The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 426. Sex, Death, & Storytelling ｜ Andrew Klavan

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody.

00:01:09.520 Today I talk to Mr. Andrew Klavan, who's a compatriot of mine at The Daily Wire, but also much more than that, an author of some 30 books he started publishing when he was 25.

00:01:19.540 He's a thriller writer, a writer of crime fiction, very much influenced by Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, influenced by Raymond Chandler, who's probably the greatest noir novelist of all time.

00:01:33.240 Also the instigator of a number of great movies like The Big Sleep.

00:01:36.380 We talked a lot about the noir genre and about the motif of the flawed masculine hero, which I suppose is every man that's ever lived, although they vary substantially on the hero front and less substantially on the flawed front.

00:01:52.400 Anyways, we had a chance to delve into all of that in some depth, into the reality of murder and mayhem, into the difficult balance between the monstrousness that character is a good man and his necessary guidance by consciousness, by conscience, by the necessity for productivity and generosity.

00:02:12.200 The complex decision-making that a woman has to undergo to evaluate a man who has to be a monster, let's say, to even be good, but also a tameable monster, so that he's not too terrible in his monstrosity. 0.94

00:02:26.980 We've talked a fair bit about religious issues delving into Mr. Klavan's journey to a Christian faith that paralleled his investigation into the literary domain.

00:02:39.620 So, all that and more in the upcoming conversation.

00:02:44.340 So, Mr. Klavan, thank you very much for agreeing to sit down and talk to me today.

00:02:48.480 This will really be the longest extended period of time, I think, that we've been able to talk to each other directly, eh?

00:02:54.640 Well, you've come on my show a couple of times and we've discussed things, but usually it's pretty brief.

00:02:59.740 Yeah, yeah, well, good. This will give us a chance to get into things more deeply.

00:03:04.000 I thought we would concentrate primarily, I think, today on writing, although we'll branch out from that wherever we happen to go.

00:03:12.020 So, maybe, first of all, tell me, how many books have you written so far?

00:03:18.400 I'm afraid there's over 30 of them. I've been at it a long time.

00:03:23.240 How long have you been at it?

00:03:24.600 Right. I published my first novel when I think I was about 25, and I'm now like 110, so it's...

00:03:32.040 Right, right, right.

00:03:33.460 It's been a long, long haul, yeah.

00:03:36.580 So, the first one when you were 25, and there's been 30, are those, is that all fiction?

00:03:42.960 No, I wrote a memoir of my conversion to Christianity called The Great Good Thing,

00:03:47.960 and recently I wrote a book called The Truth and Beauty, which was about the romantic poets.

00:03:53.040 Right, right.

00:03:53.980 And I'm working on one now, actually.

00:03:58.000 Ah, what are you working on now?

00:03:59.980 Now I'm working on a book about why I write about murder and my thoughts about murder and what it means in human society.

00:04:09.260 Murder and Mayhem, yeah, yeah.

00:04:10.900 Well, I know a couple of thriller, murder mystery writers, and I'm a great fan of...

00:04:16.520 Well, I like the genre, actually, especially the noir genre from the 1940s and thereabouts.

00:04:23.200 Raymond Chandler is something else, man.

00:04:25.600 He's the one who made me a mystery writer. He's the guy.

00:04:27.800 Is that right, eh? Oh, yes. What do you like about Chandler?

00:04:30.840 Well, the moment I became a mystery writer was the moment in the big sleep.

00:04:34.060 It's right at the opening when Philip Marlowe walks in and he sees a knight in shining armor on a stained glass window

00:04:41.680 trying to rescue a woman who's tied to a tree.

00:04:45.780 And Philip Marlowe says, if I lived here, I'd have to come up there and help him because he's not making any progress.

00:04:51.160 And that was the first time I saw a tough guy.

00:04:55.220 I was very enamored with tough guys when I was a teenager.

00:04:58.280 It was the first time I saw a tough guy who had a purpose.

00:05:01.080 He was carrying within him an ideal of chivalry that he wanted to bring into the corrupt world.

00:05:06.700 And that was actually Chandler's idea.

00:05:08.680 And I just thought, that's who I want to be personally, and that's what I want to write about.

00:05:13.100 Yeah, right. Well, there's a St. George image lurking at the bottom of that.

00:05:17.500 And, you know, that ties in for me.

00:05:19.360 So, the Google boys a while back, the engineers, they did an analysis of women's use of pornography.

00:05:25.880 Men's, too.

00:05:26.520 Well, so, males use visual pornography, as everyone in their dog knows.

00:05:32.400 But women prefer literary pornography, and it's very tightly themed. 1.00

00:05:37.500 Like, it's very archetypally themed.

00:05:40.080 So, the typical protagonist is surgeon, werewolf, vampire, pirate, or billionaire, or some combination,

00:05:49.260 some interesting combination of all of those attributes.

00:05:51.800 And the standard plot is attractive young woman, all of whose virtues are not well known.

00:06:04.120 So, it's like mousy librarian type, you know, the Hollywood beauty who takes off her glasses, 0.95

00:06:08.580 you know, exactly that.

00:06:09.600 But she attracts the attention of this more predatory male, let's say, or at least a male 0.99

00:06:15.600 with the capacity to be predatory, entices him into a relationship, and helps him reveal

00:06:22.040 his commitment and his good side.

00:06:23.860 And it's beauty and the beast, fundamentally, which I really think is the fundamental female 1.00

00:06:28.720 archetype.

00:06:29.440 Like, there's a heroic archetype that goes along with the feminine as well, because women also 1.00

00:06:33.260 confront the unknown and all of that.

00:06:36.060 But it is the fundamental, it's certainly the fundamental female sexual archetype. 1.00

00:06:41.880 And so, what that means, this is perhaps what struck a chord in your soul, is that you were

00:06:48.700 enamored, you said, of the image of tough guy, right?

00:06:52.340 And so, that would be equivalent, in some sense, to a desire from the Jungian perspective of

00:06:58.120 incorporation of the shadow, right?

00:07:00.360 To make yourself into someone who's capable of being stalwart and tough, a James Bond sort

00:07:06.780 of figure, that's a good example, in the modern age.

00:07:09.500 But then you found that that should be allied with a purpose, right?

00:07:14.460 And that rescuing of the maiden, you know, that goes two ways.

00:07:18.160 Of course, the maiden gets rescued, but the fact that that dangerous hero rescues the maiden

00:07:23.600 and is therefore attractive to her is also his salvation.

00:07:28.580 Right.

00:07:28.780 And I mean, it is the problem that young men have to solve, right?

00:07:31.400 It's the problem of power.

00:07:32.960 You know, we have strength, we have power, we have a kind of sexual power as well. 0.80

00:07:38.360 And you start to think, well, you know, if you don't want to be the bad guy.

00:07:43.240 I mean, at some point, every young man realizes that nasty guys get more sex, and they realize 0.53

00:07:49.300 that people who push women around can be very successful.

00:07:52.200 And you have to say to yourself, well, is that who I want to be?

00:07:54.820 And I very much did not want to be that guy, but I did want to be successful with girls.

00:07:58.800 And I also could perceive, just in actual fact, that the world is a corrupt place, and it's

00:08:07.340 power that makes it corrupt.

00:08:09.360 And Raymond Chandler has that famous, wonderful line, down these mean streets, a man must go

00:08:14.980 who is not himself mean.

00:08:17.000 And that just rang a bell inside me.

00:08:19.440 That's great, man.

00:08:19.580 Yeah.

00:08:20.160 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:20.860 Well, okay, so on that too, so the literature shows, so what the psychopaths and narcissists,

00:08:28.140 the Machiavellians, and even the sadists do, the men, is that the false confidence of the

00:08:35.280 narcissist is a mimicry of competence.

00:08:38.940 And that can be put on very early.

00:08:40.960 And young women are particularly susceptible to that camouflage.

00:08:45.300 And that partly accounts for the differential success of, you know, bad boys, let's say.

00:08:51.500 Now, it's partly because the women are looking for the beast that can be turned into the ally. 1.00

00:08:56.320 But it's not easy for them to distinguish the beast who is beast right to the bloody core and should be stayed away from in every possible way from the potentially redeemable, you know, Philip Marlowe hero.

00:09:09.380 And then there's another complication too, you know, to say something in favor of the more beastly men is that the other thing a woman doesn't want, and no men really want to have around either, is a man who's actually weak and unskilled, who pretends to be moral and kind, you know, not only to cozy up to women, but also to parade his weakness as moral virtue. 0.55

00:09:36.340 You know, I'm not the mean guy, I'm not the bad guy. 0.99

00:09:39.820 Well, the reason for that is you're too goddamn weak to manage that. 0.98

00:09:43.200 And instead of just admitting that forthrightly and doing something about it, you parade it as a moral virtue. 0.99

00:09:48.680 You know, and I think that sort of man is actually a lower form of man than the outright bully.

00:09:54.020 And there's some evidence that other people think this too, you know, because the kind of anti-social bully types, especially in elementary school, aren't unpopular.

00:10:04.820 They're ambivalently popular.

00:10:07.680 Now, what happens is that as their life progresses, if they continue with the bullying attitude, let's say that sort of narcissistic and even callous attitude towards others, it doesn't work well as a long-term strategy.

00:10:22.340 But the bullies are certainly more popular in elementary school, say, and even in junior high, than the bully victims are.

00:10:29.960 I think it goes beyond that.

00:10:32.400 I mean, I think this is why feminism has blown up in women's faces so much is when you outlaw masculinity, when you call it toxic, when you make people feel bad about their masculinity, only outlaws can be masculine. 0.96

00:10:43.440 So if you look at the golden age of television we just passed through that lasted about 10 years from about 2020 to 2010 or 15, all of the shows were about bad guys.

00:10:53.860 The Sopranos, The Shield, The Wire, they're all about guys who really cut the edge.

00:10:57.720 This fellow, Andrew Tate, who is a buffoon and a pimp and just a terrible person, for a period he was immensely popular, especially with teen boys. 0.98

00:11:08.220 And he would tell people how to abuse women and how to get them into sex work for your profit. 0.99

00:11:14.340 And I would look at that and I would say, the guy's a pimp, what are you talking about? 0.97

00:11:18.660 But they would say, well, you're not hearing him, you're not really understanding him.

00:11:21.380 But I think I was.

00:11:22.320 Because I think what they had lost was the idea of St. George.

00:11:26.140 They had lost the idea that your power is a path to virtue.

00:11:30.240 It's not an obstacle to virtue if you use it correctly.

00:11:33.280 Yeah, well, you know, and to give the devil his due.

00:11:35.640 I mean, the thing about Tate is he is a complex character because not all of his bravado and posturing is false because he is a mixed martial arts fighter.

00:11:46.580 He is a genuinely tough guy.

00:11:48.120 And he is also someone who came up from the street.

00:11:50.940 You know, and so you can imagine that within his soul, all sorts of different forces contend.

00:11:56.520 And just, and I am not making excuses for him because I think the electronic pimping aspect in particular is, like, I think that's unforgivable.

00:12:04.460 It's absolutely 100% unforgivable.

00:12:07.180 There's no excuse for ever having done that in your life.

00:12:09.920 Not even once.

00:12:11.020 And it's not even necessarily the kind of sin that you can recover from.

00:12:15.140 Not without, like, 20 years in serious hang-your-head repentance.

00:12:19.460 But he is a complex figure because allied with his bravado is a genuine physical toughness.

00:12:26.500 And it is definitely the case that, as you pointed out, something I warned about years ago is that, you know, if you think that, like, strong men are dangerous, you wait till you see what weak men are capable of.

00:12:37.560 And if you demonize everything that's positive, everything positive that's associated with masculinity, you do drive it into the unconscious.

00:12:44.980 You drive it underground.

00:12:46.200 And then you do get this weird attraction.

00:12:48.500 You know, like, another element of that attraction is, who is that, there was a show for a long time about a serial killer who decided to—

00:12:57.560 Oh, yeah, it was Dexter, yeah.

