The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 251. You Probably Should Have Read The Bible ｜ Franciscan University

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00:00:52.000 Welcome to episode 251 of the JBP podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson.

00:01:00.000 This episode is a speech Dad gave at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio.

00:01:06.000 The main point of the speech is something Dad spent years grappling with.

00:01:10.000 The relationship between ethics, how we navigate the world, and the problem of perception,

00:01:16.000 and navigational problems that come up as we explore the world.

00:01:20.000 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:01:38.000 About a month and a half ago, I went to the Museum of the Bible in Washington.

00:01:46.000 And that was pretty interesting. It's a really good museum. If you ever go to Washington, I would highly recommend it for what that's worth.

00:01:56.000 It's very carefully done. Very comprehensive. And it struck me while I was going through the museum, that although in one sense it was a museum of the Bible, in possibly a deeper sense, but possibly not,

00:02:14.000 it was a museum of the book. They'd set up the museum so you walk through the history of the Bible chronologically, you can walk through a variety of different ways in the museum, but that's one of the pathways through the museum.

00:02:32.000 And so, it was a history of a technology, you know, and the technology is the technology of the book.

00:02:40.000 And in some sense, one of the things I really realized that the museum brought home for me was that all books grew out of the, in some profound sense, particularly in the West, all books grew out of the Bible.

00:02:56.000 And so, that's interesting to me. It's interesting to me partly because we seem to have a lot of trouble in our culture now agreeing on what might constitute a valid canon of books.

00:03:10.000 I mean, part of what the humanities offered, certainly part of what religious tradition offered, was a canonical book.

00:03:17.000 I mean, Judaism has a canonical book, and Christianity has a canonical book, and Islam has a canonical book, and all the major Abrahamic religions have agreed that, in some sense, the followers of those religions are people of the book.

00:03:31.000 And that's quite a remarkable proposition, first of all, because it isn't obvious that you would consider a book the most fundamental element of your culture.

00:03:46.000 You know, it might be more obvious that you might consider a city a more fundamental element, or a dynasty, or, you know, something overtly political.

00:03:55.000 But that isn't what a huge portion of the world has decided. We seem to have decided that, no, we're founded on a book.

00:04:04.000 And we have some dispute about just exactly what that book is and what it means, but the fact that we've at least agreed that it's a book, that's something.

00:04:17.000 And I don't know what it is exactly, and that's partly what I want to investigate tonight.

00:04:23.000 Now, the Bible, in its various forms, isn't exactly a book. It's a library of books, right?

00:04:29.000 It's a collection of books, but it's an interesting collection of books, to say the least, because, despite the fact that it's a library, so a collection of books,

00:04:37.000 it also has a narrative theme that runs through it, right? It has a beginning, and a middle, and an end.

00:04:43.000 And it has a plot, strangely enough. And I say strangely, because, how did it get plotted, exactly?

00:04:52.000 You know, I mean, obviously, believers believe that it's the word of God, and fair enough, you know.

00:04:59.000 But that's not a very detailed explanation, right? It's a religious interpretation, but it's shallow in some sense.

00:05:12.000 It lacks detail. It still doesn't explain, in any fundamentally compelling sense, how the narrative God organized across time.

00:05:24.000 And you say, well, it's the Spirit of God working through the multitude of people who aggregated the Bible and transmitted it.

00:05:31.000 And fair enough. It's still not a deep enough level of understanding to make me feel that when I, for what that's worth,

00:05:40.000 when I encounter that explanation, that it's been thoroughly explained. And, you know, that's not a criticism, precisely.

00:05:47.000 Anything that's complex is susceptible to ever increasingly deep explanations, you know.

00:05:53.000 In some sense, if something's deep, you never get to the bottom of it, and all explanations are insufficient.

00:05:58.000 But I think it's a remarkable fact, speaking psychologically and historically, that there's a book at the basis of our culture.

00:06:06.000 And that's how we define the culture, as based on the book, and that it's a collection of books.

00:06:12.000 And that the collection was aggregated so that a plot emerges from it.

00:06:17.000 And Christians take that idea one step further, in some sense, because they assume that not only is the Old Testament a library of books that has a plot, 0.88

00:06:28.000 but that implicit in that book is the New Testament. It's somehow there a priori before the events actually unfold.

00:06:37.000 And that's an extremely bizarre and interesting idea. And it's very difficult to know what to make of it.

00:06:43.000 So I was thinking these things when I was going through the museum. And I was thinking about the idea of the canon,

00:06:50.000 and about the idea of fiction and truth, and about the idea of literary depth, all of those things.

00:06:56.000 Trying to make sense out of them. Partly because, as I said, we now seem to have reached an impasse in our culture

00:07:04.000 about what can be validly considered canonical. And part of the way this came about, I have to take a detour through the history of ideas,

00:07:12.000 is that it was discovered in a variety of different disciplines after the Second World War.

00:07:24.000 Really, I would say, starting in the 60s. That the problem of perception was a much more intractable problem

00:07:32.000 than anybody had heretofore suspected. And so that emerged partly in the field of artificial intelligence,

00:07:40.000 when the first artificial intelligence researchers who were interested in robotics tried to make machines that could operate in the real world,

00:07:48.000 like animals could, or like people could, to build robots. The idea, to begin with, was that,

00:07:56.000 the difficult part would be programming the robot to operate in the environment.

00:08:00.000 The easy part would be getting the robot to perceive the environment. Because, after all, there it is.

00:08:04.000 You just have to look, and everything's self-evident. And it turned out that that wasn't the case at all.

00:08:12.000 And this was reflective of a philosophical problem that had been recognized by David Hume sometime earlier,

00:08:18.000 which is the problem of the relationship between what is and what ought to be.

00:08:22.000 David Hume believed that there was an unbridgeable gap between the factual world and the ethical world, in some sense.

00:08:28.000 That you never had enough facts at your disposal to compute your trajectory into the future with any degree of certainty.

00:08:36.000 And I think that that's been proven true beyond a shadow of a doubt, as a consequence of recent investigations,

00:08:42.000 which have demonstrated not least that, what one of the problems is that, and this is associated with the problem of perception,

00:08:49.000 is that there's an infinite number of facts. And so, how do you guide, how do you guide your actions in light of the facts,

00:08:57.000 when there are endless facts about absolutely everything, absolutely everywhere all the time?

00:09:06.000 Which facts do you attend to, to guide yourself forward? Which facts do you prioritize? And which do you ignore?

00:09:14.000 Because, obviously, you have to ignore most of them, because there's a near infinite number of facts,

00:09:18.000 and you're not going to pay attention to all of them, because you can't. And so, how do you decide what not to pay attention to?

