The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 361. Husbands, Fathers, Warriors & Kings ｜ Senator Josh Hawley

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everyone.

00:01:10.480 Today I'm speaking once again with constitutional lawyer, Missouri senator, and best-selling author Josh Hawley.

00:01:16.760 We discuss his new book, Manhood, exploring the structural significance of biblical tradition within people's lives,

00:01:23.380 how those enduring narratives elevate us above human defaults such as tyranny and slavery,

00:01:29.180 why self-mastery is the precondition for ordered liberty,

00:01:32.660 why young men have lapsed in education, industry, and reproduction,

00:01:36.320 and what steps might be available to help, well, individuals and our society put itself back in something like habitable order.

00:01:45.000 Looking forward to it.

00:01:45.960 So, I've been reading your book this morning, and it was sort of a strange experience, I would say,

00:01:52.760 because, strangely enough, or maybe not,

00:01:56.780 it's structured in a manner that's almost identical to the book that I'm writing at the moment.

00:02:02.260 How about that?

00:02:03.260 Yeah, yeah.

00:02:03.840 So, I'm writing this book called We Who Wrestle With God,

00:02:06.480 and I'm obviously animated by the same spirit, so to speak, that you are,

00:02:13.140 because the books parallel each other quite remarkably.

00:02:16.640 And so, I'm hoping my book will be better, but we'll see.

00:02:22.920 I have no doubt. I have no doubt.

00:02:24.580 Well, yeah, I don't know. I don't know.

00:02:26.340 I'm, you know, I have my doubts, but we're aiming at the same thing.

00:02:31.700 You know, one of the things I've been trying to struggle with, too, is you list in your book a number of stories.

00:02:37.140 You're using biblical stories primarily.

00:02:39.500 And then a number of attributes that you think constitute what might constitute,

00:02:45.200 or what might comprise the central aspect of masculinity.

00:02:50.740 You know, and so one of the things I've been seeing in this,

00:02:53.300 as I've been walking through the same process,

00:02:55.320 is that the biblical corpus, which is a library, aggregates a set of illustrative stories,

00:03:02.740 and then uses those stories to describe a character to be emulated,

00:03:07.140 and then makes the proposition that that character to be emulated is the manifestation of a single spirit.

00:03:15.740 Right?

00:03:16.100 So, and that spirit would be the unity in your conceptualization.

00:03:19.320 When you bring this down to earth, so to speak, you talk about men being husbands, fathers, warriors, builders, priests, and kings.

00:03:27.820 Right?

00:03:28.240 Then you could imagine that there's something behind that that makes all of that,

00:03:33.000 makes it possible for all of that to become manifest.

00:03:36.360 And that's the monotheistic spirit that the biblical corpus is attempting to characterize.

00:03:44.020 Right?

00:03:44.320 And it looks to me, anthropologically, it looks to me like what's happened,

00:03:48.140 and I'm not going to speak religiously, but it looks to me like what's happened is that

00:03:51.560 people in their various tribal groups had dramatized patterns of adaptation,

00:03:59.640 central patterns of adaptation,

00:04:01.420 and then characterized those central patterns of adaptation with the attributes of something like a transcendent deity.

00:04:07.340 And then as the tribes aggregated themselves, each of those visions of transcendent deity had to be integrated.

00:04:15.440 That actually often necessitated war.

00:04:19.520 There's actual war between different tribes for what vision is going to be dominant,

00:04:23.500 but there's metaphysical battle, too.

00:04:25.240 You know, even Cea Eliade, the Romanian historian of religions,

00:04:30.120 talked about the universal battle between the gods in heaven,

00:04:33.440 which was an attempt in the metaphysical realm, the pleroma is what Jung called it,

00:04:38.800 for these concepts to go to war with one another and then arrange themselves in a hierarchy.

00:04:46.560 And so, anyways, it's quite fascinating to see that the same underlying drive,

00:04:53.800 there's actually quite a few similarities in our experience.

00:04:56.540 You know, you have Scandinavian ancestry, you had a child that had arthritis as well,

00:05:02.120 and you seem to be wrestling with many of the same problems that have beset me for, you know, forever.

00:05:07.780 So, that was kind of, it's interesting to see that.

00:05:10.920 I also read the Guardian article, Guardian review of your book,

00:05:14.240 which was everything you'd expect and hope for from the Guardian.

00:05:18.260 Yeah, hope for is the right.

00:05:19.880 I haven't read it, so you're one up on me there, but...

00:05:22.920 Well, you can just imagine it.

00:05:24.800 Oh, I'm sure.

00:05:25.480 If they're praising you, then you've done something wrong.

00:05:27.740 That's my usual motto.

00:05:28.740 Yeah, yeah, well, it's, that's the thing, you know, if there's, to some degree,

00:05:37.320 if you're not irritating the correct people, you're doing something wrong.

00:05:41.440 That's something we could talk about, too,

00:05:42.880 because one of the dangers of the sort of enterprise we're involved in

00:05:45.740 is the possibility of, you know, increasing the degree of polarization

00:05:50.760 rather than offering a positive vision, which is what you're trying to do.

00:05:54.860 It's a strange book for a politician to write, so let's start with that.

00:05:57.820 Why'd you write this book?

00:05:59.000 Tell everybody a little bit about the book, and then tell me why you were motivated to write it.

00:06:03.680 Well, I was motivated to write it because I've got two little boys at home.

00:06:07.140 I'm a father of three, and my two older are boys, and then I've got a baby girl who's two years old.

00:06:12.440 But really, Jordan, it was thinking about them.

00:06:14.480 They're ten and eight, my boys.

00:06:16.640 And my oldest is Elijah, and my second is Blaze.

00:06:19.660 And I write in the book about Blaze Pascal, so you begin to,

00:06:22.420 though I don't draw this out in the book, I don't say it explicitly,

00:06:24.460 if you read the book, you begin to get a sense of why my boys are named the way they're named

00:06:28.620 and why these ideas that I write about are so significant to me.

00:06:32.080 They show up even in my kids' names and lives.

00:06:34.760 But thinking about my boys and their future as me.

00:06:36.960 Is Elijah, and what's your other, sorry, the other boy's name?

00:06:40.100 Blaze, for Blaze Pascal.

00:06:41.200 Oh, yes, Pascal, yeah, yeah.

00:06:42.740 Yeah, who I write about in the book.

00:06:44.980 But really, it was thinking of my boys and my obligation as a father to help them grow into

00:06:51.800 the men that they're capable of being that set me thinking about the book.

00:06:55.180 And then in my work representing Missouri in the Senate, you know,

00:06:58.080 I get to meet so many men from around Missouri, from around the nation, frankly,

00:07:01.380 and seeing their struggles, seeing the sense of alienation they're dealing with,

00:07:07.300 the sense of depression, the sense of lack of purpose.

00:07:10.540 I have so many young men tell me that they feel like they don't have any vision for their lives,

00:07:16.680 that they feel that the media is against them as men,

00:07:19.980 that their educational system is against them as men.

00:07:22.020 So it was really trying to key off of that and offer a positive, affirmative vision

00:07:27.280 for what men are for and why it's good to be a man.

00:07:31.040 The content I've created over the past year represents some of my best to date

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00:07:41.400 and experienced a nice increment in production quality,

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00:07:46.440 We all want you to benefit from the knowledge gained throughout this adventurous journey.

00:07:50.980 I'm pleased to let you know that for a limited time,

00:07:53.200 you're invited to access all my content with a seven-day free trial at Daily Wire Plus.

00:07:58.560 This will provide you with full access to my new in-depth series on marriage

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00:08:19.700 Voices of reason and resistance are few and far between these strange days.

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00:08:27.460 And thank you for watching and listening.

00:08:41.660 So this idea, you covered a couple of things there,

00:08:46.400 so that with your sons, for example,

00:08:49.200 that you would like to encourage them to be the men that they're capable of being.

00:08:54.220 You know, and I kind of wonder, I don't know if this is a reasonable proposition or not,

00:08:58.540 but it might be the maternal tendency is, I think, to value children for what they are.

00:09:10.020 And the paternal tendency is to value children for what they could be.

00:09:16.000 And then if you have that nicely balanced,

00:09:18.220 and I mean, a man can value children for who they are as well,

00:09:22.680 and a woman can encourage what they could be. 1.00

00:09:25.120 But broadly speaking, the symbolic proclivity, the essential proclivity seems to be that.

00:09:32.440 And I think that's partly, perhaps, you tell me what you think about this.

00:09:37.380 Women have to bear the responsibility for primary caregiving in early infancy in particular, first year.

00:09:45.920 And there isn't a lot of, there's an awful lot of taking care of immediate needs in that first year.

00:09:54.580 Like the child's immediate needs are paramount because the child is so utterly dependent,

00:09:59.720 born early as our human infants are, and in a state of utter dependency.

00:10:04.260 And then, of course, women have to wrestle with the difficulty of transforming from that state of hyper-caregiving where needs are predominant, 1.00

00:10:17.920 the needs of the moment are predominant, into facilitating the independence of the child.

00:10:23.780 And that seems to me to be where the paternal, the patriarchal, the father is particularly paramount to encourage.

00:10:33.360 Maybe that's the primary paternal role is to encourage.

00:10:37.820 So is that in keeping with the experience that you had as a father?

00:10:42.200 Does that make sense to you?

00:10:44.120 Is there anything you'd add to that?

00:10:46.300 No, that has been my experience.

00:10:48.720 And I can remember before I was a father, and I tell the story in the book, when I was a coach.

00:10:52.880 I was a young man.

00:10:53.800 I was 23 at the time.

00:10:55.480 I was coaching a group of rowers, kids, a young high school team, a crew team, and this was in the UK, actually.

00:11:04.320 And I remember, I tell the story in the book, I had this moment where there was a scene during one of our training sessions

00:11:11.220 where I saw one of the rowers encourage, take a leadership role with one of the younger ones.

00:11:16.120 And in that split second, I saw like a flash what this kid, this, you know, he's probably a junior at the time, 17 years old, what he might be in the future.

00:11:25.140 I saw maturity in him.

00:11:26.660 I saw characteristics I had never seen before.

00:11:29.080 And I just, it struck me.

00:11:29.980 It's like, oh, wow.

00:11:31.000 He could really become something.

00:11:33.940 He could become a great leader, a strong leader.

00:11:36.120 I saw a flash of the man he could be.

00:11:38.360 And suddenly in seeing that, I realized my role, my job as a coach to him was to help encourage that and call it forth.

00:11:45.640 And for me, Jordan, I tell that story because that is a, to me, a parallel to fatherhood.

00:11:50.640 That helped me get ready for what I think fatherhood is, which is to see that in my kids, my boys and my girl,

00:11:56.280 and to help call that forth, to help call forth what they could be,

00:11:59.300 and to be willing to sacrifice myself and my interests in order to see them develop and grow.

00:12:05.020 So, I was fortunate enough to conduct a seminar in Exodus in Miami.

00:12:10.780 And one of the stories we evaluated in some depth was the story of the burning bush.

00:12:17.560 In that story, which occurs in that episode, which occurs before Moses is a leader,

00:12:22.640 he's wandering along minding his own business, intent on his own purposes, you might say,

00:12:28.220 and something captures his interest and glitters and gleams.

00:12:32.180 It's a phenomenon. Phenomenon means it's from the Greek phanisthai, and phanisthai means to shine forth.

00:12:39.200 And so, something grips his attention and makes itself manifest, and he turns off the path to investigate it, right?

00:12:46.180 He decides to further investigate.

00:12:49.260 And he does that of his own free choice.

00:12:51.280 The story makes that quite clear.

00:12:53.000 So, something calls to him, but it's him that decides to go investigate it.

00:12:57.920 As he gets closer to it, he hears a voice, and it tells him that he's starting to tread on sacred ground.

00:13:03.620 And so, he has to take off his shoes.

00:13:04.960 And what that seems to mean is that if something makes itself manifest to you,

00:13:09.940 and you pursue it deeply, you go deeper.

00:13:13.120 And if you go deep enough, you enter sacred ground.

00:13:16.160 And that's by definition, right?

00:13:17.980 Because what's deep and what's sacred, that's the same thing.

00:13:21.440 Technically, it's the same idea.

00:13:23.420 And everybody has a sense of depth compared to shallowness, let's say.

00:13:27.000 And so, Moses doesn't stop merely because he's on sacred ground.

00:13:30.560 He continues to investigate further.

00:13:33.800 And at some point, as a consequence of his engagement, at least in part,

00:13:41.280 it's the voice of God itself that speaks to him.

00:13:43.420 And it speaks with the voice of being and becoming.

00:13:46.060 God says something like, I am that I am, or I am what I will be,

00:13:49.920 or I have been what I will become.

00:13:52.380 It's the voice of being and becoming and of eternity that speaks to him.

00:13:56.100 And what that seems to mean is something like,

00:13:59.300 if you pursue something that captures your interest with sufficient intensity,

00:14:03.240 then the voice of being itself will make itself manifest to you.

00:14:07.120 And that's what happens when people take something seriously, you know?

00:14:10.040 And that's when Moses becomes a leader, right?

00:14:12.880 Because that's when God tells him to go talk to the Pharaoh.

00:14:15.760 And it's not until that transformation occurs,

00:14:17.660 and it's very much akin to the story that you tell.

00:14:20.560 Because it's a minor story in some ways, right?

00:14:22.960 That experience you had when you were coaching rowing.

00:14:26.680 You know, it's a mundane story.

00:14:29.100 It's the sort of thing in some way that could happen to anyone.

00:14:31.480 But you said it struck you,

00:14:33.160 and it also shaped the way that you conceptualized fatherhood,

00:14:36.080 and that you could see the potential in this young man.

00:14:38.560 All that happened at the same time.

00:14:40.900 Yes, yes, all that happened at the same time.

00:14:43.160 And it was a significant moment.

00:14:44.580 It was a mundane setting, I suppose, much like a bush in the wilderness, right?

00:14:48.740 But it was a significant moment in that it really shaped my sense of,

00:14:52.640 at the time, as a 23-year-old, you know, coaching a group of kids,

00:14:56.180 what is it I'm supposed to be doing with these kids?

00:14:58.100 And it just, like a flash, I thought, I'm supposed to be helping them,

00:15:01.440 not only become better athletes, of course,

00:15:03.820 but to become the men that they might be.

00:15:05.880 And there was a sense of sort of responsibility that came with that.

00:15:09.280 Having seen who these kids might be,

00:15:12.160 having seen what they might be, having seen their potential,

00:15:14.880 I was obligated to help call that forth.

00:15:17.780 And I think as a father, that's absolutely what we do as fathers.