00:12:58.380 And Dexter, exactly, the same sort of thing, right?

00:13:01.100 And you see the same sort of thing pop up, for example, in Fifty Shades of Grey, which is, again, an archetypal example of the feminine proclivity for a certain kind of structured pornography. 0.92

00:13:11.680 So, yeah, okay.

00:13:13.140 So, when you started writing, so interesting that that image, that stained glass image of St. George, right?

00:13:20.300 Because St. George fights the dragon, which is the real evil.

00:13:23.120 He's like Prince Philip in Sleeping Beauty.

00:13:25.200 You remember when the evil queen turns into the dragon, Prince Philip fights off the dragon, which is the unknown itself.

00:13:31.520 And then he's able to free Sleeping Beauty.

00:13:34.720 It's exactly his St. George motif.

00:13:36.660 And the same thing happens in the Harry Potter stories, right?

00:13:39.500 Because Harry goes underground to fight off the dragon of chaos, and that's the basilisk that turns you to stone, the thing that makes you terrified.

00:13:47.540 And he frees Ginny, Ginny, his best friend's sister, right?

00:13:53.940 And they kind of have a romantic entanglement.

00:13:56.220 And he does that with the help of the phoenix, in some sense, that helps him be reborn.

00:14:01.340 And he's reborn in part of consequence of actually having faced this understructure of chaos, right?

00:14:09.560 And confronted the mean streets and the darkness that's underneath every society.

00:14:14.240 So that called to you from the Philip Marlowe novels, from Chandler's work.

00:14:22.440 Oh, it's the moment.

00:14:23.640 Reading that passage was the moment.

00:14:25.340 I thought this is the kind of writing I want to do.

00:14:27.280 And also this is the kind of person I want to be.

00:14:29.200 Because one of the things, one of the problems with storytelling and with mythos is that when it conflicts with reality, you start to leave victims behind.

00:14:40.720 And one of the great scenes in The Big Sleep is when he's playing, the detective is playing a chess game by himself, a solitary chess game.

00:14:48.800 And he turns over the board and says, this is not a game for knights.

00:14:51.700 In other words, this mythos that he brought, this ideal that he brought into the world, is not fitting with the Los Angeles of the 1950s, which is full of corruption.

00:15:00.660 And the problem for me with, if you watch, for instance, movies that make romantic heroes out of mafiosi, The Sopranos.

00:15:10.260 I mean, you're talking about the attraction of a guy.

00:15:12.260 Tony Soprano is a very attractive person.

00:15:14.940 The Godfather is a very attractive person.

00:15:16.760 And then you talk to police officers who've actually dealt with those people.

00:15:20.340 And every single one of them, their faces turn scarlet.

00:15:24.060 And they just spit rage because they've seen them.

00:15:26.960 They've picked up the bodies.

00:15:28.140 They've picked up the people they've killed and exploited. 0.96

00:15:30.720 And they'll tell you, they're animals. 0.58

00:15:31.880 They're not really admirable at all.

00:15:34.860 And so bringing that masculine energy into the world, a very delicate operation and something that you have to remember as you're doing it, 0.98

00:15:44.540 that the people you're dealing with are real and have the same right to life and health and happiness that you have.

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00:17:30.760 Yeah, well, this is also the terribly narrow needle eye that women have to thread, right? 1.00

00:17:40.380 Because they have to find a man who's capable of contending with the darkness of the world.

00:17:45.740 Which means he has to be able to reflect that darkness in his own soul and his own actions.

00:17:50.520 But he also has to do that while simultaneously being productive and generous.

00:17:57.640 And so it's an unbelievable tight balance of opposing forces that women are aiming for. 1.00

00:18:02.440 It's no wonder they overshoot in either direction, you know?

00:18:05.520 And it's not surprising at all that they have that proclivity to overshoot towards the more negative end when they're young.

00:18:12.500 And that's well documented in the clinical literature.

00:18:15.400 You mentioned Fifty Shades of Grey.

00:18:18.240 I mean, that's one of the ten best-selling series in all fiction, which is amazing.

00:18:23.800 Well, it also came up so interesting.

00:18:26.420 It developed its popularity during the Me Too movement.

00:18:29.100 So you saw this height of attack on toxic masculinity at the same time that in the unconscious, so to speak,

00:18:37.260 there was this burgeoning desire among women who were listening to this discussion regarding toxic masculinity

00:18:43.480 to be, you know, taken by a brute, you know, this billionaire. 0.73

00:18:49.700 You see the same damn thing in Ayn Rand's novels as well, you know, with the interplay between Dagny Taggart, I think it is. 0.89

00:18:56.760 Is it Hank Reardon? 0.93

00:18:57.820 Is it Hank Reardon?

00:18:58.700 I think so, that she ends up in a kind of semi-rape dalliance with. 1.00

00:19:02.840 And so, the other thing that's very cool about Chandler, and I'm wondering how this impacted you too,

00:19:09.760 is he's an unbelievably good stylist and master of dialogue, that witty, harsh, film noir dialogue.

00:19:19.540 I mean, I don't think anybody ever topped what Chandler did on the gritty novel front.

00:19:25.180 And The Big Sleep is also a great movie.

00:19:27.920 It is.

00:19:28.480 I mean, that's a great movie.

00:19:29.620 The Long Goodbye is a great novel.

00:19:31.060 And his writing is unparalleled.

00:19:33.960 I mean, I think that that was one of the key things.

00:19:36.340 Of course, like every young man of my time, I was enamored with Hemingway.

00:19:39.940 But when I got to Chandler, I found something much more beautiful, actually, on the page.

00:19:47.200 And there was also something that bothered me about the tough guys.

00:19:50.940 You know, Ernest Hemingway, I think, had a very deep transsexual theme running through his stories. 0.99

00:19:57.380 And one of his sons became an actual transsexual. 0.98

00:20:00.240 And there was always something that bothered me about his view of sexuality.

00:20:04.620 And I was also bothered by the fact that a lot of tough guys become tough by not caring about the things that I cared about.

00:20:10.960 So, for instance, Casablanca may be my favorite movie.

00:20:14.740 I think it's one of the great movies of all time.

00:20:16.180 I just watched that this week, man.

00:20:17.940 Yeah, it's perfect.

00:20:19.240 It's perfect.

00:20:20.220 It's a perfect movie.

00:20:21.360 It's a perfect movie.

00:20:22.440 But there was a point when I started to say to myself, well, you know, his girl dumped him.

00:20:27.980 And so he's staying out of World War II.

00:20:30.220 It's kind of wimpy.

00:20:31.160 Right, right, right.

00:20:32.440 And he's bitter about it.

00:20:33.720 Yeah.

00:20:33.940 I thought your girl dumps you. 1.00

00:20:35.160 You still got to fight World War II, you know.

00:20:36.900 And so what Raymond Chandler captured was the responsibility that this guy had.

00:20:41.460 He was not just a tough guy.

00:20:42.900 They were not just moments when he had to break the law and break people's backs and bones.

00:20:47.740 But there were also these moments when he was trying to preserve something that he knew he had inside himself.

00:20:53.060 And that was just really important to me as a kid.

00:20:56.480 Right.

00:20:56.960 You see that in the Maltese Falcon, too, by the way, which we also just watched.

00:21:00.500 Same sort of thing.

00:21:01.460 This underlying moral commitment of the flawed tough guy.

00:21:05.860 Yeah, yeah.

00:21:06.580 Well, and, you know, the attraction, I think a better example for young men at the moment.

00:21:10.720 Well, Rogan's a good example.

00:21:12.180 Joe Rogan's a very good example because he's definitely a monster who's got himself under control.

00:21:16.740 But Jocko Willink as well.

00:21:18.920 Oh, yes, of course.

00:21:20.060 Yes.

00:21:20.500 Yeah.

00:21:21.300 Yeah, yeah.

00:21:21.820 Because Willink is tough as a boot.

00:21:23.360 He knows perfectly well.

00:21:24.780 And he's told me this repeatedly in our various conversations that, you know, he could have been quite the criminal.

00:21:31.720 Because he's definitely got a, I wouldn't say a bloodthirsty aspect.

00:21:35.560 Although that's in there, you know, because he's a disagreeable guy.

00:21:39.220 He's very competitive.

00:21:41.040 And that disagreeableness and competitiveness goes together.

00:21:44.740 Hey, I read an interesting study this week.

00:21:46.820 Man, this really helped me understand something.

00:21:51.560 I've been studying for a long time.

00:21:53.540 So people tend to feel pain as a consequence of the disruption of social relations.

00:22:00.760 It's not anxiety.

00:22:01.720 It's pain.

00:22:02.780 And so loneliness and grieving, for example, are variants of pain.

00:22:07.600 And if you take a child who's misbehaving and you isolate them, that isolation is a punishment.

00:22:14.080 And it's a punishment because it's associated with pain.

00:22:16.940 And that can be ameliorated with opiates, by the way.

00:22:19.680 Like, this is very well understood.

00:22:22.020 So part of social bonding is mediated by pain responses.

00:22:29.300 And I read a paper this week that showed that people who are more disagreeable, right?

00:22:37.040 So that would be, that's a masculine characteristic, show less activation in their neurological pain systems when watching someone else in pain.

00:22:48.180 And so that's part of that, that's part of that underlying neurology that can lead to a certain callousness, right?

00:22:58.020 And a certain lack of care in reference to other people.

00:23:02.360 And it's all, but then you can also understand it as a necessity for things like, well, hunting would be an example, military service, police.

00:23:11.000 Like, anytime you're dealing with something where the threat of physical combat is real, an excess of empathic responding is likely to be an impediment.

00:23:20.520 Now, the price you pay for that is that if you do have the wiring that makes you less directly sympathetic in the face of other people's suffering, let's say, you can easily tilt into the antisocial, right?

00:23:35.160 So this is another precipice that has to be negotiated by men who are wired to be competitive and tough.

00:23:44.100 It's like, well, how do you ally that forthrightness and bluntness, because that's also part of that, with the willingness to be generous and productive?

00:23:53.520 I think, you know, Jocko told me that the way he learned that was in the military, because he found that the development of high levels of skills in other people, like that mentoring relationship, was so rewarding that that's what oriented him.

00:24:14.840 That was one of the things that oriented him primarily to the good, you know?

00:24:18.860 So, you know, and you see this to some degree in those stories that you were talking about, even in the Sopranos.

00:24:26.000 Like, one of the things that makes movie mafiosos admirable is that they actually produce a family around them, right, that's structured.

00:24:37.280 There's a mentoring relationship there.

00:24:39.500 You even see that in Breaking Bad with Walter White's relationship with Jesse, for example.

00:24:45.000 Oh, absolutely. Breaking Bad is a perfect example of what we're talking about.

00:24:49.100 But again, it's also an example of the breach between storytelling and reality.

00:24:56.140 I mean, we tell, we think in stories, you know, you deal in psychology.

00:25:01.060 Psychology is a kind of story.

00:25:02.940 Sexual fantasies are a kind of story.

00:25:05.460 And stories are all about physical action.

00:25:07.380 They're all about things, people moving and doing things.

00:25:10.200 But in real life, I've met many a man who could break me in two physically who hasn't got a moral or strong, morally strong bone in his body and will cave immediately when he is dominated by a stronger mind.

00:25:25.520 You yourself, you know, you're not an absolute physical monster, but you're standing up to the entire Canadian government because you have that spine.

00:25:36.200 And one of the tricks for women growing up, I think, is understanding the difference between the kind of strength that turns itself into brutality in a sexual fantasy and the kind of strength that simply stands where it's supposed to stand and will not let the world push it aside. 0.98

00:25:52.500 And then you return to that fact that you're not afraid to be isolated.

00:25:56.280 You're not afraid to walk away from the society because when the society is wrong.

00:26:01.280 I mean, I think this is one of the terrible things we're dealing with now throughout a society that's lost its mind and lost its way a little bit is that you have to be willing to be canceled.

