The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:01:08.060 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:02:00.780 Hello and welcome to season four, episode 48 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. In this episode,

00:02:07.480 my dad hosted two of the UK's finest scholars in philosophy and religion, Dr. James Orr and Dr.

00:02:14.120 Nigel Bigger. They discussed identity-focused culture, nationalism, human rights throughout history,

00:02:21.180 ideology, theology, and more. Also, things are going great in the Peterson household. I don't think I've

00:02:29.960 been able to say that for five years. Things are going to get crazy this year in a good way. I hope

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00:06:10.320 Hello everyone. I'm pleased to have two of the UK's finest scholars here with me today,

00:06:35.320 Dr. James Orr and Dr. Nigel Bigger. Dr. Orr is university lecturer in philosophy of religion at

00:06:42.340 Cambridge. He's director of Trinity Forum Oxford and Trinity Forum Cambridge and a regular contributor

00:06:48.280 to the Times Literary Supplement and the Critic Magazine. Formerly MacDonald postdoctoral fellow at

00:06:55.000 Christchurch Oxford, Dr. Orr holds a PhD in M. Phil in philosophy of religion from St. John's

00:07:01.700 College Cambridge and a double first in classics from Balliol College Oxford. He's the author of

00:07:08.480 The Mind of God and the Works of Nature 2019 and co-editor of Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics

00:07:15.880 and the Theology of Nature. That's 2022 at Routledge published that. Dr. Nigel Bigger is the Regius

00:07:23.620 Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, where he also directs the MacDonald Centre for

00:07:29.200 Theology, Ethics and Public Life. He's also an Anglican priest and his professorial chair at Oxford

00:07:36.980 is tied to a canonry in Christchurch Cathedral Oxford. He holds a BA from Oxford, a Master's in

00:07:44.420 Christian Studies from Regent College Vancouver and an MA and PhD in Christian Theology and Ethics

00:07:50.020 from the University of Chicago. Before his current post, he occupied chairs in theology

00:07:55.460 at the University of Leeds and at Trinity College Dublin. Among his many books are the recent

00:08:01.300 What's Wrong with Rights? Oxford 2020, Between Kin and Cosmopolis, An Ethic of the Nation, 2014,

00:08:10.700 and In Defense of War, Oxford 2013, as well as Behaving in Public, How to Do Christian Ethics,

00:08:18.940 2011, Provocative Titles. Well, thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today.

00:08:26.960 James, why did you want to have this discussion?

00:08:31.300 Well, my first reason for wanting to have a discussion with you and together with Nigel is

00:08:37.640 that I felt that you were developing a voice and a kind of acuity in the public square on questions of

00:08:46.460 religion, of meaning, of transcendence. And those were the kinds of questions that drew me first to

00:08:54.440 the academy out of the law, but the kinds of questions that I think have never been more urgent

00:09:00.380 or more salient to individuals in the West, to society in the West. And so I thought this is an

00:09:09.200 extraordinary opportunity to talk with you a little bit about your views on religion and to hear Nigel's

00:09:16.980 too. Of course, we've talked a few, we've had many conversations over the years and Nigel's been a

00:09:21.940 great mentor to me. And I had a few happy years with him in Oxford. But yeah, this is a, it's an

00:09:30.200 amazing platform that you've carved out for yourself. And I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

00:09:34.580 So what makes you think it's so urgent and salient now?

00:09:39.760 Well, I think that questions of identity, questions of belonging, questions of significance,

00:09:49.080 both as those are kind of answers to them are kind of positively expressed, but also negatively

00:09:55.280 expressed, the sort of sense of crisis in the West at the kind of level of individuals, but also

00:10:02.480 trying to work out where it is we're going as a society, particularly now that we've slipped a lot

00:10:09.400 of our moorings that used to anchor us in, as it were, a stable normative universe. We told certain

00:10:18.740 stories about where we'd come from, where we're going, but broadly speaking, we're not believed by

00:10:25.260 everybody, but broadly speaking, gave us the kinds of parameters, the kinds of guardrails,

00:10:30.300 the kinds of coordination mechanisms, even the kinds of stigmas that helped us to pursue the

00:10:37.620 common good together for all of our different disagreements.

00:10:41.140 Okay, so you offered an implicit description of identity there, essentially. And that's quite

00:10:46.900 interesting, because so much of the current political discourse centers on a theory of identity,

00:10:52.920 but it's not a theory of identity that's based on identification with a central set of stories.

00:10:57.660 And that's something that's very, very different. And you also mentioned, in some sense, a collective

00:11:04.940 view of the future.

00:11:06.660 That's right. Yes. I mean, so I think the fact that we're all talking about identity now in a way that

00:11:11.460 we simply weren't before, is not a sign that we all know what it means, but actually a sign that

00:11:17.860 there's a kind of dislocation. Identitas in Latin doesn't mean anything at all. It just means,

00:11:23.780 it means sameness. And I think you don't really start talking about something until it starts to

00:11:31.740 disappear. I think it's Hegel who says at one point that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings

00:11:37.020 at dusk, by which he meant, this is in the introduction to the philosophy of right, by which

00:11:41.700 he meant, well, lots of disagreement about exactly what he meant. But it seems to be the case that

00:11:46.820 it was philosophy only starts to take a proper appraisal, a proper diagnosis of what's happened

00:11:53.780 after it's happened. And really the point where it's too late to do much about it.

00:11:57.820 Right. The question doesn't arise when everyone is in implicit agreement.

00:12:01.460 I think that's right. I mean, this is the old David Foster Wallace commencement address joke of the

00:12:07.740 goldfish going for a walk one morning in the goldfish bowl. And another goldfish turns to him and says,

00:12:12.860 how's the water? And the goldfish says, what's water? Well, we're now saying, what's your identity?

00:12:21.820 Even 25 years ago, that would have been in a sense, a meaningless question. What are you talking

00:12:27.360 about? What is identity? I had a student the other day who came to me and said, I want to look at

00:12:34.920 identity in Augustine. And I said, well, what do you want to do that for? And he said, well,

00:12:43.340 everybody's talking about it. The university is talking about it. The culture is talking about

00:12:47.160 it. I thought I could go and read the confessions and the De Trinitate and the city of God and try and

00:12:54.460 work out what Augustine has to say about identity. And I had to tell him that Augustine would have

00:13:00.980 been mystified if you'd asked him what he meant by identity. It meant something technical and really

00:13:08.040 rather trivial and empty. But so these are new ideas, but they're very dominant ideas and that

00:13:15.320 ideas that we don't really have the answer to, but we're happy to project onto the canon. We're

00:13:22.020 project to project back into the past. Reminds me of Nietzsche's statement about the question of

00:13:27.280 morality. He said that, well, when you're embedded in a culture that has a single morality,

00:13:33.140 the question is what's right and wrong within that structure. But then when you're subjected to

00:13:38.260 the onslaught of many moralities, the question of what is morality per se starts to arise.

00:13:44.920 And so the questions get deeper. And maybe that's a consequence of, you know, the intense cultural

00:13:50.080 intermingling that characterizes the world now. And the, I mean, that's a very rich and it's

00:13:55.360 enriched all of us, but it's also deeply unsettling and it raises questions. And of course, technological

00:14:00.540 transformation does the same, not least when it involves reproductive technology, let's say,

00:14:05.500 and changes the relationship between the sexes. I'm going to switch to Dr. Bigger and ask him the same.

00:14:11.400 Could I just make a comment on this business of identity, Jordan? Because I mean, I do think

00:14:18.880 certainly in some cases, identity is hooked into some kind of grand narrative. I mean, I guess I

00:14:26.280 think of human beings as we live our little lives and we often need a bigger story to identify with,

00:14:35.440 to give ourselves a significance that by ourselves we just don't have. Now, that may not be the case

00:14:40.680 everywhere, but I'm thinking particularly of nationalism. I'm Scottish born. I identify

00:14:49.260 as British because I'm both English and Scottish. I oppose Scottish separation from the UK. But,

00:14:56.060 you know, when Scots people say, you know, I'm Scots, I have a Scottish identity, I want to say,

00:15:02.300 well, okay, that's fine, but can you give an account of it? And it seems to me that

00:15:07.940 one can hold identities to account in this sense that when I claim an identity, I'm identifying

00:15:16.380 myself with something. So when I say I'm Scottish or British, I have in my mind, a certain set of

00:15:23.540 stories, a certain set of heroes, a certain set of values that I claim as my own and identify with.

00:15:30.740 And it seems to me that insofar as the stories and the heroes and the values have moral content,

00:15:37.760 that they are, they are morally accountable and can be morally criticized. So identity is not a kind

00:15:42.120 of, that's not bedrock. Okay, so that raises another question as far as I'm concerned, or a

00:15:47.080 couple is, first of all, you know, we might not identify with who we are, we might identify with

00:15:53.280 who we would like to be or what the ideal is. And when you talk about, you know, our finite mortality

00:15:59.280 and our longing for something greater, you know, I would think of that as part of a prime of the

00:16:04.960 religious impulse, essentially, that guides us to, toward the ideal that we're attempting to manifest.

00:16:10.620 And so there has to be something beyond us that we identify with. And then I would wonder if it's,

00:16:16.220 if it's not abstractly beyond, let's say, in the form of, of a religious notion, then it gets truncated

00:16:22.960 into something like nationalism, or something political, that's, that, that, that get, that then

00:16:29.180 gets inflated in significance to divine status, because the proper target of identification is

00:16:35.940 lacking. What do you think of that? Yeah, well, I think that that's, that's a danger, isn't it? That

00:16:41.900 they, the, the grand narratives we identify with, we divinize them, we give them an absolute status,

00:16:48.660 and, and nationalism at its worst does that, of course. So, so the nation becomes God, and the fact that

00:16:54.260 was, was it, Ernst Cronon talked about, or was it, you know, it's Fichter, I think, talked about

00:17:00.420 the nation being immortal, but the member of the nation, of course, is not, but you gain a kind of

00:17:05.380 vicarious immortality by belonging to the nation, which always continues, which actually it doesn't,

00:17:09.720 but never mind. But there is a, there is a religiosity to that. But I don't think that,

00:17:16.440 that all identities have to absolutize themselves in that way. So identify as British, American,

00:17:22.880 American, I could have lived and worked in North America all my life, I chose not to,

00:17:27.080 because I felt commitment to this country. Does that mean that I think that the UK is

00:17:32.580 eternal and absolute? Not at all. I mean, it didn't exist before 1707. It may not exist if

00:17:38.480 Scotland separates. But you have a place, you have a place for the relationship with the absolute in

00:17:43.520 your life. And so it's conceivable that the nation didn't have to expand for you to fill that gap.

00:17:48.320 I mean, I know in Quebec, there was a very interesting poll. You know, Quebec was the last

00:17:53.620 Western country, in some sense, to undergo the transformation from deep religiosity, almost

00:17:59.780 feudal religiosity, to secular status. That didn't happen until the 1950s. And then Quebec abandoned

00:18:06.020 Catholicism at a rate that was just absolutely staggering. But the Gallup organization indicated

00:18:12.160 that if you were a lapsed Catholic, you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist.

00:18:17.620 Oh, right, right. It was a piece of information I was looking for for years.

00:18:23.320 Just on that, I mean, I've noticed, and there's no proof here yet, but I've noticed that

00:18:31.920 the rise of Scottish nationalism is correlated with the precipitated decline in membership of the Church

00:18:39.440 of Scotland. Now, so I'm wondering, is there a kind of transference here from Presbytean religion

00:18:46.220 into Scottish nationalism? I suspect there is.

00:18:48.880 Okay, well, that reminds me of another central Nietzschean idea, which was that, a couple of

00:18:54.860 ideas, was that as a consequence of the death of God, which is, of course, something that Nietzsche

00:18:59.720 decried, he thought it was a murderous act, that we would become prone to either nihilism or

00:19:06.200 a form of radical communitarianism. He identified that with, essentially, with communism, or at least

00:19:11.220 with the spirit of communism at that point. And then I would say that the rise of fascism,

00:19:16.960 these are, in my interpretation, these are fundamentally replacement religions, except that

00:19:22.520 they have pathologies associated with them that a genuine religion, and we can talk about what that

00:19:27.840 might be at some point, it was one of the questions you guys proposed, they have pathologies

00:19:32.600 that genuine religions, in some sense, manage to skirt. Do you think that that's a viable hypothesis?

00:19:37.940 I mean, it's sort of predicated on the idea that we do have a deep religious instinct that's

00:19:42.620 associated with the necessity for us to adopt an identity.

00:19:48.160 Yeah, so when people desert kind of mainstream conventional religion, they kind of,

00:19:53.340 the religious instinct gets displaced. And so, in the case of Nazism, most obviously,

00:19:58.520 you get quasi-religious rituals. I don't know.

00:20:04.020 Yes, which the fascists were particularly good at, and those were non-verbal, so they were harder

00:20:08.200 to critique.

00:20:09.680 Yeah, but they created a sense of the transcendent. So, yes, I think that is a clause of all hypothesis.

00:20:20.260 The question of what kind of religion resists that is an interesting one. I mean, I guess religion has

00:20:29.980 always had a problem with degenerating into idolatry. That's to say, the identification of

00:20:36.240 something human, a piece of sculpture, a temple, a nation...

00:20:42.360 Concrete.

00:20:43.000 ...as divine. And that, of course, is a form of religion that monotheism, be it Jewish, Christian,

00:20:51.080 or Muslim, has been against, because God is God, and God is transcendent, and God is barely

00:20:58.920 understandable by human beings.

00:21:01.080 And there's a big gap.

00:21:01.560 Right, and there's an insistence on that. I mean, part of the insistence, well, the present-day

00:21:05.060 insistence in Islam of not making images is, I believe, it's a variant of the same doctrine

00:21:11.980 that you see in the Old Testament against making idols. And I think it's an attempt,

00:21:17.720 when it's working properly, to protect the concretization of the absolute. And that is

00:21:22.280 this psychological barrier against idolatry, which I think ideology is a form of, and I suspect,

00:21:29.720 although don't know, that it's etymologically related as well. And so, you know, you posited

00:21:36.020 right at the beginning, Nigel, that we're destined, in some sense, to search for something

00:21:41.020 beyond ourselves, that that's part of our actual nature. I guess I would wonder, too,

00:21:45.200 if that, you know, Piaget, the developmental psychologist, posited the existence of a

00:21:49.960 messianic stage in late adolescent development, and he didn't believe everyone hit that stage

00:21:55.920 of cognitive development, but that many people did, and that that was the point at which radical

00:22:00.720 inculturation should take place. But it was in, it was, it involved the turning outward to broader

00:22:08.140 world concerns, and, and the desire to join a cause. And maybe you can see that really intensely

00:22:14.840 between the ages of 17 and 25, something like that. And then, so university students are primed for that,

00:22:20.840 and then they're offered ideology. Now, I think, instead of, well, instead of what it is that we're

00:22:27.420 trying to lay out, what, what the alternative to that might be. So, so I wanted to ask you guys,

00:22:36.860 James, did you have something to say about all that?