00:09:23.000 And the answer is, you don't know. And that's the general answer, is, which we don't know.

00:09:29.000 And it's exactly the same as the problem of perception, because when you look out the world, look out at the world,

00:09:35.000 or hear the world, for that matter, or taste the world, any of those things, any sensory interaction with the world,

00:09:42.000 is there's way more things to look at than you can possibly look at, and yet you do look at things, and you see.

00:09:50.000 And then the question arises, how do we do that? And the answer is, we don't know.

00:09:56.000 And it's such an intractable problem that we haven't been able to build machines that can do it.

00:10:01.000 That's why we don't have general purpose robots. And, you know, I think the closest thing we've got to them,

00:10:06.000 probably so far, are Elon Musk's self-driving cars, but you still don't really see those everywhere.

00:10:13.000 Right? They cracked that problem 80%, maybe something like that, but that last 20% is not going to be so easy.

00:10:20.000 And it's partly because, for example, you know, imagine that there's a navigation problem,

00:10:25.000 that having a car propagate itself down the highway is a navigation problem.

00:10:30.000 And you might think that's a technical problem, you need to know where the road is, the edges of the road and so forth,

00:10:36.000 which isn't so easy because roads don't actually have defined edges, but that's one of many problems.

00:10:41.000 And so we've had to put up a whole satellite system to map the roads in detail, and to feed that information into the cars,

00:10:48.000 and the cars can compare where they are on the road to the satellite image.

00:10:51.000 And they have to have very detailed perceptual knowledge of the world to operate.

00:10:56.000 But then there's additional problems that have to do with navigation that aren't so obvious.

00:11:01.000 For example, let's say you're driving down the road, and there's a mother and a child in a pram on one side of the road,

00:11:08.000 and there's like three old women on the other side of the road, and you have to run over one set of them. 1.00

00:11:15.000 And that actually turns out to be, in some real sense, a navigation problem, obviously.

00:11:21.000 But just as obviously, it's an ethical problem.

00:11:24.000 And how do you solve that?

00:11:27.000 And the answer again is, well, you don't know.

00:11:30.000 If you were in that situation, I don't know what you would decide or how you decide it,

00:11:33.000 but I do know that you don't know how you would decide it.

00:11:36.000 And actually, our navigation problems are always ethical problems.

00:11:40.000 That's, at least, that's the proposition that I want to offer you tonight,

00:11:44.000 is that our navigation problems are always ethical problems.

00:11:47.000 And that the problem of perception and the problem of ethical endeavor are the same problem.

00:11:53.000 And this is, I think, if I've made any radical claims in my life, and I suppose I probably have,

00:12:00.000 the most radical claim is that, and it's becoming increasingly radical, I think, in some sense,

00:12:08.000 is that we can't see the world except through an ethical framework.

00:12:14.000 It's actually technically not possible.

00:12:16.000 And this is a new realization.

00:12:18.000 I mean, we had Hume's observation that you can't easily get from what is to what ought to be.

00:12:23.000 And that's an early statement of the same problem.

00:12:27.000 Why can't you?

00:12:28.000 Well, too many facts.

00:12:29.000 Which facts are you going to use to guide you?

00:12:31.000 You select facts.

00:12:32.000 How do you select facts?

00:12:33.000 And if you're selecting facts, why are they facts?

00:12:36.000 Because you've selected them, right?

00:12:38.000 You might think if they're facts, you have to sort of randomly select them.

00:12:41.000 Because otherwise, you're biased in your selection of facts.

00:12:44.000 And if you're biased in selection of your facts, then it's not facts.

00:12:47.000 It's more like misinformation, or disinformation, or whatever the hell it is that people are accused of following now.

00:12:53.000 You know?

00:12:54.000 Because your bias is disturbing your interaction with the facts.

00:12:59.000 Well, it has to.

00:13:01.000 There's no way around that.

00:13:03.000 And does that mean that it's bias, per se, that's determining which facts that you interact with?

00:13:11.000 So is all your action merely a consequence of your bias?

00:13:14.000 And I would say that's one of the claims that the postmodern radicals make all the time.

00:13:18.000 Is that your perception is nothing but your biases.

00:13:21.000 Which is a pretty bloody dismal way of looking at the world.

00:13:24.000 There's your bias and my bias, and there's no truth, and there's no ethic.

00:13:28.000 There's just your bias and my bias, and which one should win?

00:13:31.000 It's like, well, I guess we'll find out, won't we?

00:13:35.000 Because there's no, well, there's no, there's no appreciation in that realm of philosophical inquiry for the notion that there is an ethic, like a fundamental ethic, that has some basis in, let's say some basis in reality.

00:13:54.000 A transcendent ethic that's real, and certainly no appreciation that that ethic is something that people could mutually explore as a consequence of their goodwill and their honest discourse.

00:14:06.000 Those are propositions, right?

00:14:08.000 They're deeply embedded in Western culture, and I think they're fundamental to the people of the book.

00:14:14.000 They're particularly well developed, well, both in Judaism and Christianity.

00:14:18.000 I don't know the development as well in the Islamic world.

00:14:21.000 But, no, we do believe that, as believers, that people are of divine worth, and that they can exchange information honestly, and the information is actually about the world.

00:14:32.000 And that there is such a thing as an ethic, and that ethic is related to the integral worth of each individual.

00:14:38.000 And that worth manifests itself, let's say, in our capacity for honest speech, and that capacity for honest speech is in some real sense redemptive.

00:14:47.000 And we do believe that, and that's part of the religious presuppositions in which our whole culture is embedded.

00:14:55.000 I say religious in part because I think they're first principles, and maybe you could define what's truly religious as what is the first principle.

00:15:04.000 Now, if you're thinking about it psychologically, there are, what would you say, there are phenomena, I suppose, that we regard as part of the realm of depth.

00:15:18.000 What's deep.

00:15:19.000 What's deep in literature, and what's deep in philosophy.

00:15:21.000 I would say, technically, that the realm of the religious is the realm of what's deepest, and what's deepest is first principles.

00:15:28.000 And maybe you come to those first principles, maybe in some sense you have to abide by them as a consequence of faith.

00:15:35.000 You know, you choose to live a certain way.

00:15:37.000 You choose to live, for example, as if other people have worth, and you do too.

00:15:41.000 And that that worth is absolute in some sense.

00:15:43.000 And, you know, if you're an admirer of the natural rights tradition, well, you would claim that we derive our notion of natural rights from a deeper understanding that each of us is of fundamental and intrinsic worth.

00:15:57.000 Which I think is pretty much akin to making the biblical claim that men and women are created in the image of God.