00:26:10.680 You have to be willing to be thrown off social media.

00:26:13.580 You have to be willing to lose your job even in order to simply speak the truth.

00:26:19.080 And that's a kind of strength that I think men exhibit more than women.

00:26:23.480 And I think that men exhibit it sometimes when if you looked at them, you'd think like, yeah, that's kind of he's not a real tough guy.

00:26:29.940 He's not.

00:26:30.320 I could I could knock him out, which is why, you know, you hear the stories of Ben Shapiro being bullied and you think like, sure, you know, you can be bigger than him. 0.93

00:26:40.300 You can hit him.

00:26:41.080 But it's a little hard to have as much integrity as he has to stand into to walk into a riot and make your speech.

00:26:46.960 Those are the things that actually in the end play out in a civilized society.

00:26:50.580 Yeah, yeah, well, well, that speaks to a to a higher order virtue than mere absence of empathy or fear, I think, because it isn't that certainly like I am very agreeable by temperament, as it turns out.

00:27:06.220 And so conflict really does bother me.

00:27:08.160 Now, I'm I don't think Ben is particularly disagreeable, but he's certainly more disagreeable than I am.

00:27:14.440 And there's an element of him that really likes the conflict.

00:27:16.600 This is obviously not a criticism, but the the issue there is that there's a kind of commitment to character.

00:27:25.100 And this is probably the apprehension of this is what attracted you when you saw that or when you when you were thinking about that stained glass window is that there's a kind of character that's that's sophisticated beyond mere physical strength.

00:27:40.980 Which isn't trivial, that enables people to move forward or to stand their ground despite being afraid, say, and despite being empathic.

00:27:50.280 You know, and the fact it is very complex because you said, for example, that that's likely more true of men than women.

00:27:56.360 And that's a tough one.

00:27:57.780 And so we could take that apart a bit.

00:28:00.380 I mean, it's certainly the case that the most woke academic disciplines are female dominated. 1.00

00:28:07.460 And it is definitely the case that women are, by temperament, more agreeable than men.

00:28:12.760 And what that means, I believe that's primarily a specialization for infant care.

00:28:17.940 And that means that the proclivity for because, look, an infant, an infant is always right when it's in distress.

00:28:24.860 And your moral obligation, this is, say, an infant under six months of age, your moral obligation as the primary caretaker of an infant is to never question its emotional distress, never, and to respond immediately, no matter what.

00:28:40.200 And being able to do that and also simultaneously having the wherewithal to withstand conflict, especially if it's generated on emotional grounds, that's a very contradictory set of demands.

00:28:55.500 I think that's partly why human beings require two parents.

00:28:59.280 Because it's just too much, well, it's just too much, I think, for one person to take primary responsibility for that intense care that characterizes especially the first year, but particularly the first six months.

00:29:13.260 And then also to have the emotional capacity to start to implement necessary disciplinary procedures that, you know, result in some definite, some emotional tension, no matter how short term.

00:29:26.100 You need a man and a woman to play those things off one another. 1.00

00:29:30.660 Oh, I think that's definitely true.

00:29:32.440 Yeah.

00:29:32.860 And also to work out, I mean, mercy and justice are in conflict everywhere but in the mind of God.

00:29:39.020 So I think that it takes two people really to bring that together.

00:29:42.240 Yeah.

00:29:42.680 And it also means you're not just dealing, when you're dealing with all these archetypes and when you're dealing with these fantasies that are stories and these stories that are fantasies, you have to remember the moral web.

00:29:53.720 And the moral web is a complex thing.

00:29:55.340 You know, those things are borderlines that only we can see.

00:30:00.300 They're not railings in the road.

00:30:02.140 They're things that you have to be able to say, I am going to stay within this borderline and I'm going to be able to define that.

00:30:08.100 And that's one of the reasons, for instance, that men go out into the world to support the mothers at home.

00:30:13.740 And the mothers don't always know what the men have to do to get that done. 1.00

00:30:17.420 And the men have to make those very difficult decisions.

00:30:20.880 Am I going to, you know, take this guff from some guy because I need the money?

00:30:27.000 Am I going to do a job that I shouldn't do?

00:30:28.960 All of those things come into play.

00:30:31.020 And that's, you know, again, the complexity is intense.

00:30:33.840 And it definitely takes two people, at least.

00:30:37.060 And it definitely takes two different kinds of people.

00:30:39.240 At least. That's right.

00:30:39.880 At least.

00:30:40.160 Yeah, to find their way.

00:30:40.840 Yeah, you talked about the interplay of mercy and justice.

00:30:44.640 You know, I think that's a good definition of conscience.

00:30:47.600 The conscience is the voice that signifies the interplay between mercy and justice.

00:30:52.160 And you see this in characters like Philip Marlowe, right?

00:30:55.600 Because they're obviously meting out justice constantly.

00:31:00.820 And that's part of the attractiveness of their character, especially when it's devoted towards, you know, defending the femme fatale from some evil persecutor.

00:31:11.280 But they're always leaving that with mercy.

00:31:14.340 And it is as a consequence of following the dictates of their conscience.

00:31:17.580 And certainly, Marlowe is a very conscience-ridden creature.

00:31:22.660 Yes.

00:31:23.460 As is Sam Spade, for that matter.

00:31:26.180 And even James Bond, on the more comic book end of things.

00:31:31.060 You know, you were talking, too, about characters like Breaking Bad, the guy in Breaking Bad, Walter White, and in The Sopranos.

00:31:37.480 You know, and it's also been in recent years where we had the rise of the Marvel Universe.

00:31:41.760 And Tony Stark is another good example of that sort of thing. 0.98

00:31:44.680 Because, you know, that guy is so hyper-masculine that he's damn near fascist.

00:31:49.740 And it was so interesting to see, first of all, that Iron Man was the Marvel character who rose to preeminence in the movie fictional universe.

00:31:57.860 Because that certainly wasn't the case in the comic book world.

00:32:01.140 He was kind of a minor superhero.

00:32:03.460 But Tony Stark had those same attributes of, you know, this sort of hyper-masculine, almost narcissistic, this hyper-almost narcissistic masculine element.

00:32:14.520 And it was also very interesting that he ended up allied in some profound way with the Hulk, right?

00:32:20.460 That they played off each other and that Stark was the person who was also able to control and deal with and channel the Hulk in the most effective possible manner.

00:32:30.900 It was very interesting to watch all that unfold.

00:32:33.320 You know, while the whole culture was spiraling off in the hyper-feminine direction. 0.64

00:32:38.220 Well, I think the superhero is a really interesting genre.

00:32:43.300 It has always bothered me because it seems to be storytelling without sex and death in it.

00:32:49.540 Which means it's storytelling in some sense without human nature in it.

00:32:54.940 And what disturbs me about that is I see this across all genres.

00:32:58.600 One of the things, one of my absolute hobby horses is women beating men up in stories. 1.00

00:33:04.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.98

00:33:04.860 Every movie is a woman who's going to punch a guy and he goes rolling ass over tea kettle out the door, which is not what happens when a woman punches a man. 1.00

00:33:12.820 Her hand breaks and then he beats the crap out of her. 0.99

00:33:15.320 And that's a dangerous thing.

00:33:17.100 But it's also saying something about our attitude to our humanity, our turning away from humanity as possibly hyper-humanity through technology approaches.

00:33:25.980 I mean, I think when I was young, you watched stories that were largely about the past.

00:33:30.700 You watched war movies and cowboy movies.

00:33:33.420 And the science fiction that we had was very rare, but it was also kind of a projection of the past into the future.

00:33:38.880 So even when you dealt with monsters, they were very human.

00:33:41.440 They were Dracula, the werewolf, and all that.

00:33:43.680 Whereas now, we're watching movies and telling stories that seem to look forward into an inhuman future.

00:33:51.580 And what bothers me about that is without – because I think it's actually true – is that without sex and death or beyond sex and death, there's still going to be a moral web and we're still going to have to negotiate it.

00:34:03.300 And yet the immediate punishments for immorality, the fleshly results of immorality, are not going to exist anymore.

00:34:09.980 Just like with, for instance, birth control.

00:34:12.760 You can treat your body like a pincushion and not get pregnant and maybe – and solve your syphilis problem. 0.98

00:34:20.560 And yet, the moral web is still in place.

00:34:23.460 You will destroy yourself by simply treating yourself.

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00:35:32.100 Well, let's walk down, yes, well, absolutely, let's walk down that road a little bit.

00:35:40.080 I mean, I think at a deep level, part of what you see, part of the reason that you see the sorts of things that you're describing,

00:35:47.700 which is women occupying the more masculine heroic role taken to the extreme in, say, these superhero movies where women are regularly beating the hell out of men, 1.00

00:35:58.660 which, as you said, virtually never happens in real life.

00:36:03.220 And this sort of ties into some of the things that The Daily Wire has been doing, for example, with their documentary questioning what is a woman.

00:36:10.020 And, you know, it's easy for that to be a satirical question, and that was a satirical documentary,

00:36:15.160 but there's actually something really fundamental going on at the base of that,

00:36:18.320 because the truth of the matter is that with the introduction of the birth control pill,

00:36:24.500 the question, what is a woman, actually became immediately paramount.

00:36:29.280 And now that's been unfolding for multiple generations,

00:36:32.040 because the obvious distinction, the most obvious distinction between men and women prior to the pill

00:36:40.420 was the ease with which one of them could get pregnant. 0.99

00:36:44.700 And it was impossible for one of them and very easy for the other,

00:36:48.720 and that turned out to be a walloping difference, and perhaps the cardinal difference.

00:36:53.060 I mean, the biological definition of female is literally that sex that gives up most in the process of sexual reproduction,

00:37:04.860 that devotes the most resources.

00:37:06.640 And you see that even in the relationship between the sperm and the egg.

00:37:10.780 I think the egg has 10 million times the resources of a single sperm,

00:37:15.760 in terms of what it's donating to the gamete.

00:37:19.700 It's something like that.

00:37:20.840 And so, and that's echoed at every level of the dichotomy between masculine and feminine.

00:37:25.860 So, what is a woman? 1.00

00:37:26.760 A woman is the human sex that devotes most to the problems of reproduction. 1.00

00:37:32.920 So, that's a good definition.

00:37:34.440 Now, you upend that with the pill, right?

00:37:38.000 Because all of a sudden, that difference is ameliorated to some substantial degree.

00:37:43.340 Now, your point is that doesn't change the underlying moral landscape.

00:37:46.720 Well, it changes it somewhat, right?

00:37:49.620 Because the immediate consequences for fornication, let's say, to use an archaic term, for sleeping around,

00:37:58.300 the immediate consequences are clearly ameliorated.

00:38:01.140 And that leaves us to wonder, well, you know, the whole 1960s was an experiment in some ways.

00:38:06.920 It's like, all right, sex has now become consequence-free, or so we thought.

00:38:12.900 Well, then why isn't, why not have an endless orgiastic party?

00:38:18.260 And that's actually a real question, because the reason to do it is clear.

00:38:22.620 And the reasons not to do it have become murky.

00:38:25.560 Well, AIDS put the paid to that demented dream quite rapidly.

00:38:30.280 But then there were more subtle things, right?

00:38:32.580 And one of the subtle things is, well, okay, why isn't a woman, why can't a woman just replace a man now entirely?

00:38:41.500 And how do we discover the limits to that?

00:38:45.360 You know, I see some limits emerging.

00:38:47.420 And, you know, I mean, we now know, for example, that half of 30-year-old women now don't have a child.

00:38:55.740 Look, half of them, it's more than half, actually, half of them will never have a child.

00:39:03.360 And 90% of them will regret that.

00:39:05.920 And so, even if we push, even if we erase in our 20s the difference between men and women,

00:39:14.340 as the difference is erased in childhood, because boys and girls are quite similar compared to, say, teenage boys and teenage girls,

00:39:22.480 even if we equilibrate men and women in their 20s, that certainly doesn't mean we equilibrate them in their 30s.