00:22:39.220 Well, I mean, other than that, to say that, you know, this, there's sort of obviously good,

00:22:44.480 good nationalism and bad nationalism. And often the distinction is made between patriotism and

00:22:49.760 nationalism, and Nigel's written very well about this, but it's often overlooked. I mean, I think

00:22:55.500 that a lot of the problems today, certainly as we've, has been part of the debate in the, in the UK

00:23:01.200 in the last few years, has been this, this question of the, are you a citizen of anywhere, or are you a

00:23:07.720 citizen of somewhere? And a lot of the deep divides in our society flow from that basic distinction,

00:23:16.520 the distinction that the sociologist David Goodhart drew a few years ago. And a lot of the,

00:23:22.740 a lot of the differences that we are having, apparently a lot more trivial flow, are really

00:23:27.280 downstream of that, of that basic distinction. So there's a, there's an idea that Mircea Eliade

00:23:34.260 had about the, the continual disappearance of God, because he, he looked at Nietzsche's pronouncement

00:23:40.140 and said, well, God has vanished into the stratosphere of abstraction many times throughout

00:23:44.240 history. This isn't a one time only. The danger of an abstract God that can't be represented is

00:23:50.020 that he becomes so detached from human affairs that it's as if he's not there. And so the Catholic

00:23:55.160 Church maybe produces saints as intermediaries and priests to sort of link the absolute to the,

00:24:00.480 to the proximal. But I wonder too, is what happened with Brexit in the UK? I mean, I thought of that in

00:24:06.720 some sense as a tower of Babel phenomenon is that people felt that their representation in Europe was

00:24:13.380 so abstract that they were no longer connected to their land, to their town, to their community.

00:24:20.160 And so the distance between them and the central authority became too great. And there was a longing

00:24:25.940 for return to something like the concrete, which I had some sympathy for, but it begs a question too,

00:24:31.000 is like, maybe there's a rank order of identity. And so you are a patriot to your land, but that's

00:24:38.540 nested under, under an affiliation to something that's absolute, that isn't associated with nationalism.

00:24:45.360 And I talked with Stephen Fry a little bit, for example, about the utility of having a monarch.

00:24:53.060 It's sort of analogous to that is that the monarch is an abstract figure, but, but, but exists, and you can

00:25:00.340 have affiliation to her, like the prime minister does, and still be in charge of the state. And it's,

00:25:06.400 it's like, there's a hierarchy of identities, and the hierarchy has to be structured properly, or

00:25:11.080 the parts start to contain the whole in a way that's pathological.

00:25:16.760 Yes. Yes. I mean, I, I was just thinking, as you were speaking, that, that certainly the way a lot of

00:25:22.980 the arguments for thinking of one's love of country as a form of, of piety in the tradition of

00:25:30.320 moral theology, start from the most intimate and the most immediate. So it's love, love of, love of

00:25:38.440 parent, your, your, your biological parents, you didn't choose your parents. It's as it were, you're

00:25:43.440 thrown into this relationship with them, but it's the most intimate relationship there is. And

00:25:48.640 similarly, the thought is that you owe your loyalty, your loves, your affections to your community,

00:25:53.940 and so on and so on in, in, in ever expanding concentric circles. But I think both Aquinas and

00:26:00.380 somebody very different, somebody like David Hume later on in the, in the 18th century stressed that

00:26:05.580 there's, as it were, a kind of, there are diminishing returns as the concentric circles move, move

00:26:12.060 outward. And there's certainly a limit. And it's not, as it were, it may be not, not an ideal limit,

00:26:17.740 but it's simply a function of our finitude and our fragility. And, and, and in the Christian

00:26:23.660 tradition, our fallenness that we can't, as it were, love every single human, but we can't love

00:26:28.760 humanity in the abstract and nor can we love every single human being with the same sort of intensity.

00:26:36.180 So that might be a more positive way of thinking about why we ought to owe what Augustine calls our

00:26:42.540 common objects of love, or we treat our common objects of love as, as broadly proximate, but

00:26:50.160 organized by the, the, the horizon of a kind of transcendent orientation towards, towards the

00:26:56.300 source of love, which of course, in the Christian tradition is, is God himself.

00:27:00.260 Jordan, I, I, I, I, I fully agree with you that we, you know, we inhabit kind of a range of

00:27:07.140 identities, some more local, some more regional, national, global, and then religious. And each,

00:27:15.660 each identity, each thing we identify with, gives a certain meaning to our lives and a certain

00:27:20.480 significance. Just wondering, in terms of your encounter with young, younger people, at what point

00:27:29.520 does religious identification begin to gain traction?

00:27:33.720 Well, I think there's a, there's a variety of answers to that. One is that one pathway in is,

00:27:41.640 is the diagnosis that the desire for deep meaning and also deep responsibility is there and valid

00:27:50.380 and in everyone and to be encouraged and recognized. So there's that. And then, then there's a serious

00:27:58.820 discussion about, I would say about love and truth and the, and the pragmatic utility of both and,

00:28:06.740 and both as expressions of faith, you know, because you can't say, well, there's evidence that

00:28:12.860 love in the broadest sense is the most effective manner in which to orient yourself in the world.

00:28:18.740 You could make a counter case that it's power, for example, and you can't prove that speaking the

00:28:24.720 truth is for the best. And partly that's because people get into trouble for speaking the truth

00:28:29.000 all the time, but you can say, you can stake your life on those two things and see what happens.

00:28:34.600 And that there's an adventure in that. And, and that appeal to adventure, that that's really

00:28:39.320 attractive to you, especially to young men, but to young people in general. And then there's one

00:28:44.060 other element, which is part of it has to be the removal of rational objections. It's like

00:28:49.880 when I did my biblical lecture series, I said, I was going to stay psychological about it,

00:28:55.100 except when I had to become metaphysical because of my, the limitations of my knowledge.

00:28:59.800 And so I was trying to make sense of it. It's like, how can you have a relationship with this book

00:29:05.020 that makes sense so that you're not, that you're not crucifying your reason, but using it alongside

00:29:12.340 of you. And so that it's not mere, let's say, superstitious foolishness with regards to your

00:29:18.700 axiomatic presuppositions of the form that the rational atheists criticize. So, well, let's say

00:29:23.600 so effectively. So I, you know, I said, well, I brought reverence to the, to Genesis. I said,

00:29:29.440 this book's been around a long time and there's possible, there's the possibility that there's

00:29:33.440 something in it that I, that I don't understand that's appealed to people across history. And let's

00:29:39.420 approach it from that perspective and see what we can make of it. And that, that seems to have proved

00:29:44.380 extremely popular, like sort of unbelievably popular. And so, so when you mentioned this desire

00:29:54.220 for a deep desire, in a sense, for a sense, for, for a sense of being responsible, yeah, for, yeah,

00:30:00.280 and, and the truth, both of those connect to me, as it were, something that is given an objective to which

00:30:07.260 we are accountable. It reminds me of what your compatriot Charles Taylor once wrote in, in his

00:30:13.340 best, shortest book, I'm glad to say, the ethics of authenticity. He said, reflecting on authenticity

00:30:19.880 as being the kind of universal popular value we all recognize. He said, authenticity only makes sense

00:30:29.520 when there's a wider given horizon that gives it significance. So, so choice only has significance

00:30:35.780 within a context that gives it significance. Otherwise choice is caprice. It's, it's whimsy. It,

00:30:41.240 it, it, it doesn't matter at all. And so I suppose they, I mean, seeing, seeing this through

00:30:47.620 Christian eyes, as I do, um, uh, what we have here is a recognition of the need for, if you like, a given

00:30:56.520 moral order, uh, within which we are, you know, we have freedom and, and the freedom is, is what makes us

00:31:02.840 responsible and, and, um, um, makes our decisions and choices really heavy with significance. Uh, but

00:31:11.040 there, there is something that is given and we didn't create it. And, and a large part, not the

00:31:16.980 only part, a large part of the affirmation of, of there being one God is that there is not just a

00:31:22.440 physical coherence to created reality, but also a moral coherence. Um, so one God. Okay. So a couple of

00:31:30.480 things I want to talk about there. So, you know, if I look at authenticity from the psychoanalytic or

00:31:35.480 the psychological perspective, you talk about Carl Rogers and the humanists. Now Rogers, who I admire

00:31:42.140 greatly and who taught me a lot about listening technically, he was a humanist, but he was a

00:31:48.320 Christian seminarian to begin with and a wannabe missionary. And so his, his psychology of human

00:31:55.240 possibility is secularized Christianity right to the core. Now it's his talk about authenticity. So

00:32:03.660 he thought if you wanted to be a good therapist, that you had to be integrated. And so he talked to,

00:32:08.780 he's making a case for something like this hierarchical identity that we just discussed.

00:32:13.080 So imagine your identity is probably properly structured hierarchically with the utmost at the

00:32:19.920 top where it's supposed to be. And with everything in its proper place, that constitutes

00:32:23.680 you in the broadest sense. And then you speak in some sense from the center of that.

00:32:29.840 And so there's a kind of alignment that goes along with truthful speaking that's, that represents that

00:32:35.660 authenticity. And I think that's equivalent to, well, it's equivalent to Trinitarian phenomena in my

00:32:42.040 estimation. You know, when there's this emphasis in the gospels on the possibility of the spirit of God

00:32:48.200 inhabiting a group or an individual, especially in terms of their relationship with one another,

00:32:54.360 their dialogical relationship with one another. And there's really something to that. Like it's,

00:32:59.220 it's, it's not a, and it, it seems to be, you, you can enter that space when you're authentic in the

00:33:05.600 psychological sense, but it also means that the words that you're using spring up from the depths,

00:33:09.980 from the integrated depths. And that is associated with, that's associated with, with, with, with being

00:33:18.880 possessed by the ideal at that moment. If something like that, and you can call that forth out of

00:33:23.380 people, right? If you're engaging in a serious and honest dialogue with them and you trust and you want

00:33:29.000 the best from them, then they step up and then you can have that kind of conversation and it's

00:33:34.040 ennobling for everyone and everyone experiences it that way. Can I just suggest that, I mean,

00:33:39.780 we're using the word authenticity, but as listening to Nigel and listening to you now, Jordan, it seems

00:33:45.660 to me that you've actually expressed two, two very different and opposing sides of how one understands

00:33:52.880 authenticity. So Nigel offered the idea that authenticity, as it were, requires, presupposes,

00:33:59.500 or requires an author with a capital A, shall we say, some sort of given objective framework that

00:34:06.940 we don't, we don't script our own narrative. We have to, as it were, deal with the world as it's

00:34:12.860 given. You have elaborated beautifully and I'm not saying that the two can't be brought together. I

00:34:19.000 think this could be a very interesting next phase of the conversation. You in drawing on Rogers and

00:34:24.720 talking about the secularization of the sense of authenticity and the sort of the currents of

00:34:30.000 pneumatology and the spirit in the New Testament at the beginning of Acts are taking a more, shall

00:34:36.040 we say, self-scripting, self-authoring idea, account of authenticity. And this goes right back,

00:34:42.900 I suppose, in the 20th century. Okay, so I have some ideas about how those might be mediated. I mean,

00:34:48.140 I don't think you're, you're not speaking with your own voice when you're authentic in some sense,

00:34:53.740 because your proximal concerns are not relevant. All you're trying to do is to state what you

00:35:00.160 believe to be the case at that moment. And, and in honest response to the surrounding, it isn't

00:35:05.940 agenda driven, except at the highest levels of that hierarchy. So the agenda might be love and truth,

00:35:11.980 right? But it isn't anything proximal. It's not like, so for example, if I was trying to

00:35:16.340 argue against you and defeat you, that's Philo, Nikea, which I just learned, the love of victory,

00:35:23.800 if I was possessed by the spirit of the love of victory and was attempting to defeat you,

00:35:28.300 then I wouldn't be speaking in a fully authentic voice. It might be a more authentic voice than being

00:35:33.320 cowardly, but it's not as authentic as one that would be inspired by the highest possible motivations.

00:35:39.540 And, and my sense has been that it's, it's something like truth nested inside love that,

00:35:46.160 that constitutes that highest level of, of ethical striving. And so that speaks from with it,

00:35:52.340 within you perhaps. And it's strange that that would also be associated with authenticity,

00:35:56.500 because in some sense, it's not you.

00:35:58.500 It is, it is, because your definition of authenticity, which really, in a sense, it's,

00:36:07.840 it's you expressing your grasp of the truth, but it's not just you expressing yourself,

00:36:15.020 whatever that means. I mean, the, the, the common understanding of, of authenticity is,

00:36:20.320 is self-expression. Whenever someone says that, I think, well, you know, how do we know yourself is

00:36:25.740 worth expressing? How do I know myself is worth expressing, but your way putting it ties authenticity

00:36:31.140 to my grasp of the truth. So there is something apart from me, uh, which I'm relating to, which

00:36:38.580 gives it a kind of objectivity and, and seriousness and lack of caprice. Um, so, okay. So a couple of

00:36:47.480 things off that, I mean, this insistence by the radical left on lived experience and its validity,

00:36:55.080 well, it might be a stumbling towards something like that. Okay. Right. Okay. But then the next

00:37:01.160 thing, so let's leave, I'll put that up. But then the next thing I'm thinking about is I've really

00:37:05.420 been struck constantly by some of Jung's descriptions of Christ as a member of the Trinity, because

00:37:11.740 Jung makes much of John's sense of Christ, the logos that's there across time, which I read

00:37:19.600 something as something like create the creative consciousness that's involved in the bringing to

00:37:25.320 awareness of being something like that. So it's maybe identical to consciousness itself, at least

00:37:31.340 in its higher stages. It's very abstract, but then there's Christ, the carpenter who lived in a

00:37:37.200 particular time and place, which is kind of a mystery because everyone asks like in the movie,

00:37:41.940 Jesus Christ superstar, you know, uh, why that time in that place? And the answer is, well, it has to be

00:37:48.020 some bounded time and place. And so if we're, if, if what Christ is, is a representative in some sense

00:37:54.940 of what a human being is, is that there's a divine acts aspect to us, which is this creative

00:37:59.680 consciousness that's very abstract, but it's also localized intensely, you know, in a historic,

00:38:05.920 in an arbitrary throne to use the existential phrase, historical context. And then each of us is

00:38:12.100 unique in that manner, but there's something universal about each of us too, that enables us to reach

00:38:17.180 out to each other. And. And also gives each of our individual lives a larger significance that

00:38:24.900 otherwise they just wouldn't have at all. Well, yes. And the significant, you know, one of my students

00:38:28.840 once asked me a brilliant question is like, well, if the, if all stories have the archetypal structure,

00:38:34.480 why not just tell the same archetype over and over? And I thought, well, isn't that so interesting?