00:16:04.000 If God is emblematic of what constitutes the highest worth, and we're made in that image, that means that we partake in what's of absolute worth.

00:16:15.000 And then you decide, in some sense, to base your whole society on that presupposition.

00:16:21.000 And it looks to me like societies that do accept that presupposition and move forward from that first principle produce the sorts of societies that people would rather live in if they had their choice.

00:16:35.000 And societies that don't accept those first principles don't.

00:16:41.000 And I don't know if that's proof.

00:16:43.000 Because when you ask a question like that, you have to ask the question of what are you willing to accept as proof.

00:16:50.000 And, well, that's a very, very complicated problem.

00:16:54.000 But it does seem to me that societies that presuppose intrinsic worth at the individual level, which is a very weird proposition given the radical differences in ability between people.

00:17:08.000 It's much easier, in some sense, to see that highly successful people are much more worthwhile than people who are poverty-stricken and struggling.

00:17:16.000 Or that people who are highly intelligent are worthwhile in a much more fundamental way than people who aren't.

00:17:20.000 I mean, you could say that with regard to every individual difference and every talent.

00:17:24.000 It's a much more natural way of thinking.

00:17:26.000 The notion that we're all of intrinsic worth despite our variability, it's like, that's a hell of an idea.

00:17:33.000 It's absolutely amazing to me that that idea ever obtained any purchase anywhere under any conditions.

00:17:40.000 You know, we sort of think about it, in some sense, as self-evident now.

00:17:44.000 Although it's subject to intense questioning at the moment.

00:17:47.000 But that blinds us, I think, to just exactly how miraculous that idea really is and how unlikely it is.

00:17:54.000 And yet it seems to be a fundamental necessity for the organization of the kind of social institutions

00:18:02.000 that we would choose to inhabit if we had our choice.

00:18:07.000 And so, you know, that's interesting.

00:18:11.000 Back to the problem of perception and the biblical corpus.

00:18:14.000 Well, the AI types discovered, much to their chagrin, that perceiving the world was unduly complicated.

00:18:23.000 And so, the rubber hits the road in some sense as a consequence of those dilemmas that I just described with regards to self-driving automobiles.

00:18:34.000 It's like, well, if it's one group of vulnerable people on one side of the road and another group of vulnerable people on the other side of the road

00:18:40.000 and you have to run over one set, what do you do?

00:18:43.000 And the answer is, well, we don't know. And we do compute that. And how do we compute that?

00:18:48.000 We're going to have to figure that out. If we're going to build machines that are going to do that,

00:18:51.000 they're going to have to be able to think ethically. And that'll mean we'll have to understand what it means to think ethically.

00:18:56.000 And we don't understand that because it's really, really complicated.

00:19:00.000 And so, the problem of perception arose to bedevil robotics. And it's certainly not a problem that we have solved,

00:19:08.000 which is why we don't have general-purpose robots. Some researchers believe that that problem won't be solved in the absence of embodiment.

00:19:17.000 That robotic intelligence has to be embodied before it can act in the world in any real sense,

00:19:23.000 because perception is dependent on embodiment. And I think that's very interesting, especially in relationship,

00:19:30.000 particularly to the Catholic emphasis on the resurrection of the body and the valuing of the body,

00:19:37.000 as opposed to the mere spirit, you know, that the body is actually a necessary precondition even for perception,

00:19:42.000 in some way that we didn't understand before the last 50 or 60 years.

00:19:47.000 So, anyways, when this problem arose in the AI world, it simultaneously arose in, of all places, well, in psychology,

00:20:01.000 in relationship to the problem of perception, which psychologists are still beetling away trying to solve,

00:20:06.000 with some success. But more particularly, it arose in the humanities departments, especially in, in departments that were associated,

00:20:16.000 concentrating on literary criticism. Because the literary critics, especially the French, the postmodernist types,

00:20:22.000 came to a similar realization at some point, I'm condensing a lot of work here, but their basic proposition was,

00:20:31.000 well, how do you know when you've landed on the proper interpretation of a text? And the answer is, well, we don't know.

00:20:40.000 Well, so you take a text like Hamlet, and you get a hundred students to write an essay about, you know, a particular stanza,

00:20:49.000 a set of stanzas, a soliloquy, and a hundred of them have a hundred different opinions. So, well, like, which opinion is right?

00:20:58.000 And if none of them are right, well, does the text mean anything? If there can be a hundred different interpretations

00:21:05.000 of only one tiny section of the text, and you can't decide which interpretation is the right interpretation,

00:21:11.000 how do you know there's any interpretation at all? And so, how do you know the text is meaningful in any real sense,

00:21:17.000 if you can't even agree on what the meaning is? And you can certainly see how that problem bedevils something like Biblical criticism,

00:21:23.000 because Biblical stories are susceptible to a very large number of interpretations. That's for sure.

00:21:30.000 And so, if you can't agree on the interpretation, well, how do you even know that there's anything of any meaning there at all?

00:21:37.000 It's like, hey, we seem to have been able to manage it. We seem to have come to some consensus about what constitutes,

00:21:44.000 let's say, quality, high-quality literature, rather than low-quality literature. We seem to remember the high-quality literature,

00:21:51.000 perhaps, and to transmit it, and we don't remember the low-quality literature. At least that's what the humanities types would suggest.

00:21:57.000 And something like that winnowing, historical winnowing, seemed to be at work as we aggregated the stories that became the Biblical corpus as well.

00:22:07.000 Right? These were picked out from a wider variety of other ancient stories and made canonical for reasons that we don't understand.

00:22:18.000 All sorts of decisions were made about which books to include and which books not to include and what order to include them in.

00:22:25.000 And that's a mysterious process. We seem to have done it. And we've had wars about it, too, because it's a complicated problem.

00:22:34.000 So the postmodernists then thought, hey, well, here's a problem. If we can't agree on what text, what a given text means, just one text or even a paragraph from a text,

00:22:47.000 how can we agree on what the canonical texts are?

00:22:51.000 Because if it's problematic to interpret one fraction of a story, it's way more problematic to put a whole sequence of stories together,

00:23:00.000 maybe that would be the classic books of the Western tradition, let's say, and say, those books and not others.

00:23:06.000 It's like, well, who says? And why those books? Exactly. And what's your motive for putting those books together?

00:23:14.000 And that's where things got even more peculiar because I think it was perfectly reasonable of the postmodernists in some sense to say,

00:23:21.000 well, how do we decide what the meaning of a text is? We don't know. How do we decide which books should be canonical? We don't know.

00:23:29.000 But then to take the next step, which was, well, your motives for aggregating these texts are suspect.