00:39:31.000 Well, I think it's an open question whether if you remove the immediate physical consequences of a bad act, it ceases to be a bad act.

00:39:40.480 I think that this is the key question that we're facing right now.

00:39:44.860 You know, in The Truth and Beauty, I write a chapter on Frankenstein,

00:39:48.500 in which I make the argument that Frankenstein, the Dr. Frankenstein, who creates this monster,

00:39:53.640 has not violated, as Mary Shelley did, has not violated God's prerogative.

00:39:58.660 He's violated a woman's prerogative. 1.00

00:40:00.700 He's created a being, which we all do.

00:40:03.720 Anyone who has a child has created a living being.

00:40:06.340 But he creates it without a mother.

00:40:07.960 And if you read Frankenstein in that way, you begin to see that science and fantasy have been trying to solve the problem of women 0.99

00:40:17.280 and the fact that they create a consequence, a deep consequence to our chief physical pleasure.

00:40:25.040 They've been trying to solve that since science existed and really since imagination existed.

00:40:30.000 I mean, prostitution, in some ways, is a way of trying to solve that problem as well. 1.00

00:40:33.760 And I believe that the attacks on men now are not really attacks on men.

00:40:38.180 What I think they are is trying to clear men out of the way so that women can cease being women 1.00

00:40:41.940 and can actually become men as well.

00:40:44.520 Because what women do is they raise this question. 1.00

00:40:47.440 Are we purely physical beings?

00:40:49.820 If you can remove the physical consequences of a bad act, does it cease to be bad?

00:40:54.480 Is there something within us?

00:40:55.880 And I obviously, I'm a Christian, and I believe there is.

00:40:58.200 Is there something within us that is damaged by immoral action?

00:41:03.760 And the evidence seems to be that there is, actually.

00:41:06.660 Well, actually, the evidence with regard to that is clear.

00:41:11.420 So let me lay it out.

00:41:13.260 The clinical evidence is clear.

00:41:15.480 Okay, so let's go down deep into the biological for a minute to sort that out.

00:41:20.460 Okay, so there's two fundamental strategies of reproduction among sexually reproducing creatures.

00:41:25.620 There's the zero parental investment strategy,

00:41:28.600 and there's the profound parental investment strategy on the two ends.

00:41:32.860 So fish and mosquitoes, by and large, are on the zero investment end.

00:41:38.740 What they invest is sperm and egg, and that's pretty much it.

00:41:42.860 And so, and what, the way those organisms manage that is they produce tens of thousands

00:41:48.880 or hundreds of thousands of copies of themselves and leave them to their own devices.

00:41:54.520 And almost all of them perish, but almost isn't the same as all.

00:41:59.360 And if you produce 100,000 offspring and only one survives, you're successful in replication.

00:42:06.440 Okay, on exactly the other end of the spectrum are human beings.

00:42:10.340 Because our offspring have the longest dependency period, period, by a long margin,

00:42:17.600 even compared to our immediate primate cousins.

00:42:20.720 And that's partly a consequence of our rapid or comparatively massive cortical expansion

00:42:27.820 and the need for extensive socialization.

00:42:30.800 We're a high investment species.

00:42:32.760 Okay, so now let's look within the realm of human attitudes towards reproduction.

00:42:38.180 There's a distribution.

00:42:40.680 There are those who engage, like mosquitoes, in short-term mating strategies.

00:42:46.680 And there are those who engage preferentially in long-term pair-bonded mating strategies.

00:42:54.260 Okay, now we could ask ourselves, what are the personality characteristics that go along with that?

00:43:00.780 Well, the clinical literature and the personality literature are clear.

00:43:04.080 Here are the predictors of short-term mating strategy preference.

00:43:10.120 Early onset criminality.

00:43:12.720 Familial history of antisocial behavior.

00:43:16.060 Psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism.

00:43:21.220 Right.

00:43:21.760 And it's worse than that.

00:43:23.280 Not only do those predict the proclivity and preference for short-term mating.

00:43:28.860 One night stands, let's say.

00:43:30.320 Sex only for pleasure in the absence of a relationship.

00:43:33.080 It's also the case that practicing that produces those personality characteristics.

00:43:40.360 And you can see why.

00:43:41.560 Because if the goal is that you're going to subordinate all things, including the possibility of any relationship whatsoever, to mere sexual pleasure,

00:43:51.140 you're now using the other person as an object for pleasure.

00:43:54.140 But you're also using yourself.

00:43:56.060 You're also training yourself in a form of psychopathy.

00:43:59.540 And so I don't even think this is debatable.

00:44:01.540 I think the evidence for this is, like I've known for 35 years, that one of the best predictors of criminal proclivity among teenagers is early and frequent sexual experience.

00:44:17.300 That's been known forever.

00:44:19.480 Forever.

00:44:19.920 No one debates it in the criminology domain.

00:44:23.760 And the same is exactly true in personality with regards to these dark, you know, sadism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism.

00:44:31.940 So for all the women who are listening, men too, for that matter, if you're out with a guy and his orientation is, you know, let's get it on, babe.

00:44:40.260 It's a one-night stand.

00:44:41.520 There's no more reliable marker of his untameable, primordial, malevolent beastliness than that.

00:44:51.140 Right?

00:44:51.660 And there's not a debate about that.

00:44:53.440 And it brings us back to where we started in a way.

00:44:56.160 I mean, this is the conundrum we're faced with in this scientific moment is can you solve the problems of being a human being without solving human beings, without getting rid of human beings themselves?

00:45:07.060 Because all of the things that we admire are very basic and yet in a civilized society have to be maintained in a civilized way.

00:45:16.440 And so this is, to me, the essential question we're looking at.

00:45:20.700 You know, we talk about what is a woman, which is an excellent question, but what is a human being and what exactly – we can't even begin, in my opinion – in my opinion, we're in this moment of great transition.

00:45:31.760 Not only is my generation passing away, but all kinds of world orders are passing away, and a new age is coming in.

00:45:40.200 And we're asked – we have to start with this question is, who are we trying to serve?

00:45:44.300 What is the creature that we're trying to build governments around, that we're trying to build communications around, that we're trying to build avenues of information around?

00:45:53.260 And I don't think the question is asked often enough.

00:45:56.760 What you have is the people at the top trying to solve problems with great, big, wonderful ideas in Davos.

00:46:02.420 They're going to have the great reset and so on.

00:46:04.420 And then, yeah, the people on the bottom are just saying, leave me alone and let me do what I want to do.

00:46:09.560 And obviously, somewhere between those people is the idea that kind of the American founders started out with is, what are people, what do they do right, what do they do wrong, and how do we not only control the people, but how do we control the people who control the people?

00:46:23.920 And I think we're back to those questions again.

00:46:26.360 And I fear that these – not the scientific worldview, but the scientistic worldview blinds us to certain things that people are and that may be ineffable.

00:46:39.040 I think everything has a physical analog, but it doesn't mean that that's its cause.

00:46:43.580 And you see this in, for instance, when we drug people for depression and they feel happier.

00:46:49.900 Are they happier?

00:46:50.460 And I think a lot of them are not, as shown by the fact that we now have a medicine for depression, and yet depression is spreading.

00:46:58.900 When you have a medicine for polio, polio goes down.

00:47:01.340 When you have a medicine for depression, it spreads.

00:47:03.260 And I think that's because we're not actually treating the depression.

00:47:06.600 I think most psychologists now agree with that.

00:47:09.640 Well, you know, one of the things that we're skirting around, in some sense, is the question of what limitations – like, the question of what defines a man or a woman or a human being is actually a question, in some sense, of boundaries and defining limitations.

00:47:27.260 Right.

00:47:27.620 Right.

00:47:27.800 Now, one of the ideas I've been wrestling with recently is that death makes things real.

00:47:34.180 You know, because one fundamental philosophical question is, well, what does it mean for something to be real?

00:47:41.520 And it seems to me that the hallmark of the real is death, is the finitude of existence.

00:47:47.900 Something can be so real that if you encounter it, it kills you.

00:47:50.760 And then, if that's true, if mortal limitation defines reality, it makes – let's walk through that.

00:48:01.960 Is something that threatens you with death serious?

00:48:05.560 Well, yes.

00:48:07.280 Right?

00:48:07.960 Right.

00:48:08.440 Death – now, it might not be the most serious reality, because I think you could make a case that something that threatens your soul is more real than something that threatens your life.

00:48:18.600 And I think if people understood that distinction, they would sacrifice their life to save their soul.

00:48:26.120 So, that's something we could talk about.

00:48:28.040 But in any case, the logic of the argument depends on accepting the proposition that what we take most seriously is what we regard as most real.

00:48:37.540 And certainly, those things that threaten us with death, we regard as most serious.

00:48:42.620 And therefore, are those things that help us define what is real.

00:48:48.920 I don't know if we transcended our mortal vulnerability, which is the dream of the transhumanists. 1.00

00:48:57.200 It seems to me that we would, instead of solving the problem of mortality, I think we would substitute a kind of soulless existence for life itself.

00:49:09.780 It's something like that, you know, because you might say, well, if you now can't be killed, if you're now an immortal creature, which, in principle, is the aim of, you know, of all of our striving to overcome our illnesses and our subjection to weakness, like, are you – is there anything in you that's now human?

00:49:33.240 Yeah, I think this is absolutely true.

00:49:36.460 And death not only makes things real, it actually gives us meaning.

00:49:40.080 You know, the poet John Keats said that life is the veil of soul-making.

00:49:44.440 And I think that the reason it's the veil of soul-making is death gives everything – all meaning, I think, comes from death.

00:49:51.980 Even the moment of love, the fact that it's precious, the fact that it passes, the fact that every moment passes, is what gives it such urgency and importance.

00:50:00.900 And one of the arguments I've heard against Christianity, against the Christian idea of eternity, is that where will the meaning come from?

00:50:08.360 And I think that's a solvable issue, obviously.

00:50:10.760 But still, here, now, we are dealing – it is death that gives our life meaning and is death in which we find the meaning of life.

00:50:19.700 There would be no purpose.

00:50:21.040 You know, I believe that if we – if we had no death, if we actually eradicated that, we'd get something like the end of the time machine, where those people are sitting around, you know, doing absolutely nothing and just kind of floating downstream.

00:50:33.900 Right.

00:50:34.100 And it looks like paradise, but in fact, it's hell.

00:50:36.900 And I think that that is – this is the thing that disturbs me so much about these superhero movies, is really when you take away the traits that make us human, death and sex, eros and thanatos, you've taken away the meaning of being human as well, and you leave us with virtually nothing.

00:50:54.280 And some of these transhumanists also become death worshipers because what they talk about is it'll be great when human beings are gone. 0.81

00:51:03.480 It's time for these meat sacks to get out of here and leave everything to AI. 0.71

00:51:08.860 There are people who believe that AI is more important than we are.

00:51:12.000 And for me, it's always the question of, like, why?

00:51:15.100 What consciousness does AI have?

00:51:17.840 What is precious about AI?

00:51:19.520 We're the ones who are precious precisely because we die, precisely because this moment and this internal life that I lead and that you have to assume I lead because you lead one too, that's where all of the meaning exists.

00:51:35.100 And the fact of your life is so urgent and sacred.

00:51:38.660 Well, right, right.

00:51:39.520 Well, the relationship between urgency and the sacred is definitely – it's a very close relationship.

00:51:46.300 And if you have infinite time, the question that immediately arises is, then why anything now, right?

00:51:54.720 And I think that's actually, in some ways, you might say even that that's one of the curses of plenitude and wealth, even – especially if it's unearned.

00:52:03.160 It's like, well, how much urgency does there have to be to drive you forward in a meaningful fashion?

00:52:09.460 You can think about this in terms, for example, of the effects of pornography.

00:52:13.480 You know, we know that young people are much less likely to couple than they were.

00:52:18.500 This is particularly pronounced in places like Japan and South Korea, where I think it's about one-third of the young people there under 30 are virginal.