00:38:40.360 Because what you want is you want old wine and new skin, so to speak, right? You want, you want the

00:38:46.240 universal story particularized. And then I thought, well, that's exactly what Jung said about the

00:38:52.020 figure of Christ is it's the universal story particularized. And, and both of those, like

00:38:56.480 both the particularization and the universality, it's the intersection of those two that produces

00:39:01.180 the meaning. It also produces, I guess you say meaning, I would say human dignity because on the

00:39:09.440 one hand there is individuality. No one quite grasps the truth or speaks the truth in my time and place

00:39:17.180 like me. So in a sense, everyone is a unique prophet and has a unique responsibility, but we are commonly

00:39:26.520 subject to a universal order, universal obligations, universal calling, which, which endows our little

00:39:36.580 lives with a larger significance. I mean, this, this oscillation that you've been describing so

00:39:42.600 beautifully between the universal and the concrete, the general and the particular, you touched on it

00:39:48.400 earlier, Jordan, when you were talking about the iconoclasm of Judaism and Islam relative to the

00:39:53.640 the shocking acceptance and indeed embracing of particularity in the form of, of the second person

00:40:01.080 of the Trinity incarnate as a human being. And the, the, so that the sort of shocking Christian claim

00:40:07.840 is that God leaves his authenticating signature on the, not just on the processes of history, but on

00:40:14.320 this particular, this particular carpenter in, in first century Palestine. This is, this is what it

00:40:20.420 gets, gets Hegel and others just so excited that it seems to be this final synthesis where everything

00:40:26.960 could, as it were, come, come to a, come to a resting point. But as also, as, as Nigel says, it

00:40:32.560 also underwrites the, the dignity and, and as it were, the, the, the value, the intrinsic value of human

00:40:39.120 beings and others have written about the... Well, that's, that's another major question, you know, and this is

00:40:44.840 something I think the new atheists don't take into account at all because they have this

00:40:48.820 enlightenment orientation and they attribute the idea of human rights. It's like their historical

00:40:54.100 sense is truncated at 400 years ago. And that's really odd because so many of them are biologists,

00:40:59.640 you know, and, and they should be thinking across the millennia. Now that can be a problem for religious

00:41:04.040 thinkers too, because it isn't obvious that the worldview of the Bible is a 13 billion year old cosmos. But,

00:41:10.560 you know, I, I don't believe that our notion of rights is an enlightenment product. I think the

00:41:16.160 enlightenment articulated an implicit Judeo-Christian view of man and, and expressed it brilliantly in

00:41:24.200 many political documents, but that the roots of that explicit construction were mythological and

00:41:31.500 ritual and, and centuries or millennia or, or, or, or, or, or far past that old. And I actually don't think

00:41:39.640 that's debatable. I think the idea that, you know, that the, the, the dignity of the human being and

00:41:45.900 the rights of man emerged in the Renaissance, let's say in the enlightenment and out of nothing

00:41:51.760 is a completely absurd proposition. It's much more reasonable historically to look at the, at the

00:41:58.700 narrative precursors to that idea. Yeah. No, I, I, I agree entirely with that. I mean, there's,

00:42:05.120 it has been established that the notion of, of natural human rights can be found in the 13th

00:42:11.860 century in the medieval period. And Larry Seedentop recently wrote a book called The Origins of

00:42:17.580 Individuality, where he, he, he locates the, the, the, the notion of the, the, the value of the human

00:42:25.960 individual in a biblical Christian narrative. I mean, that they, the kind of archetype of the

00:42:31.560 individual is the prophet, the one who, who can respond to the call of God, um, is called out from

00:42:38.580 the mass of people. And indeed, poor old Jeremiah is, is, is called out to speak against his people

00:42:45.160 alone. Um, and it's, it's, it's, it's that, uh, it's, it's, it's the relationship between the

00:42:51.760 individual and the, and the call of God that it says creates the individual and draws them out

00:42:56.040 of, of, of the mass. Right. Well, and you see that so often in the Genesis stories. I mean,

00:43:01.020 Abraham's a classic example of that too. I mean, he's, he's a failure to begin with. I mean,

00:43:05.260 he's like 80 years old and still living in his dad's tent. He's called by God. And so this lowly

00:43:11.280 guy who's a non-starter is called by God and all that happens to him for the first section of the

00:43:17.340 story is one bloody, awful catastrophe after another. It's like, and you think, well, do you believe

00:43:23.040 these stories? Well, here's the question is what's not to believe about that? It's like,

00:43:28.220 there you are, you're a dismal failure and you're not living up to your potential. And then some,

00:43:33.140 you're inspired by something that forces you outside of your, of your proximal self and makes

00:43:38.540 you feel guilty and ashamed if you don't manifest it and enthusiastic, which means it possessed by God,

00:43:44.300 if you do manifest it and then you do. And then like, it's one catastrophe after another.

00:43:48.940 It's like, who doesn't believe that? How is that not life?

00:43:53.380 I mean, it seems like there are at least sort of three possibilities. There's a kind of the

00:43:58.980 enlightenment creationist account of dignity, just coming out of ex nihilo, coming out of nowhere

00:44:05.260 with, with Kant and, and others that says, which gives a kind of universalist basis to rights and a

00:44:15.200 kind of cosmopolitanism that is based on pure rationality and nothing else.

00:44:20.640 And we don't believe the silly stories anymore. Okay. So here's a, here's something that's

00:44:25.760 interesting, James. So let's say that's true. Well, then why not postmodern critique that

00:44:32.200 rationality out of existence? If there's nothing behind it, that is more fundamental than a mere

00:44:38.100 proximal European rational construction. Why can't we just blow it away? First of all,

00:44:43.380 attribute it to the West, which I think is a big mistake because I don't believe that's true,

00:44:47.340 but then also just replace it with another rational construction. If there's nothing

00:44:50.800 transcendent about it, nothing deeper. Well, I think a quick answer to that is to say,

00:44:57.100 we didn't need to wait for the postmodernist. We simply needed to wait for the 1790s and the

00:45:02.240 reign of terror that was orchestrated of course, by devotees of the cult, literally devotees of the

00:45:08.660 cult of reason that was set up in Notre Dame, proclaiming liberty, equality and fraternity,

00:45:14.420 even as the bloods and the heads were running in the streets.

00:45:18.300 Right. And in the cathedral, as you point out, which is so symbolically relevant.

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00:51:14.100 So the question then is that we now can't take seriously the Kantian claims to universal reason.

00:51:23.940 And we can't really take seriously that... And I think the postmodernists would have some... There's

00:51:29.800 force to what they have to say. That deracinated reason that tears us away from any kind of

00:51:38.820 locality, any kind of the sort of messy contingency of human development and human upbringing. I mean,

00:51:45.560 it's not an accident, as some people like to point out, that Kant never had children and never went

00:51:51.120 further than 10 miles of Königsberg. And yet had this extraordinary impact. I think it was the

00:51:59.400 German poet, Heiner, who said that Kant was far, far more deadly than Robespierre, because whereas

00:52:04.800 Robespierre simply decapitated a king, Kant decapitated God. That is to say...

00:52:11.020 It would be helpful, I think, for the audience, for you to talk a little bit about Kant, because

00:52:15.380 they're not going to be familiar in that way. So elaborate.

00:52:19.180 Just a kind of a 90-second digest. I mean, Kant, 1724 to 1804, known as the kind of the sage of

00:52:26.940 Königsberg, which is Kaliningrad, now Prussia. Broadly speaking, he has had an enormous impact,

00:52:34.320 a subterranean influence these days, I think, because he's just so darn difficult to read.

00:52:39.560 German is really only just becoming a philosophical language. A lot of his early writings are in Latin.

00:52:44.800 But the explosion occurs in 1781 with the critique of pure reason. And what's so fascinating about that

00:52:51.960 is that it's a critique of reason, that is to say, critique of reason's tendency always to overreach

00:52:59.500 itself beyond what could possibly be given in sense experience. And so he's got the metaphysicians and

00:53:05.920 the rationalists, Leibniz and Descartes and so on in his sights there.

00:53:09.620 Is that an ally with Milton's warning about the dominance of Satan, just out of curiosity?

00:53:17.120 Because I always saw Milton's Satan is always trying to transcend God.

00:53:21.920 Yes.

00:53:22.400 And he's the light bringer, right? And the spirit of rationality in some real sense.

00:53:26.680 Yes. Yes.

00:53:27.920 Well, there are some who would characterize Kant's impact like that, certainly. But in that period,

00:53:33.400 1781 to 1790, he's just, as it were, it's the critical philosophy. He starts to get more

00:53:40.100 interested in 1793 with the notion of evil. And suddenly evil comes back in, something that was

00:53:46.480 inexplicable within the terms of the critical philosophy. He suddenly realizes that there's

00:53:52.260 something that can't be reasoned. And it's interestingly not, it's not the good, which has tended to occupy

00:53:57.700 Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas. It's evil. And perhaps he was affected by reports of what was

00:54:06.500 going on in Paris in the early 1790s. Who knows? But his impact is enormous. When we talk about the

00:54:12.500 turn to the self in the Enlightenment period, there are many important figures. But I think Kant is the

00:54:18.000 paradigm. He's the archetype. He's the point of no return. There are very few philosophers in the

00:54:23.940 history of philosophy, which, as it were, you can describe with the adjective pre and post.

00:54:30.640 There's Socrates. Everyone who comes before Socrates is a pre-Socratic, even though there

00:54:34.760 were some very fine philosophers before Socrates. And similarly, we talk about pre-Kantian and post-Kantian

00:54:41.140 philosophies. So his impact is enormous in terms of this turn to the self, the primacy of reason,

00:54:46.440 confidence in cosmopolitanism, and a certain very coherent account of the role of subjectivity

00:54:54.720 in aesthetics, and an account of the moral life and ethics, just obligation, not the good,

00:55:02.640 that is entirely sealed in to the sphere of practical reason, ethical reason. And he then

00:55:10.860 wheels God back in. Okay, so you started this, or at least to some degree, with a discussion of what

00:55:17.100 happened in Notre Dame Cathedral with the elevation of reason. And so, and I thought about Milton at

00:55:22.460 that point. And so, is this, is it reasonable to point to Kant and say, Kant is the philosopher who in

00:55:32.200 the West and the Enlightenment figure, who elevated reason to the position that God once occupied?

00:55:38.600 I think that's a fair summary of how a lot of people will, would interpret Kant's impact. Some

00:55:45.680 would take a positive view of that. Some, yeah, it's the birth of secularism. We don't, and it's not so

00:55:52.400 much an antipathy to religion and to God. There's also a sense of hope and optimism.

00:55:58.680 Well, well, and warranted. I mean, look what happened when everybody became able to think. I

00:56:04.560 mean, that our technological mastery is, is part and parcel of that process. It's, it's not all

00:56:10.440 negative, but, but it's still a matter of getting everything in its proper place. I mean, I read

00:56:16.800 Milton as warning, as a warning that when reason is elevated to the highest place, that hell follows

00:56:23.120 quickly behind. And I think about that, for example, there's nothing more rational than Marxism.

00:56:29.480 All the axioms are wrong, but all the logic that flows from the axioms is perfectly rational,

00:56:35.560 perfectly logical. And I mean, that's why Solzhenitsyn was able to make the case that what

00:56:39.600 happened under Stalin was true communism. It was the axioms playing themselves out. They were arrayed

00:56:44.880 logically. And so rationality, I've been talking to some cognitive scientists recently too, you know,

00:56:50.200 and they're interested in artificial intelligence and the development of independent thinking machines.

00:56:54.380 And the people who are really working hard on that are very, very interested in the idea of

00:56:59.240 embodiment because they're not convinced that intelligent systems, abstract systems even can

00:57:04.260 exist in the absence of embodiment, that embodiment is tied to. And so there's a, there's an element of

00:57:09.680 embodiment that's sort of something like the proximal concerns that you were talking about, that seems

00:57:14.620 necessary for, for proper cognitive operations to take place.

00:57:19.280 So one of the interesting things about Kant, and I think he's, he's onto something here is that one of

00:57:25.260 the things that haunted him was the idea that what can be given in sense experience and our

00:57:30.940 understanding of what was then fully Newtonian physical universe didn't fit in, couldn't accommodate

00:57:38.560 what really mattered. Rationality, the soul, freedom, and God. And this worried him. He was trying to

00:57:46.500 develop a way of understanding and making room for, for these notions. And I think with, with AI and

00:57:53.020 cognitive science and so on, I mean, my, my worry is always, well, first of all, I want to ask the

00:57:58.940 cognitive science, the scientists, have you cracked the mind body problem? That is to say, do you think

00:58:06.440 They're trying hard. They're trying hard. They're trying hard. And in a sophisticated way, you know,

00:58:12.440 as far as I can see. Well, but the question of the, of the mind body problem is whether or not

00:58:18.820 a complete science, the most sophisticated science that it was possible to generate could fathom the

00:58:26.700 mysteries of consciousness. That is to say, could purely physical causal processes generate reason,

00:58:33.360 intelligence, and consciousness? Yeah. Well, I think the answer to that is yes, but when that

00:58:38.300 happens, our notion of matter will be radically transformed, right? Because that it sort of assumes

00:58:44.080 that we understand matter and we don't understand consciousness. It's like, no, we don't understand

00:58:48.740 either. And when we understand both, both will be radically different.

00:58:52.720 Well, it's, it's certainly the case that in, in Anglo-American philosophies, the, the, what was

00:58:59.460 unthinkable is now a live option in the philosophy of mind. And that is this doctrine of panpsychism,

00:59:05.380 the idea that the concrete material universe somehow exhibits mind-like or conscious properties.

00:59:15.220 And that's okay. Okay. So I'm going to make a segue from that. So I had been playing with some ideas

00:59:20.480 here recently that if you guys don't mind, I'd like to run by you a bit. And I've been thinking

00:59:25.600 about what people might mean when they talk about God. And I want to tell you how I got to this point

00:59:32.160 first. So there's this idea that's coming out of this postmodern and Marxist critique of the West,

00:59:39.560 that the primary organizing principle of West of, first of all, that social institutions in the West

00:59:46.660 are structured according to Western axioms. That's the first one. And the second one is,

00:59:51.420 is that they're structured according to the arbitrary expression of power. And we'll start

00:59:56.980 with the second one. I think that is antithetical to the truth. And the reason I think that is because

01:00:03.880 when I've met men of goodwill, who are successful in functional organizations, they're creative and

01:00:12.880 productive and honest and generous and kind and mentors. And they might deviate from that when

01:00:19.720 their desire for power overtakes them. But that's a deviation from the genuine spirit.

01:00:27.340 And so then I was thinking, I had this vision at one point, and it was an ancestral vision. It gave me

01:00:35.160 some insight into ancestor worship. And I had this vision of all these men that had had an influence

01:00:39.960 on me in my life. I could see them all. And it was like the positive elements of them were the same.

01:00:47.240 And then that sort of extended back into history a bit. I was thinking about historical figures and

01:00:51.600 this spirit shining through. And I thought, well, the spirit that shines through the ancestral figures,

01:00:57.600 that's equivalent to the Old Testament God. That's the animating spirit of civilization.