00:15:21.100 That's the responsibility we have as fathers.

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00:16:59.680 Well, you know, it's interesting.

00:17:04.400 One of the things that has been a phenomenon that's been continual in the lectures that I've

00:17:12.640 been doing around the world is the proclivity of the audience to fall absolutely silent when

00:17:19.140 I discuss the relationship between responsibility and meaning, and I'm suggesting to the people

00:17:25.280 that I'm talking to that one of the things that you need in life is a meaning that will

00:17:29.420 sustain you through suffering.

00:17:30.920 That's almost like a definition of a deep meaning, right?

00:17:33.560 It'll sustain you through suffering.

00:17:35.600 And I offer the possibility that the place you find that is in responsibility.

00:17:41.120 And this is something conservatives have been bad at.

00:17:43.320 They're bad at it because they hector and lecture young people about what they should

00:17:48.760 do as if it's a kind of detached morality.

00:17:51.500 You should be good because being good is the right thing.

00:17:54.640 You know, it's like an abstract call to duty.

00:17:56.320 And there's something in that.

00:17:57.380 I don't want to be cynical about that, but that's not the core issue.

00:18:00.980 The core issue, I think, is the fact that in that adoption of responsibility, you find

00:18:07.200 the deepest meaning.

00:18:08.360 And that's really true on the mentoring front.

00:18:10.580 Like my graduate supervisor, for example, his name is Robert Peel.

00:18:14.680 He's still alive.

00:18:15.420 I still work with him.

00:18:16.620 And I went to his Festschrift, which was a celebration of his academic career when he

00:18:21.120 retired.

00:18:22.020 And he had about 40 people there.

00:18:24.100 They were students mostly that he had mentored.

00:18:26.660 And it was an extremely positive event.

00:18:28.780 And the reason for that was because Bob was a very, very good mentor.

00:18:33.340 He gave credit where credit was due.

00:18:35.060 He tried to develop people and he didn't take, he distributed his ideas widely and was generous

00:18:42.880 with them.

00:18:43.600 And he taught people how to be independent and how to conduct themselves as independent

00:18:47.340 researchers.

00:18:47.840 And he helped them develop their lives and their careers as scientists and academics and

00:18:53.600 clinicians.

00:18:54.380 And he was really good at it.

00:18:55.640 And he really liked doing it.

00:18:57.020 That's the crucial issue here.

00:18:58.720 It's that there's a meaningfulness in mentorship that justifies the sacrifice.

00:19:04.200 Because you might say, well, why bother developing other people?

00:19:07.240 And part of the answer to that, this isn't just a hedonistic answer, is that, well, there

00:19:11.320 isn't anything that's more delightful and meaningful to do than that, as far as I can tell.

00:19:17.560 I mean, maybe my relationship with my wife in some ways would triumph over that and some

00:19:21.820 of the intellectual interests that I've pursued.

00:19:24.160 But other than that, that pleasure in aiding the best in other people to come forward, I don't

00:19:30.700 think there is a deeper pleasure than that.

00:19:33.380 Though I agree with you.

00:19:34.200 I don't think there is either.

00:19:35.340 And just to your point about the power of responsibility and why, sure, we want to call

00:19:39.460 people to duty.

00:19:40.240 Yeah, of course.

00:19:40.880 But the power of responsibility, it is the most transformative thing in your life, I

00:19:46.020 believe.

00:19:46.600 That's been my experience and my observation.

00:19:48.500 If you want to exercise influence in life, I think every man wants to be influential and

00:19:53.360 wants to leave a legacy.

00:19:54.980 And I've become convinced over the years that if you want to have influence, if you want to

00:19:59.440 leave a legacy, take on responsibility and pour into other people.

00:20:04.380 I mean, you talk about transforming yourself, yes, but also transforming the lives of others

00:20:08.720 and ultimately transforming the world around you.

00:20:11.480 That is done through shouldering responsibility and sacrifice, living in a sacrificial way that

00:20:17.720 empowers and enables others.

00:20:19.240 It's the ultimate legacy.

00:20:20.220 And I think there's something in that for men that they want to hear, they want to be called

00:20:24.300 to that.

00:20:25.780 Yeah.

00:20:26.220 Well, that sacrificial element is extremely interesting.

00:20:29.300 And this, I suppose, brings us back to the biblical motifs that proper work is sacrifice.

00:20:35.140 And that's a definition, again, is that if you're working, what you're doing is sacrificing.

00:20:41.240 And you might say, well, what do you mean sacrificing?

00:20:43.840 And the answer is, well, you're sacrificing the hedonistic whims of the moment for the

00:20:48.580 medium to long term.

00:20:50.080 That's literally what you're doing.

00:20:52.120 Well, you could say, and you can think about that in two ways.

00:20:55.080 I think this is very useful.

00:20:57.260 Number one, like if you just do what you want right now all the time, one of the problems

00:21:02.260 with that is you're going to get yourself in trouble.

00:21:04.520 And everyone knows that.

00:21:05.560 This is why two-year-olds can't really live on their own, because they're whim predicated.

00:21:09.900 And they will do what they want to do right bloody well now, with no thought whatsoever

00:21:14.420 for the iterating consequences of that into the future.

00:21:17.720 And so because people are self-conscious and can see the future, we have to bind our actions

00:21:22.920 in the present in relationship to our future selves.

00:21:26.240 So you have to act now so you don't hurt you tomorrow and you next week and you next month

00:21:31.280 and you in a year and five years and 10 years and maybe even when you retire.

00:21:36.120 And that's actually a community, right?

00:21:38.780 It's a community of potential selves that extends across time.

00:21:42.680 And I don't think there's any difference between that and serving the community as a whole.

00:21:47.320 I think that's the same ethos.

00:21:49.320 And so the sacrifice would be joint.

00:21:51.780 It's you sacrifice the whims of the moment.

00:21:54.500 So that's delayed gratification and maybe a definition of maturity.

00:21:57.700 You sacrifice that because it's a better medium to long-term contract or covenant with yourself.

00:22:05.000 But at the same time, that applies to everyone else, because there's no difference between

00:22:09.680 me serving who I'm going to be when I'm 75 and me serving other people.

00:22:15.260 And so that ethos unites.

00:22:17.180 And then the payoff for that is that I think the payoff for that emotionally is the sense

00:22:26.260 of meaning and purpose that suffuses that enterprise.

00:22:29.420 And that's not exactly a hedonic, it's not a hedonic pleasure, right?

00:22:33.020 It's not infantile satiation.

00:22:35.900 It's a deeper and more comprehensive, it's a deeper and more comprehensive mode of experience.

00:22:42.360 And it's worth sacrificing for, and it's real.

00:22:46.640 Yes, and there's a connection here, I think, also with liberty and freedom.

00:22:52.300 And this is something that I talk about in the book, that in order to experience true

00:22:57.340 liberty, self-discipline, self-mastery, and yeah, self-sacrifice is necessary.

00:23:03.480 And of course, this is a tradition that goes all the way back to the Greeks and the Romans.

00:23:06.640 It's certainly there in the Bible that says as we learn to discipline our passions in the

00:23:11.720 moment, as we learn to discipline our whims in the moment, as we learn to master ourselves,

00:23:16.800 we become possible of a kind of liberty where we can see our true interests in the long term,

00:23:22.240 we can see the interests of those around us who we serve, and we can become self-governors,

00:23:28.140 literally, and then participate in self-government.

00:23:30.500 And I think that the modern left and probably the modern right has completely lost sight of

00:23:36.100 that whole tradition.

00:23:37.260 And so part of our message to young people is, you know, learn to master yourself.

00:23:41.100 That is to be capable of a kind of liberty, a profound kind of liberty that really has

00:23:47.360 been, we've lost sight of in the modern world, but that is profoundly, profoundly transformative

00:23:51.600 and also fulfilling.

00:23:53.220 Yeah, well, you know, most young men understand this, at least in principle, because most young

00:23:59.080 men are interested, at least to some degree, in games and sports.

00:24:02.840 And if it's not physical sports, at least it's video games.

00:24:06.260 And the thing about video games and games in general is that they are ordered, they're

00:24:12.020 forms of ordered liberty.

00:24:14.040 They're not chaotic because they have rules.

00:24:16.480 And if you're going to be good at the game, first of all, if you're not good at the game

00:24:20.380 or if you're not interested in the game, then why the hell play it?

00:24:23.420 So if you're going to play the game, it's because you want to be good at it and you want

00:24:26.480 to play it.

00:24:27.000 And so you've already bought in.

00:24:28.640 And if you're going to do that, then you have to follow, you have to abide by the rules.

00:24:32.080 And hopefully you can do that skillfully.

00:24:34.700 And that scales, like it's not just true of games per se.

00:24:39.340 It should be true of your life.

00:24:41.120 You know, when God makes himself manifest to Moses and calls him to be a leader, what

00:24:47.660 he tells him to tell the Pharaoh is something very specific.

00:24:51.120 He says, tell the Pharaoh to let my people go so that they may worship me. 0.99

00:24:57.260 Now, the civil rights leaders almost always stress the first part of that statement, but

00:25:03.660 they don't pull in the second part.

00:25:05.900 And that's a big mistake because the second part speaks of ordered liberty.

00:25:10.660 And disordered liberty, that's the desert, right?

00:25:13.660 That's where the Israelites end up after they flee the tyranny.

00:25:17.480 It's a chaotic realm.

00:25:19.000 They can go anywhere and do anything.

00:25:20.880 There's no up or down.

00:25:22.260 There's no direction.

00:25:23.700 There's no leadership.

00:25:24.480 And that's so terrible that they start to pine for the tyranny, right?

00:25:30.280 Well, they also start to worship false idols, which is definitely a story for our time. 0.68

00:25:34.360 But they also start to pine for that tyranny.

00:25:37.460 And, you know, you're making the case, and you make it repeatedly in the book, that self-mastery

00:25:42.000 is the precondition for ordered liberty.

00:25:44.480 And if the conservatives, and you are doing this in your book, if the conservatives could

00:25:50.200 get the notion that the deepest meaning in life is to be found in the mastery of that

00:25:55.920 ordered liberty, then they have a message they can tell to young men in particular.

00:26:01.040 Yes, yes.

00:26:02.040 Yeah.

00:26:02.680 So now you, now you're writing a book here that's not primarily political.

00:26:08.060 No.

00:26:08.260 And yet you're operating in the political realm.

00:26:11.560 And so how do you experience the tension between those two?

00:26:15.380 And how do you believe that we could bridge the gap between the motivational, let's say,

00:26:22.800 and the narrative, the sacred fundamentally, and the political?

00:26:27.760 And how do you manage to do that in your own life?

00:26:29.920 Or do you, and how do you fall short?

00:26:32.480 Good, great question.

00:26:33.480 I think that one of the reasons I wrote the book, and you're right, it's not, it's really

00:26:37.440 not a political book at all.

00:26:39.200 But my conviction is, is that we have in our culture, and particularly on the left, but

00:26:44.460 also some on the right, we've lost sense of, and we've lost touch with, our most foundational

00:26:48.740 moral intuitions and moral foundations.

00:26:51.520 And that's why I go back to the Bible and the book, you know, and I make the case early

00:26:55.700 on that the biblical tradition is in many ways the foundational story and narrative of the

00:27:01.720 entire Western tradition, certainly the American tradition.

00:27:04.880 So I think that we live in a world, and this is true for young men in particular, where there's

00:27:09.180 no story, there's no narrative.

00:27:11.060 You know, what is it that it means to be a man?

00:27:12.520 There's no narrative there.

00:27:13.520 What is it that I'm supposed to do with my life?

00:27:14.860 There's no narrative.

00:27:15.740 So I think we've got to go back to and recover those narratives.

00:27:19.440 And that's why I try to recover some of the symbolism of Genesis.

00:27:22.480 You know, what is it a man is called to do?

00:27:24.080 It's called to make the wilderness into a garden, right?

00:27:27.140 To expand that garden.

00:27:28.900 God makes a garden.

00:27:30.120 The rest of the world is wilderness.

00:27:31.760 What's Adam there in the garden to do?

00:27:33.380 He's there to expand the garden into the wilderness.

00:27:36.520 There's something profound there about what it means to be a man.

00:27:40.480 And you talk about a high calling, because really what God does in Genesis is he gives

00:27:44.580 his work to Adam.

00:27:46.240 He says, all right, I've created the world.

00:27:48.660 Now I've created a garden in the midst of the wilderness.

00:27:50.960 Now, Adam, you follow my example.

00:27:53.020 You take this garden, you expand it.

00:27:55.980 You use your responsibility.

00:27:57.860 You use your authority.

00:27:59.120 You use your strength.

00:28:00.380 And you expand it into all the world.

00:28:02.080 And my conviction is men need to hear that story.

00:28:05.080 The Bible's making a point with that, of course, that there's an archetype there, an

00:28:09.780 archetypal pattern of what it is men are supposed to do to expand the garden, to bring order

00:28:16.700 from chaos, to make beauty where there's chaos.

00:28:19.100 And so I think telling those stories is critical then to recovering in our culture some sense

00:28:25.860 of order and purpose and meaning.

00:28:27.960 And then we've got to give in our politics.

00:28:29.360 The key is how do we give that voice?

00:28:31.260 You know, how do we then cash that out into policy?

00:28:33.380 And, you know, we can talk about that if you want.

00:28:34.800 I've got all kinds of ideas about that.

00:28:36.300 But I think there's tremendous value personally and culturally in recovering these foundational

00:28:43.100 stories about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, and what we're

00:28:46.700 here to do.

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00:29:57.960 So I want to go in two directions with that.

00:30:01.100 So the first direction we might say is there's only three situations that we can find ourselves

00:30:08.660 in.

00:30:09.320 We can find ourselves united psychologically and socially by an overarching narrative, or

00:30:16.840 we can let that narrative fragment, which means that we'll be tribal once again, both

00:30:22.500 socially and psychologically.

00:30:23.840 And the cost of that fragmented tribalism is anxiety and hopelessness and social conflict.

00:30:30.520 That's the chaotic state of nature, anxiety, hopelessness, and social conflict.

00:30:36.280 Okay.

00:30:36.480 Now, if you see that, and I think the evidence for that, by the way, is incontrovertible.

00:30:41.440 If you see that, a question arises, which is, well, what might the central unifying narrative

00:30:46.620 be?

00:30:47.660 Now, what's happened on the left is the central unifying narrative, although the leftists

00:30:52.860 often claim there isn't one, what they've replaced it with, at least implicitly and often explicitly,

00:30:58.560 is a narrative of power.