00:23:38.000 And it looks to us, this is where the Marxist twist came in, extraordinarily and appropriately, in my estimation,

00:23:46.000 is that it's nothing but your will to power that aggregated those texts. Right?

00:23:51.000 The reason there's a Western canon is because the idea that there is a Western canon supports the domination of the West.

00:23:58.000 And it was that drive to domination that was the spirit that aggregated the texts to begin with and that justifies their choice as canonical.

00:24:07.000 And that's your support for that canon is either your conscious participation in that, let's call it structure of oppression,

00:24:17.000 or the manifestation of the same will to oppression operating within you.

00:24:22.000 And that's sort of where we're at now in our culture, because that's the accusation.

00:24:30.000 And I'm not very fond of that idea, partly because although I do agree that we don't know how we make sense out of things.

00:24:38.000 We don't know. But that doesn't, that lack of knowledge, that ignorance is where it should have stopped in some sense.

00:24:45.000 There should have been an investigation there. It's okay, we don't understand this.

00:24:48.000 We shouldn't have leapt to a, like a quasi-Marxist determination that said, oh, well, it's all will to power.

00:24:55.000 It's all the desire to dominate. Right? And because that's, well, first of all, really, you're so sure of that, are you?

00:25:02.000 What makes you so sure of that, that it's will to power that's the organizing principle, let's say, for society as such?

00:25:10.000 You really believe that? Does that work in your personal relationships?

00:25:13.000 Is that how you conduct yourself with your wife or your husband? It's domination all the way.

00:25:17.000 And same with your friends. It's domination. And when you go out, you know, you have a business.

00:25:22.000 And, of course, if you're radically left, you assume businesses are oppressive structures to begin with, 1.00

00:25:27.000 because you're jealous and stupid. And, well, and because, and also, because sometimes they are, you know, 0.99

00:25:34.000 because structures do warp and bend, and they can tilt towards oppression and tyranny,

00:25:39.000 and human structures are susceptible to that. But that's a deviation, as far as I'm concerned,

00:25:44.000 from the, certainly, I would say, from the norm, but certainly from what's optimal.

00:25:50.000 And is it your relationship with, between husband and wife is governed by nothing but power?

00:25:55.000 That's sort of the patriarchal oppression theory of marriage theory. 0.83

00:25:59.000 It's like, well, women have always been dominated by men. That's the historical reality. 0.99

00:26:03.000 It's like, really, that's your story for the entire corpus of the cooperation and competition

00:26:09.000 between men and women since the beginning of time.

00:26:11.000 It's essentially domination and nothing else. That's how it works, is it?

00:26:15.000 It's like, I don't think there's a bloody shred of evidence for that, by the way,

00:26:19.000 because I've looked at the principles that appear to underlie the establishment and maintenance of stable social institutions

00:26:28.000 at the micro level, so let's say within the confines of an intimate relationship,

00:26:32.000 and among friends, and among business partners, and among, well, political entities for that matter.

00:26:38.000 And it looks to me like all the evidence suggests that it's something a lot more akin to reciprocal altruism

00:26:44.000 and honest trade than it is akin to domination by power, because it's just not stable.

00:26:50.000 You know, if you're around people who do nothing but exploit you, are you going to participate in that voluntarily?

00:26:55.000 Are you going to do your best in a situation like that?

00:26:57.000 Or are you going to fight it in small ways and large and bring it to its knees?

00:27:01.000 And I think, I really do believe the answer to that's quite clear.

00:27:04.000 Those systems don't work.

00:27:06.000 And it's also the case that psychopaths, for example, who probably do operate in the world,

00:27:11.000 primarily on the basis of power, aren't successful.

00:27:14.000 And they never get to be more than about 3% of the population, because it's just not a successful strategy.

00:27:20.000 You can oppress people and exploit them to some degree, and that might be better, you know,

00:27:26.000 in a biological sense than just laying on the floor doing nothing, you know, as a reproductive strategy.

00:27:32.000 But it's not successful enough so that it characterizes the bulk of human beings.

00:27:37.000 It just doesn't work.

00:27:38.000 And it doesn't even characterize animals.

00:27:40.000 If you look at the principles upon which animal societies or social animals are structured,

00:27:46.000 especially complex animals, mammals, it isn't obvious at all that it's the meanest, scariest, toughest guy

00:27:51.000 who climbs to the top and then hangs on by brute force.

00:27:55.000 It isn't even the case for chimpanzees.

00:27:57.000 So, alright, so if it's not power, then what is it?

00:28:05.000 Well, I suggested it's something like reciprocal altruism, and that's a biological term,

00:28:10.000 but it's something like do unto others as you would have them do unto you, as the basis for social organization.

00:28:16.000 You know, it's something from me, something from you, something from me, something from you,

00:28:22.000 and not in a zero-sum manner either, understanding that if we treat each other as if we're both of worth,

00:28:28.000 and we act honestly, that we can both have more of what we want and need than we would if we were operating independently.

00:28:35.000 And isn't that the basis for your relationships? Fundamentally, you get married because you assume that you're better in the marriage

00:28:41.000 than you would be outside the marriage. And I don't mean things are better for you in some narrowly selfish sense,

00:28:46.000 although perhaps that's also true. I mean better in general, right?

00:28:50.000 You're wiser because you have a partner, you're more careful, you're more attendant to the needs of others,

00:28:56.000 and you can think of that as, you know, finger wagging, you should be more attendant to the needs of others,

00:29:02.000 but you can think about it as proper ethical training too, because if you learn to treat the person you love

00:29:07.000 with a certain degree of respect and reciprocity, maybe that prepares you to do that with other people.

00:29:13.000 At least you've got some practice that way, and isn't it better to run a business under those auspices?

00:29:19.000 Anybody who's run a successful business is inclined to say yes. I mean, you have to make tough decisions,

00:29:23.000 and sometimes you have to be cut and dried and maybe even somewhat cruel to make the proper decisions.

00:29:29.000 But still, you're fundamentally looking at something that is akin to voluntary cooperation and voluntary...

00:29:37.000 And the voluntary choice of the people that you associate with, voluntary association, exactly that.

00:29:47.000 And the right to speak your mind, hoping that if you do speak your mind, you can keep the pathways in front of you clear.

00:29:54.000 And so, well, so back to the biblical corpus and the museum.

00:30:00.000 I mean, I was thinking about all these things that I've sort of laid out in this scattershot impressionistic manner.

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00:32:55.000 I was trying to solve the problem of the canon.

00:33:01.000 How do we figure out what's canonical?

00:33:03.000 It's like, well, is it merely...

00:33:05.000 We pick the books that justify the dominance of our culture.

00:33:08.000 Well, first of all, you have to presume that we basically identify as human beings with groups to take that tack, right?