01:01:03.360 Now, I'm not making a metaphysical claim here. I'm not. I'm saying that,

01:01:07.780 you know, we already talked about the fact that when we're in a deep conversation,

01:01:12.380 there's something the same about us that's operating. And I would say it like a biologist

01:01:17.100 like Ewa Wilson would agree with that we wouldn't be able to communicate with one another if we were

01:01:21.180 talking about something that was fundamentally human, because we wouldn't understand our axiomatic

01:01:25.340 presuppositions. So we have to be speaking from the particular to the universal in order for us to

01:01:30.160 communicate. So the question is, what's the nature of the spirit that inhabits you when you're doing

01:01:34.980 that? And then I think of it as this benevolent spirit that operates through history. It's

01:01:40.260 responsible for the golden thread of philosophical conversation down the ages. And that would include

01:01:46.500 the spirit that wrote and arranged the Bible, operating in different human beings. And that's

01:01:52.940 a nod to the notion of its divine inspiration. And so I was thinking, these aren't attributes of God

01:01:59.660 that the atheists consider, because they reduce it to a set of relatively absurd axiomatic

01:02:04.640 presuppositions. But there are experiential elements to this. And so I think we exist within

01:02:11.660 a hierarchy of values, and that that selects our attention, because you pay attention to what you

01:02:16.480 value. And there's a unifying tendency in that hierarchy of values, because it has to be unified,

01:02:22.620 because otherwise you exist in contradiction with yourself and everyone else. So there's a tendency

01:02:26.720 towards unity. So that's part of this paternal spirit. I think Mircea Eliade made much of the

01:02:34.260 war of gods in mythologies. It's a very, very common theme. And what happens is the gods war,

01:02:40.280 and one god comes out as superior. He's the dominant god. And I thought, well, that's associated with the

01:02:46.560 moving together of tribes. Each tribe has its own narrative, and it's represented by a set of deities.

01:02:53.600 And when the tribes unite in conflict and cooperation, their religious stories fight in

01:02:58.760 abstract space. And there's this proclivity across time for that to organize itself into something like

01:03:04.280 a unity, that that's the origin of monotheism. And that's the spirit of God as well. And then I

01:03:09.220 thought, I won't go through all these attributes, but because I can bring them up one at a time. But

01:03:13.820 then another one is, I was thinking about this common trope in American sports movies. And I'm

01:03:22.280 pointing to them for a particular reason. When you're engaged in a sport, you're trying to hit a

01:03:26.280 target. And if you do it well, then everyone celebrates you. And that's the opposite of

01:03:30.700 hamartia. That's the opposite of missing the mark. And so there's this collective celebration of the

01:03:36.340 tendency of excellence in cooperation and competition to hit the mark. And everybody

01:03:40.520 celebrates. That's worship. Everyone worships that. They don't even notice it. That's the same spirit.

01:03:45.500 And then there's this movie theme. And the Americans are very good at mythologizing this

01:03:51.220 sort of thing. So you imagine that the victorious quarterback is carried out of the stadium on the

01:03:58.700 shoulders of his teammates, supported by his school and the town in triumph. And the cheerleaders are

01:04:04.600 waiting for him. And you think, well, why would men elect one of their members to be the most

01:04:11.760 attractive? And the answer to that is because that's how you see the path. It's something like

01:04:17.520 that. And that's a manifestation of the same spirit. That's not power. And so this thing that

01:04:23.880 we, and then I'll close with this. One of the things that really hit me when I was doing my Genesis

01:04:28.220 lectures was the realization that the word Israel meant those who struggle with God. And I think that's

01:04:34.120 a way better definition of belief, true belief than reliance on an axiomatic set of explicit

01:04:41.640 presuppositions. It's like, this is something you contend with, right? It's like, what's the ideal?

01:04:46.960 Is there an ideal? If there is an ideal of what nature is it? Is it a personality? How does it

01:04:53.020 manifest itself across time? We don't know the answers to this, but we can definitely wrestle with

01:04:57.600 the, we wrestle with the, we wrestle with that. And that's, that's the right pathway, I think,

01:05:04.620 is the wrestling rather than the dogmatic insistence that a particular, sorry, well, that's a lot.

01:05:12.560 John, can I, can I wind you back to, to, to your early, earlier impassioned statement that I,

01:05:18.980 you're not making a metaphysical claim here? Because it seems to me that, that the phenomenon

01:05:24.680 pushes in a metaphysical direction in this sense that you're talking about all these people who

01:05:30.860 have shaped you for the, for the good. And in a sense, it's as if they've been animated by

01:05:38.280 a kind of spirit, a benevolent spirit. Well, you know, if you're going to, as it were,

01:05:45.700 remain strictly secular, secularist or naturalist, then in a sense, the spirit is simply a product

01:05:52.040 of these people. But the, but the, I, I, I suggest that the, the, the lived experience,

01:05:58.820 if you like, or, or the phenomenon of the spirit as experienced by these people is not that they

01:06:03.640 possess it, rather than it possesses them. It obliges them. So, so in a sense, uh, the,

01:06:11.480 the phenomenon pushes toward something that is metaphysical.

01:06:15.640 Well, okay. So let, let, okay. So let, let me add another wrinkle to this. That's related to

01:06:21.480 something that James, that James said, well, we talked about consciousness per se, right? And this

01:06:27.060 is where the metaphysical starts to become interesting is that this spirit that calls

01:06:31.940 and impels and judges as well. And, and is in part, the voice of conscience and all of that.

01:06:38.900 I can't distinguish it from the active action of consciousness per se. And we don't understand the

01:06:48.560 metaphysical status of consciousness. Now, one of the things I've been thinking, for example,

01:06:52.220 I wanted to talk to Richard Dawkins about this, and I'm afraid he'd slash me into ribbons. So

01:06:56.560 I'm, I'm somewhat hesitant to do it, but you know, Darwin talked about natural selection a lot,

01:07:03.760 but he also talked about sexual selection a lot. And until recently, last 30 years or so,

01:07:11.440 biologists tend to concentrate a more on natural selection, but you know, women are hypergamous

01:07:16.400 in the extreme. They mate up and across hierarchies of competence or power. I think competence

01:07:23.900 fundamentally. And that means that our whole evolutionary history was shaped by the selection

01:07:31.060 of consciousness. And so like the, the, the, the mechanism that generates random variation and

01:07:38.820 allows for the menu from which the selection is made, that might be random, but the selection process

01:07:44.980 is bloody well, not random. And it looks to me like men's consciousness elevates men to positions of

01:07:51.980 status and women's consciousness selects those men. And they're not selected on the basis of power.

01:07:58.360 That's not true. That's not even true of chimpanzees, by the way, and they're more violent and much more

01:08:04.520 primitive than we are. So like that deep ethic that we're talking about, that doesn't run itself out.

01:08:10.180 Even it's certainly not only Western, it doesn't even look like it's only human. And Franz de Waal,

01:08:16.280 who I'm going to be talking to at some point on this podcast is made very much of that, you know,

01:08:20.220 that there's this natural ethic that you see emerging in chimpanzee behavior in their,

01:08:24.920 in their hierarchical behavior within troops. So he said the tyrannical chimps get torn to shreds

01:08:31.160 by their subordinates who band together. You can dominate the group with power, but it's very

01:08:36.140 unstable. Well, if I could just chip in here, I mean, well, it's obviously the case that there are

01:08:43.760 behavioral patterns that can be described as certainly altruistic and that we, as it were,

01:08:50.000 can describe as, as ethical. And it's certainly the case, Jordan, that you can, you can, as it were,

01:08:56.020 theorize that what's going on in say sexual selection is the operation of, of consciousness,

01:09:01.260 but don't forget that somebody like Dawkins is going to say that there simply is no such thing.

01:09:06.960 There is no such thing as consciousness. If by consciousness, you understand some element of

01:09:12.900 reality, some ontological ingredient of reality that is somehow not fully reducible to underlying

01:09:20.240 neurological states. I don't have a problem with that. I read Dennett's book on consciousness,

01:09:23.800 which was aptly criticized as consciousness explained away. It's by no means the best book

01:09:29.340 I read on consciousness because I don't think it wrestles with, because the ontological significance

01:09:34.840 of consciousness is equivalent to the ontological significance of being, because the mystery,

01:09:39.820 the mystery question is, how is there anything without awareness of it? And, and good luck,

01:09:45.660 good luck solving that issue. And, and even if it is reducible to the material, my answer to that is,

01:09:51.080 well, that'll just make material transcendent in a way that we don't understand. So you can't say

01:09:56.640 you have omniscient knowledge of the structure of matter and consciousness is reducible to that.

01:10:02.300 It's like, no, you don't, you don't know anything about matter at the fundamental quantum level,

01:10:06.680 let's say it's so mysterious and peculiar. Absolutely. But what we can at least say,

01:10:12.900 and this is a very Kantian thought that it's a condition of the possibility of any successful

01:10:17.760 empirical or scientific inquiry into the way the world is that we are a subject that we exercise

01:10:24.520 our consciousness. We exercise our reason and we exercise the laws of thought. So, so I agree with you.

01:10:31.160 I mean, I think those, the problem with a new atheist is not so much their atheism, it's their

01:10:36.420 a priori commitment to the doctrine of metaphysical naturalism, which is roughly the idea that all

01:10:43.340 truths are scientific truths or reducible to scientific truths. And it's a non-starter,

01:10:48.980 the far more interesting golden thread that you talked about earlier, that sometimes known as the

01:10:54.140 perennial philosophy. Yes, exactly that. It is, it is the thought that, that being a capital B being is,

01:11:04.340 is the, the fundamental metaphysical question. And once you start approaching deep philosophical

01:11:11.560 problems in that way, then you do start to see a remarkable convergence between Abrahamic monotheism,

01:11:18.460 uh, uh, uh, Vedanta and Upanishads, the question of whether Brahman and Atman are one that is say being

01:11:25.740 and, and mind and the self self are one. Uh, we see it, uh, uh, those, those sorts of questions are,

01:11:32.220 are, uh, are, are also not particular to religious systems. So think of somebody like Heidegger,

01:11:38.300 you know, Heidegger is supposed to have spawned the kind of the great atheistic tendencies in 20th century

01:11:45.040 existentialist and phenomenological philosophy. He says, the fundamental question is, why is there something

01:11:51.100 rather than nothing? Why being? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So, so there's the

01:11:57.120 metaphysical, so part of what this hinges on is the metaphysical status of consciousness. And, and, and you

01:12:02.580 can make a case that that's equivalent to, to this question is, well, what, I mean, David Chalmers, who's

01:12:08.600 maybe the most, the most well-known cognitive scientist studying consciousness, you know, he's, he, he,

01:12:15.040 he has one set of the hard question, you know, the hard question about consciousness. But for me,

01:12:20.380 the hard question is the question of being itself, because I can't distinguish between being and

01:12:26.300 awareness. You can think, well, there's an objective world without subjectivity. It's like,

01:12:29.920 well, try to think that through and see how far you get. It just, you just run into problem after

01:12:34.840 problem with it. And, and I mean, there's technical problems at the level of physics as well, but there's

01:12:39.920 certainly metaphysical problems. And so, so then the question is, well, what is the,

01:12:45.040 what is the cosmological significance of consciousness? And, and that, that's a central

01:12:50.320 question, right? Maybe that's the central question. And when I look at the inside of a Christian

01:12:56.280 cathedral, and I see the logos spread out against the sky, because that's what the dome

01:13:00.560 is, it's affiliated with the sun. There's this proposition that consciousness is what engenders

01:13:06.220 reality itself, and that we partake in that. And let's say we abandon that notion. It's like,

01:13:11.300 okay, well then do you have any dignity as an individual? And then we get into the postmodern

01:13:15.900 question is, well, are you there as an individual at all? Or are you just, this is part of the

01:13:20.700 identity issue. Are you just one of your immutable physiological characteristics, right? Your sex,

01:13:26.680 your gender, your race, that's matter, man. And there's no individual soul there. Well,

01:13:31.800 why can't I just reduce you to that? What are you going to use as an argument?

01:13:35.520 Well, just a very quick thought, if I may, I don't want to sort of keep butting in too much,

01:13:44.120 but a very good line for Dawkins and others to remember, and you should remind him of it if he

01:13:49.600 comes on your podcast, is that metaphysics always buries its undertakers. That is to say,

01:13:56.520 every time there's an attempt to say, we can, all of that mumbo jumbo that was being talked about by

01:14:02.280 those clever philosophers or those stupid religionists. That's all gone now. That's a

01:14:08.660 warning sign. It's a sign that there's actually total confusion and all sorts of kind of fragmentation

01:14:14.800 and the quest for meaning and the quest for the answer to the question of the meaning of...

01:14:21.280 Is that the abandonment of the perennial philosophy?

01:14:23.840 It's an attempt, certainly, to reject it. And I mean, if you look in, say, Vedantic systems,

01:14:31.660 you look in Indian philosophy, there were materialists. There was a school of materialism,

01:14:37.960 but it was a relatively small and short-lived belief system. You see materialism in the

01:14:46.360 Greco-Roman world. You see it in Democritus. Democritus is atomism. You see it in Epicurus,

01:14:51.520 of course. But it is, it is, it is a minority report. There is, it's a quite a, it's a strange

01:14:59.840 superstition in, in ancient thought. Well, we took it apart a bit, James, because you mentioned

01:15:05.980 earlier that among, I think it was cognitive scientists that you were discussing, that

01:15:10.940 discussion of panpsychism has become non-heretical because there's notion that there's a mystery in

01:15:17.580 matter. See, it isn't materialism exactly that's the fault. Perhaps, perhaps it's, it's deterministic

01:15:25.600 clockwork materialism that's essentially Newtonian. And we know that's not right. I mean, it's

01:15:32.380 proximally right, but, but, but, but beyond that, it's not right. Matter is very deep mystery. And

01:15:37.600 I can't see how you can get rid of the problem of consciousness by positing a materialist substrate

01:15:43.500 when there's no way that you can get rid of the metaphysics of matter.

01:15:48.100 Very quickly. I mean, you mentioned David Chalmers, as you say, this brilliant young philosopher who in

01:15:53.620 1994 published his PhD thesis, The Conscious Mind, which brought back in onto the table that what he

01:16:00.740 called the hard problem of consciousness. And he parsed that in different ways, that there's something

01:16:06.580 absolutely irreducible about qualitative experience. But the problem that then opens up that he, that then,

01:16:12.580 I think, leads him towards taking panpsychism very, very seriously. This is just really in the last

01:16:17.520 10 years, I think, is the idea, well, okay, we've got consciousness. It's a hard problem. We just can't

01:16:23.020 get rid of it. And yet we can't get rid of matter either. We can't get rid of the truths of the physical

01:16:28.140 sciences. And we, but we can't work out how on earth these fit together. They couldn't be laws of

01:16:34.360 nature. They couldn't be psychoanalytic or psychological laws. The laws of thought are fundamentally

01:16:39.960 different from the laws of nature. So how do we fit these two together? And panpsychism at that

01:16:47.260 point, though, it might seem crazy to the person on the street, suddenly start to seem quite an

01:16:51.860 attractive account of the nature of ultimate reality.

01:16:56.480 And I suppose, just as a quick footnote to that, once you're there, materialism,

01:17:06.460 Dawkinsian materialism is Dickensian and long gone. And the dialogue between the perennial philosophy

01:17:15.100 and Anglophone philosophy of panpsychism is back on.

01:17:19.280 So elaborate on that. That's what stopped me exactly, because now I'm trying to figure out,

01:17:24.500 well, there's this, we should define panpsychism again for the audience, but then,

01:17:28.940 okay, so what sort of dialogue does that open up as far as you're concerned?

