The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 290. Douglas Murray & Jonathan Pageau

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening. I'm very excited today to bring to you two of my favorite people, I would say, Douglas Murray and Jonathan Paggio.

00:01:20.280 I wanted to bring the three of us together to talk about the underlying metaphysical and theological substrate, if any, that constitutes the precondition for classic conservatism, small L liberalism, and maybe Enlightenment rationality.

00:01:39.220 As well as, let's say, classic Western religious belief, which is sort of obviously linked to that underlying metaphysic, or maybe the substrate for it.

00:01:49.720 I got interested in talking to Douglas about this because we've been talking over a couple of years, and he's become more convinced, I suppose,

00:01:57.400 or at least curious about the relationship between pure rationality and an ethic that might be associated with pure Enlightenment rationality,

00:02:08.460 and the relationship between that and an underlying substrate of fiction or narrative or perhaps religious belief.

00:02:16.600 And I couldn't think of anybody better to talk about that with than Jonathan Paggio.

00:02:21.080 I've been speaking with Jonathan many times, particularly with John Verveke, or at least occasionally with John Verveke, who's a cognitive scientist who's also interested in the same things.

00:02:31.460 And so I thought we'd have a chance today to delve deeply into the bottom of things on the political and conceptual and philosophical front.

00:02:41.320 And so I'll start with a brief bio, both of Mr. Murray and Mr. Paggio, and then I'll ask Douglas about his comments and his thinking on this front,

00:02:51.980 because I know to some degree his thinking has started to shift and change.

00:02:56.280 So maybe he can outline what he did think and what he now thinks, and then we'll enter into a follow-up conversation.

00:03:03.840 Douglas Keir Murray is a British author and political commentator.

00:03:07.740 Mr. Murray is associate editor of the conservative-leaning British political and cultural magazine, The Spectator,

00:03:15.640 and the author of many books, including, most recently, The Strange Death of Europe, 2017,

00:03:23.720 The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race, and Identity, 2019, and The War on the West, 2022.

00:03:31.960 Jonathan Paggio is a Canadian religious scholar, podcaster, and fine artist specializing in Christian

00:03:39.860 Orthodox iconography. He was a participant in a recent Exodus seminar that I hosted in Miami,

00:03:47.920 accompanied by a number of other theologians, the first half of which, comprising eight sessions,

00:03:52.780 will be released November 26, 2022. He is also filming a set of introductory commentaries

00:03:59.000 for the forthcoming re-release of my lectures on Genesis.

00:04:02.960 So, well, welcome, gentlemen. It's a pleasure to be able to introduce the both of you.

00:04:07.320 And, Douglas, maybe I'll get you to open.

00:04:09.500 I remembered, and I was struck by the comments that you made, I believe, when you were talking to Dave Rubin,

00:04:16.220 about the transformation of your thoughts in relationship to religious conceptualization,

00:04:21.320 and your insistence, or your realization, or your speculation, that something like a fictional

00:04:29.080 metaphysic is a necessary precondition for the stabilization of more rational worldviews,

00:04:36.420 including conservative, liberal, and perhaps scientific. And so, hopefully, I'm not putting

00:04:41.020 words in your mouth. I hope I derived the right gist and conclusion from your comments. And so,

00:04:47.240 I'd be happy to hear what you have to say about all that.

00:04:53.060 First of all, it's a great pleasure to be with you both, and particularly to meet Jonathan for the

00:04:56.880 first time. I don't know if there's been a shift in the last few years in my thinking,

00:05:01.960 but certainly in the last 15 years or so, no doubt about that. I was brought up a Christian,

00:05:07.880 indeed, in adulthood, was a believing Christian into my late 20s. As is, I think, sometimes quite common,

00:05:15.320 I fell into atheism. I became a non-believer in my, I suppose, late 20s. And there were lots of

00:05:25.460 reasons for that we could get into. But I was very much a sort of part of that, a minor part of that

00:05:32.920 new atheism movement in the 2000s. And I suppose I had a period in which I thought that that was enough.

00:05:42.060 And through the years that followed that, I suppose I had some of the zeal of the convert,

00:05:48.960 as it were, that can happen with atheists as much as it can happen with the religious.

00:05:54.020 With the zeal of the convert, once that sort of fell away a bit, I was left with the same questions

00:06:00.840 that I was before, with perhaps a less dogmatic tone. And I suppose one of the things that was on my

00:06:09.380 mind increasingly in the 2010s was that question of what's often been, many people are credited with

00:06:17.860 the thought, but the German jurist, Buchenford, Ernst Wolfgang, Buchenford is usually regarded as

00:06:25.400 having done it most epigrammatically, which is to pose the question, can a society

00:06:32.340 continue to survive in its form if it has cut itself off from the things that gave it birth?

00:06:42.120 In other words,

00:06:44.100 if you like Western societies, if you like societies like Britain, America, and elsewhere,

00:06:51.160 there are several directions you can go in. One is to pretend that these societies owe nothing to Christianity,

00:06:57.680 the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is something that is attempted as a claim by some people. I think

00:07:05.360 it's obviously risible. Once you accept that the Christian tradition at least gave a very significant

00:07:14.240 amount, at least was an incredibly important strand of our societies and what we treasure and cherish in

00:07:20.720 our societies today, we would not treasure or cherish if we didn't have that inheritance. Once you accept

00:07:26.400 that, then there's this question of, is that society you have able to sustain itself, are the things you

00:07:34.720 love able to sustain themselves and be replenished without reference to the thing that gave them birth?

00:07:41.440 Put it another way, let's say we're sitting on a branch, does the branch remain up if the roots of the

00:07:48.160 tree are not nurtured? And putting it that way, of course, makes the answer rather obvious, which is,

00:07:56.400 well, obviously not. I mean, if you use the branch of the tree analogy, obviously that doesn't work.

00:08:01.600 That's like sawing off the branch you're sitting on. But then that poses a further question. And I addressed

00:08:08.080 this a bit in the book you referred to there, Jordan, the strange death of Europe. There are a number of

00:08:14.400 chapters I use in that book, which is about movement of peoples in the 21st century, the ease of movement,

00:08:21.040 migration, and many other difficult questions. But the part of the book, which at least

00:08:26.400 I think is most significant, if I say so myself, is the portion on what I describe as a state of

00:08:33.040 Western man's belief in the 21st century.

00:08:35.920 History has happened, discoveries have happened, biblical criticism has happened, Darwin has

00:08:45.280 happened, science has happened, discoveries have happened. The way in which we used to explain

00:08:55.840 things we didn't know by putting God in there has increasingly been narrowed, so that increasingly we

00:09:03.120 know through science and discoveries how certain things in our universe happen, how certain things

00:09:09.120 in our bodies happen, and the role of God diminishes and diminishes. But that, as I explained in the

00:09:14.240 strange death of Europe, that we are in this, and I myself am in this uncomfortable position, because,

00:09:21.280 of course, if you believe that what you, and recognize that what you love and want to sustain,

00:09:27.440 is a very significant part from this particular route, what do you do?

00:09:35.280 Various theologians, albeit perhaps heretical theologians, like Don Cupid and Richard Holloway,

00:09:42.000 have also asked this question. But it's a difficult and, I admit, frustrating position to be in, the one that I

00:09:48.320 hold, because in part, and I think, Jordan, you yourself have experienced this, in part it's frustrating,

00:09:54.880 because Christians say, well, therefore, why don't you just believe? And that's not as straightforward

00:10:02.640 as those Christians seem to think. They seem to think, well, we've got you in a corner by

00:10:08.080 you recognizing what you owe to the religion. So therefore, make the final leap.

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00:11:54.560 Yeah, well, the question then becomes, what is that leap? So let me offer you a proposition here,

00:12:00.640 and you tell me what you think about this, and then maybe Jonathan can chime in. So,

00:12:04.400 you know that the battle between the atheist rationalist materialists, let's say, and the

00:12:11.440 religious types, if it's played out on the battleground set by the atheist materialists,

00:12:18.240 is a battle between the claims that the scientific mode of explanation and the religious mode of

00:12:24.240 explanation are alike in kind, but different in conclusion. And so that you have a description

00:12:31.040 of the world where God's a causal agent, and you have a description of the world where natural

00:12:35.920 processes are causal agents, and the scientists tend to win that battle. But then I think, well,

00:12:42.320 there's a problem with that, because it isn't obvious to me at all that the way that God is

00:12:47.280 conceptualized in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and maybe more universally, is as like an analog of a

00:12:56.240 material cause. If I look through the biblical canon, and the way that God is characterized

00:13:02.800 as a character, let's say, in some sense as a fictional character, and I'll return to that idea,

00:13:08.880 his essence is something more like role model and spirit to emulate. It's something like a mode of

00:13:19.200 being, it's it's an enacted mode of being in the world, rather than a, than a pure causal agent.

00:13:29.360 And the problem with the scientific endeavor is that, as Hume so famously pointed out,

00:13:35.360 there's a huge gap between is and ought. And what I see offered on the religious front is an answer to the

00:13:41.680 question of ought. And then I'll add one more thing to that. So this is how you ought to behave.

00:13:46.320 But not only to behave, but how you ought to perceive, how you ought to make a hierarchy of

00:13:53.040 your attentional resources, so that you're looking at the right thing and acting in the right way

00:13:58.640 toward the proper goals all the time. How do you earn yourself to do that? And so that, and I don't

00:14:06.080 think that the, first of all, the atheist types can't respond to that, because there's no way that they

00:14:11.520 can produce an ethic on the fly in some sense. And that was Hume's objection. And, and it also,

00:14:22.240 thinking about the problem this way, see, it also opens the door to a deeper understanding of

00:14:27.360 the role that fiction and mythology play. Because you can think of fiction, including mythology,

00:14:34.880 as a form of abstraction that characterizes patterns of behavior and action, rather than a

00:14:41.680 form of abstraction that describes the world the way science does. And that way, fiction becomes a

00:14:47.200 different kind of truth, which is a pragmatic truth rather than a descriptive or propositional truth.

00:14:52.960 And it's oriented towards ethics and the direction of attention. And so I'm increasingly

00:14:58.160 thinking about the heavenly hierarchy as a internal, in some sense, psychological structure

00:15:05.200 through which we see the world. And I'll add one more thing to that and turn it over to Jonathan.