00:52:26.220 And one of the questions you might ask yourself is, well, how much is the fractious but necessary long-term relationship-making between men and women driven by sexual urgency and scarcity, right?

00:52:45.240 And you see the same thing, if you're reasonably well-off financially, the same conundrum emerges with regards to your children, which is, well, how do you provide them with optimal deprivation, given that you could provide everything for them?

00:52:59.620 In which case, you become something like the, you know, the infinite mother that destroys their souls by providing them with so much care that there's absolutely no reason for them to ever get up and do anything.

00:53:12.880 I, that's, that's what I think this whole moment in history is about.

00:53:18.040 I mean, we do seem to be on the verge of solving so many problems, and yet you solve the problem that the solution is, is in some ways the problem.

00:53:26.200 And the idea of choice and the vastness of our choices and the lessening of the consequences of our choices actually threatens to strip us of the human being for whom those choices are made.

00:53:40.840 Right, right, exactly.

00:53:41.540 Yeah, and I, and I think that's why the, the actual, you know, we have to return to those actual Aristotelian questions of who we are, what we are.

00:53:51.780 It's, it's a weird thing to be talking about in this moment when it seems like we're going to travel into space, we're going to travel into inner space, we can clone people, we can make people live forever.

00:54:00.920 But to me, it's the urgent question, and it's why the, it's why the ancients matter more than ever in, in this hyper-modern moment.

00:54:11.100 It, it really is, we really are reaching a branch in the road.

00:54:14.620 I think everybody can feel it coming, and it's, it's dispiriting to hear our leaders talking in these old-fashioned terms about what they're going to do and how they're going to solve our problems for us without really taking into account who we are and, and their, the responsibility of leaders to our happiness and to make our happiness possible and to make it possible for us to find our happiness, which we can only do on our own.

00:54:37.600 And this is, this is, this is something I think that makes it so important that we look upon the least of us with compassion.

00:54:48.400 You know, this is why you look upon the least of us with compassion, because they're us.

00:54:53.200 Because in the end, if we can't figure that out, we can't figure ourselves out.

00:54:58.220 It, it really is, it is amazing that people who are somewhat older than this generation,

00:55:06.200 recently I heard somebody after the October 7th attacks on Israel, I heard a Columbia student, a woman celebrating the slaughter in Israel and quoting Chairman Mao.

00:55:17.260 And I thought Chairman Mao was the worst mass murderer in human history.

00:55:21.400 I don't think anyone has ever racked up the body count that Chairman Mao has racked up. 0.77

00:55:26.260 And the ignorance that that entails, and the ignorance that entails spreads out to an ignorance of Shakespeare, of Plato, of the Bible. 0.93

00:55:34.340 You have to be totally ignorant in order to be quoting Chairman Mao as if he mattered morally.

00:55:40.480 And so I think that we've come to this moment when futurism makes it seem as if all of the wisdom that was piled up behind us is meaningless. 0.77

00:55:50.360 What did they know?

00:55:51.000 They didn't even know whether the sun goes around the earth or vice versa.

00:55:55.300 When in fact, they knew all the things that mattered because they were dealing with life at a much more basic level.

00:56:00.880 And without that basic understanding, the future is going to be a disaster.

00:56:05.280 So there's a scene in the story of Noah that's apropos in that regard.

00:56:12.340 So Noah is presented as a man wise in his generations, right?

00:56:17.940 So which means that for a man of his time and place, he was properly morally oriented, which is all that can be required, expected, even in the best possible case of any of us, with like vanishingly few exceptions.

00:56:36.060 So he's a good man and he attends to the warnings of his conscience and he shepherds his family and the human race for that matter through a complete bloody apocalyptic catastrophe, comes out on the other side, which in some ways is what every single one of our successful ancestors did, right?

00:56:58.280 To manage to negotiate through life with all its vicissitudes and leave progeny behind and leave behind the progeny who actually survived.

00:57:11.660 It's so unlikely.

00:57:13.260 So all of our ancestors are Noah to some degree.

00:57:16.200 Now, after he washes up on shore and the flood recedes, he plants a vineyard and proceeds to get rip-roaring drunk on the consequences, right, once it's all brewed up.

00:57:30.960 And he's lying in his tent, nakedness fully exposed, and his son Ham comes along and has a pretty good time poking fun at the old man, right? 0.60

00:57:41.420 And then he decides to get his brothers in on the joke, and he invites them to come and have a gander.

00:57:47.600 And instead of acting in a manner that's derisive toward their father, they back into the tent and they cover him up with a blanket.

00:58:00.560 And so, and then, but this is where the story gets serious, because the tradition that surrounds that story is quite clear.

00:58:06.880 The descendants of Ham are slaves, right? 1.00

00:58:13.200 And so what that means, as far as I'm concerned, and I think this is dead right, and it's relevant to what you were saying, is that you adopt a pose of moral superiority, derisive moral superiority to the past at your immense peril. 0.67

00:58:30.760 Because if you're foolish enough to presume that, for example, in your stunning ignorance and moral superiority, the Chairman Mao is a model, the probability that you're going to end up as a slave is 100%. 0.85

00:58:46.360 You're already a slave to the ideology. 0.99

00:58:50.500 You know, it's only by...

00:58:51.760 I have to tell you a wonderful story from my Hollywood days, because they made the Noah story into a movie with Russell Crowe, it was a big epic movie, and they completely changed God's motive, being Hollywood, they completely changed God's motive for destroying the world from sinfulness to being not environmental enough, so that they weren't being green enough.

00:59:12.400 But according to the producers, what the evangelicals complained about was that they showed Noah getting drunk.

00:59:21.940 And the poor Hollywood producers were left explaining to the religious Christians that, no, that was actually scriptural, that was actually in the Bible.

00:59:29.640 So piety of any kind is actually a way of blinding ourselves to what human beings are in both their decency and their wickedness.

00:59:40.060 And I actually think that this, I believe, you know, there's always been, especially in the, once the stage of science begins, there's always been this idea that you can find a single governing motivation for human behavior.

00:59:54.220 So you have Floyd and with all of us, yeah, and power and alienation and all this.

00:59:57.900 But I think one motivation that we completely forget about is the motivation to appear virtuous to oneself and others.

01:00:05.220 And I think that the knowledge of our brokenness, the knowledge of what we really are, is just intolerable to so many people.

01:00:13.500 And it's that that I think causes you to have both the pious Christian who couldn't care less about the person next to him and the guy in Davos who thinks he's going to, it's fine for him to make the decision.

01:00:27.320 Okay, well, you put your finger on something absolutely crucial there, I think.

01:00:31.920 So one of the things I've been exploring really in depth, especially in the last month, is the intersection between a biblical injunction and a gospel injunction.

01:00:46.380 So the biblical injunction is do not use the Lord's name in vain.

01:00:50.140 Now, people think that means don't swear, and that isn't what it means.

01:00:55.440 It isn't what it means.

01:00:56.720 It might mean that in some peripheral sense, because it is a warning against the careless use of God's name.

01:01:02.500 But what it really means is do not claim moral virtue, especially of the highest sort, for acts that are clearly self-serving.

01:01:13.780 Now, there's no more self-serving act than one that's narcissistic, by definition, because narcissism is the core of self-serving.

01:01:23.360 Okay, so a narcissistic act is one that elevates my moral virtue falsely.

01:01:29.320 Okay, so now then imagine the worst extent of that sin is for me to claim that my narcissistic motivations are actually done in the name of what's highest.

01:01:38.580 And that would be God in the case of the totalitarian religious zealot, and it would be compassion in the case of the modern left-leaning atheist who, you know, has basically made the goddess of mercy his or her unconscious God.

01:01:54.300 Okay, so now I can claim false moral virtue, and I can elevate my social status and my self-regard without commensurate effort, especially, and I can circumvent all the problems you just described, which is actually contending with the depth of my genuine misalignment and sin.

01:02:15.420 Okay, now that's echoed in the Gospels.

01:02:17.240 Like, Christ goes after the Pharisees in particular, as hypocrites, and so they're the religious types that you just described, the ones that parade their moral virtue.

01:02:28.760 They're the same as the bloody modern protesters, too, but the false butter-won't-melt-in-their-mouth evangelical types, and the zealots in the Islamic world, they're all of the same type.

01:02:42.400 They take this unearned moral virtue, they're acolytes of God, and they use that.

01:02:49.820 Christ accuses their praying in the marketplace, which is no different than protesting, to elevate their social status so that they have good reputation among men, which he also warns about, and so that they can occupy the highest seats in the synagogue.

01:03:04.700 And so, there's this terrible sin, and it's opposition to that sin that gets Christ crucified, right?

01:03:13.100 Because it's the Pharisees he really makes enemies of, and he says to them, he says, they worship the dogma of men as if it's the commandments of God, 0.81

01:03:20.680 and that they are the same people that would have killed the prophets whose words they purport to worship.

01:03:26.180 Like, they're vicious criticisms being put forward by Christ.

01:03:31.480 He makes terrible enemies out of the Pharisees, but what he is calling out is exactly what we see at Davos.

01:03:37.780 It's exactly that, this presumption that mere ideological purity and the claim to serve a higher power, 0.96

01:03:46.160 I'm saving the planet, is sufficient to pass for genuine, the genuine moral effort of hoisting your own goddamn cross, as it turns out, in a more fundamental sense, right? 0.81

01:03:58.740 It's a substitute for true moral effort. 0.56

01:04:01.740 It's true, and it brings us back, too, to the idea about sometimes solving the problem is the problem.

01:04:08.820 One of the wonderful things about the Enlightenment is it gave us all these systems that marshal human flaws for the good of all.

01:04:15.840 So you have capitalism, which is a wonderful economic system, and you have democratic republics, which elevate people to power ostensibly on merit and some kind of connection to the people.

01:04:28.380 But they don't eliminate the fact that the love of money is the root of all evil and power corrupts.

01:04:33.200 So what you now have is people who no longer have to confront the parasitical nature of their wealth because they can say,

01:04:40.200 oh, well, I created jobs, I created wealth, I spread the wealth.

01:04:42.940 But they still are corrupted in Seoul because they fall in love with money, which is a form of idolatry, and it does eat people away.

01:04:49.720 And you have people who are in power, whether through wealth or through election, who can say,

01:04:55.460 well, it's not like Henry V thinking all this is a ceremony.

01:04:59.360 I actually have been elevated by the people or by election, or I created Amazon.com, or I did something like that.

01:05:06.420 And yet that power is still corrupting.

01:05:09.420 So as we solve the problems, we still haven't eliminated the fact that the human being is a broken system.

01:05:15.000 It's a contradictory system, a system that actually is aiming.

01:05:18.400 But it was Oscar Wilde, I think, who said, we're all standing in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

01:05:24.820 And I think that that idea that we forget that we're standing in the gutter, because now we can actually say, you know, Tolstoy, you know, found God and he thought, oh, my God, I'm a parasite.

01:05:35.640 I'm living on the backs of the serfs.

01:05:37.580 But now you don't have to say that anymore.

01:05:39.460 And people, this is why I despise Ayn Rand, by the way.

01:05:43.040 This is why I just can't, I despise from the fact that she's a terrible writer.

01:05:45.780 I just can't stand this elevation of power and wealth to a state of virtue.

01:05:52.740 It's simply not.

01:05:53.880 It is power and wealth, and sometimes it's deserved, and sometimes it's used correctly by people who have virtue.

01:05:58.860 But it's not the virtue itself, and it can be incredibly destructive to the human soul.

01:06:04.360 Yeah, well, the reason that I've stayed as firmly as I've been able to in the psychological domain is because I don't believe that systemic alteration strikes to the core of the problem.

01:06:20.820 I've always, I've been concerned, I would say, my fundamental intellectual interest, it's not only intellectual, existential interest, is the issue of evil.

01:06:31.660 And I'm not really that interested in systemic evil, partly because I'm much more interested in actual individual motivation.