01:17:33.600 Well, my view is that panpsychism, it's early days, and at least in its modern contemporary

01:17:40.460 iteration, I think you can say that Aristotle, if you read the De Anaba, Aristotle's Treatise on the

01:17:45.180 soul, there's soul all over the place. The plants have a nutritive soul, animals have a perceptual

01:17:50.780 soul, and human animals have both of those and a rational soul. So as it were, all of organic life

01:17:57.800 is minded. If you move to the basic framework of Abrahamic monotheism, then look, it follows very

01:18:05.940 naturally that if you've got an axiomatic commitment to mind at the bottom of the universe,

01:18:13.320 as it were, the creator is a minded being, is ideal, is not material, and everything,

01:18:21.680 all of reality distinct from God is created and including, as it were, space-time, then the idea

01:18:29.380 that the universe as we discover it, as we come upon it, is shot through with mind, is legible to

01:18:37.900 the minded inquiry that happens when cognitive scientists are trying to unravel the mystery of

01:18:45.560 the brain. It's suddenly you've got an isomorphism there between consciousness...

01:18:49.780 So does that mean, does that mean that there's this insistence in the Judeo-Christian tradition that

01:18:55.940 God is outside of the material world and outside of time and space? And that, what that does in some

01:19:02.140 sense, is deaden material. It deadens matter. And then when God disappears, we're left with dead

01:19:07.980 matter. So where's the dialogue between the advocates of the Judeo-Christian tradition and

01:19:14.760 the panpsychists? Well, there's only one time that Aquinas ever loses his cool in about 10 million

01:19:23.360 words that he wrote. But one is with this poor guy called David of Dinon, who dared to suggest that

01:19:29.480 God might be a material being, to which Aquinas said, quia est idiotus, which is simply stupid.

01:19:38.560 So the idea that the creator could be somehow bound up with his creation was a simple logical

01:19:45.540 impossibility within Abrahamic monotheism. Is there any difference between the mind-body problem

01:19:51.220 and the God, the spirit, and the material world problem? Are they the same problem on two different

01:19:57.520 planes? Jordan, that's an extremely acute question. And it's one that has puzzled me for a long time,

01:20:05.900 or at least attracted me. I think you're absolutely right to say that there are all sorts of interesting

01:20:11.500 structural, metaphysical, and theoretical parallels between understanding and fathoming the God-world

01:20:17.500 relation and, as it were, the mind-world relationship, the human mind.

01:20:22.440 Or the soul-world relationship, right? Because, you know, it could be that we're the contact point

01:20:30.920 between God outside of time and space and the material world. But then that does beg the question,

01:20:37.780 the panpsychism question, which is a very interesting one. So...

01:20:42.440 That's precisely the claim of Christology.

01:20:45.520 I don't have a lot to say to this discussion, but just two points. Jordan, a moment ago, you talked

01:20:52.420 about, you know, in the Judeo-Christian vision, God is other and absent and matter as they're deadened.

01:21:00.220 Of course, that's not quite true, is it? Because in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the spirit of God

01:21:05.520 is present in the world. And also you have the incarnation. So even if one doesn't want to say,

01:21:12.960 one doesn't want to be stupid, as Aquinas thought, and say that God is material,

01:21:18.580 I don't want to say that. Certainly, it's not true to say that God and the material world are divorced.

01:21:25.080 They're not.

01:21:26.280 So that's one of the...

01:21:26.880 No, no, I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. It's...

01:21:30.280 I'm thinking about it. I'm trying to think about it with regards to the idea of this animating spirit.

01:21:37.980 The... Let's say... Let's say that part of... See, one of the things I've thought is that

01:21:42.960 at minimum, what Christianity is, is a thousands of years long discussion about what constitutes

01:21:49.380 the human ideal. It's a purely psychological viewpoint. Now, I understand the metaphysical

01:21:55.800 implications, you know, that... And I don't want to dispense with them, but it's best to start

01:22:01.100 with what's simple. So there's this discussion of what constitutes the ideal. And we're exploring it

01:22:10.860 and discussing it. And we explore and discuss it in all sorts of interesting ways, right? Because

01:22:14.840 it's not merely rational. We... Bach writes this soul-inspiring music. And that makes us feel a

01:22:21.680 particular way. And that's a hint as to the nature of the ideal. And then there's these great cathedrals

01:22:26.600 that are built all across Europe. And they're awe-inspiring masterpieces of stone and light,

01:22:31.960 right? So opposites conjoined. And they bring the primeval forest into the city. And they provide

01:22:37.260 color. And the music is set in there. And then there's the invocation of the ancestors. And...

01:22:42.140 And the dogmatic formulations that Christianity consists of that go back centuries as well.

01:22:49.320 And all of that. And that's all part of this exploration. And to me, it's the exploration of

01:22:54.720 that central animating spirit. And when we're debating the postmodernists who say everything

01:22:59.240 is power, this is the sort of thing that needs to be pointed out as a rejoinder. It's like,

01:23:04.580 no, it's not. We're doing our best to manifest this ideal that we're discussing. We're flawed and

01:23:10.380 fragmented and ignorant. And we don't... So, for example, you asked me earlier, Nigel,

01:23:15.540 what sort of things I had to discuss in order to make people attracted, say, to a discussion of

01:23:21.560 Genesis. And what it is, is that I try to get the wheat from the text. And in the chaff, I think a

01:23:28.920 lot of that's my ignorance. It's not necessarily chaff. But I'll leave it be because I can't... I

01:23:33.140 don't have the intellectual wherewithal to make sense of it. So I just leave it be without despising

01:23:37.920 it. Because I can't understand, it doesn't mean there isn't something to it. Now, you know, we're still

01:23:43.860 stuck because we have problems like, well, the idea of the resurrection, you know, which is obviously...

01:23:50.200 a very big problem in a very fundamental sense. And I leave that be, except to say that I have seen,

01:24:00.980 you know, in my studies of mythology, that there are stories of dying and resurrecting gods throughout

01:24:05.460 history. And the idea of Christ seems to be of that type, although it's not only that, but it's

01:24:12.000 something I can't touch. And that's a problem. But that doesn't mean that there isn't this

01:24:17.420 investigation that we're all undertaking, including us in this conversation of what constitutes the

01:24:22.160 ideal and how we could manifest it if we could only understand it. And I think that's unbelievably

01:24:27.240 compelling to people. And it's not only compelling, they die without it. Because we can't live with

01:24:34.900 only knowledge of our limitations. We have to be moving towards an ideal.

01:24:39.020 Well, I mean, just a quick thought there. I mean, certainly within the Christian tradition,

01:24:47.160 the claim is that God's decision to become incarnate is not accidental. He chose this particular human

01:24:56.320 being, not just because he had to choose some human being in order to become a human being. But he chose a

01:25:02.840 human being and, as it were, exhibited the qualities that he wanted to, as it were, disseminate as a

01:25:09.300 kind of moral exemplar that were profoundly countercultural to the values and the exemplars of

01:25:17.040 the time. So you think of the weakness of Christ in some contexts, obviously the sense of self-sacrifice,

01:25:27.080 the radical openness to those on the margins, the poor in particular, the ceremonially unclean,

01:25:35.760 and of course, to women. And so it's as if that this is completely subverting the kind of the sort of

01:25:43.620 power narrative that dominated first century Palestine, particularly in the form of the

01:25:49.400 Roman legions and the Roman imperium. And so I think that's a quick thought. Could I say something

01:25:59.380 very quickly on the resurrection and dying and rising gods? Please do. I mean, I'm not a specialist

01:26:08.860 in the sort of the history of the kind of mythology, but I think that, you know, a lot of those myths are

01:26:13.980 in the first instance, effectively myths and understood as myths by devotees of the various

01:26:19.840 mystery cults of the period. So there are certain claims made about, is it Osiris and Atis and others?

01:26:30.200 And there's some evidence that they were kind of fertility gods. But if I think if you dig deep into

01:26:35.060 the stories, they're very, very different from the kind of narrative, rather shocking narrative

01:26:39.800 that you have in the Gospels that stress the physicality of the resurrection.

01:26:45.140 Yeah, well, there isn't the union. Like, if you look at the story, the story of Osiris is one that's

01:26:48.560 really fascinated me. Because, so the Egyptians, this goes back to our discussion about rationality.

01:26:54.660 So the Egyptians were trying to understand what the most fundamental principle of sovereignty,

01:27:00.340 they were trying to understand the fundamental principle of sovereignty. So that would be something

01:27:04.180 they were trying to understand in opposition to the presumption that it was merely power.

01:27:09.000 So let's say you were the pharaoh. Well, what justified your existence as the pharaoh? And

01:27:15.180 the answer was, you were the reincarnation of the union of Osiris and Horus. And so then the question

01:27:21.940 is, what were those things? Well, Horus isn't, Horus is more like Christ, more like the individual.

01:27:28.440 Osiris is the father. And Osiris is the state. In fact, the provinces of Egypt regarded as parts of

01:27:35.560 Osiris' body. So it's the body of the state, like the body of laws. That's another way of thinking

01:27:40.540 about it. And Osiris was willfully blind, archaic, anachronistic. And what he was particularly willfully

01:27:48.220 blind to were the machinations of evil. And that's why he died, because his evil brother overthrew him.

01:27:54.980 And so that's a cautionary story about the consequence of the blindness of the state.

01:28:02.300 Now, he's reanimated by Horus. And Horus isn't logic or rationality. Horus is the eye.

01:28:10.600 And the eye pays attention. And so there's something different. There's something very

01:28:14.780 radically different between attention and rationality. Like attention is allowing things

01:28:19.860 in in some sense, right? It's opening yourself up to the world. And Horus is the falcon who can see

01:28:25.960 everywhere. Falcons have extremely acute vision. And he journeys to the underworld where an Osiris

01:28:31.200 is down there dead and reanimates him. So Horus is the hero who rescues the dying father from the

01:28:38.240 underworld. And so that's part of the rebirth resurrection story there. It says, what is the

01:28:44.600 resurrecting principle? And the resurrecting principle is live attention, acting on dogmatic

01:28:50.180 certainty. It's something like that. It's a theory of consciousness in some sense.

01:28:55.060 It is. I mean, of course, there are lots of different versions of the story of Osiris. I think

01:28:59.680 the most popular one has it that he's ripped into 14 pieces and his sister Isis tries to sort of put him

01:29:06.200 back together. But you're right. It does end with him in the underworld, in this sort of shady,

01:29:13.160 shadowy, semi-conscious realm. He's divinized. And this generates all sorts of fascinating mystery

01:29:21.780 cults thereafter. And what's interesting is that you can do that sort of mythological psychoanalytic

01:29:30.000 analysis quite easily. The stories lend themselves to that kind of analysis. Whereas I think what you're

01:29:36.700 getting with the early Christian attempts to grapple with this extraordinary and actually offensive,

01:29:43.680 scandalous claim, as Paul talks, scandal to the Jews and craziness, moria, madness to the Greeks,

01:29:51.140 is not that at all. This wasn't what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to come along and throw off

01:29:58.480 the Roman yoke, not to sort of die in this horribly ignominious way. And then suddenly coming back,

01:30:04.440 this was not what Second Temple Judaism was expecting. There's some evidence that there

01:30:09.520 would be a resurrection at the end of time. But the idea that God would become,

01:30:15.340 would be incarnate and, as it were, would emerge. And as I said earlier, leave his authenticating

01:30:22.000 signature through this very dramatic and, as it were, plainly historical event was simply not part of

01:30:28.760 their expectations at all. So I was just saying, they're very, I think there are clear differences

01:30:33.740 between the two. And I think a lot of our, the temptation to see parallels really comes from,

01:30:38.880 it's, it's, it's, it's Fraser, really. It's, it's Sir James Fraser in the late 19th century. And,

01:30:43.340 and that gets picked up by some French scholars, I think. And, but I think that the parallels,

01:30:47.960 those stories are absolutely fascinating. The actual parallels with the New Testament

01:30:52.760 don't really stand up to scrutiny. That's just my view.

01:30:58.220 Jordan, can I, can I take us back a little bit? You talked again about the,

01:31:02.660 the importance for people, particularly young people of, of this pursuit of the ideal.

01:31:08.540 And way back, you mentioned Piaget and his theory of development and the stage of development you

01:31:14.220 called can the messianic stage. And I'm thinking about, um, lots of, uh, contemporary young people,

01:31:22.040 uh, who, who are party to the crusade for social justice over gender, anti-racist, uh, anti-colonial.

01:31:31.460 And, uh, on the one hand, I want to applaud them. I want to say, yep, um, you, you, you've invested

01:31:36.720 yourself in, in, um, the cause of justice and that's, that's a worthy investment. Um, and then I

01:31:44.080 observe, you know, now, as, as in my own time, when I was an undergraduate, uh, the, the, the

01:31:50.780 adolescent, uh, um, messianic crusade is, of course, it's, it's absolutist, it's intolerant,

01:31:57.860 it's convinced of its own rightness, it's intolerant of those who object and patient with

01:32:02.880 them. Uh, nowadays at social justice in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate, it was Marxism.

01:32:08.420 Um, but what's changed, what's changed, I think is that it's not just adolescents who are invested

01:32:16.080 in this social justice crusade. Um, it seems as if they're the minions. It's what they're

01:32:22.880 the minions. Yeah. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so who are the, who are the, uh, uh, uh, who's

01:32:29.340 driving it? And, and also, um, I mean, as a Christian looking on this, it's us, it's us, you know,

01:32:35.880 it's our failure to have conversations like this, that's driving it. Really? Right. Because,

01:32:41.340 well, I think so. If we were offering a sufficiently attractive alternative, then it wouldn't be so

01:32:45.660 powerful. I mean, because otherwise we have to point to someone, you know, and it just doesn't

01:32:50.540 seem that useful to me. I mean, to, to, to, to give us some credit, let's say us speaking broadly,

01:32:57.160 this is a hard problem. It's, you know, it's not like the answer is so obvious, but, but I think it's

01:33:02.280 best to take it on as a failure of the academy. That's right. That's good. Cause, cause the kind

01:33:07.840 of conversation we're having now is not the kind of conversation you would have in a university

01:33:11.280 classroom as a role. Yes. And it's certainly not the kind of conversation that I was allowed

01:33:15.760 to have at Cambridge, let's say. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So as a consequence of what we've been talking

01:33:24.660 about, so. Yeah. Yeah. Um, let me ask you a question guys, and this is part of this spirit

01:33:32.040 idea. So I've been thinking about, you know, is power the central organizing tendency and does

01:33:38.720 that imply that power is the central ambition of human beings? And then I thought, well, let's

01:33:44.260 think about the people that I know and admire. Okay. So then I think maybe about my graduate

01:33:49.420 student mentor, Robert Peel. And so, uh, I didn't really even know anyone in graduate school. When I

01:33:55.380 went to graduate school, I didn't know what it was about at all, you know, and, um, he took me under

01:34:00.360 his wing, I would say, and treated me as a, I wouldn't say as an equal, but as someone who had valid

01:34:06.720 things to say, always had time for me. And he allowed his administrative acumen and his wide range

01:34:15.060 of resources to unite with my ability to generate creative ideas. And we collaborated and it was

01:34:22.100 great. And I never felt like I was in an exploitative power relationship. I felt that he

01:34:28.780 was a mentor and that, and then, then I have that really got me to think because all the people that

01:34:33.220 I admire, I think one of the things that I found that's so characteristic about them is that they

01:34:37.500 love the opportunity to find people who are talented and worthy, let's say, and provide them

01:34:46.080 with opportunities and education and advantages and a pathway to further realization. And then I

01:34:52.600 thought, I don't think there is a more fundamental pleasure than that. And that's part of that

01:34:57.640 animating spirit. And that's not power. It's like, it's the delight in, and I tried to specify it

01:35:03.920 technically. It's the delight you take when the best in you can serve the best in someone else.