00:15:09.680 The other thing that strikes me as psychologically unassailable is the fact that you need a uniting principle

00:15:20.960 to orient your perceptions and actions toward for two reasons, two fundamental reasons, three

00:15:28.960 fundamental reasons. One is, if you're aiming towards something valuable, that gives you positive

00:15:34.640 emotion and hope. And so all the motivation that goes along with that fills you with enthusiasm.

00:15:39.440 Second, if you don't have a uniting ethic that governs your own perceptions and actions,

00:15:44.880 then you're confused and in disarray. And the cost of that is anxiety and hopelessness and pain

00:15:52.560 and frustration and disappointment and grief, all of the negative emotions. And then third,

00:15:57.760 if you don't have a uniting ethic, and so that has to be united under something like a monotheistic

00:16:03.520 superordinate entity, if you don't have that, then you have social disarray. Because there's nothing

00:16:09.360 that unites people in their common ethical pursuit, and that's their behavior and their perceptions.

00:16:14.320 And so I'll let Jonathan comment on that a bit. No, I think what you're saying is right on track.

00:16:19.520 That is, one of the problems that happened in the story of Christianity is something like

00:16:25.280 the Enlightenment and modernism, which is that as the world was moving towards this notion of

00:16:30.160 mechanical causation and the interest in mechanical causation, there came to be a misunderstanding of

00:16:36.720 the way that traditional Christians believed the world actually existed. And so there's a difference

00:16:41.360 between the material causes and something like the vertical cause of something. And the vertical cause

00:16:47.680 of something is exactly this hierarchy that Jordan is talking about. And I would push what Jordan is

00:16:52.880 saying even further. That is, it does actually affect, to a certain extent, even the is, because we can't

00:17:00.320 perceive an is without a hierarchy of attention and without a hierarchy of perception. Because the world

00:17:06.320 is indefinite in detail and in quantity. And so for even to be able to say this, to point to something,

00:17:13.360 to say that, is already in this hierarchy of something we could call vertical causation. So this

00:17:20.240 glass has millions and millions of aspects to it. But we nonetheless are able to see it as one.

00:17:27.440 And the fact that we see it as one is a total mystery to scientists. They don't know how to account

00:17:33.040 for it. They use words like emergence and you could just use the word magic and it would be the same.

00:17:38.240 It's like this jump into unity. That is the type of causation that we talk about when we talk about

00:17:44.320 religious causation. Well, that unity that you discuss in relationship to the glass

00:17:49.120 is a pragmatic unity because... It's a unity of good. Well, that's also a unity of good. Well,

00:17:54.320 then you think, well... It's an ethical, in a general, very general sense, it's an ethical unity.

00:18:00.400 It is an ethical unity. Well, I would say in a specific sense, because if you were a photo

00:18:05.120 realist painter, you could spend a month painting all the reflections on that glass. It's a very complex

00:18:10.480 thing to perceive. But you perceive it as a unity, and we know this neuropsychologically,

00:18:15.840 we know this scientifically. You perceive it as a unity because you can grip it. And because you

00:18:21.280 can raise it to your lips. And because you can drink it. And because you need to drink water to

00:18:25.840 survive. And you are willing to drink water to survive because you believe emotionally and

00:18:31.120 motivationally and perhaps rationally that survival is a good. And that's dependent on your belief that

00:18:36.320 human existence, in some sense, is a good. And that it's striving towards some sort of higher unified

00:18:41.600 order. And you might think, well, you don't need all that to perceive the glass. And the answer is,

00:18:45.760 yeah, as a matter of fact, you need all of that to perceive the glass. And if you lose some of

00:18:50.640 that because of various forms of cortical damage, let's say, you enter into the realm of all sorts

00:18:56.320 of bizarre blindnesses. And so that point you make about the is being dependent on the ought is also

00:19:03.200 extremely interesting. Because if the world is infinitely complex, which seems to be the case,

00:19:07.760 or close enough, the hierarchy of attention you bring to bear on it, and so your intent,

00:19:14.800 determines in no small part the array of manifestations that that infinity will produce

00:19:20.080 in your field of apprehension. And that does determine, to some degree, at least what elements

00:19:25.760 of the object you have access to, and then manipulate and then bring into being. I've been thinking about

00:19:31.520 objects too as this, so they have this reality surrounded by a field of possibility, right? And

00:19:38.000 so the object isn't just what it is, it's also a set of things that it could become with varying

00:19:45.040 degrees of difficulty depending on your intent. So it's a combination of being and becoming.

00:19:49.840 It could become a weapon, but it couldn't become a car. Right, right. So it has an identity,

00:19:55.360 but it's also surrounded by a field of possibilities. That's a good way to talk about it. Right, right,

00:19:59.520 right. The point is that when we look at the way that the creation of the world is described in

00:20:05.760 Genesis, it's related exactly to that. God creates something, sees it, and sees that it's good. And so

00:20:13.040 there's this notion of apprehension of identities and realizing that those identities have to do

00:20:19.760 with their, the fact that they're bound up in a value judgment, even though it's not necessarily

00:20:25.920 moral. It's just a value judgment about how good something is. Because if I see a glass,

00:20:31.200 I am always asking, is it a good glass? Even if I don't do it consciously, necessarily, because I have

00:20:36.480 to, I know that it's there to grip and to drink from. And it's the same, even with like, even scientists

00:20:42.480 are doing that because they have to focus their attention on something because they can't study

00:20:48.000 everything at once. They have to decide, I'm going to study this, and I'm going to decide the reason

00:20:54.640 why I study that. And therefore, I'm going to be able to identify the facts that fit with my theory

00:20:59.920 and prove my theory. So even the scientist is moving, is moving in this type of perception of

00:21:06.160 the world, even sometimes without realizing it. We could, I'd like to make a comment on the scientific

00:21:10.240 front too. And I really started to think about this after talking to Dr. Dawkins. And I suppose,

00:21:15.600 to some degree, to Sam Harris too, on the atheist front. And so I know that as the death of God in

00:21:24.080 the Nietzschean terms has progressed, we've lost faith in an increasing range of underlying realities.

00:21:31.280 And the first might be the deistic reality. But then what we've seen happening under the onslaught

00:21:36.240 of postmodernist thought is that we're starting to lose faith in the idea of fact itself. And then I

00:21:42.240 was thinking, well, what's the precondition for being a scientist? And I thought, well, in some sense,

00:21:46.560 it's a deistic pre-, there's deistic preconditions. Because one of the things that characterizes

00:21:52.080 scientists, and this includes people like Dawkins, who's a real scientist, is that the scientist

00:21:58.640 presumes axiomatically that there's a transcendent realm outside the domain of epistemological theory.

00:22:07.280 So if you have a scientific theory, and you're a real scientist, you know that your theory, which

00:22:11.360 is really what you see when you look at the world, you know that your theory is insufficient in

00:22:17.040 comparison to the reality that transcends it. And so then as a scientist, what you try to do is you

00:22:23.360 try to pit your theory up against the transcendent reality so that it fails. So that you find something

00:22:30.880 about what you don't understand that is able to make itself manifest. Then you adjust the theory,

00:22:36.800 to get a better grip on the world. And you assume, while you're doing that, that there's an

00:22:42.240 underlying logic to the transcendent object, and that analysis of that underlying object is both

00:22:48.480 corrective and redemptive. And as far as I can tell, those are all essentially axiomatic religious

00:22:54.960 claims, and that they're preconditions for any true empirical science. And then, so what that implies is

00:23:00.720 that if we lose faith in the transcendent hierarchy, we might lose the entire scientific endeavor.

00:23:08.560 Let me just briefly, if I may, take us away from the glass of water, because I only have Jonathan

00:23:16.480 Paggio's word that it is a glass of water, and I don't want to get into that. Let me address what I think

00:23:24.720 is a necessary thing to begin with, which is the issue of the magisteria. We are talking about them

00:23:33.360 separately, but of course the interrelation of them. Whether or not the realms of science and religion

00:23:39.920 are overlapping magisteria or not. And of course some people would claim that they're absolutely

00:23:45.040 unrelated. We're getting towards, I think in this discussion, the realization that of course they're

00:23:50.720 overlapping to some degree. We don't know exactly how much. Jonathan probably thinks very significantly,

00:23:56.080 I suspect Jordan thinks, to some extent, and I would say to some extent as well. But let me throw

00:24:01.040 out then two issues that I would put as a challenge both for the religious and the non-religious in the

00:24:08.720 discussion that we're heading towards. The first is a challenge for the non-religious, and that's to do

00:24:13.680 with something that Jordan's already talked about, which is the area of ethics and shared values and much more.

00:24:21.200 A great challenge for the non-believers in our age is that issue of where the values come from.

00:24:30.000 And as Jordan's already suggested, for instance, the Enlightenment, the idea of rationalism,

00:24:38.000 sole rationalism, which not all Enlightenment thinkers were dealing with, but many were. The idea of

00:24:43.920 rationalism being the sole way in which to discern ethics seems to me not to have been embedded very

00:24:50.720 wide or very deep and may suggest that it's just not possible as a project. So, to quote my late

00:24:59.920 friend Rabbi Jonathan Sachs on this, the idea that ethics are self-evident is self-evidently wrong.

00:25:10.240 So, let me throw that out first as a challenge for the non-believer. Then the challenge for the

00:25:16.880 believer comes down to this thing that Jordan's also already dealt in, which is the issue of,

00:25:24.640 let's say, myth or story. Because we might agree, for instance, that we need a story to agree upon,

00:25:32.960 or a myth to agree upon, or a set of ideas to rely upon and to ground ourselves in. And that doesn't

00:25:40.240 necessarily, of course, by any means lead to the fact that those things are also true.

00:25:46.000 We get into the realm of what Schopenhauer and the dialogue on religion, which always made a huge

00:25:51.520 impression on me, deals in, where he says, of course, what he describes as the tragedy of the

00:25:55.920 clergy. The tragedy of the clergy is that they know the necessity of the thing, they know the

00:26:02.720 truthfulness of the story in a certain sense of truthfulness, but could never admit, or their job

00:26:09.360 would be over, that that's what it is. In other words, they have to continue to deal in it as if this

00:26:15.680 is not simply story, or unifying myth, or anything like that, but is something which has a truth

00:26:22.160 claim behind it. And then let me just say one other thing on that, which is this. The issue of unifying

00:26:27.520 ethic, because it must be what we're sort of somehow also among other things, as well as trying to define

00:26:33.840 what the true is and what the real is, must be one of the things that we must sort of try to grapple

00:26:38.800 towards. The issue on this seems to me to be, is the Christian ethic, the Christian tradition,

00:26:48.160 to think of it in Hegelian terms, is it an exhausted force or an unexhausted force?