00:33:15.000 Because we're trying to support the domination of our culture.

00:33:19.000 I don't think that way.

00:33:20.000 I don't think most people in the West think that way.

00:33:22.000 I think most of us think at the level of the individual.

00:33:25.000 And I think that's more appropriate.

00:33:27.000 And so the idea that we aggregated the canon to justify the domination of our, like, ethnic group, I think, no.

00:33:34.000 I don't think so.

00:33:36.000 I mean, fair enough.

00:33:37.000 And sometimes things go in that direction.

00:33:39.000 But fundamentally, no.

00:33:41.000 I don't think that's it.

00:33:43.000 What's canonical?

00:33:44.000 How about this?

00:33:45.000 How about the more texts a text is influenced, the more canonical it is?

00:33:49.000 That's pretty damn straightforward.

00:33:51.000 And it seems straightforward enough, so I don't even know why it would be questionable.

00:33:55.000 A text is relevant, important, vital, valued, if it had a tremendous effect on other texts.

00:34:03.000 And so maybe you write a book of genius like right now today, but it's not going to be canonical because it hasn't had the time to wend its influence through the entire corpus of texts that constitutes the culture.

00:34:15.000 And so we could say, well, maybe a corpus of texts does constitute the culture.

00:34:19.000 How do we make decisions of value?

00:34:20.000 How do we see the world?

00:34:22.000 Well, I think there's two ways.

00:34:24.000 One is we do it in an embodied manner because we have emotions and we have motivations and they're built into us.

00:34:32.000 And part of the reason that we can understand each other is because we have the same motivations and emotions.

00:34:37.000 And so we can make reference to them without having to explain them.

00:34:41.000 I don't have to explain what anger means to you.

00:34:43.000 I don't have to explain what jealousy means.

00:34:45.000 I might have to specify the conditions under which they arose and we could have an interesting discussion about whether that's relevant or not.

00:34:52.000 But I don't have to tell you what they are.

00:34:54.000 You're like me enough so that we can assume that.

00:34:56.000 And so that's part of the ground for our fundamental understanding, our shared embodiment.

00:35:02.000 We're very similar as embodied creatures.

00:35:04.000 And we're even similar enough to animals that we can more or less understand complex animals for the same reason.

00:35:09.000 You know, you know when a dog wants to play if you have any sense and you know anything about dogs.

00:35:14.000 The dog bounces around in a playful way and you think, dog wants to play.

00:35:19.000 And, you know, and the reason you know that is because you want to play too.

00:35:22.000 And so you don't have to talk to the dog to establish that.

00:35:25.000 It's there to begin with.

00:35:27.000 And so we have this biological substrate that enables us to communicate.

00:35:32.000 That's part of what enables us to solve the problem of perception.

00:35:38.000 But then on top of that we have a historical overlay.

00:35:42.000 And I think, and this is the point of this talk fundamentally, this is the idea that I've been wrestling with most recently.

00:35:48.000 Is that, imagine that you had a map of all the books that there are in the West.

00:35:58.000 I'll just stick with the West for now because that makes things easier.

00:36:01.000 You have a map of all the books that there are in the West.

00:36:05.000 And you could map out the relationship between every book and every other book.

00:36:09.000 The dependencies.

00:36:10.000 And you'd find, for example, that you should read Hamlet because a lot of other books refer to Hamlet.

00:36:17.000 Or you should read Shakespeare because a lot of other books refer to Shakespeare.

00:36:20.000 And if you don't understand Shakespeare, then there's a whole bunch of books you can't understand.

00:36:24.000 And then you might say, well, having to understand Shakespeare, what should you have read?

00:36:30.000 And the answer to that could easily be, well, you probably should have read the Bible.

00:36:34.000 And maybe that's a claim that you could make about wanting to understand any book.

00:36:40.000 Because if you mapped out the relationships between all the books that there are,

00:36:44.000 you'd find that the most fundamental book is the biblical library.

00:36:48.000 And I think that's even merely true historically.

00:36:52.000 It's partly why the museum of the Bible was so interesting to me.

00:36:56.000 Because walking through it, you'd see how the books were...

00:37:00.000 How the book aggregated itself across time and became fundamental.

00:37:05.000 And the first book that was really widely available for printing, purchasing, and reading was the Bible.

00:37:11.000 And all the books that we know about now, millions of books that we have, emerged from that base, that trunk.

00:37:19.000 And they're all related to that.

00:37:21.000 And it's certainly possible that without an understanding of that fundamental book, you can't understand all the other books.

00:37:27.000 And maybe it's possible that without an understanding of that book, you can't understand other people.

00:37:33.000 So, you know, to be people of the book means that we're all inhabited by the same book.

00:37:40.000 Or... but it's probably more complicated than that.

00:37:43.000 Like, it's not just the Bible, because there's lots of books.

00:37:46.000 It's the biblical corpus, which is a library.

00:37:49.000 And it's the relationship between all the texts in that book to one another.

00:37:53.000 And then it's the whole structure of the relationship between all the texts that grew out of that.

00:37:58.000 And you could imagine a map of that.

00:38:01.000 And then you could imagine that what you do as an educated person is sample that.

00:38:09.000 And so there's this structure that constitutes the sum total of the civilization... of the texts of our civilization.

00:38:18.000 And then there's you as an agent that needs to understand that structure.

00:38:24.000 But you can't read all the texts, obviously, because how much time do you have?

00:38:29.000 Nowhere near enough time to do that.

00:38:31.000 You have to sample it in a way, though, that gives you an understanding of the...

00:38:36.000 Let's say of the gist of it. Something like that.

00:38:39.000 And so... and maybe the best way to do that in a fundamental sense is to become familiar with the biblical writings, per se.

00:38:46.000 And then to move on to other literary forms from that.

00:38:51.000 And so, one of the ideas I've been wrestling with here...

00:38:56.000 And you guys can think about what you think about this.

00:38:59.000 You know, people of faith, Christian faith, believe that the Bible is true.

00:39:05.000 But that's never been that satisfying to me because I don't know what they mean.

00:39:08.000 I don't know what people who make that claim mean when they say the Bible is true.

00:39:12.000 It's like, well, what do you mean exactly?

00:39:14.000 Is it true like...

00:39:18.000 Is it true like a videotaped recording of what you did this morning is true?

00:39:24.000 I would say, no, it doesn't seem to be because who cares about the videotaped recording of what you did this morning?

00:39:29.000 There's nothing about it that's relevant or interesting, you know, except peripherally.

00:39:33.000 Well, really, you know, even when you talk about your day, you don't say everything you did.

00:39:38.000 Who wants to hear that? No one.

00:39:41.000 And you know that. Not even you.