00:31:00.520 And this is something you touch on in your book, too, with regards to the ideas of toxic

00:31:06.380 masculinity.

00:31:07.260 And so the accusation is that all social relationships are structured as a consequence of domination

00:31:15.000 and oppression and victimization.

00:31:17.660 And that's true for marriage, and it's true for family, traditional family, and it's true

00:31:24.800 for economic organizations and political organizations.

00:31:28.480 It's all about power.

00:31:30.400 And so if you accept that, you can see very quickly why the narrative of toxic masculinity

00:31:37.060 might have arisen and been accepted.

00:31:39.040 Because if you believe, and maybe you believe this because you've never had any experience

00:31:43.200 with a good man even once in your life, this is often the case, you know, like I talked

00:31:48.060 to Naomi Wolf recently, who's been a very powerful voice on the leftist front.

00:31:53.200 And, you know, she had some bloody, brutal experiences with men.

00:31:56.100 She was raped when she was 11, and that didn't help.

00:31:59.460 And then when she went to university, instead of being mentored, she was hit upon, and in

00:32:04.540 a way that, you know, was reminiscent of what happened to her when she was early.

00:32:11.700 So then she didn't get mentored.

00:32:13.740 And her whole conception of masculinity, which I believe is rather fragmented, is predicated

00:32:18.220 on her genuine experience of being exploited and hurt.

00:32:22.260 And then we get a cycle, right?

00:32:23.960 You can see a cycle developing there.

00:32:25.620 And so your claim is that the narrative that's running through the biblical corpus is a good

00:32:35.240 unifying narrative.

00:32:36.720 It's the right unifying narrative.

00:32:37.940 Now, I just talked with Stephen Fry a couple of days ago, and Stephen is very interested in

00:32:42.200 mythology.

00:32:42.900 And although he's, I say he likes to shake his fist at God, and he has his reasons.

00:32:48.940 And he isn't convinced at all that there's a reason that the biblical narrative code, per

00:32:55.360 se, should be set up as primary.

00:32:57.860 Like, I happen to disagree with him, because I think it should be.

00:33:00.920 But it isn't obvious to me why it should be, you know?

00:33:03.900 And I've done a fair bit of delving into mythologies and so forth from all over the world and found

00:33:08.840 lots of useful information in them.

00:33:10.620 So how would you justify, how do you think it's reasonable to justify your assumption that,

00:33:17.340 you know, it's back to the Bible, to use a, you know, an old evangelical phrase?

00:33:22.900 Why do you think that makes sense?

00:33:24.460 And why do you think it's not just like an extension of patriarchal neocolonialism or

00:33:29.420 something of that sort?

00:33:32.020 Two answers.

00:33:32.980 The first one is historical and the more surface answer.

00:33:35.740 And that is for American history, just as a purely historical matter, no text has been

00:33:42.420 more influential.

00:33:43.460 No set of ideas has been more profound in shaping our system of government, our basic

00:33:48.980 moral intuitions than the Bible and the biblical tradition.

00:33:52.560 So in a sense, the first answer is, it's our tradition.

00:33:55.980 Our most fundamental moral intuitions are grounded in that tradition.

00:33:59.840 And I go further.

00:34:00.980 I'd say that's actually true of the entire Western tradition.

00:34:03.820 You know, Leo Strauss, as you know, had this great saying that it was the interplay of Athens

00:34:08.300 and Jerusalem that really forms the West.

00:34:10.560 And there's something to that.

00:34:11.800 I'm not a Straussian, but there's something to that.

00:34:14.280 But the biblical tradition, the Jerusalem tradition is so foundational as a historical

00:34:18.600 cultural matter, number one.

00:34:20.080 Number two, I would say as a Christian, a practicing Christian myself, I think that it's

00:34:25.860 power derives from the fact that it's fundamentally true.

00:34:28.660 I mean, that there's a reason why the stories of the Bible, both the Old Testament and the

00:34:34.500 Christian New Testament, are so profoundly effective and transformative in different cultures over

00:34:40.840 time, and certainly in ours, I would argue.

00:34:43.020 And that's because they touch on something—they're true.

00:34:46.320 In fact, I would argue they are the truth, capital T.

00:34:50.140 So, you know, whether you accept that second claim or not, I certainly think that the cultural

00:34:55.220 element—it's just hard to deny that American culture is organized around and derives its—you

00:35:01.000 know, what Charles Taylor would have called the moral sources, right?

00:35:04.100 The moral sources of our culture.

00:35:05.340 The Bible is the moral source.

00:35:08.080 So those would be my arguments.

00:35:09.920 Okay, okay.

00:35:10.520 So let's take each of those in turn.

00:35:14.180 Let's start with a historical argument.

00:35:16.580 And so, one of the things that strikes me as problematic, let's say, with projects like

00:35:24.380 the 1619 Project, or the leftist insistence in the United States, that America, per se,

00:35:30.540 was founded on, let's say, slavery and oppression.

00:35:34.560 The reason it really bothers me is because I think it's an anti-truth.

00:35:38.120 I don't think it's just a lie, because a lie is sort of like a deviation from the truth.

00:35:42.540 But an anti-truth is something that's exactly the opposite of what's true.

00:35:46.200 And this is how I look at it.

00:35:47.620 So, the first question might be, well, is slavery a universal human proclivity or not?

00:35:54.440 And the answer to me, to that, as far as I can tell, and I've done some research into

00:35:59.480 the topic, is yes, it's the default mode of operation for human cultures has been slavery.

00:36:07.500 And that might be a consequence of our proclivity to engage in war.

00:36:11.580 Because my suspicions are that the institution of slavery arose as a consequence of capturing

00:36:18.940 enemy combatants, deciding not to kill them, which would be the simple thing to do, and

00:36:25.560 then utilizing them, and also feeling justified in doing that because, well, after all, they

00:36:30.420 were trying to kill you, or there was a reason you were at war.

00:36:33.820 And so, we could say, well, slavery is the default condition for social organization.

00:36:37.820 So, then, what emerges out of that is a kind of miracle.

00:36:42.980 And the miracle, to me, is that any society ever decided that that was a bad idea.

00:36:47.580 And as far as I can tell, the society that decided that most particularly and explicitly

00:36:52.560 was Great Britain.

00:36:55.180 And that was particularly Wilberforce.

00:36:57.800 And he was an evangelical Christian.

00:36:59.880 And the reason that he opposed slavery, 100%, the reason that he opposed slavery was because

00:37:05.000 he was steeped in the biblical tradition.

00:37:06.600 And so, and then the Brits fought slavery on the high seas for 175 years, and basically

00:37:12.480 eradicated it as at least a morally acceptable enterprise.

00:37:17.260 And the American tradition comes out of that tradition.

00:37:20.160 And even if the U.S., like other cultures, is contaminated by the desire for power, it's 0.72

00:37:27.760 the anti-slavery ethos that's actually central to the entire project.

00:37:33.020 And so, when the radical types are making the claim that Western culture is essentially

00:37:38.420 slaveholding in its essence, as far as I can tell, they are opposing the only strain of

00:37:44.960 culture, which also wasn't Western, by the way, because it's not like the Bible is a Western

00:37:49.780 book exactly.

00:37:51.360 It's not European. 0.99

00:37:52.340 It's an import.

00:37:53.340 It's an import.

00:37:54.340 And so, they're opposing the only strain of thought that's ever existed that made both

00:38:02.000 a powerful implicit and explicit anti-slavery case.

00:38:04.940 And so, that seems to be entirely counterproductive if they actually care about slavery.

00:38:09.340 And then, one more twist on that, historically speaking, well, I don't think that it's debatable.

00:38:16.940 The Enlightenment types, like Steven Pinker would debate this, I think, but I think he's

00:38:22.780 wrong.

00:38:23.780 I think all the societies in the world that are free and productive and generous, and

00:38:30.180 those would be the societies that people would flee to if they had their choice, all of those

00:38:35.840 are offshoots of the biblical tradition, every single one of them.

00:38:40.680 And I can't see that as chance.

00:38:45.420 And I also think the same thing about literacy is that without the biblical tradition, it was

00:38:50.000 the biblical tradition and the invention of the printing press that brought literacy to

00:38:53.620 the world.

00:38:54.180 And it needed both of those.

00:38:55.520 The Chinese had the printing press, but they didn't have that evangelical fervor to elect,

00:39:04.860 to bring everyone up to the pinnacle of self-governance and self-realization.

00:39:09.640 The bloody Brits, they wanted to do that even to their colonies, you know. 0.73

00:39:14.120 And Wilberforce talked a lot about that, too, is that it was the obligation of the Brits

00:39:18.820 as the colonial administrators say, to inculcate in the people who they had colonized the spirit

00:39:29.960 of independence and freedom that would enable them to be self-governing citizens.

00:39:33.200 And I also think that the British Empire managed that to a great degree.

00:39:36.760 You know, there's plenty of terrible mess and catastrophe along the way, but the US and

00:39:42.320 Canada are both, and Australia and New Zealand, these are great countries.

00:39:45.740 And you can say the same about many of the other Commonwealth countries, including India.

00:39:50.460 They're beneficiaries of that tradition.

00:39:52.660 And it's English, but it's also more deeply biblical.

00:39:55.700 So I think you can make an extremely strong historical case for this.

00:39:59.080 I don't know what the contrary case would be.

00:40:01.200 It's got to be the Enlightenment idea, right?

00:40:03.180 That it was the Enlightenment that produced.

00:40:05.640 Now, let's talk about that, because you talk about the French revolutionaries.

00:40:09.860 Yes.

00:40:10.040 And, okay, so do you want to just outline that part of your book and your thoughts on the

00:40:15.640 French rational revolutionaries?

00:40:18.160 Yeah, absolutely.

00:40:18.940 But first, can I just agree with you by making, by restating Wilberforce's argument, because

00:40:22.640 I think you've made a profound point there.

00:40:24.580 Wilberforce's argument from the Bible, from the biblical tradition, was, I think, twofold.

00:40:29.100 Number one, it is the idea in the Old Testament, and you mentioned it when you talked about

00:40:33.480 Moses.

00:40:34.440 God says to Moses, tell Pharaoh, let my people go.

00:40:36.880 Why?

00:40:37.040 So that they can worship me.

00:40:39.060 There is an equality there that is implied.

00:40:41.860 There's only one king, right?

00:40:43.600 I mean, the message of the Old Testament is there's one God, only one sovereign.

00:40:48.120 Everyone else serves him.

00:40:50.240 But because of that, everyone else is equal.

00:40:52.820 You know, you don't have this hierarchy of gods and therefore hierarchy of humans in the

00:40:58.220 Old Testament.

00:40:58.880 God eventually does give the Israelites a king, but that is a concession to them.

00:41:03.500 And of course, in the Old Testament, God says, they've rejected me from being king.

00:41:08.320 They want a king over themselves.

00:41:09.760 And he warns them about the king.

00:41:11.000 He says, you're not going to like this king.

00:41:12.120 The king's going to oppress you.

00:41:13.080 The king's not going to treat you as equals.

00:41:14.820 So you have the Old Testament tradition, which is very strongly, God is sovereign, and he

00:41:20.040 calls all humans are equal before him.

00:41:22.160 Number one.

00:41:22.520 Number two is the Christian tradition, which, of course, extends that.

00:41:25.960 And the Christian tradition is that in Christ, there is no slave or free.

00:41:31.640 Paul says that explicitly.

00:41:32.900 There is St. Paul.

00:41:33.640 There is no male or female.

00:41:35.080 There is no Jew nor Gentile. 1.00

00:41:36.660 All are equal in Christ.

00:41:38.600 And the Spirit of God is poured out on all people.

00:41:42.380 Those are profoundly revolutionary ideas, revolutionary ideas.

00:41:46.780 And Wilberforce got that and extended that, applied it, if you like, in his own time.

00:41:51.180 But to your point about why the tradition of the Bible is a revolutionary tradition everywhere

00:41:56.360 it goes, every culture it touches, whether we're talking about ancient Rome or Britain

00:42:00.360 or America, it always cuts against what I think you correctly identified as the natural

00:42:06.060 human tendency to organize culture around the elite who have the power and everybody else

00:42:12.580 who are basically slaves.

00:42:13.860 And the biblical tradition cuts against that everywhere it's applied.

00:42:18.060 So there's something very powerful and profound about that.

00:42:19.860 Now, the French Revolution, here's what I'd say about that.

00:42:22.000 That's the Tower of Babel. 0.98

00:42:23.140 That's the Tower of Babel proclivity, by the way. 0.98

00:42:25.820 Correct.

00:42:26.100 That's the erection of Babylon as a profane alternative to proper sovereignty and the 1.00

00:42:32.640 proper sovereignty.

00:42:33.740 So part of what the Bible is attempting to do is actually to define what constitutes the

00:42:39.020 proper sovereign.

00:42:40.140 And it isn't the king.

00:42:42.480 It's not the earthly ruler.

00:42:44.880 It's something transcendent and eternal.

00:42:48.020 And that would be the principle of sovereignty itself.

00:42:50.740 It's something like that, whatever that happens to be.

00:42:52.800 And you're trying to outline that in your book.

00:42:54.980 Yes.

00:42:55.440 Can I just ask, actually, on this point, because this is an interesting point with ancient mythology

00:42:59.240 and the contrast with the Bible.

00:43:00.580 And this is your area much more than mine.

00:43:04.600 But in the Bible, we don't have a hierarchy of gods.

00:43:07.860 We have one God.

00:43:09.620 We don't have a myth in which the gods order themselves.

00:43:14.760 You've got one God who's in charge. 0.67

00:43:16.520 All the other gods or servants are slaves to him.

00:43:19.220 And then that replicates itself in the human realm, right?

00:43:21.360 You see in the other mythologies, you have the hierarchy of the gods.

00:43:24.280 And then that hierarchy replicates itself among the humans, right?

00:43:27.300 And so it's natural, in a sense, to think of, oh, well, if there's a hierarchy of gods

00:43:31.600 and there's one lead god or several, and then there are slave gods, if you like, the same

00:43:36.460 thing would be true on human cultures.

00:43:38.560 The Bible, different picture altogether.

00:43:41.140 No, there's one God.

00:43:42.560 The humans are not his slaves.

00:43:44.280 He never treats them as slaves.

00:43:46.360 He treats them as partners who are called in to cooperate with him and, in some sense,

00:43:51.820 called into his divine life with them.

00:43:53.920 Very different picture.

00:43:54.980 And I just wonder, back to the idea of why is the biblical tradition, why does it tend

00:43:59.040 to produce equality, self-government, liberty?

00:44:03.160 These other traditions don't.

00:44:04.940 Maybe that's part of it.