00:26:56.640 This for our age seems to me to be one of the absolutely crucial issues to address.

00:27:03.920 I have a few things to say, first about the idea of the the ethic question. Now there's something

00:27:15.520 which is actually, especially in your project, there's something which is more than about ethics,

00:27:20.960 and about how we should act. It has to do with the glass, sorry Douglas, but let's bring it to people now.

00:27:27.520 It has to do with why do we think people are the same? How do we recognize ourselves as being

00:27:34.480 the West, or being England, or America? Like there, these things, that's,

00:27:43.280 first that's the question. That is how, what is it that we have in common, that we celebrate in common,

00:27:49.040 that we recognize in common, as binding us together? And my contention is that one of the things that

00:27:56.400 happened during the Enlightenment, is that people thought we can get rid of God, but we can keep

00:28:01.520 our nation or whatever. But then that was a slippery slope. And as soon as we got rid of the transcendent,

00:28:08.160 the thing we wanted to have, the king, the queen, the president, this narrative, which was at a lower

00:28:14.560 level, started to crumble and to break down. And so it has, it has, it's not just about how we should

00:28:21.280 act, but it's even how we recognize each other as belonging to the same category.

00:28:27.200 Yeah, but let me, let me, let me, let me leap in there with something else. I would go a level

00:28:31.600 beneath that, which is, which is something which I think we could agree on, and which the Enlightenment

00:28:35.520 thinkers were dealing in, and the religiously dealing, which is a much more important issue than

00:28:41.840 mere issues of nationhood or belonging, which is, are we beings with value?

00:28:46.960 Yeah, that's for sure. Very important. That, that, of course, historically is, is, is, is not the case.

00:28:55.280 Most empires in history, in ancient world and much more saw, saw most people as having no value.

00:29:02.960 One of the revelations, obviously, I use the term in a certain degree of quotation mark, but one of the

00:29:09.360 revelations of the Christian tradition is the idea that everybody does have intrinsic value. And we've all

00:29:16.000 grown up and everyone after, everyone during the Enlightenment is dealing in those terms. They're

00:29:19.360 trying to extend, if anything, the idea of Christian value. And there are some Christian theologians

00:29:23.920 who say the very idea of where we are now is, in a sense, an embodiment of the Christian tradition,

00:29:29.360 which is in the tradition of human rights, law, and much more. We accept it like fish except water,

00:29:37.280 that people have value. But that, of course, as we know, we can look around the world today to

00:29:42.240 other places and other parts of the world. And we realize that there are still parts of the world

00:29:46.480 where, where people do not have any value and their lives are regarded as valueless. And that,

00:29:51.040 and that isn't even regarded as being a tragedy in the way that we would regard it. So, so the idea

00:29:57.360 that, that we're beings with value is something that has been so deeply built into our, our senses

00:30:03.840 as a society, they don't even realize that this is what we're swimming in now. Obviously, that comes from

00:30:08.640 the, from, from the, from the Christian tradition. It comes from the idea that we're created in the

00:30:13.040 image of God. Being, exactly. The, the, the image of God, and then, and, and then the Enlightenment,

00:30:23.760 the rationalist project, obviously, to some extent, extends or, or tries to embed and deepen aspects

00:30:30.800 of that. Including, of course, I mean, the, the idea of religious toleration. Because again, I mean,

00:30:38.080 one of the reasons why Europe stopped believing was not just what I laid out as having happened in the

00:30:44.960 19th century, but the, but the, the, perhaps the worst, the worst realization of all, which was the

00:30:50.720 repeated realization that peoples of faith could not exist together. I mean, this, this is what Europe

00:30:58.400 learns in the 16th century, and it, it takes, it goes awfully deep, that realization, and changes

00:31:05.840 everything. Part of the striving towards monotheism, let's say, if you think about that psychologically,

00:31:11.840 I would say the striving towards monotheism is a descriptive enterprise to some degree, because

00:31:19.600 it's an attempt to characterize the nature of the spirit that should be put at the highest place

00:31:25.840 in the hierarchy of perception and action. And then that begs the question is, what should be put

00:31:31.120 in the highest place? And so, let me walk through something, and you guys tell me what you think

00:31:35.440 about this. So, I used to ask my students, you know, why are you writing this essay? And so, and that's a

00:31:45.200 variation of the question, why do anything? But let's make it concrete. Why are you writing this essay?

00:31:50.880 Well, so that I can get a grade for the class. Why are you taking the class? So that I can finish my

00:31:57.520 year at university. Why are you finishing your year at university and motivated to do that? To get my

00:32:03.920 degree. Why do you want the degree? Well, then it gets fuzzier. Well, maybe I want a job, or maybe I

00:32:10.240 want to educated, want to be an educated person, or some amalgam of those. Why do you think it's a good

00:32:15.840 reason to be an educated person, or to have a productive career? Well, because I want to be a

00:32:21.680 good person. Well, why do you want to be a good person? Well, because that's part of acting out,

00:32:26.880 and this is where it starts to delve into the mythological. Because being a good person makes

00:32:32.080 society work properly, and is the best route to, say, life more abundant. And so, what does it mean

00:32:37.520 to be a good person? Then it means something like, well, to orient yourself towards the highest good,

00:32:42.080 and to speak the truth. And then, that's a whole hierarchy of value that is definitely governing,

00:32:48.720 either in an integrated manner or a disintegrated manner, the actions of the person who's writing

00:32:55.280 the essay. And you might say, well, how hard are you going to try when you write this essay? And the

00:33:00.560 answer to that would be, well, it depends on how well integrated my view of the ethic is all the way up

00:33:07.040 to the highest place. And then we could say, well, the highest place is the divine place. And we could

00:33:12.560 make that a matter of definition. And so then we might say, well, what should be in the divine place?

00:33:18.880 And I would say, well, it has to be something that you can look at the world through, and it has to be

00:33:23.680 something you act out. And then we could say, well, that still leaves residual mystery. And then we might

00:33:29.280 ask, well, how do we characterize it? I would say, we characterize that using fiction. Because fiction is

00:33:36.880 the abstraction of hierarchies of attentional prioritization and action. And so we could say

00:33:42.720 that in the highest sense, in the biblical corpus, God is the ultimate fictional character. And then

00:33:50.000 we're trying to characterize his nature as that which should be emulated, that unites us psychologically

00:33:56.080 and socially. And so I'll walk through like five representations. So what should be in the highest

00:34:01.760 place? Okay. The spirit that allows you to walk unselfconsciously in the garden. The spirit that

00:34:09.680 calls you to the appropriate dedicated sacrifice. So that's from the Cain and Abel story. The spirit

00:34:16.560 that calls you to batten down the hatches if you're wise when the floods are coming. The spirit that warns

00:34:23.480 you against producing totalitarian spirits of towers of Babel. The spirit that calls you to out of your

00:34:32.440 father's tent, that's Abraham, to the adventure of your life. The spirit that calls you out of the

00:34:39.120 tyranny of Egypt or any tyranny into the desert and then guides you through the desert. And then I'll skip

00:34:46.200 the rest of the Old Testament for the sake of brevity and jump into the New Testament because there's a

00:34:51.280 characterization of that which is in the highest place that's revolutionary that emerges out of

00:34:55.560 the Old Testament. But it's the spirit that makes you voluntarily willing to bear the entire cross of

00:35:04.220 human suffering and malevolence. And then that character that's at the top of the hierarchy of

00:35:09.520 attention and action, that's characterized as God. You can say, well, is that a fiction? It's a fiction,

00:35:15.680 but you have to retool your notion of fiction because fiction then becomes the deepest form

00:35:21.200 of ethical abstraction. And so it's a meta-truth rather than a falsehood. And then if Jonathan's

00:35:27.480 right, and I think he is, and I think John Verveke agrees with this, is that if we have to perceive the

00:35:33.860 world with its multiplicity of possibilities through the lens of an ethic, that ethic becomes the defining

00:35:41.960 tool that we use, in fact, to extract even factual information out of the

00:35:49.480 infinite array of information that presents itself to us. And so not only is science nested inside a

00:35:57.460 fiction, in some sense, the fiction is more deeply true than the science. And it's so deeply true that

00:36:02.940 without the fiction, you don't even have the precondition for science.

00:36:06.640 Although is it still a fiction? Is it still a fiction, Jordan? Because for you, this is,

00:36:10.760 you're stuck in the shop and how are you?

00:36:12.480 Jonathan and I were talking about this last night, you know, about, because we just sat and did this long

00:36:17.440 seminar on Exodus. And you might ask, well, did the events in Exodus really happen? And our

00:36:22.820 conclusion was, well, not only did they, they happened in a, in a meta manner, they're still

00:36:32.040 happening. They happened so, they happened with such reality that they haven't stopped happening. And so,

00:36:40.400 and what does that mean? Well, everyone still struggles with the spirit of tyranny.

00:36:45.580 And everyone still struggles with the fact that when you escape from a tyranny, you, you don't hit

00:36:52.520 the promised land, you hit the desert. And then when you're in the desert of your imagination or with

00:36:57.680 your lost peers, then you need to struggle with what guides you and what should guide you when you're

00:37:04.000 lost. And then you have to grapple with the problem of appropriate and reliable forms of governance,

00:37:14.260 because that's all part of the Exodus story. And so it didn't happen the way a happening would occur

00:37:21.120 if you just detailed it out as a camera holding empirical observer. It happened in a way deeper way

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00:38:39.980 So I think that that's, for me, like for sure the fiction thing is a difficulty for me, that category.

00:38:45.460 But I can follow the process and understand this idea, let's say of abstracted, this abstracted story

00:38:53.360 that moves up. But then what I think is that it's causal, that we're actually discovering a pattern

00:39:00.160 which is causal to the rest. And so that it's not just that it's a fiction, it's actually that which

00:39:06.340 gives it, makes it possible for the world to exist. And so the word fiction at this point becomes

00:39:12.920 ridiculous. It's not a fiction, it's actually the source of reality. And so that's God, right? It's

00:39:17.780 the source of the possibility for reality to exist. And the manner in which, let's say, that happens

00:39:24.720 is not just a description of mechanical causes. It has to do with this orientation towards the good,

00:39:31.060 this ethic which comes down and makes it even possible for us to perceive the world.