00:39:43.000 You don't want to, like, watch a videotape of your morning the next morning.

00:39:47.000 So, well, and so that's an interesting thing because the videotape recording would be true in some sense, but it's irrelevant.

00:39:54.000 Who cares? It doesn't matter.

00:39:56.000 And so maybe if it doesn't matter, there's a form of truth it isn't.

00:40:00.000 Because maybe there's a form of truth that's the truth that matters.

00:40:04.000 That there's an identity between what matters and the truth.

00:40:07.000 And I think these old stories, biblical stories, are condensations of what matters.

00:40:13.000 That's what they really are.

00:40:15.000 And I think they're true, not like history is true.

00:40:19.000 If we think that by true history, we mean something like literal or empirical history.

00:40:25.000 It's actually impossible in any case because, well, what happened in World War II?

00:40:30.000 Well, you had to be there to see it.

00:40:33.000 Where do you have to be? Everywhere.

00:40:36.000 And that's not even possible.

00:40:38.000 And so even when you have an accurate history of World War II, it's obviously an unbelievably selective history.

00:40:46.000 And there's a point of some sort to the history which the whole historical enterprise, in some sense, coalesces around.

00:40:55.000 You don't want to read a history book without a point.

00:40:58.000 The point seems to define the investigation.

00:41:01.000 The story, in some sense, appears to define the investigation.

00:41:06.000 I mean, generally, the histories we have of World War II, the point around which they aggregate is that what Hitler did was wrong. 0.75

00:41:15.000 So there's an ethic, an a priori ethic, in some real sense, that defines the frame within which the events are interpreted, even so they can be aggregated.

00:41:26.000 Because you might think, well, the most relevant events, the most relevant events of World War II are those that are the closest to Hitler's evil. 0.87

00:41:36.000 Something like that.

00:41:37.000 And, you know, maybe you want to dispute that.

00:41:40.000 And fair enough.

00:41:42.000 Dispute away.

00:41:43.000 But my point is that if you're writing a history, there's an ethic around which the history aggregates.

00:41:48.000 And that begs the question, which is, otherwise it's incoherent.

00:41:53.000 It begs the question is, what's the ethic?

00:41:56.000 And that's the question that confronts us, I would say, most starkly in the modern world.

00:42:01.000 And that's really, in some sense, what the entire cultural war that we're all experiencing right now, that's what it's about.

00:42:07.000 It's, what is the ethic?

00:42:09.000 You know, and I'm interested in the Judeo-Christian answer to that.

00:42:13.000 I mean, the ethic and the postmodernist types like Derrida actually criticized Western thought for this very reason.

00:42:22.000 Derrida called the West phallogocentric.

00:42:25.000 Phall as in P-H-A-L-L, phallus.

00:42:28.000 So masculine. 0.61

00:42:29.000 Logocentric.

00:42:30.000 It's like, yeah, that's right.

00:42:31.000 It's phallogocentric.

00:42:32.000 Well, he thought that was a bad thing.

00:42:34.000 And my response to that is, yeah, compared to what?

00:42:39.000 Exactly.

00:42:40.000 Like, what do you got for an alternative?

00:42:42.000 What's the logos that is the source of the bias that characterizes the West?

00:42:49.000 Well, it's the speech that renews the world.

00:42:53.000 That's part of it.

00:42:54.000 Seems to be.

00:42:55.000 It's the speech that calls order out of chaos at the beginning of time.

00:42:59.000 It's the word that finds its embodiment in the figure of Christ, which is an extremely interesting idea, right?

00:43:06.000 Is that the divine word finds embodiment and that somehow is emblematic of the relationship between the infinite and the finite.

00:43:13.000 That's a hell of an idea.

00:43:14.000 You know, it's an unbelievably profound idea.

00:43:17.000 It's a bottomless idea as far as I can tell.

00:43:20.000 And to accuse the West of prioritizing the logos doesn't strike me as a particularly,

00:43:28.000 a particularly damning criticism.

00:43:32.000 Again, because compared to what exactly?

00:43:35.000 And, you know, I've spoken with a lot of people who are dubious about religious claims.

00:43:41.000 And fair enough, because they're difficult to understand and can be misused in all sorts of ways.

00:43:46.000 But the idea that there's some relationship between our notion of intrinsic worth and our capacity to be the bearers of the honest speech that redeems seems to me to be a pretty bloody solid proposition.

00:44:00.000 It's certainly what you hope for from the people that you have around you that you love and who you want to be of service to and vice versa.

00:44:08.000 You hope that they tell you the truth in some manner that combines justice and mercy in some tolerable manner that still illuminates you.

00:44:22.000 You're bloody fortunate if you've got that.

00:44:24.000 And I think you do search for that in every relationship unless you become bitter and cynical.

00:44:29.000 And, you know, that's its own set of problems.

00:44:31.000 And it's not like anybody necessarily wants to go there.

00:44:34.000 So I don't think we'll bother with that, exploring that tonight.

00:44:38.000 And so I've been more and more thinking of this as a definition of what constitutes religious truth.

00:44:47.000 So I think we have to look at the world.

00:44:50.000 I think the structure we look at the world through has to be a structure of ethics.

00:44:56.000 I think it has to be.

00:44:58.000 And that's interesting because I would say I came to that conclusion not as a religious thinker but as a scientific thinker.

00:45:05.000 I couldn't see any other solution to the problem of perception other than the imposition of the structure of value.

00:45:12.000 And so what do I mean by that?

00:45:15.000 Well, I made some allusion to it but it's even as simple as this.

00:45:19.000 You have to prioritize your perceptions.

00:45:21.000 So, for example, when you use your eyes, and I mean technically, you're pointing your eyes at something all the time.

00:45:27.000 And the very central part of your vision is extremely expensive.

00:45:31.000 It takes a lot of neurological territory for you to see clearly.

00:45:36.000 And so you can only see a very small part of the total visual field clearly.

00:45:40.000 And you move it around all the time.

00:45:41.000 And where you move it to is where you want to look.

00:45:45.000 Well, where do you want to look?

00:45:47.000 Well, you look where you think it's important to look.

00:45:50.000 And that means that, well, a hierarchy of importance is no different than a hierarchy of value.

00:46:02.000 They're the same thing.

00:46:03.000 A hierarchy of priority is the same as a hierarchy of value.

00:46:08.000 And a hierarchy of priority and a hierarchy of value and an ethic are all the same thing.

00:46:13.000 Right?

00:46:14.000 Because you're going to look at what you believe to be of cardinal importance.

00:46:17.000 Otherwise, you look well.

00:46:19.000 If you're talking to someone and you look at their feet, that's not going to be going very well.

