 And that included what you're describing on the left, which is this managed decline.

00:55:40.000 These people that want us to go gently into that good night or even maybe help the process along a little bit so that the virtuous, I don't know, indigenous people or leopards or like nature can just take back over and everything will be 1.00

00:55:54.000 fine.

00:55:54.000 Another version, by the way, in its ultimate conclusions of that anti-human or transhuman

00:55:59.000 philosophy, that it would be better if we didn't do the job of being human and something

00:56:04.000 else did.

00:56:05.000 And so that's one thing that Trump is a reaction to or a symptom of.

00:56:08.000 And then the other thing is a kind of inability on the part of certain elements on the right

00:56:17.000 to really grapple with the seriousness and the dedication of that leftist movement.

00:56:24.000 And you did have for a while on the right these adjustments in tax policy that felt like putting lipstick on a pig.

00:56:32.000 They felt like adjusting these little tiny Fringe issues when really what we needed was a kind of upheaval and a full scale rejection radical in the deepest sense that is going down to the roots of everything that's that's going on on the left and all the disputes that you're describing which I think are totally valid and legitimate among different

00:56:52.000 parts of the right, like the Chris Ruffos and the Bronze Age people and all that,

00:56:56.000 anybody that's in that conversation is basically trying to hash out what the most effective way is

00:57:03.000 and sustainable way is to accomplish that rejection of this leftist cancer that has

00:57:09.000 sort of seeped its way into the roots of our politics. And the only response to the Trump

00:57:15.000 symptom that doesn't seem to me legitimate is to pretend that it's not happening or to pretend

00:57:21.000 that it comes from nowhere. The left likes to pretend that it's...

00:57:24.000 Pure atavism, mere racism, sheer prejudice.

00:57:28.000 Some people on the right, I think, like to pretend that he's just a populist demagogue that is waving his arms around so big and shouting so loud that everybody's following him.

00:57:38.000 That's not true either.

00:57:39.000 He tapped into something, and he tapped into this long-standing discontent with civilizational decay.

00:57:46.000 Now, within the right, the really interesting conversation, I think, is What's the proper response and how did we let it get this far?

00:57:56.000 And the most interesting part of that conversation is, was it America itself in some sense that was always doomed to do this?

00:58:03.000 There are obviously a million different varieties of this, but basically it's Was this doomed to happen because of the structure of the founding itself?

00:58:11.000 Or was this kind of a perversion of American politics and ideology?

00:58:15.000 And on that side, you've got like kind of the Danines and the Integralists. 0.89

00:58:19.000 And then on the other side, you've got the Rufos who say, no, this is America. 1.00

00:58:25.000 America is actually well founded.

00:58:27.000 It's still the best governmental technology that we have.

00:58:30.000 We just, it needs a serious update for the 21st century and a refurbishment and recovery.

00:58:35.000 I'm on that side and I have yet to see anybody propose anything that would replace the regime as founded, replace the constitution, replace the founding documents that strikes me as an improvement rather than just a regression to strongman politics or to whatever other things, you know, have been proposed from time immemorial.

00:58:52.000 So that's where I stand and that's what I think is going on on the right right now that makes everything so chaotic.

00:58:58.000 Well, Spencer Clavin, his brand new book is Light of the Mind, Light of the World, Illuminating Science Through Faith.

00:59:02.000 It was released October 1st.

00:59:04.000 Spencer, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:59:05.000 Also, check out Foundations of the West, terrific series.

00:59:07.000 Really great to talk to you.

00:59:09.000 It was a delight.

00:59:09.000 Thanks for having me, Ben.

00:59:20.000 Associate Producers are Jake Pollack and John Crick.

00:59:23.000 Production Intern is Sarah Steele.

00:59:24.000 Editing is by Jeff Tomlin.

00:59:26.000 Audio is Mixed by Mike Corimina.

00:59:28.000 Camera and Lighting is by Zach Ginta.

00:59:30.000 Hair, Makeup and Wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.

00:59:33.000 Title Graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

00:59:35.000 Executive Assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

00:59:37.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

00:59:40.000 Executive producer Justin Siegel.

00:59:42.000 Executive producer Jeremy Boring.

00:59:44.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 25, 2024

Unraveling The Mysteries of The Ancient World | Spencer Klavan

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