00:39:37.140 And so I think that for me, for sure, it's not a fiction. I think that the events in scripture

00:39:45.080 happen, but they don't have to be described in a way that is equivalent to our scientific

00:39:51.320 understanding. Because they're trying to account for more than our scientific understanding.

00:39:55.920 Just like, well, the reason I would throw a word in here for fiction, I mean, we would have to

00:40:01.320 retool our understanding of what fiction is.

00:40:03.820 And so that's part of the problem. But when I read something like a novel by Dostoevsky,

00:40:08.420 I think, well, is this true? And the answer is, well, those precise events never happened.

00:40:13.960 So on that basis, it's not true. But then there's something wrong with that description,

00:40:18.420 because the characterizations in Dostoevsky are so true, that in some sense, they've never been

00:40:25.220 surpassed. And so, and I do think, to elaborate on Jonathan's point, is that imagine that human

00:40:32.640 beings, like any other object, have a being and then a realm of possible becoming. And I would

00:40:39.300 say our attempts to characterize the spirit at the top of the attentional hierarchy is an attempt to

00:40:45.660 flesh out and to discover the realm of human possibility. And so it does bring it into being

00:40:51.520 to some degree, even though it's implicate in the order. And that would be the logos of the world,

00:40:58.500 right? It's like, what's the Bible about? Well, it's about people, clearly. And so everything

00:41:03.880 that's detailed out in those stories is about the nature of humanity. Now, how that's related to the

00:41:09.760 nature of the divine is something we're trying to puzzle out. But it's clearly about people. And

00:41:14.440 is it true? Well, it has this weird sense of being true that we just described, which is...

00:41:20.480 But there's also a reality, which is that in a world that understands this or lives in this way,

00:41:27.380 then the manner that they will perceive, remember, and tell stories will be different from the way

00:41:35.160 that you tell a policeman the type of proofs that you saw. And so what we're asking of Scripture

00:41:41.140 is not only not the right questions, we're not understanding what type of descriptions that

00:41:48.440 they are. And so I do believe that the stories in Scripture happen, but I don't believe that the

00:41:53.280 people who recorded them had to do it in a way that accounts for our forensic nature, let's say,

00:42:01.120 the way that we think that something happened in the world in terms of a scientist would describe

00:42:06.340 phenomena. I think that they're doing it in a manner to show this very pattern in the story of

00:42:12.040 what it is that was happening in the world. Yes. I'm wary about some of this because we need to get

00:42:19.320 down to brass tacks, as it were. And Jonathan has done one, but Jordan, you talked about it again as

00:42:26.760 a story. And as you say, I mean, Dostoevsky, obviously, if you say is Dostoevsky true, you need to say

00:42:33.840 in what sense. But then, I mean, the issue with the Bible, the issue of Christianity, the issue with faith

00:42:40.820 is that it's obviously different. It must be in a different realm. It's clearly in a different

00:42:44.560 realm because it claims different things for itself. Dostoevsky doesn't demand that we believe

00:42:49.720 that Raskolnikov lived. The Bible, if you're going to be a believer, you have to be able to say,

00:43:00.180 in the words of the Creed, that you believe in the virgin birth, that you believe, most importantly,

00:43:07.540 in the resurrection. And as you well know, Jordan, many of us can walk 99% of the way there in terms

00:43:18.560 of belief in the truth of the story, or as Betjeman puts it, but is it true? Is it true? And then stumble

00:43:27.760 on the last thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay. So one of the things you pointed out in your conversation

00:43:34.540 with Dave Rubin was that the religious substrate risks devolving into something like a puerile social

00:43:43.560 justice without its rooting in something like transcendent mystery. And so let's just leave

00:43:50.560 that as a proposition for a moment, and then I want to return to the issue of the resurrection.

00:43:55.720 So I'll push that as far as I've been able to push it. And so it definitely appears to me that

00:44:02.320 the story of the passion is an archetypal and foretold tragic catastrophe. And I'll explain

00:44:12.840 the foretold part later. So it's an archetypal catastrophe because it melds all the worst things

00:44:20.020 that could happen to a person in their life. And so it's death, but it's knowledge of certain death

00:44:27.340 associated with death. And then it's youthful death. And then it's youthful death at the hands

00:44:32.340 of the mob. And it's youthful death at the hands of the mob, despite innocence, despite the mob

00:44:38.340 knowing of innocence. And then it's contaminated. And in front of the mother.

00:44:43.900 In front of the mother, yes. And as a consequence of the relativistic nihilism of the Romans

00:44:49.420 and the tyranny and the choice of the crowd and the betrayal of a best friend, all of that. And so

00:44:58.080 it is definitely a journey through all the worst things you could confront in your life. But then

00:45:03.080 that's not enough, eh? Because there's the mythological cloud, let's say, around the narrative

00:45:09.320 because dying horribly and unjustly isn't enough. You also have to go to hell and harrow it.

00:45:20.380 And so that would mean that the ultimate extension of the human experience is not only the confrontation

00:45:25.780 with malevolence and unjust death of the innocent, but a genuine journey into hell.

00:45:31.940 Okay, then the question would be, and this is the sticker as far as I'm concerned, is,

00:45:37.880 isn't it the case that in your own life, Douglas, that the more deeply that you've peered into

00:45:42.480 the abyss of things, the more likely it is that a light shines through it?

00:45:49.400 And this is sort of the ultimate question of the resurrection is like,

00:45:52.340 how do you revivify your faith in life? And the answer might be, it might really be by the radical

00:45:59.060 acceptance of the malevolent tragedy of life, but even more than that, by the radical embracing of

00:46:06.220 even the hellish aspect of life. And that if you did that radically enough, well, who knows what would

00:46:12.960 happen? I mean, we know clinically, look, we know clinically, if you find what people are avoiding and

00:46:19.660 are afraid of and are disgusted by, that's blocking their pathway forward, and you get them to confront

00:46:24.780 that voluntarily, they get courageous and better. That's clearly the case. And it looks to me like

00:46:31.200 the passion representation and its mythological substrate is exposure therapy on a cosmic level.

00:46:39.820 And you know that the more deeply you grapple with the fundamental issues of life, the wiser and

00:46:47.180 broader you get. And then I guess I would ask, if everyone did that to the utmost, what would it be

00:46:55.360 that we might be able to conquer? And I don't know the answer to that. Life would radically transform.

00:47:03.380 I mean, I see what happens because people write me all the time. I see what happens when people

00:47:07.740 adopt a certain amount of responsibility for their life. I mean, they write and they say,

00:47:12.660 man, everything's way better. And it's like, okay, how much better could it be? And this is also

00:47:19.460 associated with this idea in the New Testament. There's a section, I believe it's in the Sermon on

00:47:24.540 the Mount, where Christ says, it might not be, but he says that heaven will not emerge and all things

00:47:32.600 will not manifest themselves till everyone brings everything inside them out, right? Their divine

00:47:38.380 possibility, let's say. And that part of the reason that the world has fallen the way it is, is because

00:47:43.560 we hold back our best. And we don't abide by the law and the prophetic spirit. And we don't bring

00:47:50.860 everything that's within us out into the world. And the world is lesser as a consequence of that.

00:47:55.120 And I do believe that we don't bring our best out because we're afraid and because we're desperate

00:48:01.740 and because we don't have the courage to confront the malevolence and suffering and the hellish

00:48:06.800 aspect of life. And so I do think, so you look at the death and you say, well, is the death more

00:48:11.860 real and the hell more real? Or is the resurrection more real? And obviously, in some sense, I'm speaking

00:48:16.360 symbolically. But it seems to me, it's the same idea, you know, that it's ancient mythological idea that

00:48:23.680 you could go into the belly of the beast and rescue your father. And you know, you're trying to do

00:48:29.020 that with your book, The War on the West, right? It's like you see the assault on these values and

00:48:34.260 you're attempting to resurrect those values. I see that as the same pattern. Yeah. But I think,

00:48:40.360 so I think, Douglas, I understand your question. Like, I understand your question. The answer is,

00:48:45.120 is the grave empty? Something like that. Like, was the grave empty? And this is, I think, where maybe it's

00:48:51.280 the most difficult for many materialists to understand. And I know that my, like, ramblings

00:48:58.760 about the glass and about the good and about this might seem like it's going all over the place.

00:49:04.620 But it's actually supremely important to understand that if you change your perception about the manner

00:49:11.740 in which the world exists, focused based on the idea of a good, of an ethic, that it's what underlies

00:49:17.880 the, even the factuality of the world, then that which will convince me of the truth of the resurrection

00:49:24.200 is not about a bunch of material facts. It's about the imposition of that story at being so real that

00:49:32.540 it overwhelms everything else. And it shines a light on everything else. Through the image of the

00:49:38.300 resurrection, we're able to see everything through it. And so if you ask me, like, what is the mechanical

00:49:43.120 cause of the resurrection? Like, how is it that this body could have, I would say, that is obfuscated

00:49:48.540 not only in the text, but also in the creed. The reason why in the creed it says, he rose again

00:49:53.400 according to the scriptures, because nobody wanted to try to give you a mechanical description. And in

00:49:59.860 the text itself, when the disciples encounter Christ, they don't even recognize him. What is going on

00:50:04.660 there? They don't even know who he is. Well, in the beginning at Emmaus, yes. Yeah. So there's a desire

00:50:10.480 in the text to obfuscate the mechanical causes of the resurrection. And that is not the way. So if

00:50:15.960 you try to get at it that way, you're never going to get there, obviously. But I don't get there that

00:50:21.040 way because I don't, I see through the world, through the resurrection. And it makes so much

00:50:26.360 more sense. And that's, that's maybe C.S. Lewis's argument is to say, it's like, give me that one,

00:50:31.340 we need one miracle. Everybody needs one miracle to then lay the world out from, from that miracle,

00:50:37.700 whether it's the big bang, whether it's whatever it is, you need that first miracle. So give me the

00:50:41.940 resurrection and I'll explain the entirety of human experience through that one miracle.

00:50:47.840 So that is what convinces me of the resurrection. I don't know if that makes sense to you.