00:46:25.000 Right?

00:46:26.000 First of all, they're not going to be very impressed with you because they actually want you to look at their eyes.

00:46:30.000 And that's because we communicate value with their eyes.

00:46:33.000 And we do that directly.

00:46:35.000 Our eyes have even evolved to do that.

00:46:37.000 Our eyes have whites around the iris so that you can see where people point them.

00:46:42.000 Because it's that important to know what people think is important.

00:46:46.000 We see the world through a structure of value.

00:46:48.000 And I think that a huge part of that structure of value is actually derived from the entire set of texts.

00:46:55.000 The entire set of texts and their interrelationship that have the biblical corpus at their base.

00:47:01.000 And so it seems to me that you, I think you can make a pretty damn strong case, maybe on scientific grounds, that you can't see the world except through the lens of the Bible.

00:47:13.000 Like literally, you actually can't see it.

00:47:16.000 Now, if it's not the Bible, might be some other corpus of texts, but it might be.

00:47:21.000 It isn't.

00:47:22.000 And if it was, well, is it going to be a corpus of texts that we share?

00:47:26.000 Because if it isn't, then we can't share our perceptions and our values, and if we can't share those, then we fight.

00:47:31.000 Those are the options, right?

00:47:33.000 We either stabilize our hierarchies of value in some way that we agree upon mutually, or we fight.

00:47:39.000 That's, or we're unbelievably chaotic and confused, and that'll just produce fighting in any case.

00:47:44.000 And so, we have this structure of texts built from the bottom up.

00:47:48.000 It's predicated on the biblical narratives.

00:47:51.000 And the texts exist in relationship to those underlying narratives, and derive a fair bit of their meaning from the meaning of the underlying narratives, and vice versa.

00:48:05.000 And so then, the biblical, is it possible that biblical truth is the sort of truth that is the precondition for truth?

00:48:14.000 Right?

00:48:15.000 Because you think, well, it's religious people make the claim. 0.66

00:48:18.000 People of the Bible make the claim.

00:48:19.000 The Bible is true.

00:48:20.000 Well, there's all sorts of different kinds of truth.

00:48:23.000 That's an interesting claim, but it's not very elaborated.

00:48:29.000 It's insufficient.

00:48:31.000 And, you know, often what happens to Christians, when they debate skilled atheists like Richard Dawkins,

00:48:37.000 is they treat the Bible like it's a scientific theory, and Dawkins just mops the floor with them,

00:48:41.000 because it's actually not a scientific theory, compared to scientific theories.

00:48:45.000 And so, as soon as you go there, well, it's like a scientific theory.

00:48:48.000 It's like, no, it's not.

00:48:49.000 It's not.

00:48:50.000 And so, does that mean it's not true?

00:48:52.000 Well, it means that if the only thing you think is true is a scientific theory.

00:48:56.000 But, I don't think that you can practice science except within an ethical framework that's not in itself science.

00:49:06.000 And so, it's possible that there is a deeper truth than the scientific truth,

00:49:11.000 which is the ethic that has to be there a priori before you can even begin to do science.

00:49:15.000 And I did talk to Richard Dawkins about that a little bit, you know,

00:49:19.000 because he's someone who appears to believe that the truth will set you free,

00:49:23.000 which is what scientists believe, because otherwise why would they pursue the truth, right?

00:49:27.000 For malevolent reasons?

00:49:28.000 Well, hopefully not.

00:49:30.000 They believe the truth is redeeming, but that isn't a scientific assumption.

00:49:34.000 That's a religious assumption.

00:49:36.000 And so, is it possible that you can't practice as an honest scientist without making the religious assumption

00:49:41.000 that the truth will set you free?

00:49:43.000 It's certainly possible.

00:49:45.000 I mean, it's impossible to undertake the scientific enterprise in any real sense

00:49:50.000 and discover anything that's truly factual, let's say,

00:49:54.000 without abiding by the truth in an extraordinarily rigorous manner.

00:49:58.000 You just don't get anywhere.

00:49:59.000 Certainly what you do won't be reproducible.

00:50:02.000 And so, I know, maybe I'll wrap up with this.

00:50:17.000 Maybe I can make this a bit clearer.

00:50:20.000 So, I spent a lot of time studying cybernetic models of perception.

00:50:27.000 And so, those are models of perception that were informed by artificial intelligence theorizing.

00:50:35.000 Stretching all the way back to a man named Norbert Weiner who established the field of cybernetics.

00:50:40.000 And he basically claimed that you organize your perceptions in relationship to a goal.

00:50:45.000 So, for example, if I want to walk across the stage, then I'll specify my endpoint.

00:50:52.000 And I'll see that in high resolution.

00:50:54.000 And then I specify the pathway.

00:50:57.000 And that, the observation of that untrammeled pathway produces positive emotion.

00:51:03.000 Because positive emotion is an index of an untrammeled pathway towards a valued goal.

00:51:08.000 Which is also something that's very interesting to know.

00:51:11.000 Because it suggests that there's no positive emotion without a goal.

00:51:16.000 And also suggests that the more noble the goal, the more complete and elevated the positive emotion.

00:51:24.000 And that could be true.

00:51:26.000 That could be true.

00:51:28.000 You know, and it's the case as well that when you organize your perceptions around a goal.

00:51:34.000 And that provides a container for your negative emotion.

00:51:38.000 So, if I want to walk across the stage.

00:51:40.000 Because I think that getting to the other side is preferable to being here.

00:51:43.000 So, that's a hierarchy of value.

00:51:45.000 That place is better than this place.

00:51:48.000 Then, when I observe myself undertaking the actions that will get me to that place.

00:51:53.000 That's comforting and provides security.

00:51:56.000 Because it shows that the structure that I'm using to organize my perceptions.

00:52:02.000 And to reduce the world to manageable, to manageability.

00:52:08.000 Is sufficiently accurate so that I can implement it.

00:52:12.000 And so, we seem to inhabit those structures all the time.

00:52:16.000 Whenever we're looking at the world.

00:52:18.000 Whenever we're interacting.

00:52:19.000 We specify a goal.

00:52:20.000 And so, that's an ethical enterprise.

00:52:22.000 And we organize our emotions within the specification of that goal.

00:52:26.000 And then we produce hierarchies of goals.

00:52:28.000 So, you know.

00:52:30.000 You go to.

00:52:31.000 You sit down in front of your computer.

00:52:33.000 So, you can write a paper.

00:52:34.000 And you write a paper.

00:52:35.000 So that you can finish an essay.

00:52:36.000 And you finish an essay.

00:52:37.000 So that you can get a grade in a class.

00:52:40.000 And get a grade in a class.