00:44:06.000 Maybe it's this fundamental difference in how they picture the universe.

00:44:09.940 So anyway, that's more of a question or a thought.

00:44:12.300 Well, it's also not just the New Testament that stresses that, too, because one of the

00:44:15.880 miraculous elements of the earliest biblical writings in Genesis 1 is the insistence.

00:44:22.960 And this is a very strange insistence that, first of all, whatever god is, is equivalent

00:44:28.160 to the spirit that calls the habitable order that is good out of chaos and potential, which

00:44:34.420 is, I think, what you're doing when you're mentoring, for example.

00:44:37.140 It's an example of that.

00:44:38.380 But that that spirit characterizes men and women alike and equally.

00:44:42.600 Yes.

00:44:42.780 And this is another thing.

00:44:45.040 You know, I've talked to feminists who say, well, you know, the Old Testament in particular 0.99

00:44:48.720 is a patriarchal document.

00:44:50.120 And I think you're completely out of your mind.

00:44:52.560 It's so anti-patriarchal that it really is a kind of miracle.

00:44:55.800 Because the notion that there was a fundamental equality between men and women and that that

00:45:00.680 was grounded in equal access or equal characterization by the divine, there isn't a more radical claim

00:45:07.140 than that on the gender or sex front.

00:45:10.320 And the notion in the New Testament that each person is a locus of divinity and intrinsic

00:45:17.140 worth is a reflection of that initial statement.

00:45:20.180 And that's established.

00:45:21.420 It's like the fifth thing that happens in the biblical corpus.

00:45:24.760 It's a fundamental proclamation.

00:45:27.660 And maybe the most, you know, what's the proclamation?

00:45:31.180 Human beings are created in two forms.

00:45:34.140 And that's something that, of course, we're questioning like mad at the moment, to our

00:45:38.340 great chagrin, because it might be the most fundamental perceptual axiom, you know, the

00:45:42.760 distinction between the sexes.

00:45:44.280 And the second one is that men and women alike are created in the image of God.

00:45:48.780 And, you know, that's quite, that's a ridiculously radical proposition.

00:45:52.440 And it is, I do think, it is the right, it is the essence of the Christian stance against 1.00

00:46:00.000 slavery in particular.

00:46:01.280 Now, we're going to talk about the French revolutionaries as well.

00:46:04.420 They're Tower of Babel types, by the way, those. 0.98

00:46:06.820 They are, totally, Tower of Babel types. 0.97

00:46:08.580 Yeah.

00:46:08.820 So, I mean, their approach is a fundamentally atheistic one.

00:46:12.660 It is to root out the biblical influence, really any religious influence, and to set up 1.00

00:46:18.440 in its stead human reason, they said.

00:46:22.600 But as you pointed out, what it really becomes is the rule of the powerful.

00:46:25.840 So, once you take out the biblical insistence on the equality of all people, once you take

00:46:31.280 out the powerful biblical message that every person is called to work with God, every person

00:46:36.600 is called to advance God's purposes, every person can have God's Spirit within them, right?

00:46:42.120 I mean, this is the teaching of the New Testament.

00:46:43.620 You come to Christ, He pours His Spirit out on you.

00:46:46.160 It doesn't matter if you're man, woman, Jew, Gentile, slave, free. 0.80

00:46:50.180 Once you take all of that away, and it becomes about, oh, well, you know, we're going to

00:46:54.380 worship human reason.

00:46:55.400 Well, according to whom, right?

00:46:57.060 Who defines that?

00:46:58.520 Who's in control of the narrative?

00:47:00.560 And to what ends?

00:47:01.620 Exactly.

00:47:02.140 To what ends?

00:47:02.640 Exactly.

00:47:03.080 Well, yeah, yeah.

00:47:04.180 Well, it's been interesting to me to watch what's happened with the four horsemen of the

00:47:10.780 four atheist horsemen over the last few years.

00:47:14.060 And Hitchens died, so he's obviously off the table.

00:47:16.820 But it's interesting to consider what's happened to both Dawkins and Harris.

00:47:23.440 So Harris, and I say this with all due respect, I like both those men.

00:47:27.520 And I think that, I actually think they're honest men.

00:47:30.080 And I think they're trying to strive upward.

00:47:31.780 I think they're both wrestling with God in their own way.

00:47:34.180 And I mean that, like, seriously, with all due respect.

00:47:37.800 Dawkins is a real scientist.

00:47:39.360 And I think Harris is a real moral actor.

00:47:41.480 Now, one of the things that's happened to Sam is that he's kind of left the rational arena

00:47:46.920 altogether.

00:47:48.220 Like, he's pursuing meditation.

00:47:50.440 That's his fundamental goal.

00:47:52.100 And so Sam has created for himself a sort of, what would you say, a disembodied Buddhist

00:47:57.980 deity.

00:47:58.580 And I think the reason that Sam leaves his deity inarticulate is because if he made it

00:48:05.940 articulate, he would criticize it to death with his rationality.

00:48:09.900 And so he has an ineffable God, and now he's decided to devote his life to that.

00:48:15.360 And so that's interesting.

00:48:16.440 You know, and Harris was motivated.

00:48:17.740 I talked to Sam a lot.

00:48:19.160 Harris was motivated fundamentally by the problem of evil.

00:48:21.960 And he wanted to ground morality in something unshakable.

00:48:26.180 And he thought the only thing unshakable was objective truth.

00:48:29.640 But it turns out that grounding morality in objective truth actually isn't possible for

00:48:34.200 all sorts of technical reasons.

00:48:35.660 And I write about that a little bit in this new book.

00:48:38.300 And so Sam turned to Buddhism.

00:48:39.860 And then with Dawkins, like, I think Dawkins has seen, and I know I'm speaking for him,

00:48:45.660 but I believe this to be true in good faith, that the rationalist humanists that he thought

00:48:52.100 would replace the superstitious biblical religious types turned out to be whim-governed tyrants.

00:49:00.000 Right?

00:49:00.200 And so that rationality, that unmoored rationality, it seems to degenerate in two ways very rapidly.

00:49:05.740 It degenerates into something like power claim that's driven by worship of the intellect.

00:49:11.660 Right?

00:49:11.800 And Marx is a great example of that because he was so intellectually arrogant.

00:49:14.960 And that characterizes universities like mad.

00:49:17.960 And it's part of the spirit that raises the Tower of Babel, you know, because that's associated

00:49:22.660 with Luciferian presumption.

00:49:24.880 And so that worship of the intellect produces a Luciferian Tower of Babel. 0.60

00:49:29.480 And that's happening all around us, like, at an absolutely mad rate.

00:49:33.460 But the other thing it seems to produce is a kind of disintegration of narrative into hedonism.

00:49:39.820 You know, and hedonism is a kind of polytheism, right?

00:49:42.040 It's just, you just worship whatever whim happens to seize you at the moment.

00:49:46.220 And so you get a Luciferian presumption on the one hand that produces endless towers of Babel. 0.77

00:49:52.780 Or you get a degeneration into kind of mindless hedonism.

00:49:56.040 And our culture at the moment is, well, it's toying real hard with both.

00:50:00.200 It's like we got the worst of 1984 and Brave New World at the same time.

00:50:04.120 And so the alternative to that is, I think what the biblical corpus does is lay out the alternative

00:50:11.020 to that.

00:50:11.640 That's what it's striving to do, you know?

00:50:15.400 So, all right.

00:50:16.300 So back to the French revolutionary types.

00:50:18.760 So how do you read what happened in France?

00:50:21.560 You said it was elevation of rationality to the highest place, for example.

00:50:25.320 Yeah.

00:50:25.860 Yeah.

00:50:26.240 And I mean, rationality is, yeah, with a capital R, which is really just, then it begs the question,

00:50:31.220 again, what's the substance of that?

00:50:32.340 Here's my thesis, if you look historically and also sort of philosophically, what the

00:50:36.880 French Revolution and maybe the Enlightenment writ large, and those are separate things,

00:50:40.140 I realize, but just mushing them together for a second.

00:50:42.640 What they really do is they try and take the moral content of the biblical tradition and

00:50:47.760 then separate it from the biblical God and biblical obligation, I think.

00:50:52.460 And so what they're really doing is living on borrowed time, right?

00:50:55.520 I mean, so they're really, they're trying to separate out these fundamental moral precepts

00:51:00.340 and they're trying to ground them in something else.

00:51:02.520 And it just doesn't work.

00:51:03.560 I mean, we've had centuries of experiment with it, right?

00:51:06.020 I mean, we've seen it.

00:51:06.960 It doesn't work.

00:51:08.380 I mean, what the French Revolution quickly ends up with, of course, historically, is

00:51:11.540 they're all killing one another because it becomes purely a power play.

00:51:15.280 Yeah.

00:51:15.640 I mean, it's who has the power?

00:51:17.820 The Enlightenment type, so I'll make their argument for them.

00:51:20.420 And this is the sort of argument that Pinker would make is, no, you're wrong about that,

00:51:24.460 Senator Hawley, because we didn't really see any progress towards the states of being

00:51:30.880 that characterized the modern state till we established the scientific method.

00:51:35.020 And it was the Enlightenment types that drove that.

00:51:37.700 And it was the divorce of science from the religious underpinnings that allowed that to

00:51:42.800 occur, that escape from, say, biblical superstition and other forms of superstition allowed for

00:51:47.940 that clarity of mind.

00:51:49.780 And so, but here's what I think is the problem with that.

00:51:52.640 You can tell me what you think is that I, and I think you can see this reflected in the

00:51:58.300 all-out assault on the scientific front by the leftist, rationalist, radicals who are

00:52:03.860 inheritors of the French revolutionary tradition.

00:52:06.800 It's like, they're not just going to plow their way through the religious tradition.

00:52:10.020 They're going to take science out at the same time, because I think true scientists

00:52:15.040 operate according to religious presuppositions, and they don't recognize them.

00:52:19.860 And I think this is true, just as true of someone like Dawkins as anyone else.

00:52:23.940 So let me lay out the presuppositions, and you tell me if you can see any holes in this.

00:52:28.620 Okay, so the first presupposition is that there is a logos in the cosmos, right?

00:52:33.280 Is that there's an order in reality itself.

00:52:37.180 Okay, because otherwise, why bother investigating it if it's not?

00:52:40.100 And then that order is comprehensible to the human spirit, right?

00:52:45.240 So not only is there an order, but we can understand the order.

00:52:48.280 Now, these are axioms, right?

00:52:49.640 You don't start the pursuit without accepting these axioms.

00:52:53.640 Okay, the next axiom is, if we understood the logos, that understanding would be individually

00:53:02.240 and universally beneficial.

00:53:03.560 It would make you a better person, and communicating what you discovered would make society better.

00:53:08.780 So not only is there a logos in the cosmos, and not only is that logos apprehensible, but

00:53:14.420 fundamentally, that logos is good in that its expanded understanding will be of universal

00:53:20.900 benefit.

00:53:22.080 Now, not only are those religious presuppositions, because they cannot be established on scientific

00:53:26.980 ground.

00:53:27.580 They have to be accepted before the enterprise begins.

00:53:31.060 They're also specifically Judeo-Christian, right?

00:53:34.440 And then there's a third, fourth element, religious element, which is, in order to be

00:53:40.760 a scientist, you have to conduct yourself in an ethical manner, which is that you have

00:53:46.380 to allow your investigations into the intrinsic logos of the world to reshape your own tyrannical

00:53:54.700 presuppositions, right?

00:53:56.280 You have to take your hypotheses, and you have to throw it against the world.

00:54:00.120 And if it doesn't withstand the contest, then you have to be willing to abandon it.

00:54:05.540 And that's also, as far as I can tell, that's also a religious praxis, fundamentally.

00:54:12.000 And so the scientific endeavor that the Enlightenment types claim is the precondition for modern flourishing

00:54:18.540 is actually inextricably embedded in the biblical tradition.

00:54:23.920 And I think that also explains why science emerged in Europe and nowhere else.

00:54:29.040 Yes, I think you're right.

00:54:30.920 I agree with that.

00:54:31.720 And I think that if you play that out, if you look at the Enlightenment tradition and

00:54:35.240 what it becomes in the 20th century and the late 20th century, when we get to critical

00:54:39.600 theory, when we get to the postmodernists, and you're hinting at this, is they reject

00:54:44.060 the scientific enterprise, as you've been describing it, almost completely.

00:54:47.800 You know, their position then becomes, there is no objective truth.

00:54:50.900 There are only points of view.

00:54:52.160 You know, there is no place of neutrality to stand in the universe.

00:54:56.420 There are only situated persons with situated points of view.

00:55:00.540 There's no such thing as any universal anything.

00:55:03.860 And so all we can do is describe our own experiences, and that's best done on the basis of power

00:55:08.600 relationships, right?

00:55:09.600 So the Enlightenment attempt—

00:55:11.680 No, it's only done on the basis—it's not even best.

00:55:14.140 It's that there's no alternative.

00:55:15.780 That's the most nihilistic claim of the radical postmodernist types, is that not only is it

00:55:21.540 a power game, it can't be anything other than a power game.

00:55:25.160 And all claims to the contrary are just subtler expressions of a power game.

00:55:30.240 God, it's brutal.

00:55:31.320 It's a brutal doctrine.

00:55:33.140 It is.

00:55:33.620 It is.

00:55:33.980 And my argument would be that is not the Enlightenment getting off track, as it were.

00:55:38.540 That is where the Enlightenment leads you once you say that the only standard for any truth,

00:55:44.700 the only standard for any reality is going to be this Cartesian idea that only what we as

00:55:50.600 humans can hold in our own minds, can affirm ourselves, can verify ourselves, only what we

00:55:55.880 can control.

00:55:56.760 I really think that the Cartesian Enlightenment attempt to define truth apart from the biblical

00:56:02.500 tradition or any religious grounding is an attempt to control it, to say, if we control

00:56:07.640 the knowledge, then it's real.

00:56:09.500 And as it turns out, you can't.

00:56:11.260 And so that's why—

00:56:12.100 Well, it's also—and I found this out when I was investigating the Tower of Babel story

00:56:16.660 and its association with Luciferian presumption.

00:56:19.340 So it's the descendants of Cain who turned to building cities.

00:56:25.880 And it's the descendants of Cain who first built weapons of war.

00:56:31.640 And also Babylon, in particular, is founded by Ham.

00:56:36.460 And Ham is the son of Noah who laughs at his own father's nakedness.

00:56:40.860 Right.

00:56:41.220 So that's all tangled up in the story of the Tower of Babel.

00:56:44.060 Now, what seems to happen—and I see this with modern Luciferian intellects.