00:50:52.060 So, so, so I was thinking about this idea too, this, I'm sure Jonathan loves some criticisms of

00:50:57.780 this idea, but we'll see. So there's this idea in Christianity that the, the, the voluntary

00:51:03.700 sacrifice of Christ redeemed the world. And so then you might ask, well, and that that's already

00:51:10.240 happened in some fundamental sense. But the stories that put that proposition forward play with the

00:51:17.360 idea of time in an extreme way, because you have the notion, for example, of God being the alpha and

00:51:22.760 the omega and being outside of time. And so the manner in which time is being used in the stories is

00:51:27.900 very, it's very mysterious. But then I would say, well, it seems to me that it's something like this,

00:51:36.080 is that a sufficiently courageous confrontation with the catastrophe of life would redeem it to

00:51:44.300 an indeterminate degree. And that's already happened because we have the example, but even

00:51:49.760 though it's already happened, we still have to do it. It's something like that. And, and, you know,

00:51:55.420 there's this emphasis in, in, in the biblical writings in particular, that each person has a

00:52:00.100 divine part to play. And that in some sense, the part that each person plays is equally necessary

00:52:07.300 and equally valuable. And so we have the pattern, which is to confront things in as forthright a manner

00:52:15.800 as we possibly can, and to bear the maximal degree of responsibility. And that will redeem things,

00:52:22.100 but we still have a real destiny. Like we each have something real to do that hasn't been,

00:52:28.100 that's been granted to us, or that hasn't been taken away from us or lifted away from us.

00:52:32.040 And we could turn the world into hell if we wanted to, but we could maybe do the alternative

00:52:36.900 in some real sense.

00:52:39.880 I don't disagree with that. What Jonathan says about the resurrection and reality, of course, raises

00:52:45.820 a particular conundrum, which is that if you're going to use, uh, uh, religion as an explanation

00:52:55.820 of reality, you're also describing the event that subverts reality completely. That the resurrection

00:53:05.820 is the thing that is the least possible thing to do, given the world as we understand it.

00:53:11.820 Least possible than the Big Bang, for example?

00:53:16.820 Uh, I don't know. I see, I see all scientists move towards something which is least possible,

00:53:23.640 let's say.

00:53:24.580 As a precondition?

00:53:25.360 Oh yeah, of course. That's something that is impossible as a precondition for possibility.

00:53:30.860 I'm, I'm, what I'm trying to get to is a sort of, not diminish it, but having your cake

00:53:35.260 and eating it thing, which is religion explaining reality, reality explained by religion. And also

00:53:40.360 this thing happens that has never been able to happen. And that if you can make that leap,

00:53:47.500 then you've got the faith and religion. I'm not saying that this isn't possible to do.

00:53:52.700 You obviously do it yourself, but it's two things that seem to be in some very, very deep way

00:53:58.700 contradictory. And maybe the contradiction is the point.

00:54:03.020 Well, I think you also do it imperfectly. You know, I mean, you, you ask yourself, I mean,

00:54:09.480 you're in some ways on the edges of the cultural battlefront, you know, you ask yourself, well,

00:54:15.340 how much of the catastrophe of the world can you voluntarily take on? There's many, many problems

00:54:21.120 that beset us. And there's a great adventure in trying to rectify them. And it's an open question

00:54:29.160 how much better you can get at that. If you proceed in the spirit of goodwill.

00:54:34.740 I think that's an indication in the most fundamental sense of your belief, you know, because we don't

00:54:41.440 want to reduce this to a proposition again, because I don't think that's the right. I think it's a,

00:54:47.120 it's an axiom of faith. It's something like, okay, do I believe in the resurrection? It's like, well,

00:54:53.360 it's not a scientific proposition. At least I'm not going to treat it that way at the moment.

00:54:58.560 It's a manner of confronting reality. And, and the, and so that it would be a statement of faith,

00:55:04.060 which is that I believe that if I act in oriented towards love and life more abundant, and if I speak

00:55:11.660 the truth, then, then I can prevail against the gates of hell. And I'm willing to put my life on

00:55:18.180 the line to see if that's true. And I would say that's the faith, right? Because who knows?

00:55:27.100 But what's the alternative? It's like, are we going to accept the ultimate, what would you say,

00:55:32.420 the ultimate metaphysical reality of the pointlessness of being and the atrociousness

00:55:36.800 of hellish suffering? I mean, it looks to me like we can rectify that. And it also looks like we have

00:55:42.620 to move towards that rectification in something like faith, right? Okay, but let me return to the,

00:55:50.100 the, the two questions I posed earlier on about this, where the thing that the religious have a

00:55:54.460 problem with, and the thing that the non-religious have a problem with. I mean, putting my cards on the

00:55:58.900 table, I would be, I would be relatively happy for Jonathan's view to be dominant in my society

00:56:06.280 and for me never to be asked whether I literally believe in the resurrection.

00:56:13.040 To dodge the question, I'd be relatively happy for that to be the situation, because there is the

00:56:20.040 place where, where we get into an awful lot of problems, but that, but that there is virtue and good

00:56:28.020 in what he's describing. We, we, we could leave it as a mystery unless our age happened to be leaning

00:56:34.380 on this because it needed to know whether, whether the story was literally true, more than Dostoevsky,

00:56:40.460 more than the great poetry, that it was the thing that we relied on more than anything.

00:56:45.340 You would need to know that in that situation.

00:56:48.400 So I, I think that for sure Christians believe that the resurrection happened, that it's an event,

00:56:53.920 that it's something that is not just a fiction in, in the, in the simplest sense. But they also do insist

00:57:01.520 that you can't, you can't describe it in terms of mechanical causes, that it's not, it cannot be

00:57:08.320 reduced to that. And so when people always ask me, like, did Jesus sit up in the grave? And I'm like,

00:57:14.500 I don't, that's not what the text says. When, if you read what it says in scripture,

00:57:18.140 it leaves it very mysterious at what the event is. I think for the, the reason that it is in some way

00:57:26.400 a meta event, it's an event, which is, you know, the, even, even in scripture, there's even this

00:57:31.840 description that talks about Christ as being the lamb that was sacrificed before the foundation of

00:57:37.240 the world. That is the notion that the sacrifice, that the death and the resurrection of Christ is

00:57:42.520 in some ways the foundation of reality. So, and it's not, I know it's hard because people are such

00:57:49.320 scientists and such materialists that it's, they struggle, but that's why we, I try to help people

00:57:54.400 understand this, the, the, the, the fact that attention precedes phenomena. And that's why sacrifice

00:58:02.280 is, comes before phenomena. The importance of sacrificing the externals, of being able to perceive and give up

00:58:10.020 the unity of something. That is actually the foundation of reality. And so it's ritualized in

00:58:15.040 cultures as actual physical sacrifice. That's fine. But then it leads up to the mystery that,

00:58:21.100 of Christ, which is that ultimately the highest version of that is self-sacrifice. And if you do

00:58:26.920 that and you participate in that, you are gaining a key to the mystery of how reality actually lays

00:58:32.900 itself out. Well, look, look, let's look at, I've always been struck by Michelangelo's pieta. And so,

00:58:38.940 because it's a sacrificial offering. And so we could say, well, what's the precondition for the life

00:58:44.880 of a autonomous child? And the precondition is that the mother is willing to offer up the child as a

00:58:52.520 sacrificial entity in the face of life. And the psychoanalysts used to describe the necessary

00:58:59.960 failure of the mother. So that's the anti-Oedipal mother. The Oedipal mother protects and shelters,

00:59:06.420 right? And then destroys because of that. Whereas the non-Oedipal mother lets go so the child can be

00:59:12.760 hurt and broken and killed by the world. And so then you might say, well, the willingness to sacrifice

00:59:18.280 the innocent to the realities of existence is a precondition for existence. And I actually think

00:59:25.140 that's true. And so Jonathan's notion that the sacrifice of the innocent lamb is a precondition

00:59:32.100 for existence, you could say at least that that's true phenomenologically, or maybe for the existence

00:59:39.260 that isn't hell, because that's another way of thinking about it. Let me just pick up on this

00:59:45.360 point again, because we might be returning to what I described as these two problems we've got to

00:59:53.280 address. The first is whether it's possible to accept the idea of religion being true in some sense

01:00:02.260 and essentially philosophy for the masses, which is how many 19th century thinkers were already thinking

01:00:09.380 about it. That you can say it's true in some sense. And it's the best way to allow the largest

01:00:16.920 number of people to contend with the deepest set of ideas. Because philosophy is only ever going to be

01:00:23.800 an elite sport and no derogatory term of the meaning elite, but only a small number of people are going

01:00:28.680 to engage in it. Most people are not going to engage in it. Therefore, religion is the best means to

01:00:33.080 engage with meaning in the world. That's one way of seeing things to begin with. But the second,

01:00:37.680 and that's something we could contend with. But the second thing I wanted to say is just to give

01:00:43.460 Jonathan a breather, although as it were, on some of my demands, which is what about the non-religious

01:00:48.460 in this? And the non-religious problem in all of this, it comes back to what you described earlier,

01:00:52.560 Jordan, as the patterns problem. The patterns we see in the universe, including patterns of truth.

01:00:57.220 What does the non-believer do when they find, for instance, the beauty of a mathematical formula,

01:01:02.780 which works and is there and is true? What does it mean? What does it mean when we find the extraordinary

01:01:12.100 patterns in nature? What does it mean when we find patterns in our own lives? And what you describe

01:01:20.920 as things like that thing that people can recognize, of needing to see through the void and see the glimpse

01:01:26.860 of light? What do we do about the sense, for instance, that we know that we're contending

01:01:31.740 with a very, very difficult problem in our lives, set so many difficult problems in our lives, one of

01:01:36.960 which, perhaps the deepest of which is, does this matter? Does this matter beyond itself? Or one of my

01:01:44.120 favorite quotes from Rilke, Rilke says in one of the Duino elegies, does the outer space into which we

01:01:49.660 dissolve taste of us at all? Does the outer space into which we dissolve taste of us at all? Now,

01:01:57.320 our senses, probably one of our deepest hopes is that the answer is yes. Yes. That what we do in our

01:02:05.280 lives does not just matter to us or just to the people around us, although that's not nothing,

01:02:10.400 but matters in some far higher sense. And then we get to that question underneath that, which is,

01:02:15.560 are we simply meaning-seeking beings or is there meaning? And the problem with this question is it

01:02:23.280 leans us towards the second one. Our deepest hope is that the second one is true. Okay, so when I look

01:02:31.680 at that, I start by trying to determine what people react to as if it's real. And the scientific answer

01:02:41.800 would be, well, there's nothing more real than matter. And I would say, no, that's not actually

01:02:47.160 how people, that's not actually how people act. When push comes to shove, people act like there's

01:02:53.300 nothing more real than pain. And you can't argue yourself out of pain, or you can do that with great

01:03:00.160 difficulty. And so, so we can start with the reality of suffering. And then I would say that that's a

01:03:06.720 phenomenological description or an existential description of reality. But I'm okay with that,

01:03:11.000 because I'm not going to make the assumption that reality is fundamentally material and devoid

01:03:16.600 of purpose. It might be, but it might not be, because we're trying to figure out what's

01:03:20.440 fundamental. Okay, we act as if pain is real. We act as if the pain of infants is particularly real.