00:52:41.000 So that you can graduate with a degree.

00:52:43.000 And you do that.

00:52:44.000 So that you can get a job.

00:52:45.000 And you do that.

00:52:46.000 So that you can be, what?

00:52:47.000 A good husband.

00:52:48.000 A good wife.

00:52:49.000 A good citizen.

00:52:50.000 And you do that.

00:52:51.000 So you can be a good person.

00:52:54.000 There's a hierarchy of ethic.

00:52:56.000 That permeates the entire enterprise.

00:52:58.000 Right from the microcosm up to the macrocosm.

00:53:01.000 And I think that's something like.

00:53:03.000 The whole landscape of religious value.

00:53:05.000 With the outermost container.

00:53:08.000 So, be a good person.

00:53:10.000 Let's say.

00:53:11.000 That's the ultimate aim of the religious enterprise.

00:53:15.000 That's something like the imitation of Christ.

00:53:17.000 In the most fundamental sense.

00:53:19.000 And all the things that you do within that.

00:53:21.000 Are a reflection of that.

00:53:22.000 Or you're confused and chaotic.

00:53:24.000 And if everyone's doing that at the same time.

00:53:26.000 Then you have a society that's integrated.

00:53:28.000 And aiming up.

00:53:29.000 And capable of telling the truth.

00:53:31.000 Something like that.

00:53:32.000 Does that seem reasonable?

00:53:34.000 And so.

00:53:35.000 So what's the proposition here?

00:53:49.000 Well.

00:53:50.000 I think when we describe these frameworks of perception.

00:53:56.000 The name we give to the description of a framework of perception is a story.

00:54:02.000 And I think the reason that we like stories so much.

00:54:05.000 Is because we need to establish frameworks of perception.

00:54:10.000 In order to operate in the world.

00:54:11.000 In order to operate in the world.

00:54:12.000 And to allow ourselves to be integrated peacefully with other people.

00:54:18.000 And so we're extraordinarily interested in anything that has a narrative basis.

00:54:22.000 And the reason we're interested in that is because we're trying to build within ourselves.

00:54:26.000 And collectively.

00:54:27.000 The structure that enables us to perceive the world without undue confusion and chaos.

00:54:31.000 And in a manner that provides some value to us.

00:54:34.000 And some sustainability.

00:54:36.000 That's the goal overall.

00:54:38.000 And.

00:54:39.000 That seems to me to be the goal of the entire religious enterprise.

00:54:43.000 And so.

00:54:44.000 Is it possible that.

00:54:47.000 Well.

00:54:48.000 I guess that's the claim I thought I'd elaborate out a little bit today.

00:54:53.000 Is that.

00:54:54.000 That.

00:54:56.000 The Bible is true.

00:54:58.000 In a.

00:54:59.000 Very strange way.

00:55:01.000 It's true in that.

00:55:03.000 It provides the basis for.

00:55:06.000 Truth itself.

00:55:09.000 And so it's like a meta truth.

00:55:12.000 Right.

00:55:13.000 Without it there.

00:55:14.000 Without it there couldn't even be the possibility of.

00:55:16.000 Truth.

00:55:17.000 And so maybe that's the most true thing.

00:55:19.000 The most true thing isn't some.

00:55:21.000 Truth per se.

00:55:22.000 It's.

00:55:23.000 That which provides the precondition for all judgments of truth.

00:55:26.000 And it seems to me that.

00:55:28.000 I can't see any holes in that argument.

00:55:33.000 And I can't see any holes in it from a scientific perspective either.

00:55:36.000 Because I think we do know well enough now as scientists that.

00:55:39.000 The problem of.

00:55:40.000 Deriving ethical direction from the collection of facts is an intractable problem.

00:55:45.000 There's too many facts.

00:55:46.000 There's an infinite number of facts.

00:55:48.000 They do not provide an unerring guide for action.

00:55:52.000 They can't.

00:55:53.000 There's too many of them.

00:55:54.000 They have to be prioritized.

00:55:56.000 And as soon as they are prioritized.

00:55:58.000 Well then you're in the ethical domain.

00:56:00.000 And then that begs the question.

00:56:02.000 What's the valid ethical domain?

00:56:04.000 And the postmodern answer is.

00:56:06.000 Well there isn't one.

00:56:07.000 It's all the expression of domination and power.

00:56:09.000 And I think that's nonsense.

00:56:11.000 I don't think that's a tenable solution.

00:56:13.000 I think that we stumbled onto the proper answer in some sense in our religious enterprise.

00:56:19.000 Which is that we aim at what's highest.

00:56:22.000 Or we don't.

00:56:24.000 We aim at what's highest jointly.

00:56:26.000 Or we're divided.

00:56:27.000 We aim at what's highest and that gives meaning to all the things we do that are subordinate parts of that.

00:56:33.000 We aim at what's highest and that's what collects us and gives us structure.

00:56:37.000 All of that.

00:56:38.000 You know singly and jointly.

00:56:40.000 And that's all what we've been trying to communicate all these centuries.

00:56:45.000 As we've been trying to communicate the whole religious corpus.

00:56:49.000 Generation after generation.

00:56:50.000 And to sort this out and to straighten it out and to try to understand it.

00:56:53.000 And I think that's where we're at now.

00:56:58.000 You know.

00:57:00.000 Maybe a little bit more conscious of what this all means.

00:57:04.000 And maybe a little bit more capable of being more certain.

00:57:09.000 Certain.

00:57:10.000 As people of the book.

00:57:12.000 That.

00:57:13.000 The faith we have in the.

00:57:16.000 Textual corpus that we inhabit.

00:57:19.000 Is.

00:57:20.000 We just haven't done better than that.

00:57:35.000 And we strive to flesh it out.

00:57:38.000 We strive to understand it.

00:57:39.000 But.

00:57:40.000 Fundamentally.

00:57:41.000 It seems.

00:57:42.000 To be true in that fundamental sense that I just described.

00:57:46.000 Which is.

00:57:47.000 Not merely true but.

00:57:49.000 The precondition for truth itself.

00:57:51.000 And so.

00:57:52.000 That's what I thought I would talk to you about tonight.

00:57:56.000 Thank you very much.

00:57:57.000 Thank you very much.

00:58:09.000 Thank you very much.

00:58:11.000 Thank you very much.

00:58:12.000 Thank you very much.

00:58:13.000 Thank you very much.

00:58:14.000 Thank you very much.

00:58:16.040 Thank you.

00:58:18.000 Thank you very much.

00:58:20.000 Really cute.

00:58:21.000 Thank you very much.

00:58:22.000 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - May 09, 2022

251. You Probably Should Have Read The Bible ｜ Franciscan University

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