01:06:41.900 So I wanted to know, see, I wanted to know how I could be an Auschwitz prison guard.

01:06:48.620 But more than that, I wanted to know how I could be an Auschwitz prison guard and enjoy it.

01:06:53.980 And if you don't think that you are that person, you don't know much about people.

01:06:58.720 Now, that doesn't mean that there are some people.

01:07:00.740 There are some people who would be tilted more in the direction of the temptations and pleasures that being an Auschwitz guard would provide, right? 0.91

01:07:09.980 There are some people who are more temperamentally protected against that particular sinful root.

01:07:15.060 You know, it'd be very hard for someone who is hyper-compassionate to make that particular error.

01:07:20.480 They'd be much more likely to turn into a devouring mother, for example, and infantilize everyone. 1.00

01:07:25.900 But I was still very curious about how you erect barriers in your own soul to the blandishments of those who would provide for you an avenue to that kind of sadistic misuse of power.

01:07:40.940 And you might say, I'd never do that.

01:07:42.500 And I'd say, no, the opportunity for you to do that just hasn't presented itself.

01:07:47.220 And that might be because of your own inability, not your moral virtue.

01:07:51.600 You've just never managed to elevate yourself to a place where you have power over anyone else.

01:07:56.740 And that's not a virtue.

01:07:57.780 That's that weak man that we were talking about at the beginning of the discussion.

01:08:01.180 And that's also what, and this can segue us into the next part of this conversation maybe, that's actually also what got me interested in theological ideas, you know, because I became convinced that the fundamental issues that beset us are psychological, but that the fundamental psychological issues are indistinguishable from the theological.

01:08:23.920 And so, because I think the battle against evil, and I do believe in the reality of evil, the battle against evil is fundamentally fought in the soul.

01:08:37.340 And so, now you have had a long journey towards a relatively elaborate faith, and it's not the faith that you were born into.

01:08:47.500 Right.

01:08:47.760 And so, do you want to walk us through that a bit?

01:08:50.760 And I'd like to know, like, what were the steps?

01:08:54.800 How did this come about?

01:08:56.000 I'd also like to know how it dovetailed with your fiction writing in particular.

01:09:01.800 Because I think of the theological as like meta fiction, you know?

01:09:05.840 Yeah, it created actual problems in how to write natural fiction.

01:09:09.240 For a while, I wandered into fantasy writing because it was the only way I could express the new level of reality that I was seeing.

01:09:17.380 But ultimately, I found that very unsatisfying because I feel that God is God of the real world.

01:09:21.960 I feel, you know, he's not a fantasy God.

01:09:23.940 He's not, and he's not God of Candyland.

01:09:25.800 He's God of this world.

01:09:26.960 Since I was baptized at the age of 49, it's kind of a long story, so I don't want to go into it.

01:09:31.460 That's okay.

01:09:32.360 That's okay.

01:09:33.220 We'll lay it out because I'm very curious about, and I think it'd be helpful for the listeners.

01:09:37.240 Well, when I was in college, the first wave of the postmodernists were coming on, and we were starting to hear about relativism and the disjunction of language with meaning and all of these things.

01:09:51.680 And I guess I was 19 years old, and I read Crime and Punishment.

01:09:56.340 When was this?

01:09:57.380 What year was that?

01:09:58.780 See, of 19, it would have been 73.

01:10:02.480 73.

01:10:03.200 Okay, so now I'm situated in time.

01:10:05.060 You read Crime and Punishment.

01:10:06.280 Oh, that'll do the trick.

01:10:07.560 Yeah, exactly.

01:10:09.580 And, you know, here's this scene of a man who, and, you know, Dostoevsky was writing before Nietzsche, but he actually, Dostoevsky, I believe, was an actual prophet, and he actually prophesied what Nietzsche was going to say.

01:10:22.220 He saw those ideas coming.

01:10:24.540 And so you have this scene in a novel where a man takes an ax, not just to the pawnbroker who is bedeviling him,

01:10:31.220 but to his retarded, her retarded sister, and kills in just a scene of incredible innocence and evil, kills a woman who can't think straight and just looking at him with this blank look. 0.96

01:10:48.080 And I thought, you know, you know, there is no way this is not an evil act.

01:10:53.780 And I think that's Dostoevsky's point.

01:10:55.420 There is no construct that you can have.

01:10:57.380 And this, to me, is the only leap of faith I ever took.

01:11:00.720 The only leap of faith I ever took in my journey to Christianity was saying that there is something that is evil and, therefore, something that is good or not evil.

01:11:10.160 Whether or not every single person in the world thinks so and whether or not you can convince yourself it's not, it remains evil.

01:11:18.520 And that means that our physical actions and our mind is linked to a level of meaning above the natural, which is what I mean when I say supernatural.

01:11:28.940 I don't mean, like, magical things happening.

01:11:30.440 Do you mean transcendent?

01:11:32.100 Transcendent, yes.

01:11:33.000 And it transcends the natural and the physical.

01:11:36.760 And so for that to be true, first of all, that moment when that murder happens in that book inoculated me to the blandishments of postmodernity.

01:11:45.820 So when I read, if you read the mad scene in Hamlet, Hamlet goes through, walks through all of the ideas in postmodernity.

01:11:55.040 He says, well, I'm reading, what are you reading?

01:11:56.980 I'm just reading words, words, words, as if the words were disjointed from meaning.

01:12:00.820 He says, nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

01:12:03.820 Right, right.

01:12:04.520 And the only thing about that is Shakespeare, the great, said, was showing to you that Hamlet is pretending to be mad.

01:12:13.400 He knows that the things that he's saying are mad, but the professors who were coming into my university didn't know it.

01:12:19.220 They actually thought what they were saying was sanity.

01:12:22.660 And I think what Shakespeare was saying was they really did know, but they were saying it anyway because the logic was following it that way.

01:12:29.200 For other darker motivations, right?

01:12:31.720 Because it allows for a complete abdication of responsibility and a descent into responsibility-less hedonism.

01:12:38.400 That comes along with it.

01:12:40.260 There's no way around that.

01:12:41.980 That's right.

01:12:42.280 That's why the Marquis de Sade is also a standard bearer of the Enlightenment rationalists.

01:12:47.980 And he predicated the rules.

01:12:48.620 And Dostoevsky knew that.

01:12:50.240 I mean, the thing that's so remarkable about crime and punishment, you pointed to one of the things.

01:12:54.500 It was certainly my investigations into what had happened in Nazi Germany and in worse places even, the horrors that were perpetrated.

01:13:05.380 If you can read about those and you can imagine human beings doing that and you don't regard that as evil, I don't want to be anywhere near you.

01:13:16.480 That should wake you up.

01:13:18.660 Oh, God, if that doesn't wake you up.

01:13:21.660 And I think this is so interesting that you had a very similar experience.

01:13:25.040 I think Sam Harris had a very similar experience, by the way, too, because he's been obsessed by the issue of evil as well.

01:13:31.880 Evil is something so palpable that if you face it, then you will become, you'll either become convinced of its reality or there is no hope for you.

01:13:42.940 That's right.

01:13:43.580 That's right.

01:13:43.880 So that happened with crime and punishment for you, eh?

01:13:47.260 That's so interesting.

01:13:48.140 It did, but because of my milieu, because I was a secular Jew in coastal cities in the artistic world, I was a novelist, I was dealing with sophisticated people, the idea of believing in God unironically, or even beyond the Jungian, well, you can't tell whether this is a delivered meaning or a real meaning, that idea was absolutely closed to me.

01:14:12.700 I couldn't reach it.

01:14:13.420 So I spent many years struggling with the postmodernists in my novels, the themes of my novels, or how could you tell what was real?

01:14:20.780 I'm writing thrillers, but there were thrillers about the nature of reality, the inability of theory to contain reality.

01:14:25.800 And so I was struggling with that, and I was beginning to realize that you simply could not get to moral reality without some idea of an ultimate good, and that that ultimate good had to be a personal good, because there is no good without choice, without consciousness, without morality.

01:14:44.560 So I was beginning to understand.

01:14:45.940 Maybe without relationship, which is why, well, it's so interesting, because one of the things that happens in the Old Testament is this weird insistence that our fundamental relationship with reality must and should be covenantal.

01:15:02.520 So it's actually a relationship that's best construed.

01:15:05.980 Well, and then you think, okay, let's think about that for a minute.

01:15:09.180 Okay, so what's a human being?

01:15:11.180 Well, a human being is a personality.

01:15:13.880 Now, if a personality can function in the world, like a personality exists in relationship, that's like the definition of a personality.

01:15:24.000 And so if it's our personality that enables us to survive, to exist, then in what possible manner is our relationship with the world not covenantal in the final analysis?

01:15:38.160 Like, I can't see a way out of that.

01:15:41.160 And so that means there's a personal element to it that's relationship-like.

01:15:45.500 It's not like we stand as dead objects in relationship to a set of dead facts.

01:15:52.000 That's not how it works.

01:15:53.240 You know, this is why, to me, if there's such a thing as the most profound moment in all of literature, it's Moses confronting the burning bush, because he's confronting what's a symbol of the creation and destruction of the world.

01:16:05.820 Things are born and they die.

01:16:07.440 They grow and they're consumed, but they never end.

01:16:10.460 And it says to him, I am.

01:16:13.100 I am.

01:16:13.800 It says that this is a person speaking to him.

01:16:16.600 Right.

01:16:16.980 The fact that that is happening.

01:16:18.560 Yes.

01:16:18.820 And the fact that it's happening between a consciousness, Moses's, and this object, which is the universe, essentially, in small, makes it impossible to know whether it's in that relationship that it becomes I am, which is kind of what Jung, I think, was talking about, the uncertainty of that.

01:16:34.160 But it also sort of says, more in an Aquinas point of view, that if you accept this on faith, you will then contain it.

01:16:43.160 It will then become part of what you see.

01:16:45.120 Well, there's more in the Moses story than that, too, which is absolutely crucial, you know, because up to that point, Moses is an escapee from Egypt.

01:16:56.240 He's essentially a wanted criminal, and he's a shepherd.

01:17:00.220 Now, he's doing all right as a shepherd, and he's made a good relationship with his father-in-law, and he's got a couple of wives, like he's got a normal life.

01:17:07.600 But then he has that encounter with the ground of being, right, that beckons to him, and he pursues it deeply, and then the voice of being itself speaks to him.

01:17:16.900 But then the next thing happens, that's when God charges him with the responsibility and the ability to stand up against tyranny and to oppose slavery, right?

01:17:28.700 So now, all of a sudden, because Moses has made that connection with being itself, he now becomes the person who can genuinely lead.

01:17:37.220 And then he says to God, it's like, well, you're charging me with this, and this is revealed to me, but I don't even know how to speak.

01:17:45.240 And God says, yeah, that's your problem, buddy.

01:17:48.860 And that's so interesting, because it's so interesting.

01:17:53.220 So Moses has now delved deep into something, some interest that beckoned to him, and he's confronted the fundamental reality of being itself, and that's transformed him.

01:18:03.300 And now he's left with the aftermath of that, which is he has to figure out how, as the flawed person he is, unable even really to speak,

01:18:12.240 because Moses has some impediment in his ability to communicate.

01:18:16.120 He still is charged with the moral obligation, like your superhero characters, or like Philip Marlowe, like your heroes, to stand up against tyranny and to oppose slavery.

01:18:26.980 And, you know, it's an open question for all of us, especially if we're concerned with authoritarianism, or licentious hedonism, for that matter.

01:18:34.580 It's like, what is it that transforms us into the sort of person who has the moral fortitude to stand up against that?

01:18:42.360 And it is something like the establishment of a relationship with the ground of being itself.

01:18:47.320 If you have that burning inside you, nothing is more frightening than losing that relationship.

01:18:55.800 Nothing.

01:18:56.120 And it also gives you the idea that because you can communicate with it, you can become like unto it.

01:19:03.360 You can move into that image of God within you that is your essential personality that we all know we've fallen short of.