01:03:27.880 Okay, then you might say, well, is there anything more real than pain? And I would say, yeah, there is.

01:03:32.740 The meaning that overcomes pain is more real than the pain. And then I would say, well, that's actually

01:03:39.400 what meaning is. And I could speak psychologically about this. It's like, we know the quality of a

01:03:48.380 meaningful experience. It's engaging. It's engrossing. It activates positive emotion and enthusiasm.

01:03:55.320 It makes people more creative. It quells anxiety. And it's an analgesic, probably mediated by opiate

01:04:02.260 mechanisms. And then the phenomena of meaning seems to emerge on the axis between chaos and order. And

01:04:10.760 so let's say that we fall into a deeply meaningful conversation like the one we're having now.

01:04:15.920 And the reason it's meaningful is because our nervous systems are signaling to us that

01:04:20.600 we're inhabiting a structure that we comprehend and that's secure, and that we understand what's going

01:04:26.440 on. So we're not anxious and upset, but we're moving new information into that structure at an

01:04:33.160 optimized rate. And our nervous system signals to us that that's deeply meaningful, and that

01:04:39.760 regulates our positive emotion and quells our negative emotion. But I think all of that's

01:04:44.760 occurring in relationship to this entire hierarchy of attentional priority that we described. And so

01:04:50.080 the more deeply meaningful something is, the more it's associated with every level in that hierarchy

01:04:55.940 all the way up to the level of divinity itself. And then it's a matter of faith. It's like, well,

01:05:00.800 is that a reflection of fundamental reality? And the answer might be, it might be.

01:05:05.760 We also don't have access to any other reality. Like, it's actually the other reality that doesn't

01:05:10.240 participate in this hierarchy of attention, this hierarchy of goods, which is, it's like,

01:05:15.980 I would say a delusion, but it's at least something that you're positing without much proof that it

01:05:21.640 exists. The idea that the world out there completely exists neutrally without a value

01:05:26.880 hierarchy, which sustains it into unities, is something which I think is more dubious than the

01:05:32.360 other way around. And so that you could- I think the scientific evidence supports that proposition now.

01:05:39.020 You could take your idea of pain and meaning, and you could reduce it to the most simple experience

01:05:45.740 of the world, which is question-answer. What is pain? And that is the meaning. And that happens

01:05:54.060 all the time. Like, you encounter a phenomena that you've never seen before. And that phenomena is

01:05:59.720 screaming at you, like, am I dangerous? What am I? What is this? And then there's a manner in which

01:06:06.800 we're able to bring it together and to give it a name and to identify it. And that's already meaning.

01:06:12.780 The identification of things, especially if we understand that it necessitates a hierarchy of

01:06:20.640 attention, is always meaning. It's actually harder to live without meaning. You can't move without

01:06:27.440 meaning. You can't point your eyes without meaning. You would just lay in bed and wait to die without

01:06:32.500 meaning. Like, nothing would exist in the- nothing would have light in it. I completely agree. I mean,

01:06:38.500 I think it's one of perhaps the biggest questions of our age of where you can find that, as it always

01:06:44.900 has been. It's just that the options in the buffet at the moment are all demanding of something which

01:06:53.720 a lot of people in our society, at the very least, find it hard to accept. You know, what you've just

01:07:00.100 described about, I mean, the nature of sacrifice, for instance, and all these things, we know from

01:07:04.360 Girard and others. I mean, these are at such a deep level that they certainly come before religion.

01:07:11.320 They certainly come before any of the religions that we currently have in the world today is still

01:07:15.240 operating. I mean, what's the oldest religion we have in the world? Judaism, still actively.

01:07:20.560 A religion that's three and a half thousand years old or whatever is young compared to the instincts

01:07:26.980 we're talking about, such as the need for a scapegoat, the need for sacrifice. I mean, we go back

01:07:34.260 thousands of years and we keep finding some kind of organized belief system which believed in sacrifice

01:07:40.340 and totally futile sacrifice in the cases of most of these ideas. But the question of meaning that comes

01:07:51.060 from that is, I come back to this thing that Jordan was just touching on. I agree, Jordan, that if we

01:07:59.100 agree that the thing that's most real and most to be overcome by us in our lives is suffering,

01:08:06.620 then we have to work out what the thing is that can counter suffering. And then we find that there's

01:08:10.800 probably only one thing in the world that can counter suffering, which is love. And that's an instinct

01:08:15.300 that's an instinct that we may have because of the tradition that we've come from. It's possible

01:08:21.780 or it's possible that it is at such a deep level that people had it, whether they came from this

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01:09:47.440 Not. Well, I think it was at least latent there before, you know, because that also brings up the

01:09:57.060 question of to what degree something exists, accepted potential, before it's been dramatized

01:10:04.260 and conceptualized. I mean, I think if you look at the work of people like Franz de Waal with non-human

01:10:10.520 primates, chimps in particular, you see the emergence in chimp social hierarchies of something

01:10:16.720 like long-term reciprocal altruism as the basis for the stable polity and society. It's not oppression

01:10:25.500 and it's not power. Now, you might say, well, is that love? And the answer is, well, it's sort of love

01:10:32.060 the same way that a chimpanzee recognizing himself in a mirror is sort of self-consciousness.

01:10:37.320 But once it's elaborated up and turned into something communicable and sharpened by dialogue

01:10:45.000 and philosophical inquiry and aesthetic effort, it becomes more real, right? It's a possibility

01:10:53.040 that becomes deeper and more real. Well, look how weak the exhaustive force of even the thing we're

01:11:00.200 talking there as perhaps the most real thing has become in recent generations. Look at the sloganing

01:11:06.140 around love, for instance. I mean, the ease with which it's turned into a sort of greeting card-like

01:11:11.980 thing. The placards of protesters saying, all you need is love. The sort of John Lennonism of the

01:11:19.540 society. We know that in some sense, even this deepest and most important thing can be cheapened

01:11:25.320 if it's not, as you say, sharpened, unless it's made actual in some way. As if you don't have

01:11:30.880 something around it that makes it stronger, it's like I always contend, you know, one of the oddities

01:11:35.460 of being in a society that's essentially post-Christian, or at least post-literal Christian,

01:11:40.280 is that people hold on to bits of it, like angels or angelic forces, without having any idea what

01:11:47.560 they're talking about other than there's a nice idea of something they dream about.

01:11:50.940 Don't you think that the idea of love is deepened by its admixture with the appreciation of hell and

01:11:56.480 suffering? I mean, my family has been through very dire illnesses lately, and one of the things that

01:12:03.200 guide us through those illnesses was love. And I don't think that you have any sense of the depth of

01:12:08.560 love unless it's experienced as the antidote to cataclysmic tragedy and malevolence.

01:12:16.720 Let me add one thing to that. I agree. Let me add one thing to that, though.

01:12:19.880 Love may be the thing that can support you through terrible suffering, the love of your loved ones

01:12:27.500 towards you, and you towards them. But there's something more than that, which is a bigger

01:12:34.120 ambition, a bigger drive. I don't know if you know the On an Arundel tomb of Philip Larkin,

01:12:42.680 his description. I'm sorry to keep reverting to poets, but maybe it's a good thing to keep reverting to.

01:12:46.840 He describes an earl and a countess in an English church lying side by side in stone. They're stone

01:12:57.320 effigies, and their hands are intertwined still, and they've been there for 700 years, and the earl and

01:13:05.260 countess lie in stone. And the last lines of the poem, where Larkin is, of course, a very

01:13:10.540 wounded non-believer, a mournful non-believer, says at the end of this poem that the sight of this

01:13:21.500 triggers in him, he says, a sense of our almost instinct being almost true. What will survive of us

01:13:33.160 is love? Now, that seems to me, people quite often tear that line out, and they forget he's saying

01:13:41.960 almost instinct, almost true, because you can sense that he's wishing it to be true. He wills it to be

01:13:47.860 true. But the reason why that line and that poem find such resonance with people is because it does

01:13:53.240 seem to be something that we all wish for. It's not just that love in our lives can see us through,

01:13:58.900 but that, to go back to that quote of Rilke, it's something that echoes in the universe. It's

01:14:03.360 something that survives after us. It's something bigger than us. And there we get to Jonathan's

01:14:08.300 realm, which is that here we're in the realm of religion, that religion would explain that.

01:14:13.560 When you love someone, I do believe that what you see in them is something like a glimpse of the

01:14:20.780 eternal embedded in the finite. And so, and we don't really understand the relationship between the

01:14:27.840 finite and the eternal. And we certainly have the apprehension at times in our life that we're

01:14:33.600 making contact with the eternal inside the finite. And we also see that as deeply revivifying. I think

01:14:41.400 you get that in the face of beauty. You get that in the face of music. You get that in the face of

01:14:46.940 love. And I'm loathe to say that that's not the deepest reality. And because we don't understand the

01:14:54.240 relationship between the finite and the infinite, we don't know how our actions echo in the eternal

01:15:01.160 landscape. And I'm unwilling to think that the instincts that orient us towards our deepest

01:15:08.020 sources of meaning that intimate an immortality and an infinity beyond our apprehension are erroneous

01:15:15.800 because they orient us so well. I mean, the great cathedrals of Europe, they're oriented towards

01:15:21.980 a time span that's outside the mere mortal. But there's something absolutely magnificent about

01:15:28.060 that ambition. And this notion of a love that survives death is like, well, if you love your

01:15:34.160 wife and you have children and you have children in that love, and that love propagates itself to an

01:15:40.720 unspecified degree out into the world and into the future. And so we don't understand the relationship

01:15:47.840 between the finite and the infinite. But I don't think we can reduce the infinite to the finite and

01:15:52.800 dispense with it. And that seems to demoralize people completely. Unbelievable. It's the cause of

01:15:58.280 demoralization in our society. The single greatest cause of demoralization in society seems to me not

01:16:03.540 just the issue of not having a story, not having a structure, but the sense that nothing matters and

01:16:12.060 that other people don't think it matters and what you do doesn't matter. So why would you bother doing

01:16:16.600 anything? Why would you bother setting sail into the wind and trying to discover new things? Why

01:16:21.520 would you bother with any endeavors? I mean, what's the point of even prolonging life if it's just

01:16:26.140 another 10 years sitting on the couch watching Netflix? Like, what's the point of any of this?