00:56:48.660 You see this on the engineering front often.

00:56:50.560 Like, I have a lot of respect for engineers.

00:56:52.520 But they tend to presume that the proper way forward is a technological way, is that the

00:56:58.580 way you deal with the fundamental existential concerns of life is by—is through technological

00:57:04.340 mastery.

00:57:06.040 And now it's obvious the case—and you make the case for this in your book—that human

00:57:10.980 productivity, including tool-building productivity, is admirable.

00:57:14.480 But the question is, like, do we worship the tools or do we worship the ethos that utilizes

00:57:21.700 the tools?

00:57:22.400 And are those separable?

00:57:24.420 And I think the way the Enlightenment types went wrong is that they didn't understand that

00:57:28.800 there was an ethos that made objective science possible and that that ethos was encapsulated

00:57:34.740 in a narrative, not in science itself.

00:57:37.380 And that technologists are making the same problem.

00:57:39.860 It's like, well, we can just solve this with technology.

00:57:42.520 It's like, well, if evil people control the tools, then the tools will be used for evil

00:57:47.940 purposes, right?

00:57:49.640 And so I read this great book once called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by a man named

00:57:56.560 Richard Landis.

00:57:57.480 And he analyzed Japan in particular because he thought Japan was a very interesting case

00:58:02.800 history.

00:58:04.640 The Japanese have a very disciplined culture.

00:58:07.140 And after World War II, it was a westernized culture.

00:58:09.720 And Japan is very, very wealthy.

00:58:12.780 But Japan has no natural resources.

00:58:16.300 So then you might say, well, what's the basis of Japanese wealth?

00:58:19.820 And the answer is something like, well, it's an ethos.

00:58:22.800 The Japanese are very disciplined.

00:58:24.480 And the fundamental transaction between two Japanese is honest.

00:58:28.880 Like, I think you could say that there isn't any other natural resource except air, maybe,

00:58:33.480 you know, the air we breathe.

00:58:35.880 The only natural resource is trust.

00:58:38.500 And trust is predicated on, like, you can't trust productively unless people are honest.

00:58:44.060 And if people are honest and trustworthy, then they can cooperate in a manner that makes

00:58:48.700 abundance not only possible but inevitable.

00:58:52.840 And that means that the technology has to be embedded in an ethos.

00:58:58.940 And that ethos has to facilitate trust.

00:59:01.000 And so the way that you make a society rich isn't as a consequence of them being blessed

00:59:09.120 with natural resources, say, or even with technological prowess.

00:59:12.100 It's that all of that's embedded in an ethos.

00:59:16.520 And that ethos is the one that enables people to cooperate and compete productively and generously.

00:59:21.720 And that's the ethos that seems to be laid out in the biblical corpus.

00:59:25.100 And now that's the case you're making in your book.

00:59:27.320 I agree.

00:59:28.400 And you could just ask yourself, Jordan, I mean, you think about our technological advances,

00:59:32.520 you think about AI now, but why is it?

00:59:34.840 I mean, if you look at science alone, my contention would be science alone is at a loss to explain

00:59:42.040 why those who are not the most intelligent, however you define it, why those who are not

00:59:46.960 the strongest, however you define that, why they should not be privileged in some way.

00:59:51.720 In other words, if you look at the natural world where that is true, right, and this is

00:59:56.340 Darwin, natural selection, and you had the social Darwinists of the last century who we

01:00:00.660 rightly despise and condemn now, but they would have said, that's just science.

01:00:05.740 We're just applying to the human realm what we've observed in the natural scientific realm.

01:00:10.400 And why should it be that those who have the AI technology that can displace thousands

01:00:15.380 of workers, why should they not be the ones who have most power in society?

01:00:19.000 I don't know that science can explain that to us.

01:00:21.480 Well, there's a rationality there.

01:00:23.160 Like, I think the rational stance is that if I can take what you have, then why shouldn't

01:00:27.560 I?

01:00:28.820 Yes.

01:00:29.520 Like, why isn't that a rational stance?

01:00:31.400 In fact, the Romans would have thought that was a rational stance.

01:00:34.240 Absolutely.

01:00:34.900 And the Greeks would have thought that was a rational stance. 0.98

01:00:37.240 And I would say it's partly because it does have its own self-evidence. 0.94

01:00:41.060 If you're weak and despicable, and I can just take what you have, and there's nothing you

01:00:45.100 can do to stop me, why isn't it the case that your own contemptible weakness isn't evidence 0.95

01:00:50.360 that I should be allowed to do whatever I want with you?

01:00:53.340 That is not irrational.

01:00:55.460 Now, that doesn't mean it's not wrong. 0.86

01:00:56.980 And so, now, I would dispute, you know, I would dispute to some degree, if you don't

01:01:02.900 mind momentarily, the social Darwin or Darwinist argument, you know, because I talked a lot

01:01:10.220 to friends DeWall, the primatologist.

01:01:12.900 And, you know, DeWall has shown quite clearly that among chimpanzees who do have quite a patriarchal

01:01:17.720 social structure and who are extraordinarily powerful physically and brutal beyond belief,

01:01:23.660 like, they hunt colobus monkeys, those things weigh 38 pounds, and they eat them when they're

01:01:28.880 alive, right?

01:01:30.700 There's no pity in chimps. 1.00

01:01:33.120 And so, the chimps will tear each other apart, and they do that in their chimp war. 1.00

01:01:37.260 But DeWall has shown very clearly in his analysis of the chimps that he's studied over the last

01:01:42.600 20 years that the biggest, roughest, toughest, social Darwin triumph male is very, very likely

01:01:49.560 to meet an unbelievably violent end, and to rule very briefly over a very unstable and

01:01:56.580 malfunctioning community.

01:01:57.880 He showed that the stable alpha males, sometimes they're the smallest male in the troop.

01:02:04.700 They're the most reciprocal individuals in the entire troop, male or female.

01:02:10.380 They do the best at tracking social relationships and engaging in essentially reciprocal altruism.

01:02:17.240 And so, that's the basis for a stable polity, even among chimpanzees.

01:02:24.140 So, it's another bit of evidence, but this time from the scientific side, that power, it

01:02:29.980 doesn't look like in a biological community, or in many biological communities, that it's

01:02:34.080 power and dominance per se that are associated with, let's say, biological success, reproductive

01:02:41.080 success.

01:02:41.560 So, you know, there are situations, baboons are more violent, but even then, it's by no 1.00

01:02:49.300 means as simple as the most powerful male is the one who propagates his genes forward.

01:02:54.580 And it's certainly not the case in complex social organizations.

01:02:57.980 It's not true with rats, for example.

01:03:00.100 Yes.

01:03:00.360 Well, it may be just on the social Darwinist point that we could say the social Darwinists

01:03:05.980 were crude scientists.

01:03:07.320 You know, they didn't make their argument as they might have.

01:03:10.280 They didn't understand the science.

01:03:11.540 But I would still press the point, Jordan, that even then, even in these other species 0.95

01:03:16.780 that we observe, do we observe these species sacrificing their lives for one another?

01:03:22.080 Do we observe them carrying on the kind of moral interactions that we say, that's praiseworthy?

01:03:27.620 You know, where someone, a stranger, will give his life for someone else, where they will

01:03:32.460 put themselves in danger in order to protect people they don't really even know.

01:03:35.840 We look at those things and say, that's praiseworthy.

01:03:38.520 You see the rudiments of it, you know, just like you see the rudiments of language.

01:03:43.000 You can see it starting to emerge even from the bottom up.

01:03:47.400 So you see it among rats, for example.

01:03:50.360 So I'll tell you a very quick story.

01:03:52.820 You may have heard me tell it before, but Yacht-Panksep established this with rats, and it's

01:03:56.820 a killer, it's a killer observation.

01:03:59.460 I think it was Nobel Prize worthy.

01:04:01.360 So if you pair two male juvenile rats together, if one of them has a 10% weight advantage,

01:04:06.680 he can beat the other one in a wrestling bout.

01:04:09.220 And rats like to wrestle. 0.87

01:04:11.260 And it's easy if you watch rats wrestle once to assume that it's a form of dominance and

01:04:16.740 that the big rat wins, the big powerful rat wins.

01:04:19.540 10% weight advantage will do it.

01:04:21.220 And so you could imagine that's a scientific observation.

01:04:25.540 You pair two juveniles together, they wrestle, the big rat pins the small rat, the big rat

01:04:30.340 is now dominant.

01:04:31.400 He's the victor.

01:04:32.540 And that, you know, has implications for his potential reproductive success in the future.

01:04:37.260 But Panksep, this is such a crucial move.

01:04:41.280 He realized that rats lived in social organizations and that they didn't play once.

01:04:46.300 They played repeatedly.

01:04:47.760 And someone you play repeatedly with is a friend.

01:04:51.220 Right?

01:04:51.720 Because otherwise they won't play with you repeatedly.

01:04:53.800 So what Panksep showed was that if you take the rats, again, if you put them together again,

01:04:59.680 the little rat who lost has to ask the big rat to play.

01:05:03.140 That's now his role.

01:05:04.560 So he has to do the play invitation, you know, that mammals engage in.

01:05:08.100 Then the big rat will play.

01:05:10.420 And playing isn't aggression.

01:05:12.700 Like, almost all mammals can distinguish between play aggression and genuine aggression.

01:05:17.900 They are not the same thing at all.

01:05:19.100 And you know that if you have a dog or a child, for that matter.

01:05:23.280 If you have any sense at all, you can tell the difference.

01:05:25.440 It's like the definition of sense that you can tell the difference between play and aggression.

01:05:29.700 Anyways, if the rats are paired together repeatedly and the big rat doesn't let the little rat win

01:05:36.620 at least 40% of the time might be 30, some significant proportion of the time, the little rat will stop playing.

01:05:45.200 And so you have an emergent ethos of reciprocal play that's a consequence of repeated matchings, right?

01:05:53.400 And that's the same idea in some sense that you have to play with your future self and that you have to play with other people.

01:05:59.840 Is that you can think this is the optimistic union of the scientific enterprise, let's say, and the moral enterprise.

01:06:06.180 Is that there might be an implicit ethos in complex social organizations that's a consequence of what would you call the necessary constraints that emerge if you have to repeatedly interact with someone, right?

01:06:20.240 You have to treat them like, well, what?

01:06:22.140 Maybe you have to treat them like they're of fundamental worth.

01:06:25.120 And animals can do that to some degree, like the chimps.

01:06:28.180 Chimps have decades-long friendships, you know, and they will go out of their way for each other.

01:06:34.260 They're not that good at sharing food.

01:06:36.020 Like there's limits, you know, like serious limits.

01:06:38.640 But you can see the glimmerings even among our non-human cousins, let's say.

01:06:46.000 You can see glimmerings of a deeper ethos.

01:06:50.560 Yes, yes, and that makes sense.

01:06:53.640 And I suppose that the way that the biblical tradition might capture that is something like natural law.

01:07:00.040 You might say that there's a natural order to the universe and you see it.

01:07:04.160 You see glimmerings, to use your word.

01:07:05.560 You see glimmerings in other species and so on.

01:07:08.400 But my point is that I think I still hold to is that it is difficult to derive from merely observations of biology or science alone a moral code of the kind that we live by and say is praiseworthy.

01:07:25.000 And my point in that is, is that this is where I think there's a certain arrogance to the Enlightenment tradition that we'll ground it all on science.

01:07:33.100 We'll do away with religion, particularly biblical religion. 0.99

01:07:36.240 We'll get rid of all of that.

01:07:37.180 We'll ground it all on science and then we'll all be better.

01:07:39.640 You know, I think the 20th century, and no one has written about this more than you, the 20th century, I think, is in many ways a refutation of that.

01:07:47.040 Where did we do better in this century of science and technology?

01:07:51.520 I don't think that we did.

01:07:53.300 I don't think we did.

01:07:54.820 No, and, you know, the atheist types that I debated with, one of those questions that always annoyed them was, well, you know, was, were Marx and Stalin and Mao humanists?

01:08:05.160 Well, no, no, you know, they don't count.

01:08:07.620 It's like, well, I think they count.

01:08:09.400 They actually count.

01:08:10.300 And it's not like communism wasn't rational.

01:08:12.680 You accept a few axioms, like to each according to his need, from each according to his ability, which sounds self-evident and rational.

01:08:21.920 You accept that and the whole bloody nightmare emerges.

01:08:25.000 And Solzhenitsyn did a very good job of delineating that.

01:08:28.260 Like the communist catastrophe was not an aberration from an ideal.

01:08:31.840 It was the manifestation of the implicit nature of the ideal.

01:08:36.020 It was the genuine article, which is why it did the same thing wherever it was implemented.

01:08:40.220 You know, that isn't real communism.

01:08:41.520 It's like, yeah, I'm afraid so.

01:08:44.060 After the 20th experiment, we can pretty much establish that.

01:08:47.560 You know, and I think the presumption on the scientific side might not be something that's pathologically embedded within science itself.

01:08:55.940 Because science itself properly conducted is really an exercise in continual humility.

01:09:00.900 I think where the scientists go wrong often is they say, well, we know enough right now as scientists, which means our theories, to be able to say what constitutes appropriate morality.

01:09:12.720 And that's, you know, in a kind of bi-fiat sense, that's what the social Darwinists did.

01:09:20.680 And it was premature closure in the scientific enterprise instead of staying grounded in ignorance.

01:09:27.700 Yes, and I think there's a reason also that you made this point a minute ago, I think, that science, as we know, it emerges out of societies grounded in the biblical tradition because of the fundamental presuppositions that the world is an orderly place.

01:09:42.240 That we can, in fact, discover some of the order of that world and it will be good for us.

01:09:47.020 I mean, those are very biblical notions.

01:09:49.180 You contrast that with the ancient Epicurean physics, right?

01:09:52.820 What were Epicurus physics?

01:09:55.040 I mean, a scientific turn of mind Epicurus had.

01:09:57.640 But he thought that the world was composed of atoms, right?

01:10:00.340 He got that right.

01:10:01.020 He was the first one to see that, that we know of.

01:10:02.680 But he thought it was a fundamentally random place, a fundamentally random, the atoms moved in fundamentally random ways, therefore the universe was fundamentally random.

01:10:11.980 Now, when we come to the modern scientific world and the birth of modern science in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, it doesn't take the Epicurean foundation as its premise.

01:10:22.060 No, no, no, it takes the, then you made this point, it takes the biblical foundation.

01:10:25.460 And actually, no, there's order in the world and we can discover that and we can use that to our good and that would be a good thing.

01:10:31.280 And by the way, I agree with all of that, but it has to be grounded in that larger ethic, I think.