01:35:10.220 And that's...

01:35:13.180 Well, I guess my response to that, Jordan, is, you know, when postmodernists talk about power,

01:35:20.320 they always talk about it cynically. It's oppressive power. It's unjust power. And I want to say,

01:35:25.880 there's nothing wrong with power. And in a sense, you can describe the influence of this man on you

01:35:32.820 who was an exercise of a certain power, a certain authority.

01:35:35.980 Authority, for sure, yes.

01:35:37.240 So we need to get past the notion that power, or even hierarchy, are of themselves wicked things.

01:35:43.160 I mean, they can be, but they needn't be. And my objection to the postmodernist view is it's

01:35:48.780 implausibly cynical. It doesn't apply everywhere.

01:35:52.360 It's unbelievably cynical. It couldn't... I can't see how you could possibly generate

01:35:57.000 a more cynical theory about what constitutes the animating spirit of civilization than it's the

01:36:03.940 arbitrary expression of power.

01:36:06.500 Yeah, yeah. We all want power. Nothing wrong with that. But the trick is to use it well.

01:36:15.120 Everyone wants power. No one likes to be powerless. And why should we? But we need the right kinds of

01:36:20.440 power for the right kinds of reasons.

01:36:21.620 Well, but when you speak about power, in that sense, you want to be free, at least to some degree,

01:36:26.760 of the arbitrary expression of power on the part of other people.

01:36:30.700 Yeah, sure.

01:36:31.500 Right. And so we need to differentiate what power means. It means authority.

01:36:36.220 It means competence. It means a wider range of knowledge. It means wider access to resources.

01:36:42.360 It means wisdom. Like those... It means competent and productive generosity.

01:36:48.320 And those are much more powerful forces than the arbitrary expression of power.

01:36:53.020 And that... It's only people who are failures morally that default to the use of power to structure

01:37:00.880 their social relations. Like I can't see... And I haven't seen this argument put forth in a

01:37:06.760 particularly coherent way. It's like, what are you saying it's arbitrary power? Like

01:37:11.280 arbitrary power is actually a weak force in comparison to these other modes of social

01:37:17.680 organization. And somehow we've been taken aback in the academy. We haven't been able to make...

01:37:23.380 We're guilty. I think we're guilty. And that's part of it. And so the question is then,

01:37:27.740 well, what are we guilty about? And why is that undermining our moral authority?

01:37:33.920 Yeah. Yeah. There's that old Latin tag,

01:37:38.040 that abuse does not invalidate use. And that just seems very obvious, that there are no power-free

01:37:48.240 zones. And be wary of the person who claims that they are setting up a power-free anarchy. They're

01:37:54.800 often the most tyrannical and power-hungry kinds of people. And I certainly... I try with my first-year

01:38:01.460 undergraduates, we work through Plato's Republic. And one of the ways traditionally it's understood,

01:38:06.240 of course, it is a dialogue about justice, but it's about also the proper dispersal and arrangement

01:38:11.380 of power. And you get this power-hungry guy at the beginning of the dialogue, Thrasymachus,

01:38:18.480 who is clearly only interested in brute strength. And that is the only account of justice he will give,

01:38:25.720 as it were, the power of the fist. And so I try to say that, in fact, this is the kind of

01:38:31.420 idea of power that is animating figures like Foucault. But I try to also underline that this

01:38:38.700 does not eradicate the proper use of power. And I make this sort of slightly, kind of give the

01:38:44.980 slightly silly example of going to the dentist. When I'm at the dentist and I'm in the dentist chair,

01:38:49.560 I do not accuse my dentist of oppressing my molars. There is an appropriate asymmetry in the

01:38:56.220 relationship between me and my dentist. And that's partly because it's voluntary, right? I mean,

01:39:01.660 that's a huge part of it. They might be involuntary too. So one of the ironies, I think, is when we're

01:39:08.220 starting to talk about the university or we're starting to talk about more sort of hard left

01:39:12.780 authoritarian ideas of the market and of the state, you are paradoxically getting antidotes to

01:39:20.700 the abuse of power that are, in fact, extremely constrictive mechanisms. So, I mean, this is a

01:39:28.760 critique that comes up again and again, but whether we're talking about the markets in the way that

01:39:34.640 Hayek talks about, or whether we're talking about the English common law, or whether we're talking

01:39:39.340 about the free pursuit of truth in a thriving, vibrant intellectual culture, this cannot be imposed

01:39:46.160 from the top. There must be what Hayek talks about, it's mechanisms of spontaneous order.

01:39:53.980 Piaget makes the same case. And so do the biologists who study the emergence of morality from games.

01:40:01.040 Right.

01:40:01.120 It's the same idea. I mean, Panksepp, Jock Panksepp showed that if you, rats will strive to,

01:40:07.080 juvenile rats strive to play, they'll work to rough and tumble play, which you'd think would be an

01:40:11.820 expression of power. But, and if you pair a rat with another rat that's 10% bigger, the 10% bigger

01:40:18.700 rat will pin the smaller rat. And so you watch that once and you think, power. But then you repair

01:40:24.520 them repeatedly. And the next time they meet, the little rat asks the big rat to play. And there's

01:40:30.480 ways they do that. They kind of look like the way dogs invite to play. And then the big rat will deign

01:40:35.280 to play. But if he doesn't let the little rat win one third of the time across repeated play

01:40:40.240 bouts, the little rat won't play. And that's like, that's rats, you know, and now they have

01:40:45.360 complex social hierarchies, but that's like, that's a major league finding, right? Because

01:40:50.020 even rat hierarchies, and they're not known for their moral nature rats, you know, there's more

01:40:56.020 this element of play. And, and, and play is actually a specific mammalian circuit. And, you know,

01:41:01.740 in a conversation like this, there's plenty of play, too. And that's one of the things that makes

01:41:06.320 it extremely. And so that animating spirit is also the spirit of play, right? And play is play is the

01:41:12.900 manner in which we experiment with manifestations of the ideal. That's what play is. Right.

01:41:20.160 And the point is that it's, it's organic, it's, as it were, it's, it's spirit driven, it's not

01:41:25.500 rationalized, it's not imposed, as it were, from, from the top down, there's a kind of

01:41:30.780 organized chaos, as it were, chaos permitted within certain parameters. And I think that's

01:41:37.560 what any good thriving university ought to aim to be, as it were. Sorry, that's what a walled

01:41:44.080 garden is, is exactly that. It's the bordering of a zone where chaos can manifest itself creatively.

01:41:51.220 Right. Right. Well, then another way of thinking, saying it would be that the walls of the university

01:41:57.180 of the walls of any, any thriving intellectual culture should be the walls of a, of a walled

01:42:01.340 garden. So that, as it were, that the chaos, as it were, has parameters, but there should be

01:42:06.100 complete freedom for the people who the university is entrusted with research and teaching to test and

01:42:14.760 to pursue their ideas. Some of them may be disastrously wrong. Others will end up being

01:42:21.040 brilliantly right. And there will over time be a kind of, precisely through this freedom,

01:42:27.180 precisely because it's implausible to suppose that any three, to guess that three or four

01:42:31.900 brilliant academics will, will have all the answers to, to all the questions that there's a

01:42:37.200 kind of, um, a sort of spirit of intellectual inquiry that, that animates that seemingly quite

01:42:42.560 chaotic process, but it, what it's, what yields, uh, extraordinary. I mean, I've had a vision of the

01:42:49.580 proper father within a family as he who sets the parameters within which play can occur. So when

01:42:57.180 children develop, it's their, their play is unbelievably important. I mean, that's how they

01:43:01.600 found, that's how they structure themselves and their social relations. And so if they're deprived

01:43:06.380 of play, Panks have demonstrated this too, um, rats that are deprived of play, they are prefrontal

01:43:15.320 cortices don't mature properly. And you can use attention deficit disorder drugs like Ritalin to

01:43:20.380 combat that behaviorally. And then if you let them play, they have a burst of play and their brains

01:43:25.220 develop. And so the proper paternal spirit sets boundaries, which wall out too much chaos and allow

01:43:31.800 playful endeavor to manifest itself within that walled enclosure. And that's part of this animating

01:43:37.920 spirit as well. And that's not power. And it has this spontaneity and this capacity for spontaneity

01:43:44.460 generation of spontaneous order that you described. Yeah. Yeah. And look, I think that's also where

01:43:51.740 belief systems can, can, can help. That is, but belief systems that are not too prescriptive.

01:43:57.980 And so what we're looking for are certain norms, guardrails, uh, coordinating that, that help to

01:44:04.940 animate these, these, these coordinating mechanisms that are not too, too prescriptive. Um, so this is

01:44:11.340 okay. I want to talk to both of you about this then. So, you know, if you look at how people describe

01:44:17.940 their religious belief now, they're not going to church and they, they're not admirers of dogma,

01:44:24.940 but they describe themselves in the majority as spiritual. So there's this spirit dogma, um,

01:44:32.120 paradox. Now the problem, and you see this even in people like Sam Harris, because he's technically

01:44:38.760 atheistic, but he's very interested in spiritual pursuits. He doesn't want to concretize that. And

01:44:43.880 maybe that's because it would be then become prone to rational critique and he doesn't want to lose

01:44:49.080 it. Right. But the thing is, is that you need dogma like Osiris and Horace, they're part and parcel

01:44:58.500 of the same thing. And you can't move ahead without axiomatic presuppositions. The issue is they have

01:45:03.920 to be, it seems to me, and maybe this has to do with the, the Christian idea that you're supposed to

01:45:09.120 look for the evil within, you know, so you're, you're destined to operate with a set of axiomatic

01:45:14.280 presuppositions. You can't help it. You can't make a move forward without it, but you should be cognizant

01:45:19.760 at the same time that in many ways that you don't understand that you're radically wrong.

01:45:23.800 And, and, and the play then is something like an exploration of that.

01:45:29.840 Yes, absolutely. I don't know if Nigel wanted to, had any thoughts on that, but yes, I, I think,

01:45:35.280 I think that's, that's absolutely right. I mean, I think it was Chesterton who once said that the

01:45:41.840 only alternative to the doctrine of original sin is the doctrine of original perfection. It's a kind of,

01:45:46.960 it's, it's, it, what, what, what do we have a tendency towards? Tendency towards the good that has

01:45:52.400 been corrupted towards, towards the bad. Um, so I think, or there is a sense that, uh, certainly

01:46:00.240 within most established religions, that there's a kind of generally speaking, an account of human

01:46:06.160 nature that has a story to tell about what the evil within us is and what that tendency is. And I

01:46:14.520 think that injects, even at its, even in the kind of worst chapters in the history of institutional

01:46:19.520 religion, a certain humility, uh, a certain, uh, healthy pessimism in the, in the, um, in the

01:46:29.940 possibilities of, of, of, of human being that there's sort of, uh, uh, uh, kind of an estimation

01:46:34.920 that, that there's going to be fragility. There's going to be, uh, uh, there's going to be a lot of

01:46:39.720 mistakes. And this is very, very different from the kind of dewy eyed, uh, optimist, optimistic

01:46:46.280 account of human nature that we get, that we get from, from, from the enlightenment that,

01:46:50.980 you know, all that needs to be done is to clear away superstition. And then we can look forward

01:46:56.140 to, as it were, the, the sunlit uplands of a, of, of a perfect utopia where everyone is,

01:47:01.140 is, is kind and nice to each other. Um, well, you know, the graveyards and the concentration

01:47:08.240 camps of the 20th century have certainly, uh, uh, undercut, undercut that hope. Um, so yes,

01:47:16.400 I mean, this idea of, of fragility and that sense that society somehow needs those sorts

01:47:23.200 of guardrails, those sorts of, those parameters that will anticipate, um, mistakes and, and

01:47:30.480 human frailty is, is, is crucial. Governments struggle to deliver that.

01:47:34.500 Well, let me ask Nigel a question here that comes out of this discussion. Nigel, you talked

01:47:41.000 earlier about the idea that, that, that a religious belief in some sense could be an inoculation

01:47:47.460 against idolatry and ideology. And so I want to ask you a bit more about that, but with

01:47:51.920 a twist on this idea about evil, because one of the things that I don't like about the claim

01:47:58.180 of oppressive patriarchy is that it, it identifies evil externally in the social world, right? It's

01:48:05.940 that malevolence exists. So that's in, that's kind of an original sin variant. You know, the idea that

01:48:12.560 there is in fact malevolence and evil. Well, where is it? Okay. Well, it's in society and then it's in

01:48:18.680 this patriarchal spirit. It's like, well, that's really dangerous as far as I'm concerned, because

01:48:22.280 well, if it's someone else and they're evil, then all the restraints are lifted. And we've seen that

01:48:29.100 many, many times in the 20th century. And there's a Christian, the Christian idea, I believe, and I don't

01:48:35.980 think it's limited to Christianity, but it's very well developed in Christianity, is that the best place

01:48:40.720 to search for evil is within. And you're, you're likely to find plenty of it as well. And it'll keep

01:48:47.260 you occupied, if you want something to do. And so is that part of an inoculation?

01:48:53.520 Yeah, I think it is. I mean, just going back to your earlier comments about postmodernism,

01:48:58.720 it struck me when postmodernists say that everything around us is about power and the abuse of power.

01:49:06.940 Ironically, it gives the postmodernists license to abuse power in the treatment of other people. So,

01:49:13.580 for example, because I'm, I'm white, privileged, and God help me in Oxford, nothing I say about,

01:49:22.660 let's say, colonialism is taken seriously, because of course, it's only a rationalization of my,

01:49:27.320 my, my social or political interests. And so my critics never take what I say seriously,

01:49:34.400 don't listen to what I say, constantly misrepresent what I say, constantly do me injustices.

01:49:41.100 But it's justified, because they're in the right, and I am clearly motivated by unjust power.

01:49:50.220 Ironically, of course, they are abusing power themselves, but they don't see it. So it's

01:49:54.920 often struck me that that one feature of, for want of a more scientific term, the social justice

01:50:02.660 crusade is that it is a kind of Christian heresy, a heresy being a kind of unbalanced form of

01:50:08.200 Christianity. Because on the one hand, the social justice warrior has certainly got the bit about

01:50:14.060 the, the, the, the moral ire of the Old Testament prophets, they got that bit.

01:50:19.920 And hypothetical concern for the dispossessed.

01:50:23.200 And, and indeed, absolutely, absolutely. So that's all right. But what they lack is a Christian sense of

01:50:31.480 compassion for, for weak, feeble humanity, which we all are, we're all crooked. And, and, and this sense that

01:50:40.000 the line between good and evil runs right down the middle of every one of us. So, so therefore,

01:50:45.700 no Christian can regard someone who's done wrong as simply subhuman or of, of another kind than themselves,

01:50:54.620 because we're all sinners. Uh, and it's that sense of, of, of universal, uh, common sin that, that generates

01:51:02.700 the, the obligation of compassion, even for the longer.