01:16:31.420 And there's so little. I mean, you're doing it a lot, of course, and Jonathan's doing a lot,

01:16:36.420 and I'm doing a tiny bit. But there is so little in our society saying to people,

01:16:41.080 here is something worth finding your way towards. And I absolutely agree, Jordan, that even if you

01:16:49.280 don't even need the religion, you don't even need religion or to think you have the religious urge

01:16:54.600 to do this. But in our lives, we find these moments. It's what our late friend Roger Scruton

01:17:00.080 described in one of his essays as effing the ineffable. The struggle, he said in a volume of his essays that I

01:17:07.880 wrote a new introduction to last year, Confessions of a Heretic, I much urge people to read this essay

01:17:14.720 if they don't know it. It's three pages long. It's easy to get through, but will very, very much

01:17:21.100 influence people. Effing the ineffable, Roger says, is this, he knows there is these things in our lives

01:17:27.780 we cannot put our finger upon, and yet we will continue always want to do so. We know that there

01:17:35.240 are moments in our lives on the winding staircase of our lives where we see something, and we glimpse

01:17:39.840 it, and we know we can't reach it, but that it speaks to us of a thing we cannot reach. And you

01:17:45.020 can put words to it. You can say it's the divine. You can say this is the justification of religion.

01:17:49.540 Or you can say, I don't know what this is, but whatever it is suggests to me now, and I could run

01:17:55.240 off it for a lot of the rest of my life, that there is something not just me in the universe.

01:18:00.540 Let's say based on what you're saying, and I think this also is a point that I wanted to make

01:18:06.800 regarding the question of belief. There's a lot of talk about belief, and I can't believe this,

01:18:14.040 or I believe that, and that ethics, and belief, but the thing about religion is that it's practice.

01:18:20.980 It's not, it's actually not belief, although belief is part of it, but it's embodiment, and it's

01:18:26.840 practice, and it's worship. And so this moment that you talk about, this moment where you

01:18:32.900 glimpse something, this love which transcends this momentary, where you feel like you're

01:18:38.060 transported, well, the answer, the only answer to that that we can have is something like

01:18:43.900 gratitude, right? It's something like this moment of gratitude and of recognizing it as

01:18:48.980 this gift which comes from more, let's say. And I think that the truth is that that is actually,

01:18:54.960 that's the foundation even of the Christian religion, those churches that are there, that's

01:18:59.920 what they're for, right? They're objects of worship. They're objects that point up to the

01:19:05.200 sky in this celebration and gratitude for those exact moments and those things, those glimpses

01:19:12.180 of light that we are given that guide us through the world. And so I think that sometimes when

01:19:17.720 we talk about, you know, I can believe this thing or this miracle or this, you know, and we

01:19:22.180 get caught up. But if we engage in this act of gratitude, like if you go into church, into

01:19:28.620 a beautiful service where the choir is singing and you are elevating yourself in that moment,

01:19:35.180 that is actually, yeah, that is actually the source. And in some ways, some of the more

01:19:41.080 difficult parts of belief will, they will figure themselves out, let's say, you know.

01:19:46.180 So one of the things I've really learned from talking to Jonathan, I think he's helped me

01:19:51.340 understand the stress on something like communal celebration and worship. And I've experimented

01:19:57.920 this with this in my life with Tammy, these religious practices. And, you know, practice

01:20:05.420 makes perfect. And so, well, what's the opposite of resentment? Well, it's something like gratitude.

01:20:10.600 Okay, so maybe you could practice being grateful. And what's the opposite of deceit? Well, it's

01:20:16.660 truth. So maybe you could practice telling the truth. And the opposite of hate is love, etc. And you

01:20:21.980 can practice these. And then at least you could say that what happens when people are going to

01:20:26.640 church is that they're attempting to point themselves towards the highest good and to practice.

01:20:33.280 And the belief is that the practice is worthwhile. It's not a, if it's reduced to the propositional,

01:20:39.880 then we end up in the weeds. But, you know, I've been always struck by the beauty of European

01:20:47.500 architecture, especially the classic Christian architecture, which is stunning beyond comprehension

01:20:52.580 in some real sense. And it's something to be able to open yourself up to that. And you are opening

01:20:59.760 yourself up to a glimpse of the infinite. And then you think, well, how do people find themselves

01:21:05.080 revivified? And I would say, well, you can look at communal practices. We go to sports stadiums and

01:21:10.660 we celebrate masterful athletes hitting the goal, which is the opposite of sin, because sin means to

01:21:17.440 miss the target, means to miss the mark. And we go to rock concerts where we can collectively worship

01:21:23.060 the harmonious patterns of being spontaneously played out. And we find respite and nourishment in

01:21:31.660 great literature and in the love of our friends. And there is a way to live that encourages you to

01:21:39.900 seek that out and to notice the fact that it's revivifying. And I would say that's, well, that's

01:21:45.320 the practice of faith. It's like, well, I could get better at being grateful. I could get better at

01:21:50.280 caring for other people.

01:21:51.360 Obviously, this is one of the key advantages. And I don't say that with any derogatory spin. But this

01:22:02.000 is one of the key advantages of religion. Organized worship, organized weekly worship,

01:22:08.480 as you say, the moment of being able to feel grateful, which, as you know, I wrote about this

01:22:14.800 in my last book, is the only possible, only possible answer to the culture of resentment.

01:22:22.160 But absent a weekly hour or hour and a half where you have that, you have to recognize your sins and

01:22:33.080 what you've done against other people. And you have to signal that you would like to be better

01:22:37.880 going forward and that you would like to, after all, this is what the Eucharist is about,

01:22:43.260 memorialize again the most important thing that happened. Unless you have that, as it were,

01:22:49.660 in the calendar, for most people, all of these things slip by. And it's always going to be a—you're

01:22:57.300 never going to find the hour in the week where you even turn off your damn iPhone and look out

01:23:03.300 the window. So of course, organized religion always has this very distinct advantage. I know it

01:23:09.960 myself. Whenever I sidle into the back of a cathedral, usually for an even song, it has to be said,

01:23:14.540 because this seems to me to be the best way to engage without engaging beyond your level of

01:23:20.820 tolerance, shall we say. And by the way, I add a side note, which is something I'm sure you'll both

01:23:28.260 agree with, which is that one of the great tragedies of our era is that the churches have pretty much

01:23:33.980 given up all the most beautiful things they had, including giving up the most beautiful liturgy they

01:23:39.600 had, giving up the most beautiful music they had, often closing the most beautiful buildings they

01:23:44.480 have, and replacing a sort of banal, third-rate Greenpeace-ism. I mean, that aside, as my friend

01:23:51.840 Tom Holland says, you know, I'd love them to concentrate on the weird stuff. I'd love them to

01:23:56.460 concentrate on the angels and the cherubim and the resurrection and the virgin, but I wish they did

01:24:01.980 that. And it wasn't just another place where you get another manifestation of the same boring,

01:24:06.700 regurgitated pap of the time. I wish that the churches would do that more. But that aside,

01:24:11.360 yes, this is one of the great advantages of religion, and it signals that there is something

01:24:15.540 we need to do. We do need to, as human beings, engage actively in these processes we're talking

01:24:20.460 about. Otherwise, we will always push them off for another day. Well, and collectively. Well,

01:24:25.200 so when I was a kid, you know, there was a corrosive, cynical attitude towards Sunday Christians as well.

01:24:31.140 These people go to church for an hour, and they're Christians, and then the rest of the time,

01:24:35.160 they go back to their old wayward ways. And I kind of bought into that as a teenager and

01:24:40.220 regarded it as a form of hypocrisy. But then when I got older and possibly wiser, I thought,

01:24:45.600 well, at least they were bloody well doing it publicly for an hour. Like, that's not nothing.

01:24:51.240 It's 50 hours a year. You know, it's what? 3,000 hours in a lifetime. That's a third of the way to

01:24:58.340 being an expert. And what are we going to replace that with to get rid of the hypocrisy? Well,

01:25:03.040 we're not going to ever devote any attention whatsoever to any of that.

01:25:07.500 And look at the movements that have tried to take, I mean, 19th century movements,

01:25:11.780 late 20th century movements that have tried to replicate parts of it. I don't know if either of

01:25:15.680 you are familiar with the Sea of Faith movement started in the 1980s. You know, I mean, to a great

01:25:21.020 extent, I think certainly, Jordan, you and I would have almost 100% agreement with this movement that

01:25:26.480 recognized what Nietzsche had done, recognized the existential position that we were in as modern

01:25:32.140 man in the late 20th century. They used to be groups. They used to meet on a weekly basis.

01:25:37.840 There are some, I gather now, but they've pretty much dwindled away because they don't work unless

01:25:42.640 you have that revivifying central force. And that's where Jonathan has his great advantage.

01:25:48.420 Well, and you pointed in the last bit of your commentary, you pointed to the fact in your

01:25:55.620 discussion with Holland is that if these collective acts of worship and orientation towards the good

01:26:03.520 aren't rooted in the kind of transcendent mystery that's outside the domains of the political,

01:26:11.040 whatever that means, because we don't know what's outside the realm of the practical and the

01:26:14.620 political. Well, the realm of the mysterious and eternal. And to the degree, when I go to orthodox

01:26:20.400 Christian ceremonies, I think I'm probably most at home there, I would say, because all of it's ancient

01:26:26.920 and all of it's liturgical and musical, and there's no propaganda. And it's such a relief.