01:10:36.320 Yeah, well, you know, one of the things the postmodernists got right, and they really did get this right, was that our enterprises, our interpretive enterprise, and the enterprise that governs our actions is embedded in a narrative tradition.

01:10:53.620 The postmodernists got that right.

01:10:55.140 Now, what they got wrong was that the right narrative is either fragmented, so there's no metanarrative, or it's one of power.

01:11:02.820 And that's where they made their alignment with the Marxists for their own devious reasons and produced a kind of hyper-Marxism where it's not just economic exploitation that characterizes economic history,

01:11:14.120 but exploitation of all types across all binary axes for all social relationships.

01:11:20.940 So it isn't that what we have on the woke side is Marxism precisely, or even neo-Marxism, it's hyper-Marxism, right?

01:11:29.100 It's Marxism raised to an exponent so that every human relationship becomes nothing but a manifestation of power.

01:11:38.600 And that's a metanarrative too, right?

01:11:41.740 But it's certainly not a uniting metanarrative.

01:11:45.740 It's a tyrannical metanarrative.

01:11:47.500 And it's also incorrect.

01:11:49.060 It doesn't work for chimpanzees.

01:11:51.020 And psychopaths, by the way, use nothing but power.

01:11:53.900 And psychopaths, despite what people think, tend to be very unsuccessful, partly because other people catch on and, you know, hem them in very rapidly.

01:12:03.520 That's why you have the wandering psychopath as a kind of narrative trope, you know, the guy who's hitched a ride from one place to another, the drifter, the drifting loner.

01:12:13.480 Well, he's drifting because people figure out what he's up to, and then they won't have anything to do with him.

01:12:17.460 So he has to go find a new population to exploit, you know.

01:12:20.880 And online, this is something for legislators to consider, you know, I really believe this.

01:12:25.700 I think that all the restraints off the psychopathic narcissist types, all of the restraints have been lifted online, all of them.

01:12:33.720 And in fact, their behavior is facilitated rather than inhibit it.

01:12:36.800 And if it's the case that the parasitical and predatory psychopathic narcissist types are a permanent existential threat, which I think is the case biologically and historically, we've disinhibited them with our technology.

01:12:54.100 That's a very bad idea.

01:12:56.080 You know, when you talk a little bit in your book about pornography, you know, this is a cool thing.

01:12:59.820 The other thing I found out when I was investigating this Tower of Babel story.

01:13:04.640 So Babel is associated with Babylon.

01:13:07.280 And Babylon is associated with Luciferian intellectual presumption and a kind of technocratic worship.

01:13:13.160 But it's also associated with the horror of Babylon.

01:13:17.100 Right.

01:13:17.660 And so there's an idea.

01:13:19.520 It's a very interesting idea that the worship of the intellect, the raising of the technological spirit to the highest place, the attempt to build edifices that compete on the spiritual side with what's properly transcendent, also disinhibit feminine sexuality and pathologize it.

01:13:38.560 And 25%, it's about 25% to 35% of internet traffic is pornographic.

01:13:45.440 You detailed out your understanding of what pornography is doing on the masculine front.

01:13:49.940 So maybe we could delve into that momentarily.

01:13:52.680 Yeah, absolutely.

01:13:53.600 Well, if you just look at the data on this, Jordan, I mean, the consumption of pornography, of course, is as you would expect, given its availability everywhere, is just off the charts.

01:14:02.120 You know, I mean, one researcher quipped, and it's absolutely true, that a young man today can see more naked women in five minutes than his, or heck, probably 90 seconds than his grandfather could in a lifetime. 0.84

01:14:14.560 You know, I mean, so that's, technology has made that available.

01:14:17.160 And as you might expect, I mean, given the dopamine effects here, the more porn men watch, especially young men, the more porn they want to watch.

01:14:24.780 And then you ask, well, what happens over time?

01:14:26.960 And what the data, there's an increasing body of data on this, and what it shows is, is that you spend more time on screens, you spend less time in real human relationships.

01:14:35.840 So massive porn consumption tends to inhibit dating.

01:14:39.600 It tends to inhibit healthy self-image.

01:14:42.180 For men, it tends to inhibit confidence, actually.

01:14:44.760 It's just the reverse of what the porn industry, I think, would sell, right?

01:14:47.820 They would sell that, hey, you know, this is a sign of machismo. 0.73

01:14:52.100 I mean, this is a sign of you're a real man.

01:14:54.160 It's actually, porn consumption, particularly at scale, makes men more timid, more passive, yes, less confident, and then ultimately impotent.

01:15:04.600 Well, it's also, yeah, and you know, that might be true psychologically as well as physiologically.

01:15:09.080 Because another thing you document in your book, and I'll just read some stats here that I think are dead relevant.

01:15:14.880 In 2015, so that's eight years ago, so these are outdated stats already, and it's worse now.

01:15:24.260 One quarter of men of working age have no job whatsoever and have done no work at all within the last 12 months.

01:15:31.380 So that's 25%.

01:15:32.600 So that's cataclysmic.

01:15:35.080 In 1970, two-thirds of men made more than their fathers, and in 2014, it was 40%.

01:15:39.320 Men are acquiring 70% of all Ds and Fs given in grade school.

01:15:45.260 Only 20% are proficient in writing by grade 8, 24% reading.

01:15:49.440 Men aren't trying. 1.00

01:15:50.480 They're now less than 40% of college students.

01:15:53.280 So between 2015 and 2022, men were 70% of the 1.5 million person drop in college enrollment, and that was replaced primarily by screen time, video games, and porn.

01:16:06.000 Suicide increases up 25% between 2000 and 2017, and drug overdose up 250%.

01:16:13.120 And the majority of babies, by the way, now are born in fatherless homes.

01:16:17.020 And so there's a weird entanglement there too, because one of the, I believe this to be the case,

01:16:24.260 is that one of the motivating factors that drive men out into the workplace is the possibility of attaining genuine status in the workplace as a consequence of competent endeavor.

01:16:36.620 And that does make them more attractive to women. 0.93

01:16:39.460 Now, maybe being more attractive to women is, I don't know what percentage it is of male motivation on the work front.

01:16:46.340 It might be 50%.

01:16:48.020 You know, like I noticed, for example, I used to work with high-end lawyers, both male and female.

01:16:54.760 And the males were always competing to see what their bonus was going to be at the end of the year.

01:17:00.400 And it wasn't because they wanted the money.

01:17:03.080 I mean, they wanted the money, you know, but they already had lots of money.

01:17:05.560 They could always do, already do what they wanted on the monetary front.

01:17:08.260 It was a contest.

01:17:09.120 And they wanted to be on top.

01:17:11.720 And we know that the biggest predictor of male attractiveness to females is socioeconomic status.

01:17:19.360 It's correlated with male reproductive success, access to women, let's say, at about 0.7, 0.6, 0.7, which is a walloping correlation.

01:17:28.100 You don't see like that anywhere else in the social sciences.

01:17:30.680 So then you think if you deprive men of their fundamental sexual impulse, you deprive them of the necessity of sexual pursuit, maybe you emasculate them almost completely on the practical front as well.

01:17:45.360 Like, we have no idea, right?

01:17:46.440 But it's certainly possible.

01:17:48.100 It's certainly possible.

01:17:49.320 It's certainly possible.

01:17:50.380 And the growing body of research would suggest that there absolutely is a correlation there.

01:17:54.780 I mean, and you also look at just—

01:17:55.760 Yeah, well, and you add to that the other factors you detail out in the book.

01:17:59.100 So the overt demoralization of young men, right?

01:18:04.580 So their play preferences are stymied in elementary school.

01:18:09.700 They're taught nonstop from the time they enter school that the entire masculine enterprise is oppressively patriarchal and evil in its essence derived as it is from power. 0.99

01:18:21.360 Even the American Psychological Association apparently agrees with that now, their idiot report on so-called toxic masculinity. 0.97

01:18:27.840 And then if the boys do escape that, which they don't, then you have the bloody environmentalist planet-worshipping Gaia sacrificers saying, 0.99

01:18:37.360 well, you know, if you do have any ambition, all you're doing is using it to rape the planet to all our eventual demise.

01:18:44.160 It's no bloody wonder the boys drop out if that's the story that's being told them.

01:18:48.220 Yes, exactly.

01:18:49.900 And that is the story.

01:18:50.920 And it's interesting, Jordan, when you put all that together, you've got the modern left who force feeds this to young men.

01:18:57.840 But then when they get older, to come back to screens and porn, the left also tells them, though, spend your time on screens and porn.

01:19:05.180 That's fine.

01:19:05.740 In fact, any time you mention porn, I've noticed, the left absolutely melts down.

01:19:10.960 If you criticize, even slightly, porn consumption, the leftist has a fit and says that's moralistic, it's puritanical.

01:19:19.280 And I think the message to men really is, when you take it in the aggregate, you're terrible, your ambition is toxic, your assertiveness makes the world a worse place.

01:19:27.320 So be passive, go sit in front of a screen, consume some stuff, entertain some stuff, and be androgynous. 0.83

01:19:32.900 That's the message that they send to men.

01:19:34.660 And it is debilitating in every respect.

01:19:37.420 Yeah, well, I think the conservative type should take that accusation of moralistic and puritanical as a compliment under today's conditions and stop being defensive about it.

01:19:47.800 It's like, you mean moralistic and puritanical in comparison to your absolutely whim-ridden, narrow, self-centered, self-satisfied, hedonistic, moralizing apocalypse?

01:19:59.820 Like, you mean puritanical in relationship to that?

01:20:02.080 Yeah, I think if that's what puritanical means, I'll go with puritans, thank you very much. 0.97

01:20:08.020 Because what the hell do you have to offer? 0.99

01:20:10.200 Yeah, it's really, it's really, it's unbelievably destructively pathetic. 0.98

01:20:14.000 And this is also why I think the left, the radicals in particular, don't have a moral leg to stand on, you know.

01:20:19.820 Because I think, and this is especially true for people like Foucault, Foucault was really, really smart.

01:20:25.340 Like his book, The Order of Things, is a real work of genius, especially the first half.

01:20:28.960 He needed an editor in the second half, but the first half is quite brilliant.

01:20:32.760 He was super smart.

01:20:34.160 But as far as I can tell, reading Foucault, every single thing he put his intellect to was an attempt to justify his essential perversion.

01:20:42.560 His desire to utilize his sexual behavior in whatever manner he saw fit, regardless of the cost to anyone, children or other men.

01:20:51.420 Because he was notoriously promiscuous after he knew he had AIDS.

01:20:55.540 You know, and that was just one of his many sins.

01:20:58.200 I see in Foucault the perfect example of someone who subordinated his intellect, which he was very proud of, to nothing but the whims of his sexual drive.

01:21:08.880 And that was his god.

01:21:09.940 Priapus was Foucault's god, kind of a satanic Priapus.

01:21:14.220 You know, and so, and I see that on the left.

01:21:16.460 It's like, well, why are you opposed to traditional masculinity?

01:21:21.920 Well, it's because it's oppressive.

01:21:23.140 It's like, yeah, maybe. 0.99

01:21:24.460 Maybe it's because if you accepted the doctrines of discipline, you wouldn't be able to gratify every goddamn whim that entered your mind the second it entered your mind. 0.94

01:21:33.220 And then that's the definition of self that's emerged among the radicals. 0.94

01:21:38.000 I am what I am, which is, by the way, what God says to Moses.

01:21:41.880 I am what I am, moment to moment.

01:21:44.880 And why do you have no right to interfere with that?

01:21:46.680 Because I want to be allowed to do whatever the hell I want to whoever I want at any given moment.

01:21:53.100 Like, with no thought whatsoever, even for my own preservation.

01:21:57.360 You know, and I think we see that celebrated.

01:22:00.780 We see that ethos celebrated in pride season.

01:22:03.620 And it's not fluke that it's called pride season. 0.71

01:22:06.860 Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about this.

01:22:09.040 And this is why, in the book, I talk about the sort of Epicurean spirit.

01:22:12.740 And I mean by that everything you've just said, which is to make the self God.

01:22:17.960 And by self, it is the momentary whim.

01:22:20.780 Because there's really no self there.

01:22:22.600 That's right.

01:22:22.920 There's no self there.

01:22:24.420 There's no self there.

01:22:25.260 It's just whatever your whim or passion is, your desire at this particular instant.

01:22:29.280 And this is why I think that ideology is so disorienting to young people in particular.

01:22:33.860 Because as they're trying to form their identity, what they get from modern culture, the tribunes of modern culture, the academia, entertainment, certainly the left.

01:22:43.080 What you get from them is, just do what makes you happy.

01:22:46.140 Just gratify yourself.

01:22:47.440 Well, how do I choose my goals from my momentary whims?

01:22:52.520 They have no answer to that.

01:22:53.900 The left has no answer to that.

01:22:55.380 And so kids—

01:22:55.740 You just choose the primary whim.

01:22:58.200 Right, in the moment.

01:22:59.180 Well, you know, this is also something where conservatives, I think, could take a page from the more thoughtful leftists.

01:23:07.420 Because there's an evil interspace there between the worst of capitalism and the worst of the woke ethos.

01:23:13.780 Because if, to the degree that capitalism drives a mindless consumerism, it can feed exactly that kind of narcissistic, self-aggrandizing ethos.

01:23:24.020 And it certainly does that.

01:23:26.260 That's right.

01:23:26.780 And so, yeah, yeah.

01:23:27.920 And so, yeah, and so I don't think—

01:23:30.920 And this is where the right—

01:23:32.360 Go ahead.

01:23:32.860 Well, this is—I want to—yeah, we're in heated agreement.

01:23:35.640 I mean, this is where I think some elements of the right, they don't have an alternative.

01:23:38.900 Because what they basically present is a form of capitalistic consumerism.

01:23:44.140 You know, their answer is, yeah, well, let's just, you know, let's consume more stuff.

01:23:48.120 I mean, it is—the right to be free is the right to choose, right?

01:23:51.420 I mean, you had Milton Friedman.

01:23:52.660 God love him.

01:23:53.740 There's a lot to like in Milton Friedman.

01:23:55.020 But his whole concept of liberty was, it's basically just personal choice at any time for anything.

01:24:01.560 And, you know, and he situated that in the context of the market.

01:24:04.280 You know, markets are the ultimate expression of freedom.

01:24:05.960 Listen, I love free markets.

01:24:07.460 But to your point, if all we're saying is as an alternative, just choose what you want.

01:24:12.620 Just choose what you want to do.

01:24:13.920 Take off all inhibitions.

01:24:15.440 Consume, consume, consume.

01:24:18.360 There's no substance to that either.