01:51:06.160 So does that, does that mean, does that mean technically then that you judge someone's character

01:51:11.400 by how they treat their enemies? I mean, that's a fundamental Christian claim. It's, and, and, you know,

01:51:17.320 because I do believe very frequently that people who say the central animating spirit of

01:51:21.720 civilization is power is a confession and a desire, both at the same time.

01:51:28.700 That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really believe that. And, and, um,

01:51:33.320 yeah, and in, in any case, so, so the, the issue of the enemy. So there's a couple of thoughts that

01:51:40.860 are jumbled together in my mind. I'm going to, so I was thinking, one of the things I tried to figure

01:51:44.840 out for a very long time was why the snake in the garden of Eden was associated with Satan.

01:51:49.940 It's a very, very weird thing. And it's, it's, it's outside the domain of rationality. It's an

01:51:55.440 intuitive leap of unbelievable magnitude. It's, it, when I think I figured it out, it just about

01:52:01.000 flattened me. So there's an idea that the snake is the enemy of mankind, and that's a biological

01:52:07.720 reality. The serpent, the devouring serpent is the enemy of mammals. We could say that it's very old

01:52:13.920 idea. So then the question is, well, we have an enemy that we have to contend with, right? That's,

01:52:18.780 that's an adaptive question. We have, what is the enemy? Well, it's a snake. Well, it's a snake in

01:52:24.060 the garden. And that means that no matter how well you build the walls and, and how carefully you

01:52:30.060 aggregate the territory, there's still that possibility of malevolence. And so then the

01:52:34.380 question is, well, what's the malevolence? Well, it's the snake. Well, maybe it's the existence of

01:52:39.480 snakes, but then, then it gets psychologized. It's like, well, it's the snake in your soul.

01:52:45.200 You know, it could be the snake in your enemy, but then even more sophisticated, it's not. No,

01:52:50.700 the ultimate enemy is the snake in your soul. And you see that right away in Genesis with the story

01:52:55.420 of Cain and Abel, because Cain is possessed by the enemy, the adversary, right? It's a, it's an

01:53:02.100 analogy of the story. It's an analog of the relationship between Christ and Satan, more

01:53:07.660 concretized, but it's so sophisticated, right? Because the whole, one of the things that humanity has to

01:53:13.980 figure out is what's our enemy, what, what can destroy us? It's like, well, the snake, that that's

01:53:19.320 natural world and predation. It's, well, what about that in other people? Well, yes, what about that?

01:53:24.260 We can demonize the enemy in no time. But if we're really sophisticated, we think, no, no, no,

01:53:29.520 the most fundamental adversary is the one within. And then that also offers the opportunity of

01:53:35.900 something like a romantic adventure, because you can tell young people,

01:53:39.820 overthrow the oppressive patriarchal tyrant. Or you could say, no, you should seriously contend with

01:53:48.160 the evil within. That's a far more difficult endeavor and a far more noble endeavor. And,

01:53:54.420 and it seems to me that that's something a religiously inspired humanities would make that

01:54:00.120 a central issue. And that's part of the building of character.

01:54:03.300 So your point about the snake is, is well taken. On the one hand, it is a kind of objectification

01:54:08.980 of evil because the evil lies in the snake, right? But your point is well taken. The snake is in the

01:54:15.180 garden. No one explained how it got there. It's just there. It's in, it's on the inside, not the

01:54:20.240 outside. So, so here's a question to you. That all makes sense. And, and, and what that means is that

01:54:28.220 no human enemy can, can, can ever be entirely the enemy because the enemy is also us. And so that,

01:54:37.340 that's a restraint on, on the way which we treat.

01:54:41.040 That's why I'm trying to, trying to lecture to my students about Nazism, particularly the

01:54:48.260 concentration camp situation, that the best way to understand that is as a perpetrator, not a victim.

01:54:53.140 Oh yeah. But okay. So do your students, your students get this because they,

01:54:59.700 It terrifies them. It terrifies them.

01:55:02.260 The social justice warriors don't seem to get it.

01:55:03.800 Hmm. They're never taught it. They're never taught it. They don't take this, you know,

01:55:08.960 like I took the idea that there was something to learn from Nazism and, and what happened in,

01:55:13.000 in the communist state seriously. It's like the idea, there's an idea that's promulgated,

01:55:18.640 promoted in particular by, by Jewish people. And rightly so that we should never forget what

01:55:25.240 happened in Nazi Germany. But then I think, well, what do you mean? Forget you mean, remember? Well,

01:55:29.800 what do you mean? Remember you mean, understand? Well, what does it mean to understand? That's easy.

01:55:34.160 You're the perpetrator. So you have to think, well, would you have been a Nazi concentration camp guard?

01:55:40.620 That's possible that the answer is no, but it's also possible that the answer is yes,

01:55:45.080 because they were people. And there isn't, there isn't that much evidence. The evidence that they

01:55:50.820 were all psychopathic, that's, that's pretty slim. There, there were certainly psychopaths among them.

01:55:57.280 And so that's a terrifying thing to contend with. It's like, you weren't the victim. You weren't the

01:56:03.200 hero who rescued the Jews, or maybe you're all of those, you know, and fair enough, we could investigate

01:56:08.520 all those possibilities, but perpetrator, that's right up there, man. And then you could see,

01:56:13.520 well, the social justice warriors are insisting upon that in some sense too, because they say,

01:56:18.720 well, look at the evil. It's like, fair enough. You know, who, who can, who can dispute that?

01:56:24.840 But, but it's the locale it's because they're not, the responsibility isn't within it becomes

01:56:30.240 too easily pathologized. That's what it looks like to me. And it, and it takes away the adventure. I

01:56:35.680 mean, this is one of the things that I've been trying to talk to Christian professors. I don't mean

01:56:41.220 professors technically, but about the fact that this, the adventure that's part and parcel of this

01:56:48.940 ethical process is not sold enough to young people because they would buy it if it was,

01:56:53.960 it was as romantically portrayed as the opportunity to participate in the self-righteous riot.

01:57:01.460 I think you're, you're both onto something very, very important that, that, that, that as soon as we

01:57:08.920 start to project a sin and culpability onto systems and structures and away from, from individual

01:57:19.280 agency, things start to go very, very badly wrong. I know that there's a, I think, I believe there's a

01:57:25.780 tradition in Ignatian Catholic spirituality. It's called the contemplatio locchi, where you

01:57:30.860 are supposed to, this is a counter-reformation, um, uh, uh, idea where you're supposed to read the

01:57:37.500 gospels very, very, uh, carefully, and you're supposed to imagine yourself there. And one common

01:57:43.080 theme is that you're supposed to imagine yourself at the, at the foot of the cross, uh, uh, not as it

01:57:48.920 were as a friend or as a follower of Christ, but as part of the mob, um, I think more likely

01:57:55.960 statistically. Right. And I, I, I seem to remember that in the filming of the passion of the Christ in

01:58:02.160 2004, Mel Gibson, the hands that you see hammering the nails of Christ of the actor playing Christ,

01:58:09.720 Jim Cavaziel into the cross were Mel Gibson's. Uh, and so his point was that you, you, that,

01:58:17.340 that, that sin is not other people. Um, and sin, by the way, is not a sin. The worst sin is

01:58:23.400 assumption that it's other people. Right. And I think increasingly now the idea that it's,

01:58:30.060 that it can be outsourced, not just to systems and structures, but to pathologies or therapeutic

01:58:35.740 conditions. And so the idea is that, that, that sin is, as I said just now, that, that it's not so

01:58:42.640 much, we don't believe in sin anymore, so much as syndromes, which is profoundly

01:58:47.100 disempowering. That is to say, you're, you're, because you're, you're medicalizing, you're,

01:58:51.240 you're pathologizing, you're, you're wrongdoing. And as soon as you've done that, you are, uh,

01:58:57.580 not able to address it or overcome it. You're not able to, as it were, develop those habits of

01:59:03.200 responsibility that you, that you write about so well. And that I think is, is, is part of the

01:59:09.000 reason that, that, that young people are so sort of drawn, drawn to your ideas.

01:59:13.160 It is something that overcomes us. No, because when I tell people, tell young people to clean

01:59:17.280 up their room, it isn't because I think the room is trivial. I think it's because their room is way

01:59:22.720 more important than they think it is. Right. And they can discover that. And it's part of this

01:59:27.240 localization of, of ignorance and malevolence. It's, and I think it is part of central Christian

01:59:33.140 thought that it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city. And that the prime,

01:59:38.980 the prime place for motivation about the sins of the world is to start with yourself. And how,

01:59:44.840 I can't see how that, if it isn't yourself, then it's something else, right? Then it's something else.

01:59:49.340 Well, then it's the natural world and, and resentment will arise from that or, or it's the place your

01:59:55.300 forefathers built. Right. And, and so, so now let's talk about this idea that this movement is a

02:00:02.180 heretical brand of Christianity or an offshoot of Christianity a bit. It's one of the questions you

02:00:06.420 guys had forwarded to me. So what are the similarities? We talked about a couple of them.

02:00:11.460 What are the differences? We talked about a couple of them too, I guess. Is there anything else there

02:00:16.620 to flesh out? No. So on the one hand, the similarity is the, the, the, the passion for justice and concern

02:00:25.480 for the, for the marginalized and the poor. That's, that's all good. But there is this, this, this notion

02:00:30.560 that, yeah, the, the, the problem lies elsewhere, a complete sense of, of self-righteousness and

02:00:37.560 therefore a complete lack of forgiveness or compassion for those whom you think are wrong.

02:00:43.520 Um, uh, I, I, I mean, I just, just going forward to the point you made, I mean, you said, you said

02:00:49.880 Jordan, that, that, you know, when you impress this on your students, you know, that, that, that the

02:00:55.640 source of evil may like lie inside them and that it's possible that they, they might through weakness

02:01:00.780 have been a, a camp guard, not, not a, not a, a liberator, uh, that, that, that, that, they're,

02:01:07.740 they're scared by this notion and I can understand why. Or through delight in cruelty. It's not mere

02:01:12.240 weakness. It's like, don't be thinking this, this might not appeal in a very remarkable way to the

02:01:18.520 darkest parts of your nature. Okay. And that's a terrible thing to investigate. So, so, but, but,

02:01:25.080 you know, fear can be paralyzing. So, so how do you move them beyond that point? And I was thinking,

02:01:30.000 well, part of it is I tell, I tell them or make it implicit too, that you cannot understand your

02:01:35.300 possibility for good until you understand your possibility for evil. Cause you don't take

02:01:39.120 yourself seriously enough. It's like, well, you're kind of an 18 year old ne'er do well, or maybe

02:01:43.360 you're a 40 year old ne'er do well. What does it matter? You're just a collection of dust in some

02:01:47.760 speck like place in the outer cosmos. Anyways, it's like, no, no, you look at what you're withholding

02:01:54.140 and what you're inflicting. And unless you're going to say that pain itself is irrelevant,

02:01:59.200 how can you say that your sins are trivial? And if they're not, well, then you're not

02:02:04.480 trivial. You're certainly not trivial as a perpetrator. So then the question is how may,

02:02:10.000 how non-trivial could you be as a savior instead of a perpetrator? And so that lights a spark. It's

02:02:16.100 like, well, and all these kids, they're looking, who could I be? Well, I say you could be a perpetrator,

02:02:21.260 but you could be the opposite of that. Whatever we could start with perpetrator and we can flesh out

02:02:27.060 the opposite. And they're, they're, they're on board with that. They're, they're, and no wonder

02:02:33.720 because like, of course, right. It's certainly consistent Jordan with some very influential

02:02:41.340 accounts of how the Holocaust could possibly have happened. Um, leaving to one side, this difficult

02:02:48.760 neuralgic debate about the uniqueness of the shower and so on. I think was it, is it Christopher Browning

02:02:54.380 or Richard Browning, the, the, that extraordinary book? Christopher. Yeah. Where, where, where he,

02:02:59.640 he studies that, that, that police battalion involved at one of the, I think the, one of the

02:03:03.940 Einsatzgruppen and, and, and just the staggering normality of the people involved in that conscripted.

02:03:11.880 They were not, um, diehard ideologues, diehard believers. Some of the letters.

02:03:17.960 They even objected. They weren't punished when they objected. Yeah. Quite extraordinary. It is.

02:03:25.380 It is. It's a deadly book. It's a terrifying book. It's, it's incredible. I always thought

02:03:31.160 Hannah Arant had it backwards. It's not the evil of banality. It's the banal. It's not the banality

02:03:37.680 of evil. It's the evil of banality. Evil of banality. Yes. And I think that's a lovely thing

02:03:42.280 to tell undergraduates too. It's like your life is banal. Well, that isn't who you are. That isn't

02:03:47.320 who you should be. It's like, this is the only thing that can justify this suffering is a great

02:03:52.360 adventure. It's well, what's the greatest adventure. It's ethical endeavor. And you have to be able to

02:03:57.280 say that without cliche. And you say, well, you'd struggle with the adversary within you want an

02:04:03.200 adventure and see what happens if you tell the truth, because you don't know what's going to happen

02:04:07.800 if you tell the truth, because you're agenda free, right? It's like, you're not trying to

02:04:12.280 manipulate the world to deliver in the Heideggerian sense of delivering standing resources. You're not

02:04:18.560 an exploiter. You're an explorer. And, and, and, you know, these kids, they come into the university

02:04:25.040 with a veneer of cynicism. And it's this deep because they're only 18, they're 19. There's,

02:04:30.820 there's no cynicism there at all. And then that cynicism is fed and they get more cynical and angry

02:04:36.720 because, well, they came to the place of wisdom and, and were turned away with, with, with more

02:04:42.600 cynicism. No, I was going to tell you guys, I talked to Yeonmi Park and I posted this video the

02:04:48.380 other day and she's a defector from North Korea. And we went through her story and she wrote this book

02:04:54.480 called, uh, um, in order to live, which is a harrowing book. Um, although I don't think it's as harrowing

02:05:01.240 to read as it is harrowing to talk to her, but in any case, her book ends in 2016. So I asked her,

02:05:08.360 what did she do after 2016? And she went through high school and university in South Korea, high

02:05:15.680 school and all the primary school in one year, locked herself in a room basically, and went through

02:05:21.520 it all in one year and then went to a South Korean university and they're hard South Korean

02:05:25.060 universities. And then after she wrote her book, which was inspired by the way, by George Orwell's

02:05:29.720 animal farm was very interesting. She went to Columbia to take humanities degree. And I thought,

02:05:35.800 well, what a remarkable story. This girl escapes from starvation and famine and cruelty and

02:05:40.920 totalitarianism in North Korea. Slavery in China makes her way to New York and goes to Columbia

02:05:47.620 university. She said it was the dream of her father that she'd be educated. And I said, how was it?