01:26:33.740 You know, when you and I went to, we went to David Byrne in New York, remember? And that was a pretty good

01:26:37.900 show. And it got transcendent because Byrne's quite the musician. And then right in the middle of it,

01:26:43.120 there was a piece devoted to woke propaganda. And it just blew the entire atmosphere. And you think,

01:26:50.160 well, you have to be aiming at something transcendent and eternal and that contains

01:26:55.820 the infinite in the finite. And why wouldn't that be incomprehensibly weird? And isn't it possible

01:27:02.000 that the emphasis on phenomena like the virgin birth and the death and the resurrection and

01:27:07.260 the word at the beginning of time and the sacrifice of the lamb aren't all part of that language

01:27:12.940 that nails down the finite to the infinite in a way that isn't amenable to the mere disruption of

01:27:21.780 reason? Like music isn't amenable to the mere disruption of reason. It's got to be something

01:27:27.740 like that. Because look what we do in the cathedrals. They're stunningly beautiful. They take hundreds of

01:27:31.680 years to build. They're full of music. They're full of strange practices and gothic symbolism and death.

01:27:38.680 And it's very uncanny and strange. But it's not trivial.

01:27:43.720 I don't think any of us think it's trivial. By the way, your mention of the Orthodox,

01:27:51.080 because there is always this feeling, particularly in Christianity, that the closer you can get to

01:27:55.740 the beginning, the more true it must be. Which is, I think people sense that in music,

01:28:01.780 certainly in worship, I suspect that the small but significant rise in Tridentine Catholics in our day

01:28:08.820 has something to do with that. You know, people, when they are rediscovering, for instance,

01:28:13.220 Catholicism in our era, a few of my close friends have done it, they don't tend to go to the sort of

01:28:18.740 weakest forms of Catholicism. They go to Tridentine Catholic mass, Latin mass Catholicism. And I think

01:28:25.940 that's totally understandable in the same way that people would go to some of the Orthodox churches for

01:28:31.940 that, because it seems to go back further. And the point with that is always you need to get right

01:28:35.780 back, you try to get right back to the beginning. And I know, Jordan, you'll know, I can't remember if

01:28:39.940 you've been to the Holy Land yet. But one of the things that's so striking about it, of course, is that

01:28:44.900 if you go to, I don't know, if you go to Nazareth, or Nazareth, Nazareth's not a good idea these days,

01:28:51.300 but let's say to the Lake Galilee, and go to the spots where Jesus is believed to have

01:28:57.140 to have called his disciples, and there's a church there, and you see the lapping water on the shores,

01:29:02.820 you feel, well, I'm at the place where this whole thing started. And that's worth thinking about,

01:29:09.780 and that's worth dwelling upon. Well, that's an old, that's a very old idea too, that that that's

01:29:15.780 what a baptism is, it's a return to the cosmogonic chaos that preceded existence. And there is this

01:29:21.940 notion that's very well developed mythologically, that in order to revivify ourselves in the face of

01:29:28.020 the continual catastrophe of life, we have to return to the origin and wash away all the stains of life

01:29:34.740 so that we can re-emerge and forge forward. And some of that's dramatized in baptism and the cleansing

01:29:41.620 that's associated with that, but that's, it's also the pattern for something like confession

01:29:46.580 and then expiation and atonement. And confession is nothing more than a listing of those things

01:29:52.740 about yourself that you know you should shed and get rid of, in the desire to return to something like

01:29:59.460 a more pristine original state. And I think that state is associated with childhood and play, which

01:30:05.940 is, there's an intimation in the New Testament, right, that unless you become as little children

01:30:10.420 you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And that is a clearing away of all that traumatic

01:30:17.220 catastrophe that's associated with maturation and a return to that playful and joyful spirit that

01:30:23.300 so delightfully characterizes children, unconscious though they may be. But I also, I think like in

01:30:29.540 terms of the return to the Tridentine and the Orthodox, there's something more that's happening

01:30:33.860 and it has to do with our discussion to a certain extent. And it has to do with something which changed

01:30:39.380 in Christianity during the time of the Enlightenment and the Reformation and the subsequent centuries,

01:30:45.060 where Christianity did end up being reduced to something like belief in certain things that

01:30:51.060 happened and was reduced to a kind of materialism and began to compete with science and materialism

01:30:56.980 in ways that ultimately didn't look right. And so if you look now back at the ancient Christianity,

01:31:04.660 and you, like, you know, I entered the Orthodox faith because I read the ancient mystics and I read

01:31:10.020 the ancient Christians, and I could read as, you know, a seventh century saint and realize that

01:31:14.820 what they're talking about does not in any way compete with whatever, you know, scientific theory

01:31:20.740 someone discovers or talks about. And that that is reflected in the very way that we worship.

01:31:26.660 That we don't have an hour and a half sermons, and we don't have the same type of moralization

01:31:31.700 that you will find in modern churches, but it is rather this kind of cosmic dance, this kind of cosmic

01:31:36.660 participation in this act of gratitude and of, yeah, it really is something like a cosmic dance.

01:31:42.660 You were, you were trained as a modern artist and you returned to the, yeah.

01:31:46.660 Okay, so, so how, so that's a return to the origin and you were trained as a postmodernist as well when

01:31:52.660 you were an artist. So what, why did you return to the source and what has that done for you?

01:31:58.180 But it has to do with something like what we're talking about. Like, postmodern art is,

01:32:02.580 is, has become a kind of caricature where it is a comment upon a comment and upon a comment. It

01:32:09.860 almost gets reduced to propositions and getting the joke and, and this type of inner language that

01:32:16.980 is actually not connected to reality anymore. And so looking back in time, I realized that,

01:32:22.660 wait a minute, traditional arts were arts of participation. They were arts of celebration of

01:32:27.700 one's own world, whether you're, it is your culture, your tribe, but ultimately a celebration of

01:32:32.900 God. And I realized if I want to make something real, something that isn't just some strange comment

01:32:39.700 upon something else. Something ironic. Yeah. Something ironic and satirical.

01:32:44.740 Then the only way to really get back to that is to engage in liturgical art. So by making things for

01:32:51.140 churches. Yeah. So making things for churches is possibly the realist thing an artist can do because you're,

01:32:56.980 you're making something that is beautiful, that is proportional, and that is there to enter into

01:33:01.700 a community, participate in that community's existence, but is also made in the celebration

01:33:06.260 of that which is highest. And so I think that that's the highest form of art.

01:33:10.100 Let me comment on something Jonathan just said and then something you said, Jordan. First of all,

01:33:13.540 the issue of modern art, I, I, I, I agree completely. I mean, I mean, there is nothing so disturbing

01:33:18.820 as going through a museum like MoMA or Tate Modern. I mean, these are effectively, I think,

01:33:24.900 like warehouses of junk or future junk. Um, it is, it's, it's so dispiriting to find a total lack

01:33:33.460 of craft, a total lack of any serious ambition, the kitsch, the irony, the irony without

01:33:41.780 end. And perhaps worst of all, I denigrated Netflix earlier, but let me go back a bit.

01:33:47.860 I don't know if you've seen this recent Warhol documentary on Netflix, but it's the absolute,

01:33:51.780 absolutely characterizes the problem that I'm sure you, I think you, you describe as having run

01:33:57.220 into as an, as an artist working in modern art, which is that you see again and again,

01:34:01.860 apart from the limitations of his own imagination, I don't say that lightly. Warhol's problem is he

01:34:07.460 roughly knows how to ask questions. I mean, he sort of finds his way towards the basic questions,

01:34:15.300 like, what are we doing here? What survives of us? What's love? And the problem is he,

01:34:23.380 he gropes his way towards these questions, sometimes quite literally, but he has absolutely no idea of

01:34:30.660 how to answer them. I mean, it's like he becomes famous for, for raising really quite banal questions

01:34:38.900 and having no answer to them. And that seems to me completely to be the situation you described

01:34:43.860 with modern art, which itself describes something very, very dangerous in the culture, which is that

01:34:49.460 it's a culture that knows how to raise certain questions, thinks it's rather brave to raise

01:34:54.260 certain questions, but has no idea of how to answer them. And that brings me to what Jordan said,

01:35:00.100 and about this, about this undoubted revivifying that comes from the breaking of nature, as it were.

01:35:06.660 There's a, there's a, there's a very, and this is about then remembering those facts in acts of

01:35:12.980 communal worship, which as I say is a great advantage of organized religion. There's a, there's a very

01:35:17.140 moving description by one of Wittgenstein's pupils of a tutorial with Wittgenstein in Cambridge in the

01:35:22.900 1920s. Obviously, I don't need to explain, I'm sure, the significance of Wittgenstein to any of our

01:35:29.780 listeners. But, but one of the things that perhaps people don't realize is that the unbelievable

01:35:34.180 magnetism of him as a, as a teacher, the sense that, that, that his brain could, could do almost

01:35:41.060 anything. One of his students once said, I remember a book I was reading about him, that one day in a

01:35:46.740 tutorial, Wittgenstein said to his student, I mean, he said, he said, take this wall, for instance, if I walk

01:35:52.340 through it now. And the student said, I thought Wittgenstein was going to walk through the wall.

01:36:00.740 His, his mind, the, everything about it was so extraordinarily powerful, I thought he was going

01:36:08.260 to break nature. And of course, that was enough to fuel that student for the rest of their life,

01:36:15.940 to be one of Wittgenstein's students and to have been near a brain that seemed capable of breaking

01:36:21.220 nature. And then we get back to that thing, Jonathan, which you've raised, which is maybe

01:36:26.020 this idea of a thing so strong that it breaks nature is the thing you need to revive and to

01:36:33.940 run off and the thing will not exhaust. Well, I think gentlemen, it's hard for me to imagine

01:36:41.700 a better place to close than that. We, we should do this again after thinking about it for several

01:36:48.580 months. And I, I would like that very much. Um, I'd like to thank everybody who is watching and

01:36:56.020 listening and following and hope that you'll all attend as these ideas continue to develop over the

01:37:01.540 next while, which we certainly hope they will. And so Jonathan, do you have anything closing?

01:37:05.780 No, that was, that was a pretty good ending. Yeah. Well, Douglas, it's always a pleasure to talk to you

01:37:11.460 and the conversation had all the qualities that I was hoping for. And so we'll keep hashing this out,

01:37:17.620 you know, we're, we're getting somewhere with this as far as I can tell. And so hopefully everybody

01:37:22.820 listening and watching will find that as useful and productive as we found it.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 22, 2022

290. Douglas Murray & Jonathan Pageau

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