01:24:20.280 And I think young people know that.

01:24:22.040 Yeah, well, and I do think that that's a flaw.

01:24:24.120 That's a flaw of classical economics.

01:24:26.820 And, you know, that's actually been demonstrated on the scientific front with trading games.

01:24:30.540 So, you know, there's a famous trading game where you take two people and you say to one of them, they're partners now.

01:24:36.920 You say, okay, I'm going to give you $100.

01:24:39.140 And you have to offer your partner some fraction of that.

01:24:43.440 And if your partner refuses, neither of you get anything.

01:24:47.340 It's like, what are you going to offer?

01:24:48.580 And so, now, the classical economics presumption is that the person making the offer, who's maximizing their rational self-interest, should offer their partner a dollar.

01:25:02.080 Because then they get $99, right, the first person.

01:25:05.920 And the classical economist also says, because the recipient is maximizing their rational self-interest, they should accept the bloody dollar.

01:25:14.700 Because, well, you want nothing or do you want a dollar?

01:25:18.580 But that isn't how it plays out in the real world.

01:25:20.940 Not at all.

01:25:22.740 What happens is that cross-culturally, people offer something approximating 50%.

01:25:28.160 And if they don't, it's rejected.

01:25:32.240 And then you might say, well, that's only true in Western countries because, you know, it doesn't really matter to a Westerner one way or another whether he gets $40, let's say, or $1.

01:25:41.900 He's willing to stand on principle. 0.99

01:25:43.560 But if you tested that among poor people, they'd take the damn dollar. 0.99

01:25:47.380 And the reverse is true, actually. 0.99

01:25:49.400 The poorer you are, the more likely you are to tell someone to go to hell if they don't give you a fair deal.

01:25:54.540 And, you know, that's reflective of this iterative ethos.

01:25:57.460 It's the reason that people insist upon being treated fairly in a trade is because life is not a trade.

01:26:03.520 It's a sequence of iterating trades.

01:26:07.240 And the rules that govern the sequence of iterating trade aren't the same as the rules that govern one trade.

01:26:13.940 Because you can screw someone if you trade with them once.

01:26:17.280 And maybe you could even argue that you should.

01:26:19.780 You know, I don't think you should.

01:26:20.960 But you could make that case.

01:26:22.680 You know, if it's you or me and in a one-off, why shouldn't I just maximize my local advantage?

01:26:28.100 The answer is, I shouldn't train myself to think that way.

01:26:32.480 That's the answer.

01:26:33.740 But it's another example.

01:26:35.060 It's the same thing with the rats, right, and the chimpanzees.

01:26:37.640 Is that if you have to iterate your interactions, a new ethos emerges.

01:26:42.920 And so the classical economists on the free trade side, the free market side, they're actually wrong in their presumption about what constitutes the ethic that's properly associated with sophisticated long-term trade.

01:26:56.480 It's not maximization of rational self-interest, certainly not in the short term.

01:27:00.660 That's wrong.

01:27:01.520 And that's just as wrong as the postmodern notion that power governs everything.

01:27:06.360 And when you put those two things together, you get something seriously toxic.

01:27:10.100 You know, there's nothing more toxic than woke capitalism.

01:27:13.420 Exactly, which is what we have now.

01:27:15.160 Yep, that's exactly right.

01:27:16.420 Or neoliberalism.

01:27:17.700 I mean, Jordan, which is really basically the same thing.

01:27:20.500 I mean, you've got, which is, I'm afraid to say, for large segments of the right, the American right, I mean, they're basically neoliberals.

01:27:28.360 I mean, they believe in markets globally, no matter what, markets without any regard to what does it do to human relationships, what does it do to the family, what does it do to our sense of right and wrong.

01:27:42.740 And, you know, it is a, it becomes this form of, frankly, a kind of elitism where you have the elites who win, those who win and profit the most from the global markets.

01:27:55.800 And then you've got everybody else and we're all just supposed to accept that.

01:27:58.680 And I just think, ah, that's not a good ethic.

01:28:00.400 Yeah, well, that's another tower of Babel. 0.62

01:28:04.100 Yeah, well, you know, even in games, you see this.

01:28:07.560 So there's two ethos that, I don't know what the plural of ethos is, actually, two ethoses that operate when you're playing a game.

01:28:15.100 And one is that you try to win the game.

01:28:17.920 But the other is that you conduct yourself while you're trying to win in a manner that makes other people want to play another game with you.

01:28:24.000 Oh, yeah.

01:28:24.780 Right, right, which is what you tell people when you tell them to be good sports.

01:28:28.060 That's what you're doing when you're being a coach or a mentor, right?

01:28:30.760 You're saying, well, don't subordinate the short-term game.

01:28:34.500 Don't subordinate the long-term game to the short-term game.

01:28:39.600 You know, don't be too triumphant when you win.

01:28:42.820 Don't be too upset when you lose a given game because you're playing the long game.

01:28:47.580 And there's something in the narrow, even classic British liberalism that's associated with the free market that reduces choice to whim.

01:28:58.060 And that reduces trade to local victory.

01:29:02.960 And there's something about that that isn't, well, that isn't kosher, so to speak.

01:29:07.480 You know, and it's interesting, too, because the British liberals in particular, you can see that in their original writings, is that they may basically make a case that's something like,

01:29:16.640 well, if everyone is abiding by a deep religious ethic, then we can act as if people are autonomous individuals exercising their free choice.

01:29:28.260 And they can take that if for granted at some point because that ethos ruled.

01:29:32.600 But when that degenerates, it isn't obvious at all that that pure, untrammeled freedom of choice, it looks like it degenerates into something like consumerist whim.

01:29:41.960 Yes.

01:29:42.400 And you can see this with Adam Smith, I mean, which to your point, I think, is that if you look at his theory of capitalism, the wealth of nations,

01:29:50.100 if you look at his theory of moral sentiments, which I think he actually wrote beforehand,

01:29:53.860 you can see that it's embedded in a particular social context, which is, frankly, very biblically informed.

01:29:59.620 And when you divorce it from that context, you get something that I suspect he would not have approved of.

01:30:04.200 He would have said, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, no, no.

01:30:06.180 That's not what I'm talking about.

01:30:07.780 So I think that that's where we are with much of it.

01:30:10.240 I am not a laissez-faire conservative.

01:30:13.120 I never have been.

01:30:14.020 And in my party, that's heretical to say that, you know, you don't believe in laissez-faire.

01:30:19.660 But I just, you know, I am not because I think that it does not capture these deeper intuitions that you've been talking about.

01:30:26.080 And it does not preserve the most important things in life and in the nation.

01:30:30.240 You know, a nation is not a corporation.

01:30:32.400 A nation is not premised on pursuit of profit.

01:30:35.580 You know, I have nothing against pursuit of profit in the business realm.

01:30:38.060 That's great.

01:30:38.500 But that's not what a nation is.

01:30:40.000 You know, a nation is held together by mutual bonds of belonging, a shared sense of purpose, and moral vision.

01:30:45.540 That's what a nation is.

01:30:47.060 And we have to preserve that, tend that, and cultivate it.

01:30:51.760 If we don't, we end up where we are now, which is at daggers drawn.

01:30:54.660 Well, and your sense of nation on the masculine side, you lay out in your chapters 5 through 10 various roles that men can play.

01:31:07.360 And then you decorate or illustrate each role with a traditional story, biblical story generally, and then with a set of personal stories and attempt to extract out the moral.

01:31:18.780 And that seems to be quite an effective way of communicating.

01:31:22.200 And so you could say a nation is also, if it's going to survive, is an enterprise that inculcates a set of virtues in its men.

01:31:32.080 And this has always been a problem anthropologically, right?

01:31:34.860 It's been well known in the anthropological literature.

01:31:37.000 This is why so many cultures concentrate more on male initiation than on females, right?

01:31:43.920 Nature initiates females. 1.00

01:31:47.800 Nature initiates females. 1.00

01:31:49.800 Culture has to initiate men. 0.67

01:31:52.180 And so men can go very, can ascend to the heights, but they can descend to the depths as well.

01:31:58.520 And men who aren't disciplined descend to the depths very rapidly.

01:32:01.680 And that's very bad for men, and it's very bad for women, and it's very bad for the nation.

01:32:05.600 And so the nation has to inculcate virtue.

01:32:09.160 That's part of its function.

01:32:10.520 And you lay out some roles for men.

01:32:12.400 You say, well, husband, that's a role of responsibility and opportunity.

01:32:16.520 And you do make a case that, well, the reason we get married is because, all things considered, we think that it's better to be with someone than not to be.

01:32:25.120 You're happier.

01:32:26.060 You're more productive.

01:32:26.820 You're more generous.

01:32:27.580 You're a better person.

01:32:28.460 But you're also more resilient in the face of catastrophe if there's not just one of you.

01:32:32.960 Okay, so that seems reasonable.

01:32:34.180 Father, well, why bother?

01:32:37.100 Well, partly because it's your responsibility, let's say.

01:32:40.780 But partly because if you don't bother, well, you're missing out one of the great adventures of your life.

01:32:46.540 There isn't a better relationship that you can have than with your children if you're wise and careful. 0.54

01:32:51.360 And to abandon your children, it's so pathetic, this culture of random and careless impregnation. 0.99

01:33:01.300 It's so unbelievably pathetic that people who engage in it should just be shunned. 1.00

01:33:07.000 It's appalling. 1.00

01:33:08.080 It's terrible for the kids.

01:33:09.520 But it's terrible for the men, too.

01:33:11.140 They're not men. 1.00

01:33:12.800 You know, they're psychopathic manipulators. 0.97

01:33:15.060 And, you know, there's the data on that's quite clear. 0.98

01:33:16.940 If you look at the dark tetrad types, so they're psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic. 1.00

01:33:24.420 They prefer short-term mating strategies. 0.73

01:33:27.560 Interesting.

01:33:28.640 Right, right.

01:33:29.300 So this isn't hypothetical.

01:33:30.760 It's like if you take the worst people, they're the ones who want to engage in exploitative sexual relationships.

01:33:36.860 And it isn't because they want to be free.

01:33:38.820 It's because they want to do exactly what they want to do to whoever they want to do it to right now.

01:33:45.500 Right?

01:33:45.720 And then they cloak that up in, well, you know, sexual freedom.

01:33:49.200 It's like, yeah, I know what you mean by sexual freedom.

01:33:52.200 You mean exactly what you want when you want it.

01:33:55.200 That's what you mean.

01:33:56.160 So, okay, so you're the roles.

01:34:00.440 Husband, father, warrior, right?

01:34:02.720 That's keeper and protector, let's say.

01:34:04.580 Builder, priest, and king.

01:34:07.620 And your vision in the book that you're outlining is like the integration across all of those.

01:34:13.380 So one of the things I've suggested to my audience of young men is that you're going to be looking at some point in your life when the chips are down and the storms are rising,

01:34:21.220 you're going to be looking for something like a sustaining meaning.

01:34:23.440 And if you don't have it, God help you in those situations.

01:34:26.720 And they're definitely coming.

01:34:28.180 In fact, you might be living chronically that way right now, right?

01:34:31.400 Depressed, anxious, nihilistic, on the edge of suicide.

01:34:35.060 Why?

01:34:36.220 Because you haven't adopted any meaningful responsibility.

01:34:39.480 That's the actual answer.

01:34:40.760 You know, and conservatives have the option now, the opportunity to put that case forward.

01:34:47.620 Say, look, the emptiness in your life isn't because you don't have enough rights.

01:34:52.260 You have all the rights there are.

01:34:53.940 You have more than you should.

01:34:55.400 And it isn't because you lack consumerist options.

01:34:58.040 You have Amazon and pornography, man.

01:35:02.400 You can get whatever you want whenever you want it.

01:35:04.680 And if that's still not working, well, what are you missing?

01:35:08.320 Well, maybe you're missing the opposite of that.

01:35:10.080 A little bit of restraint.

01:35:11.580 A little bit of sacrifice.

01:35:12.760 Some responsibility.

01:35:14.780 Yes.

01:35:15.780 Yes, exactly.

01:35:16.840 And I think this is the part about vision, calling young men, all men, but to have a

01:35:23.200 sense of what is the vision that's going to sustain you in those hard times.

01:35:25.960 You know, in the book, I talk about some hard times in my life.

01:35:29.740 I mean, I talk about losing—my wife and I lost our first baby.

01:35:32.180 We talk about that.

01:35:33.000 I talk about losing my best friend when I was still a young man to suicide.

01:35:37.560 And the point of that is—

01:35:38.680 Jake!

01:35:40.100 Yeah, correct.

01:35:41.080 Exactly.

01:35:41.720 Exactly.

01:35:42.240 I mean, we were the same age, knew each other from the time we were 14.

01:35:45.400 He was my best friend, my best buddy in life, and a guy who had everything going for him.

01:35:50.960 No, I lost a friend just like that.

01:35:52.840 I had a friend just like that, you know, and he swallowed that toxic masculinity line

01:35:58.000 a little bit different than Jake.

01:35:59.800 My friend, his name was Rob Dernan, my friend.

01:36:03.260 He committed suicide when he was 40.

01:36:05.400 He was tall, good-looking, super smart guy, very charming, very witty, artistically talented,

01:36:12.900 not particularly athletic.

01:36:14.260 He tilted more to the engineering and aesthetic side of things.

01:36:17.920 But he, right from an early age, you know, he believed that the masculine virtues were

01:36:22.140 fundamentally destructive.

01:36:24.060 He adopted a kind of nihilistic Buddhism, and it just did him in.

01:36:27.320 Like, I just watched him take himself apart for like 27 years.

01:36:30.760 It was ugly.

01:36:31.860 He wouldn't even defend himself in fistfights in Alberta.

01:36:34.860 You know, now and then, he lived in a town called High River, and the Native kids used to

01:36:38.800 pound on him, because there was a fair bit of antagonism between the Native kids and the

01:36:43.020 Caucasian kids, let's say, in these northern Alberta towns.

01:36:46.860 And the Native kids were rough, you know? 1.00

01:36:49.820 They could be rough.

01:36:50.720 And they used to beat him up, and he wouldn't defend himself, because he thought he was a

01:36:54.000 patriarchal oppressor, like even when he was 13.

01:36:56.740 You know, and there was some—you can understand that to some degree.

01:36:59.560 There was some tension there for real reasons, real historical reasons.

01:37:03.640 But his tack was self-abnegation, you know?

01:37:06.400 And it just—something like that seemed to have happened to your friend Jake.

01:37:10.480 Yeah, yeah.

01:37:11.400 And I think that in those—to your point, in those moments when you encounter those crises

01:37:15.820 of life, what is it that's going to guide you?