01:19:11.100 Right, right, right.

01:19:12.140 What happened to me, and this is kind of interesting because it goes back to the Marquis de Sade, is I came to a point where the logic of God became unavoidable.

01:19:26.540 But on almost the same moment, and maybe for similar reasons, though, I think they were much more deeply personal and connected to my past, I had a crack up.

01:19:35.320 I went nuts, and I found a psychiatrist who was recognized as one of the greats, and what I now consider to be a literal miracle, he cured me.

01:19:48.200 I went from being a suicidal, delusional, hypocontriacal, paralyzed human being to being one of the more joyful people I know.

01:19:58.340 It was insane. 0.93

01:19:59.180 I mean, this transformation was entire and insane.

01:20:02.560 When was this?

01:20:03.460 When was this?

01:20:04.300 I was about 28 when I cracked, and by the time I was 30, I was on the way out.

01:20:09.760 I was on the way back, and by the time I was 32, I was fine.

01:20:14.600 So what happened?

01:20:16.380 What were the precedents of the dissent?

01:20:21.220 I'm sorry, say that again.

01:20:22.900 What caused the dissent?

01:20:24.560 What caused the breakup?

01:20:25.820 What caused your breakup?

01:20:27.400 I mean, I had a child.

01:20:30.880 My wife and I had a child.

01:20:32.020 I was absolutely, as I am to this day, madly in love with my wife, and that was one of the things that kept me alive.

01:20:37.840 And we had a child, and I couldn't make a living doing what I wanted to do.

01:20:43.660 I knew I had a genuine talent for what I wanted to do, and I was absolutely a complete failure.

01:20:49.980 I'd published a book.

01:20:50.880 It had sold no copies.

01:20:52.220 I had nowhere to go.

01:20:53.460 I was just getting my writing, which is based on the tough guy writers.

01:20:58.060 It was crystal clear, pellucidly clear.

01:21:00.660 It had become impenetrable, even if not to know what I was saying.

01:21:03.680 So I was unable to make a living.

01:21:06.040 I was unable to proceed in my profession, and I just broke, and I had all kinds of psychological problems in getting to the place where I could act in the world.

01:21:16.920 And here's the interesting thing.

01:21:19.300 I mean, the guy who cured me was a, I would call him a neo-Freudian, and Freud was an atheist.

01:21:27.000 And so I began to feel that, up until then, the question of God, I was kind of, you know, I was agnostic.

01:21:33.560 How can you possibly know, and how can you, you know, why would you have faith?

01:21:37.180 Why can't you just go in uncertainty?

01:21:39.320 The burden of uncertainty had a certain nobility to me.

01:21:42.560 But at this point, I thought, well, maybe I should become an atheist.

01:21:44.620 And so I started to read atheist philosophers, and one of them was the Marquis de Sade.

01:21:49.700 And he was the only atheist philosopher to this day, maybe Foucault.

01:21:53.860 He was the only atheist philosopher who made sense to me.

01:21:57.140 Everybody else, I thought, you know, you cannot maintain a moral stance and be an atheist.

01:22:01.520 You can be a moral person and be an atheist, because you're basically what Nietzsche said, you're living in the shadow of a dead god.

01:22:06.820 Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

01:22:08.400 But you can't make, you can't be moral and make sense.

01:22:11.020 You can't be internally consistent.

01:22:11.840 Yeah, yeah, well, Raskolnikov had figured that out, or Dostoevsky had figured that out.

01:22:16.440 You know, he, and he, that's one of the things that's so absolutely powerful about that novel,

01:22:20.820 is that Dostoevsky was such a genius, right, because he set Raskolnikov up with every metaphysical reason to commit the crime,

01:22:29.680 every personal reason to commit the crime, right, every opportunity to commit the crime,

01:22:35.520 and then he commits the crime, and he gets away with it.

01:22:39.640 Like, it's perfect.

01:22:40.660 And then all, and then everything collapses around him, because it turns out that he does violate this intrinsic moral order.

01:22:47.400 There is no such thing as the perfect crime, even though he could have got away with it.

01:22:51.500 He ends up killing someone innocent, which is an inevitable consequence of starting to wander down that road, right?

01:22:59.200 Dostoevsky had all of that.

01:23:00.540 He's the perfect counter-enlightenment thinker, because he does, he does exactly, as you're suggesting,

01:23:08.300 he does exactly what the Marquis de Sade does.

01:23:11.040 He says, oh, I see.

01:23:12.620 So there's no final arbiter.

01:23:14.680 Oh, I see.

01:23:15.560 That really means I can do whatever I want.

01:23:19.380 Yes, yes.

01:23:20.300 Right.

01:23:20.520 He used to stand in front of a painting by Hans Holbein of the dead Christ,

01:23:25.480 in which Christ is buried.

01:23:26.740 He's in his coffin, and he's looking through the earth at him.

01:23:29.080 And he's so entirely dead.

01:23:32.680 Dostoevsky loved the painting, because he thought it was the best argument against Christianity, 0.90

01:23:36.100 and he wanted to confront it.

01:23:37.780 And that's why he gets such wonderful arguments in Brothers Karamazov,

01:23:41.700 because he confronted all the hardest arguments.

01:23:44.220 Oh, yeah.

01:23:44.740 Oh, yeah.

01:23:45.000 So that was my leap of faith.

01:23:46.560 I read the Marquis de Sade, and I thought, that's right.

01:23:48.700 He's absolutely right.

01:23:49.660 If there is no God, this is the world of sadomasochism, of torment, of torture for pleasure.

01:23:56.160 That looks like hell to me, and I am going to go home.

01:23:59.080 By another way, I'm turning around, and I'm just going—that was my leap of faith.

01:24:02.780 My leap of faith was—

01:24:03.560 Why do you think you reject it?

01:24:05.380 Why did you reject it?

01:24:06.700 Because look what's happening now.

01:24:08.420 You know, we have this weird marriage of licentiousness and power, mad striving,

01:24:14.140 and they go together by necessity, because there's no licentiousness without an accompanying tyranny,

01:24:19.900 because someone has to mop up the responsibility.

01:24:22.540 But then you might say, but you might say, like Raskolnikov did, 1.00

01:24:26.980 you might say, like the pleasure worshipers do, it's like, you know, fuck it. 1.00

01:24:31.400 Nothing matters. 1.00

01:24:32.700 Why shouldn't I just pursue my whim?

01:24:36.460 Why should I make that my identity?

01:24:38.180 Because all these identity crises that we're seeing now are nothing but the elevation of whim to the highest possible place.

01:24:45.860 Right, why aren't I identical with my momentary sexual proclivity, fluid though it may be?

01:24:53.160 You know, like that's a real question, right?

01:24:55.220 And what do you put in—

01:24:56.240 Okay, so why did you decide not to—I mean, you've got the logic for it now.

01:25:02.320 You accept the conclusions that Desaad put in front of you, but you rejected that,

01:25:08.200 like you rejected Raskolnikov's triumph to some degree.

01:25:11.820 Why do you think you rejected it?

01:25:13.700 You know, my only answer to this is what I consider to be Jesus's hardest saying.

01:25:18.760 He says, to them who have, it will be given, and to them who have not, even what they have will be taken away.

01:25:23.780 Something was inside me that looked at that.

01:25:27.040 And, you know, I thought, you know, it's pornography.

01:25:29.480 He wrote his philosophy in sadomasic pornography.

01:25:32.440 Some of it was kind of a turn-on.

01:25:33.560 I thought it was kind of exciting.

01:25:35.120 And yet, it horrified me.

01:25:37.800 It made me think, no, you know, I'm just—

01:25:40.280 It was just that thing.

01:25:41.860 There was something inside me that rejected that.

01:25:44.580 And I don't know.

01:25:45.660 You know, C.S. Lewis says, nobody knows any story but his own.

01:25:48.560 And I don't know if everybody has that thing inside him.

01:25:51.160 I really don't.

01:25:52.680 Oh, yes.

01:25:53.260 I think everyone—

01:25:54.680 I hope so.

01:25:55.240 I think—

01:25:55.960 Well, I don't think there's any difference between that and the essence of consciousness itself.

01:26:02.220 You know, and now I've thought about this a lot, you know, because I know, for example, that there are families where the tendency for the proclivity towards antisocial and psychopathic behavior is transmitted, and I know that there's a genetic proclivity for that.

01:26:18.200 Now, that doesn't mean a determinism, right?

01:26:20.800 And so, it's certainly the case that you could say, well, the constraints around our relationship with the good vary substantively from individual to individual.

01:26:33.040 But I don't think it matters in the final analysis, because it looks to me like this is the truth of the matter.

01:26:38.160 It's something like you're given your talents, and they differ widely from person to person.

01:26:45.200 But you're given your talents and your impediments, and those vary too.

01:26:51.780 But with every talent comes a corresponding impediment.

01:26:55.600 You know, you see this in the rich man, the story of the parable of the rich man, who has to give up everything that he has.

01:27:03.820 Now, you know, Christ doesn't tell him that there's something wrong with money.

01:27:07.920 What he says, he does an analysis.

01:27:09.980 The guy says, I'm miserable.

01:27:12.060 And Christ says, well, you know, are you doing the right thing?

01:27:14.660 Do you honor your parents?

01:27:15.840 Do you abide by the commandments?

01:27:17.500 Are you living a good life?

01:27:19.020 And the guy says, yeah, like, I seem to be a good guy.

01:27:22.500 I'm like, I'm checking off those boxes.

01:27:25.740 So I got the dogma thing going down.

01:27:27.960 I'm adhering to it. 0.97

01:27:29.200 And Christ says, and I think in some sorrow, it's like, well, you're screwed.

01:27:34.000 Like, you have to radically revalue your entire life.

01:27:37.080 And that probably means you have to give up everything that you've accrued, because it's not working for you.

01:27:41.940 And the disciples themselves, they say in the aftermath of that, they say, oh, well, if that's the price of salvation, no one will pay it.

01:27:51.140 So it's not a point to the fact that the money itself is, the money itself in and of itself is the problem.

01:27:58.860 And the parable of the unjust steward also makes that crystal clear, because Christ says directly that often the people who are just pursuing money are wiser and more moral than those who claim dogmatic moral virtue.

01:28:13.600 Right?

01:28:13.840 So that's crystal clear.

01:28:15.420 But it is a question.

01:28:17.920 I mean, you know, think of the blessings I did have in my life, a chief among them, a wife I loved so dearly and who loved me back and a profession I loved.

01:28:28.500 I mean, I love to write and I love beauty.

01:28:30.760 I still, I'm still a kind of beauty monger.

01:28:33.420 I love culture and the things that are, that work and sing.

01:28:36.600 And so I had so many things to turn away from, that caused me to turn away from ugliness and cruelty, that maybe it simply was life, enough life experience to do that.

01:28:46.520 I was not, I was a young man in many ways, but I was not chronologically young.

01:28:51.200 I was 30 already.

01:28:52.300 And, and I think it just made me turn back.

01:28:54.500 Well, you had, well, that also says that you had higher order forms of even pleasure, let's say, beckoning to you, you know, that affiliation with beauty. 0.96

01:29:05.100 That's a good counterposition to the most aimless form of idiot, sadistic hedonism because it's a higher form of pleasure. 0.95

01:29:12.880 You know, it's like Jocko Willink discovering the pleasure of mentorship as opposed to the pleasure of domination. 0.99

01:29:18.860 You know, I mean, there's something to be said for being able to pound someone out, you know, it beats the hell out of being weak and useless. 0.60

01:29:25.400 Getting pounded out, yeah. 0.54

01:29:27.060 Well, well, absolutely, absolutely.

01:29:29.400 And, and then you also said, you also, and you pointed to this a couple of times in our conversation, you also talked about the love that you still had, had and still have for your wife.

01:29:39.580 And so what role did that capacity for love and that experience of love, especially within the bounds of a committed relationship, what role did that have in orienting you and guiding you like through that period of misery, but even later than that?