02:05:52.620 She said, it was a total waste of time and money. And I said, it shocked me. It really shocked me

02:05:58.320 because we just had to talk about the ennobling possibility of literature, let's say with,

02:06:03.080 with regard to Orwell. And I said, it was the only time in the whole conversation that I actually saw

02:06:08.840 her cynical, which is really something to say, given what she'd been through. I said, that can't be

02:06:13.560 right. That can't be right. Like surely there was one professor, there was one course that led you

02:06:21.980 down the road of the perennial philosophy, let's say, or that held up that golden thread. And she

02:06:28.060 thought, she said, well, I took a human biology course. I learned about evolution, but it got

02:06:33.740 politically correct near the end. And that was it. She, she didn't, she couldn't say one thing about

02:06:39.540 it. And so, well, if that's what young people are receiving when they go to an august institution

02:06:45.420 like that, it's no bloody wonder their cynicism is redoubled, especially when that's what's taught

02:06:50.720 to them. We're all power, mad oppressors and despoilers of the planet. And, and then avatars

02:06:57.900 of our group power. It's like, how could you come out of that anyway, but entirely dispirited

02:07:04.020 and also angry? Well, it, I, I, I've got to say, just speaking, just speaking into defense

02:07:13.160 of my, my own students, or at least the system as I, as I've experienced it, uh, my students

02:07:19.580 have been, you know, quite, quite extraordinary and very, very promising. And they seem to have

02:07:24.240 not, not really picked up any of these, these kinds of ideological pathologies. But I think

02:07:30.280 we, at the same time, do have to sit back and look at the problem more widely. And Nigel

02:07:36.860 and I have spoken about this, uh, an awful lot in the last few years through his experiences

02:07:41.240 in Oxford and similar experiences here in, here in Cambridge, that, um, that there does

02:07:46.960 seem to be a crisis of, of the university in the West, a sense of, uh, uh, you might call

02:07:53.560 it an identity crisis, a sense that we can't any longer answer the question, what are universities

02:07:58.500 for? Um, there's one traditional way of thinking about that. And that is to say, roughly speaking,

02:08:06.680 they're for the pursuit of truth and, and goodness and, and beauty, and it's going to

02:08:11.780 be chaotic and messy, but then there are competing visions as to what the university is for.

02:08:17.320 Talking about the perennial philosophy. I mean, that just seems to me to be self-evident is

02:08:21.480 we're, we're having a conversation down the generations about the nature of humanity and

02:08:26.360 its ideal. And that's what the university is there to foster. So the humanities are at the

02:08:30.680 core and then it branches out into science and, and, and, and, and, and the professions,

02:08:36.400 but that's the heart. And the heart is this discussion of the perennial philosophy. And, and it does,

02:08:43.140 I can't understand really why that case isn't made more, uh, explicitly and also in some sense,

02:08:51.480 somewhat self-evident. I mean, I presume that, that, that I can't understand why we're so weak

02:08:59.620 in the face of this criticism. It's like, what the hell's wrong with us? Is that we don't,

02:09:03.800 is it because we're called to be explicit about things that, that we don't know how to be explicit

02:09:09.620 about, you know, we're, we're taken aback by the critique in some sense.

02:09:15.200 I think part of the problem, Jordan, might be just a structural one, that the university is no

02:09:20.260 longer a university, but much more a multiversity. And that we are, as it were, increasingly

02:09:24.840 fragmented, sometimes for very good reasons into increasingly specialized silos, uh, often even

02:09:31.440 within the same overarching discipline. I mean, one of the things I love working, uh, one of the

02:09:37.080 reasons I love working in a divinity faculty is that it does, as it were, have a single,

02:09:42.660 roughly speaking, anyway, a single organizing horizon. And so that I can have colleagues who

02:09:48.600 are sociologists or anthropologists, they work in Eastern religions. I'm a philosopher, but there

02:09:53.560 are theologians, historians, textual specialists, and so on. Roughly speaking, we are part of a single,

02:09:59.420 a single ecosystem, but that is not, not the case elsewhere. And so there's a kind of

02:10:04.100 fragmentation that makes it very, very difficult to have the sorts of conversations that we've been

02:10:09.180 having. It's a tower of Babel. Right. Everybody's speaking different languages. Yeah. Yeah.

02:10:14.600 Perspectives. Yeah. Yeah. And what happens after that? That's after that's the flood.

02:10:21.300 It's not been my experience among my humanity colleagues, humanity's colleagues that, uh, uh,

02:10:27.580 what they think they're about are the kinds of deep existential questions that the perennial

02:10:33.020 philosophy raises. I think a lot of them have lost sight of what, of what they're doing and why

02:10:38.660 they're doing it. Um, um, and I think that's part of the problem. I mean, certainly when I studied

02:10:44.500 history here in the 1970s, most of it was, was mind boring. It was soul destroying. It was really tedious

02:10:52.620 because, uh, because, uh, apart from the few courses where actually moral questions were raised

02:10:58.640 or even religious ones, um, it wasn't really clear what the point of this stuff was.

02:11:04.600 I mean, if I can say so, Nigel, I think we have a special responsibility as, as theologians or who,

02:11:09.760 those, those who work within theology too, which used to be, of course, the queen of the sciences,

02:11:15.000 the idea being that it was a, uh, uh, a discipline, not so much a discipline, but a kind of

02:11:20.360 ecosystem of different disciplines that did at least have some story to tell about how

02:11:24.860 all the different avenues of human inquiry could fit together and what place they might have.

02:11:29.660 Now, even if that's completely wrong, it, it, as it were, what it would, what would be required to

02:11:35.960 displace that integrated system would be a rival integrated system that was at least comparable in

02:11:42.880 terms of explanatory power and capacity for, to accommodate all these different,

02:11:47.060 different approaches.

02:11:50.060 Well, so in some sense, your, your claim, I think is that, you know, if that unitary principle is

02:11:55.980 lacking, and we talked about the unitary principle as the spirit that engenders the perennial philosophy,

02:12:02.560 if that unitary spirit is fragmented and lacking, then something corrupt comes in to fill the void or

02:12:09.720 something partial or something limping and crippled in, in, in some sense, right? Uh, uh, a pathologized

02:12:15.840 religion. And then that of course leads to the question, well, how do you know when a religion

02:12:20.460 is pathologized and when it's not? But we, we got there to some degree there today, we say, well,

02:12:25.060 part of the hallmark of a religion that's got its act together in some sense is that it locates evil

02:12:31.340 within rather than without. And, and that's, that's an interesting proposition and seems at least

02:12:38.320 worthy of consideration.

02:12:40.940 And that's important because it generates humility and therefore generates a certain restraint in the

02:12:46.540 way you treat other people you disagree with. Um, uh, if you don't have that, you, you can't have a

02:12:52.240 liberal space. You have people shouting at each other. Um, so I think that's really, really important.

02:12:58.320 I mean, and maybe part of it too, is, is, is the Socratic insistence upon ignorance. It's like,

02:13:05.480 I'm fundamentally ignorant and prone to malevolence. Fix me. Right. Yeah. It's something like that.

02:13:13.440 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, who would argue with that? Well, Socrates might argue with it. I mean,

02:13:19.820 Socrates, he, he, he does think that, that knowledge is, is, is, is key. That ignorance is,

02:13:25.700 is the awareness of our epistemic finitude is, is crucial. He thinks malevolence and wrongdoing

02:13:32.320 is just a failure of knowledge so that, so that as it were, moral failure is, is a kind of cognitive

02:13:38.340 failure or as an epistemic failure. And I mean, Aristotle can't, can't, can't handle that at all.

02:13:42.960 He thinks that there's actually something deep within us that leads us to, to, to go wrong, but,

02:13:47.840 but, but yes, I mean, that Socratic idea, the Socratic principle of, of dialectical diversity,

02:13:54.100 that is to say of, of, of kind of fruitful friction between, between two or more positions.

02:13:59.460 It's, I mean, I, I, I think that that model, which is at the heart of the Oxford and Cambridge

02:14:04.020 model, that is to say, broadly, we do have lectures and we do have seminars for graduate students,

02:14:09.600 but that sort of the idea of a, of a, of a tutor in a room, a supervisor with one, two, possibly

02:14:14.700 three students. And as it were modeling that kind of dialogical collaborative inquiry into the truth

02:14:21.320 is, um, is likely. Yeah. Well, that's what we're doing right now, hopefully.

02:14:25.440 Right. And, and, and you, like I said, it's very difficult to overstate the audience hunger for

02:14:30.140 that. It's, especially when it's working, I mean, people are drawn to it and, and pleased,

02:14:35.640 very pleased that it's happening. And there's, there's, there's public demand for, I mean, when I

02:14:40.260 talked, you know, this, when I talked to Harrison, in, in Dublin, in London, we had like 8,000 and 10,000

02:14:46.360 people. And it was a good faith conversation, you know, and, and, and when we asked the audience,

02:14:52.420 if they wanted to switch to Q and A or continue the dialogue, they were overwhelmingly in support

02:14:57.880 of continuing the dialogue. And we've underestimated the, we've underestimated public

02:15:03.200 intelligence, partly because of technological shortcoming, I think, is that there, there,

02:15:08.580 there is a hunger for this and, and it's being fed by ideologies. If it isn't fed properly,

02:15:13.260 it's, it's fed by ideologies. And I don't know what to make of the ignorance versus malevolence

02:15:19.120 idea. You know, I mean, it's a little of column A and a little of column B, because I do see the

02:15:25.720 delight, like, let me get, tell you a quick story. So you tell me if you think this is ignorance or

02:15:31.140 malevolence. So when I debated Slavoj Zizek, I did a 15 minute critique of the communist manifesto,

02:15:37.520 and there were a lot of radical leftists in the audience, and they'd come to hear Zizek,

02:15:41.380 you know, take me apart. Although that isn't what happened in the discussion, we just had a

02:15:46.200 discussion. And I, I mentioned at one point that the communist manifesto was an incitement to bloody

02:15:54.060 violence and mayhem. And like a fifth of the audience laughed and cheered. And it was that,

02:16:00.900 that Freudian revelation of unconscious motivation. You know, they're all individuals in the crowd,

02:16:06.200 so they're masked, they can, they can manifest their darkest motivations without fear of revelation.

02:16:11.540 And it just stopped me cold for about 10 seconds. And I thought, yeah, yeah, no kidding. It's like,

02:16:18.140 we'll go dance in the streets when things are burning. And is that towards some higher good?

02:16:22.680 Or is it just, it's about time those bastards got what they deserved. And it isn't obvious to me that

02:16:28.860 that's a manifestation of the striving for higher good. I mean, it's complicated, right? Because

02:16:33.660 if you identify evil, in some sense, you have an obligation to deal with it. But then if you don't

02:16:40.980 identify the evil that's within, and you externalize it, your motives are suspect right away, because

02:16:46.280 it's just too convenient. And you might say, well, that's ignorance. And I do think that's part of it.

02:16:50.500 But the convenience factor is, it can't be overlooked. Like, first of all, your, your moral obligation is

02:16:57.920 only to persecute those who are evil. So that lifts a huge weight off your shoulders. And then you get to

02:17:02.420 do anything terrible you want, because you've identified the adversary himself, and it's not

02:17:07.180 you. And I, if that's an, that, if that's ignorance, it's so deep that it transforms itself

02:17:14.660 at that point into a kind of willfully blind malevolence. That's how it looks to me.

02:17:23.240 Certainly, that's true. I mean, I mean, I, I've been reading more and more of René Girard recently,

02:17:28.160 and the way he describes these sort of crowd pathologies, and the way that a kind of a mob

02:17:37.060 can, as it were, lose its mind through mimetic desire, through simply imitating what they take

02:17:44.900 the rest of the crowd to, to, to be doing. I find it.

02:17:48.920 Yeah, see, they're imitating a central animating spirit too, right? I mean, they're imitating something

02:17:55.160 that, that you might think of as technically satanic. And that animates the entire crowd. And,

02:18:01.220 and it's very difficult to explain something like Nazi Germany without going down that pathway.

02:18:07.340 Yeah, yeah. Yes, I think that that's certainly right. And I think that the problem in the modern

02:18:13.540 context is that technology and social media in particular, of course, has kind of catalyzed that,

02:18:19.140 that kind of, that, that mania, that, that more malevolent spirit in, in the crowd. And, and it's,

02:18:26.820 it's escalated that, that the possibilities of, of ostracism and kind of digital star chambers and

02:18:36.900 council culture and, and, and so on and so forth. And it, it's, it's something that we're going to,

02:18:45.080 as it were, the genie's out of the bottle and it's very, very difficult to work out how, how one can

02:18:49.260 come up with a clear diagnosis and a clear prescription for how we, how we get.

02:18:53.980 I'll tell you something that's pretty interesting is, you know, when I have a conversation like

02:18:58.940 this and it goes well, and then thousands of people comment, the comments are unbelievably positive.

02:19:06.400 And so it's possible for that conversation to be depathologized in the presence of the

02:19:11.940 appropriate conversation. I mean, if you look at that conversation with your, you on me park, that

02:19:17.320 the comments are so unbelievably positive that it's, it's difficult to, there is, they're as positive

02:19:23.780 in a shocking way as Twitter mob comments can be positive, can be shocking in a negative way.

02:19:29.660 And so then it's up to people who can engage in an intense dialogue at the edge of what we know

02:19:36.080 to do so. And I think increasingly to do so publicly because that the technology affords

02:19:41.920 us that possibility.

02:19:43.040 Yeah. Yeah. Yes. It's, it's not, it's not all bad and it can offer forms of belonging,

02:19:49.760 even though it's only virtual belonging that, that can really satisfy, uh, uh, an urge for,

02:19:57.920 um, for community and, um, and a sense that atomization, the atomization that we've seen over

02:20:05.200 the last few decades can, can, can be overcome.

02:20:07.960 Um, and I think a lot of the possibility too, of these dialogical investigations that might've

02:20:13.540 been isolated to Cambridge and Oxford to become part of the public dialogue. Wouldn't that be

02:20:18.800 something? So I'm, I'm pretty sure both sides would, would, would benefit from that sort of

02:20:25.160 exchange.

02:20:25.840 And, uh, another, uh, ground of hope is, is my consistent experience has been that the,

02:20:33.140 the noisy, shouty, illiberal, uh, um, people are a minority. Uh, there's a much larger majority

02:20:40.820 of people who are uncertain and intimidated, uh, but in the right circumstances could be liberated

02:20:46.500 and, and, and would, would welcome this kind of honest, uh, rational give and take of reason

02:20:53.640 kind of, of exchange. Um, so I think that that's a ground for hope too. Um, whatever the, the, uh,

02:21:01.200 disadvantages that the, uh, the disinhibiting effects of social media are.

02:21:06.660 Well, maybe we could get fortunate and continue this conversation at some point at Cambridge

02:21:13.440 or Oxford with some other people that would be really good if we could manage it as far

02:21:18.440 as I'm concerned. And once we can travel again, and once I can travel, I'd really like that.

02:21:24.320 I thank you very much for agreeing to participate in this and it was really good to see both of

02:21:29.000 you again and hopefully we'll at the right time do this again and maybe with some other

02:21:33.840 people too. So if you guys can think of some other people that would be good contributors

02:21:38.180 to this, you know, we could open it up a bit and that would be, if you think it's worthwhile,

02:21:42.580 that would be good as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely. But let's, let's, let's work on

02:21:47.580 see each other in the flesh over here sooner or later. I'd like that a lot. I like that a lot.

02:21:54.660 Good. Thank you for having us, Jordan. Well done. Thank you very much for the conversation.

02:21:58.380 I really appreciate it. I have too. Bye-bye.

02:22:03.840 Bye-bye.

02:22:18.800 Bye-bye.

02:22:26.180 Bye-bye.

194. Searching for God within Oxford and Cambridge ｜ James Orr & Nigel Biggar

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