01:37:17.860 It's not that stuff is available on Amazon.

01:37:19.820 That's not what's going to get you out of bed in the morning.

01:37:21.980 Something that's going to get you out of bed in the morning is a sense of purpose and

01:37:24.920 vision for your life.

01:37:26.360 And if that—to go back to the most fundamental of the biblical vision, if that purpose is,

01:37:31.580 boy, my life can actually transform the world.

01:37:34.820 I can bring order from chaos.

01:37:36.400 I can make a garden in the wilderness.

01:37:37.920 What I do now can last in a meaningful way for, who knows, eternity?

01:37:43.500 That's a powerful vision.

01:37:45.280 You know, that's something that'll get you out of bed in the morning.

01:37:47.920 And then when you add that to that, I'm a father, I'm a husband, people are depending

01:37:51.480 on me.

01:37:52.300 You know, I know my own life is—that is what has pulled me through times where it's

01:37:55.860 like, yeah, you know, things are tough right now.

01:37:57.820 And I think this is what our modern culture in the left and the nihilistic left systematically

01:38:01.880 denies to men.

01:38:03.480 So, you know, we talked earlier about the biblical corpus in relationship to its historical

01:38:08.180 validity, utility, right?

01:38:11.060 The West being predicated on the biblical narrative.

01:38:13.140 It makes sense that we have to understand it and assess it and perhaps return to its virtues

01:38:19.320 insofar as they are virtues.

01:38:20.660 But then there's another issue here, too, that you pointed to, which is something like,

01:38:25.940 well, the truth of the enterprise.

01:38:28.380 So let's say, well, is it true that men should become husbands, fathers, warriors, builders,

01:38:33.300 priests, and kings in that kind of biblical tradition?

01:38:36.500 And the answer to that might be, well, what happens if they don't?

01:38:42.220 What's the reality of the situation where men abandon themselves, let's say, to chaos 0.52

01:38:46.680 or become tyrannical and hyper-orderly?

01:38:49.860 Well, then you get something indistinguishable from hell.

01:38:52.900 You know, you get the failed state on the chaos side.

01:38:56.020 Or you get the Tower of Babel on the other side. 0.71

01:38:58.800 And that's, there's abdication of responsibility in the Tower of Babel, too. 0.79

01:39:03.180 You know, the Soviet men, people under totalitarianism, they don't manifest their own destiny. 0.68

01:39:09.020 They don't tell the truth.

01:39:10.480 They don't take their place in the world.

01:39:11.820 And the consequence of that is that you get hell real quick.

01:39:15.640 And you might say, well, hell isn't real.

01:39:17.400 It's like, you don't know much about history if you don't think hell is real.

01:39:20.960 And you also don't know much about history if you can't see the connection between

01:39:24.560 the abdication of individual responsibility and the generation of hell. 0.53

01:39:30.260 And very quickly, too.

01:39:32.400 So, you know, when we're talking about a reality that transcends the merely historical,

01:39:37.380 we could point to the pragmatic.

01:39:39.700 It's like, well, what happens in the absence of virtue?

01:39:42.720 Well, you don't get freedom, you know, whim-pursuing freedom.

01:39:47.820 And even if you did, you wouldn't want it.

01:39:49.840 You know, one of the perverse things that has happened on the sexual front is that as

01:39:53.700 we've increased the varieties of sexual gratification available, we've increased the number of people

01:40:01.100 dramatically who have no sexual contact with other human beings at all.

01:40:05.080 And I think it's 30% now, I think it's 30% of people in Japan under 30 are virgins.

01:40:10.920 It's something like that.

01:40:12.340 It's close to the same in South Korea.

01:40:14.540 And there's a tremendous number of people in the West, young people, who've had zero sexual

01:40:18.740 contact with an actual person in the last 18 months.

01:40:21.320 So, it's so interesting, eh, because you get that surfeit on the consumer side, and it

01:40:27.380 produces a satiation that's so complete that it demolishes the desire itself.

01:40:32.480 Yes, yes.

01:40:34.640 And the desire that manifests in a productive way, any real way, right?

01:40:38.580 I mean, so you don't go on a date, you don't get married, you don't have children, and then

01:40:42.620 society doesn't reproduce itself.

01:40:44.440 I mean, it's the ultimate sort of death spiral.

01:40:47.120 But no, back to your point about what happens in the absence of these virtues.

01:40:51.020 You know, what happens if you don't cultivate them and you see on a personal front, you know,

01:40:54.780 you watch your life fall apart.

01:40:56.000 I mean, that's what'll happen, as every man who's gone down that path knows, right?

01:40:59.520 And that's why you talk to a man who's been through a crisis in his life and has come

01:41:03.360 out on the other side stronger.

01:41:04.780 What he doesn't say is, at least I've never heard a man say, oh, I just decided to completely

01:41:09.580 give up.

01:41:10.140 I decided to stop caring.

01:41:11.520 I decided that I would stop trying to get better.

01:41:13.740 No, that's not what they say.

01:41:15.080 What they say is, I found some purpose to live for.

01:41:18.540 I decided to try and make something of my life.

01:41:21.800 I decided to aim my life at something, you know?

01:41:24.640 Despite the catastrophe.

01:41:26.320 Despite the catastrophe.

01:41:27.840 Exactly right.

01:41:28.820 Despite, because catastrophe is going to come, as you say, right?

01:41:32.220 That's life.

01:41:33.360 Catastrophe is going to come probably multiple times.

01:41:36.300 And the question is, what's going to compel us to live through that?

01:41:40.180 And of course, if you are a Christian or a Jew and part of the biblical tradition, which

01:41:45.340 you can, the hope that you have is, not only can this catastrophe not be the end of me,

01:41:50.880 but actually it could redound to my benefit in some strange way.

01:41:55.300 Because God will redeem it in some sense.

01:41:57.740 Doesn't mean I enjoy it, but it means that it'll have some purpose.

01:42:00.980 Well, I would say that the biblical corpus, if you just look at it anthropologically and

01:42:05.200 psychologically, strip it of its metaphysical and religious pretensions.

01:42:10.700 I'm not saying you should do that, but you can do that.

01:42:12.920 But I would say at least what it is, is a millennia-long meditation on what spirit you invite to inhabit

01:42:21.200 you so that you can maintain yourself and those around you through catastrophe.

01:42:25.240 That's the spirit that guides Noah, right?

01:42:28.180 I mean, this is really how God is defined in the biblical corpus.

01:42:31.580 The God in the story of Noah is precisely the spirit that enables the wise to prepare for the storm

01:42:40.460 and shepherd themselves and their family through it.

01:42:43.420 You say, well, does God exist?

01:42:44.580 It's like, well, insofar as the spirit that enables a man to do that exists, God exists.

01:42:52.180 And then you might say, well, what sort of reality is that?

01:42:54.580 And the answer to that is, well, it's the reality that drowns you unless you abide by it.

01:43:00.680 Now, I don't know if that's real enough for you,

01:43:03.320 but it's an interesting definition of what constitutes real.

01:43:07.660 I mean, what's most real might be what's there when the times are hardest, right?

01:43:13.820 That's how you define the reality of a friendship or a love affair.

01:43:18.280 That's a different concept than, you know, the material is what's real.

01:43:23.200 It's like, no, what's real is what sustains you through the worst catastrophe.

01:43:27.420 And you might say, well, there's nothing there.

01:43:29.280 It's like, well, that's one perspective.

01:43:31.740 Your catastrophe is going to be pretty damn grim if that's your a priori attitude,

01:43:36.020 that nihilism or maybe the hedonism that goes along with it.

01:43:39.500 You're not going to be very well protected when the storms rise.

01:43:44.280 You know, and your book is a meditation on the idea that if you take up these responsibilities,

01:43:49.300 husband, father, warrior, builder, priest, king, if you take up these responsibilities,

01:43:53.740 you develop the sort of character or a relationship with the character

01:43:58.180 that allows you to prevail when the storms rise, you know, and the seas threaten.

01:44:03.740 Now, that seems right to me.

01:44:04.880 And that points to a truth in the biblical corpus, let's say, that transcends the mere historical.

01:44:11.920 Yes, I agree.

01:44:13.380 I agree with all of that.

01:44:14.740 And if I could just add to your point, but this time from the religious dimension,

01:44:20.040 I would just say that what in my reading of the biblical tradition is,

01:44:24.040 it's not that if you are a follower of God or a follower of Christ,

01:44:28.120 that you will be saved out of catastrophe.

01:44:30.520 That's not what the tradition says at all.

01:44:33.520 That's not what the Bible says, I don't think.

01:44:34.940 I mean, I don't read that anywhere there.

01:44:36.440 What it says is, is that your life will have a meaning beyond which you can possibly imagine.

01:44:42.180 What it says is, you can be part of what God is doing in the world for eternity, right?

01:44:48.080 So it's not that you won't have any hardships of life.

01:44:50.800 Quite the contrary.

01:44:52.360 Christ was crucified, for heaven's sakes.

01:44:54.180 There will be hardships for sure, but they will mean something.

01:44:57.900 And your life will mean something.

01:44:59.760 And ultimately, it will mean something for eternity.

01:45:02.200 I mean, that is a purpose to live for.

01:45:04.740 And this is why I found that I know that the problem of evil, of course,

01:45:08.120 is a great perennial philosophical question.

01:45:11.620 And I'm not diminishing that or demeaning it in any way.

01:45:14.640 But I do think that there's a certain presupposition there to that question,

01:45:19.360 which is almost as if, well, if we encounter evil in the world,

01:45:21.980 if we encounter hardship, then there must be something fundamental.

01:45:26.240 Then there must be no God.

01:45:27.740 I mean, because it's almost as if we're entitled not to have hardship or evil in our lives.

01:45:33.060 That's not a biblical presupposition at all.

01:45:35.440 And of course, we know that's not reality.

01:45:37.720 No, well, that's why in the story of Job, which is like the most blatant example of that,

01:45:41.740 perhaps, is God literally makes a bet with Satan to take Job out.

01:45:47.660 You know, and you think, well, what kind of God is that?

01:45:49.780 It's like, you wait, man.

01:45:51.780 Malevolent things are coming for you in your life.

01:45:53.760 And if you don't think that's reflective of the structure of reality, 0.98

01:45:56.220 you're pretty damn naive. 0.72

01:45:57.940 You better be ready. 0.99

01:45:59.400 And you might think, well, you know,

01:46:01.200 how can a cosmos that's structured like that be justified?

01:46:04.520 It's like, well, that's your problem, actually.

01:46:06.260 Like, literally, that's your problem.

01:46:08.320 That's the problem you have to solve in your life.

01:46:10.160 And, you know, this pathway of responsibility, productive generosity, let's say,

01:46:14.920 honest, productive generosity,

01:46:17.080 the biblical corpus suggests that that's the best characterization of the spirit that'll guide you forward.

01:46:25.160 Yes.

01:46:25.700 Yes, and if I could just add something to that,

01:46:27.160 I think that what the Christian New Testament in particular would say to people is,

01:46:32.400 who are confronting evil in the world, saying, oh, you know, this is terrible.

01:46:35.940 There's all of this evil and malevolence of the world.

01:46:37.820 Well, the Christian answer to that is, the biblical answer is,

01:46:40.960 you are supposed to do something about it.

01:46:42.900 God has called you to be part of the answer, right?

01:46:45.980 So he has accomplished something on the cross with Christ.

01:46:49.640 The salvation is available, the death and resurrection of Christ.

01:46:53.020 But then how does that get actualized in the world?

01:46:56.540 It is through followers of Christ animated by his spirit who then go out and proclaim that message,

01:47:02.400 transform lives, transform the world.

01:47:04.040 So my point on all of that is, it is a message that is aimed at hardship and difficulty.

01:47:09.960 It says when you encounter those things in your life, there can be profound meaning there.

01:47:15.320 And in fact, you're supposed to be part of the story of overcoming evil,

01:47:19.820 part of the power of overcoming hardship and malevolence in the world and doing something about it.

01:47:24.620 And I would just say that, you know, there's a profound purpose in that,

01:47:27.720 that I can say from personal experience animates you and gives you a vision for your life.

01:47:33.340 Yeah, well, to all the men who are playing video games and conquering dragons

01:47:36.560 and having a hell of a time doing that, you might think about what you're doing

01:47:39.500 is that the reason you find that so engaging when it's abstract

01:47:43.800 is because it's the pattern for what should engage you in your life.

01:47:47.040 And if you're not engaged in your life, it's because you haven't picked a dragon of sufficient merit.

01:47:53.740 And I mean that in the most, I mean that in the most, in the least literal sense, right?

01:47:58.520 In some ways, because it's a narrative trope, but I also mean it in the most real sense

01:48:02.460 is that if you haven't found meaning in your life, it's because you haven't taken on a big enough burden.

01:48:07.720 That's a strange thing.

01:48:08.820 It's a strange thing that that's true.

01:48:10.320 But I think it is, it's the closest to truth that we have.

01:48:15.740 It is true. Yeah, it is true.

01:48:18.180 All right, Senator Hawley, very nice to talk to you.

01:48:20.540 I understand that in principle, we're going to meet in Washington in a couple of weeks again.

01:48:24.760 Yes, sir. I can't wait.

01:48:26.240 That'll be good. That'll be good. We can further our conversation.

01:48:29.460 And for everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention to such matters.

01:48:34.560 They're worth taking to heart. They're worth that in all possible ways.

01:48:38.760 I'm going to talk to Josh Hawley for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side of things.

01:48:44.840 I think we'll talk, we're going to talk in more personal terms.

01:48:47.260 I want to know more about his thoughts about how to mediate between the political and the metaphysical,

01:48:52.940 because that's a constant battle for a politician who's attempting to conduct himself by ethical standards.

01:48:57.460 It's a very, very tricky question, technically and practically.

01:49:00.920 So I think that's what we'll delve into on the Daily Wire Plus side.

01:49:03.400 So give us, give us some thought to joining us there.

01:49:06.080 And to the film crew here in Red Deer, Alberta, that's where I'm at today.

01:49:12.120 Thank you for your help. It went very smoothly.

01:49:14.120 And to the Daily Wire Plus folks for facilitating this, that's much appreciated.

01:49:19.980 Senator Hawley, thank you very much for your book and also for talking today.

01:49:23.740 And we'll see you soon.

01:49:26.220 See you soon. Thank you so much for having me.

01:49:27.820 Hello, everyone.

01:49:31.020 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on DailyWirePlus.com.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - May 29, 2023

361. Husbands, Fathers, Warriors & Kings ｜ Senator Josh Hawley

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