01:29:55.560 And why do you think that's still alive for you?

01:29:58.460 Well, it has, it has a, a double role.

01:30:00.720 I mean, one is, of course, love is civilizing and it just is a, a, a wonderful pleasure.

01:30:07.320 As you say, it's a higher pleasure.

01:30:08.880 But the other thing about my wife was that I picked her up hitchhiking and I wasn't even driving a car. 0.88

01:30:14.100 She was a very, very beautiful woman.

01:30:15.940 And she was hitchhiking and I thought, I've got to go get my car.

01:30:18.480 And I ran up to get my car and drove around the block at 50 miles an hour so I could get to her before anybody else. 0.87

01:30:23.900 She sat down in my car.

01:30:26.820 That's a very creepy beginning.

01:30:29.660 In those days, it wasn't as creepy in those days.

01:30:31.820 No, no, that's, that's true.

01:30:32.980 No, no, absolutely.

01:30:33.920 Absolutely.

01:30:34.420 It definitely wasn't.

01:30:35.640 But she sat down in the car and the experience was exactly like if you've ever done a jigsaw puzzle and you've been looking for a piece for 20 minutes without finding it.

01:30:44.380 And then you find it and it goes in, it's this very quiet sense of, ah, you know.

01:30:49.480 And the fact that I recognize that and now it's many years later, at least 10 years later, and I'm still absolutely romantically head over heels with her, meant to me that I was capable of perceiving a spiritual reality honestly.

01:31:06.840 Right, right, right, right.

01:31:08.760 So this is one of the problems I've always had with the postmodernists.

01:31:11.400 They talk about the meaninglessness of language, but I understand what they're saying.

01:31:15.780 And so obviously, except with Derrida, who had the integrity to write absolute gibberish, they actually are disproving their own point.

01:31:24.560 And they talk about basically the fact that we can't know anything, but we can.

01:31:29.160 We can know if I go north, I get to Canada.

01:31:31.800 If I go south, I get to Mexico.

01:31:33.320 We can't know anything purely by words.

01:31:36.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:31:37.340 That's right.

01:31:38.020 And so I really did have some kind of trust in myself.

01:31:42.460 I simply could not break through my milieu, which was so default, at least agnostic and really atheistic.

01:31:49.540 Right, right, right, right.

01:31:50.780 The funny thing is that after – the other thing about this too, by the way, is being a bit of a tough guy, I thought that in my misery, when I cracked up, to embrace God, even though it was logical, was a crutch.

01:32:05.160 Right.

01:32:05.340 Right, right, right, right.

01:32:05.960 So how would I know whether I had embraced him in reality or just because I wanted to get out of this incredible pain I was in?

01:32:13.040 And so I couldn't do it.

01:32:14.740 And when, years later, I was now a very happy person, my career took off, everything started to go right, I still had that logic.

01:32:24.860 And something else was true as well, which is that I had been a real Freudian.

01:32:30.580 I had grown up in that real core of the Freudian world where all the art stank because everybody was trying to prove your mother was to blame for everything and all that.

01:32:37.780 And I didn't come to feel that what Freud said was utter nonsense.

01:32:43.180 I came to feel that the details of what he said were utter nonsense.

01:32:46.900 That the structure of the relationship between a therapist or a mentor and a client or, you know, a son or a friend or whatever.

01:32:56.160 I thought he got a lot of that quite right.

01:32:59.360 The idea of transference and all this, which made me feel that all of the insights I had had in therapy that I thought were salvific had not been.

01:33:09.100 And what had been salvific was the loving relationship I had had with this older man who had taken the place of a father who had not been very helpful.

01:33:17.640 And it was actually the love that had saved me.

01:33:22.740 And I began to believe that psychology is largely—

01:33:24.520 Well, that's relationship again, eh?

01:33:26.660 Yep, yep.

01:33:27.680 And it made me feel that psychology is a story, that stories give us the ability to take the ineffable and move it around a little bit.

01:33:34.940 Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely.

01:33:37.200 Right, and so you split up things that are actually unified into pieces that you can move.

01:33:41.500 And that brought me back to God, and I ultimately, as an experiment—and it comes back to fiction again, how much I love fiction.

01:33:49.980 I was reading—I don't know if you've ever read the Patrick O'Brien novels.

01:33:53.440 They're just wonderful, seafaring adventure stories about the Napoleonic Wars.

01:33:58.240 They're absolutely brilliant.

01:34:00.040 Hmm, no, no, I don't know of them.

01:34:02.180 And in them, there's a very intellectual character named Maturin, who's an ugly little man, but very brilliant and kind of a spy.

01:34:09.300 And I kind of admired him and identified with him a little bit.

01:34:12.740 And there's just a scene—he's a Catholic—and there's a scene where he was falling asleep.

01:34:16.760 And the line is, he said a prayer and went to sleep.

01:34:19.060 And I was reading in bed, and I thought, well, if Maturin can say a prayer before he goes to sleep, so can I.

01:34:27.120 And I just thanked God for the journey I had come out of, this horrible darkness that I thought was the end.

01:34:34.200 I thought I was going to kill myself.

01:34:35.680 Instead, I had come out, and here I was now.

01:34:38.380 I had two children.

01:34:39.060 My career was great.

01:34:40.020 I was so happy to be with my beloved wife.

01:34:42.820 I was living in a wonderful place.

01:34:44.600 And I thanked God, and it changed my life.

01:34:47.260 I woke up the next morning, and everything was brighter.

01:34:51.180 Everything was clearer.

01:34:52.480 The details of life—I called it—I christened it the joy of my joy, because I realized up until then, I had been happy.

01:35:00.640 That's the definition of gratitude, man.

01:35:03.240 Yeah.

01:35:03.500 So, there's three things you pointed to there that we should take apart.

01:35:08.500 Maybe we can close with this.

01:35:09.760 So, the first is, you know, one of the primary Freudian accusations—and Marx did this, too—was that religion was just a, what would you say, a shield against death anxiety.

01:35:20.280 You know, or a sop for the victimized poor, right?

01:35:25.140 So, that would be Marx.

01:35:26.020 But Freud, a little bit more trenchant.

01:35:28.220 It's like, well, it's a shield of meaning the weak used to protect themselves against the ultimate reality of pointless death, right?

01:35:35.480 And people like Ernest Becker made much of that in his Denial of Death, which is actually really a great book, even though it's fundamentally wrong.

01:35:42.840 It's a great book.

01:35:43.520 But, you know, there's something really not wise about that perspective.

01:35:49.480 So, and here's, like, here's three arguments against that from someone who really admires Freud, by the way.

01:35:56.500 First of all, if that was the case, why bother with hell?

01:36:00.300 Because hell—medieval people were as scared of hell as modern people are of death.

01:36:06.740 The evidence for that's clear.

01:36:08.220 And you might say, well, hell was just a convenient place to put your enemies.

01:36:11.740 It's like, no, no, that's not a good analysis.

01:36:16.560 So, if it's just a death anxiety shield, then, you know, why decorate it with this terrible moral obligation and the reality of hell?

01:36:24.160 So, that's a big problem for that theory.

01:36:26.660 And then you have two other problems, which is, well, you're supposed to hoist your cross as a Christian believer.

01:36:34.740 And there literally isn't anything worse than that, by definition.

01:36:39.340 Because it means you have to stand up to the mob, even if they're your brothers, that you have to forsake your family in pursuit of ethical truth, right?

01:36:48.600 That you have to suffer torment, physical and metaphysical, and that you have to face the reality of hell itself.

01:36:56.120 It's like, sorry, guys, that is not a defense against death anxiety.

01:37:01.280 Not least because I think you can make a very powerful case that confronting malevolence is worse than confronting death.

01:37:09.040 Yes.

01:37:09.540 Like, I've watched—we know this because people are rarely traumatized by a brush with death.

01:37:16.680 And they are routinely traumatized by a brush with malevolence.

01:37:21.520 So, even on those grounds, you can see that the reality of evil is more trenchant and salient than the reality of death.

01:37:29.260 So, that Freudian argument, that it's just—it's just not right.

01:37:33.100 It's not—he got that wrong.

01:37:35.120 This is where Freud indulges in quackery a little bit.

01:37:38.460 He's interviewing, you know, 20 hysterical Victorian Viennese, and he decides that God is a projection of the Father.

01:37:45.580 And he says it very definitively.

01:37:47.500 And you think, like, hey, you're welcome to your opinion.

01:37:49.420 But it really—what you're talking about, to me, is like saying that you believe in bread to forestall the fear of hunger.

01:37:56.860 You know, C.S. Lewis points out that we don't have any desires that don't have an answer.

01:38:01.660 All our desires have an answer.

01:38:03.860 In fact, in the world, everything that we hunger for is actually there.

01:38:08.220 And this is one of my problems with the evolutionary biologists who think that they can trace the creation of morality.

01:38:17.080 And my point about that is it's like saying that because I have eyes, I've invented light.

01:38:23.380 You know, I've invented the human experience of light, perhaps, but not light itself.

01:38:27.760 And it's the same thing with the moral sense that we have.

01:38:29.980 You can say it's a result of evolution.

01:38:32.480 That's fine.

01:38:33.400 But it's a result of evolution, like the I, in relationship to something that exists, which is the moral order.

01:38:39.040 And I think that these arguments really do fall apart once you begin to have a realistic view of God and not the sort of happy, you know, yellow face with a smile on it.

01:38:49.920 Right, right, right, right.

01:38:51.320 So much.

01:38:51.880 Right.

01:38:52.700 And I have to tell you that weeks after my baptism, my wife, who now knows me to my foot souls, turned to me and she said, you are such a different person.

01:39:06.260 You are just filled with joy and relaxation.

01:39:09.820 And knowing God has been joy on joy for me, I have to tell you.

01:39:14.060 So this is one of the least quoted lines in the gospel is Jesus said, I'm telling you things so that my joy will be in you and your joy will be complete.

01:39:23.660 And somehow religion manages to turn this into this tormented struggle with your sexual desires or whatever.

01:39:30.400 But no, I actually do think this journey toward the self that you were made to be is a very joyful journey.

01:39:37.260 And every time you take a step on it, your joy and by joy, I don't mean happiness.

01:39:40.260 I don't mean, again, that smiley face.

01:39:41.660 I mean, what the poets write, Christo, you know, the vitality of life.

01:39:46.420 And that, like in love, the only evidence for love is over time.

01:39:53.460 Experience over time is the evidence for love.

01:39:55.760 And I think that's true of God, too.

01:39:57.180 Ultimately, there's no proof of God.

01:39:59.320 There's only experience over time as you get to know him and it develops in your life.

01:40:04.640 And I highly recommend it.

01:40:07.140 That's all I can say.

01:40:08.860 Well, I think that's an excellent place to close.

01:40:10.840 It's a timely place to close.

01:40:12.320 I think one of the things that we could discuss on the Daily Wire Plus side for all of you who might be inclined to join us there is I'd like to talk to you a little bit more about the overlap between evolutionary views and potential religious views because I think there's something interesting there.

01:40:27.200 And I'd like to talk probably a little bit more about this idea of gratitude and joy and how those things are linked together.

01:40:34.260 So if you're interested, everyone watching and listening, if you're interested in continuing this discussion, you could do that on the Daily Wire Plus side.

01:40:40.540 We'll talk for another half an hour.

01:40:42.020 In the meantime, thank you very much for sitting down and talking to me for 90 minutes.

01:40:46.880 We got deep into many of the things that I was hoping we would cover today.

01:40:50.900 And it was a pleasure getting to know you a bit better.

01:40:54.400 And thank you to everyone who's watching and listening for your time and attention and for the Daily Wire Plus folks who made this conversation possible.

01:41:03.600 We'll see you in a bit, Andrew, and bye, everybody else.

01:41:06.080 Thanks very much, Drew.

01:41:06.920 We'll see you in a minute.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 26, 2024

426. Sex, Death, & Storytelling ｜ Andrew Klavan

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