The Michael Knowles Show - “Sh＊t Cray” ｜ Jonathan Pageau

00:00:00.980 Well, we got to do shows over here so we can't keep talking.

00:00:04.060 I definitely didn't expect to talk about cannibalism.

00:00:22.840 Conservatives are very good at talking about truth.

00:00:27.040 We own the libs with facts and logic.

00:00:30.060 We're generally very good at that.

00:00:33.160 Conservatives are pretty good at talking about goodness,

00:00:37.320 the moral majority, the religious right, this is good, this is bad. 0.95

00:00:43.420 Conservatives are very, very bad at talking about that third transcendental beauty.

00:00:51.000 Here to help us speak about it a little more accurately and persuasively

00:00:55.560 is Jonathan Pajot, who is an artist, an iconographer, a man who eludes titles.

00:01:04.320 Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on the show.

00:01:05.920 Thanks for having me.

00:01:06.720 It's great to be here.

00:01:09.300 Conservatives love to talk about true and false, boom, owned, statistic, fact, debunked.

00:01:17.840 Conservatives used to, at least, and to some degree still do,

00:01:20.420 like to talk about morality and ethics, and you should do this and you shouldn't do that.

00:01:25.560 In my lifetime, conservatives have just really ignored that third transcendental beauty.

00:01:34.200 Is it because beauty doesn't matter or is it because conservatives are just missing something?

00:01:39.080 I think they're not only missing something, but I think they're also missing the key to their project

00:01:44.660 because beauty is that which draws you into truth and goodness.

00:01:53.160 It is the possibility of the world, let's say, being transparent to something transcendent.

00:02:00.300 But we see that it's beauty that draws us in.

00:02:02.880 And so the fact that conservatives have been focusing a lot on economics, on, let's say, family values, all this stuff,

00:02:10.020 and ignoring beauty means that the other side has captured the world through using those means, let's say,

00:02:18.140 twisting them for sure.

00:02:19.680 But using the means of beauty has been the loss of the conservatives for sure.

00:02:24.000 Because if I'm trying to win someone over to my side of a political debate,

00:02:29.380 I guess I can make some logical, reasoned argument.

00:02:32.400 But that might elude a lot of people, or it might just turn people off, or they might just not be interested.

00:02:36.500 If I make a moral argument, a lot of people these days, when we're living in an age of materialism

00:02:42.920 and moral ignorance and idiocy, if you don't mind the bluntness, 0.66

00:02:48.340 that's probably not going to work very well either. 0.99

00:02:50.640 They'll turn to the big Lebowski argument.

00:02:53.400 They'll say, well, that's just like your opinion, man.

00:02:55.460 Who cares what morality is?

00:02:57.740 But if I show someone a picture of a beautiful sunset,

00:03:01.040 if I show someone a picture of the Sistine Chapel, the Duomo, or a beautiful mountain range,

00:03:07.200 it kind of bypasses the reason.

00:03:10.460 It kind of cuts right to the heart of someone.

00:03:13.560 The power of beauty seems much more widely accessible.

00:03:17.520 Exactly.

00:03:17.960 But it's also, I think, one of the issues we've had in, let's say, the last few centuries

00:03:24.700 is that there's been a movement, especially with the emphasis on reason,

00:03:28.640 there's been a movement where beauty or the appearances are always seen as something which

00:03:33.660 is tricking you, something which is lying, let's say.

00:03:36.840 And sometimes that's true.

00:03:38.840 And we see that a lot in advertisement.

00:03:41.080 And, you know, the modern media has a lot of that.

00:03:44.040 But there's a manner also in which, because we believe that the origin of truth and goodness

00:03:53.120 is that which creates the world.

00:03:56.180 It's that which makes the world.

00:03:57.340 Therefore, the world is made in a way that reflects that.

00:04:01.940 And that's beauty.

00:04:02.980 That's that exactly.

00:04:04.280 It's like that moment that cuts through everything, you know, where you're shaken in your body.

00:04:09.920 You know, it's not just about up here.

00:04:11.260 It's like your whole body participates when you walk into a beautiful building, especially.

00:04:16.140 You know, you feel overwhelmed with this sense of awe, right?

00:04:19.080 The hairs on your neck stand up and you feel like you're small and that you're in this amazing presence.

00:04:25.280 These are real.

00:04:26.600 They're not illusions.

00:04:28.540 These are real feelings.

00:04:29.820 And you can imagine, like even imagine in the Bible, you imagine, you know,

00:04:34.200 the Israelites coming up to the mountain and this mountain trembling and, you know,

00:04:37.880 the glory of God appearing on the mountain.

00:04:39.460 These are appearances.

00:04:40.900 These are things that are, let's say, seizing people.

00:04:45.220 And I think that we struggle with that, especially in North America, I would say.

00:04:51.580 You know, we do have a kind of cult of ugliness and also a cult of the banal is the best way

00:04:56.080 to think about it.

00:04:57.480 We love things that are banal.

00:04:59.140 We have the strip malls.

00:05:00.300 We have, you know, the electric wires.

00:05:02.160 We have these huge highways.

00:05:04.640 And so we've lost our sense of this pattern.

00:05:10.440 We've lost our sense of proportion.

00:05:13.200 And because of that, I think our souls are impoverished for that.

00:05:17.400 I totally agree with your point.

00:05:19.780 I was at a wedding in the south of France last year and I'm walking through these medieval 1.00

00:05:24.180 towns.

00:05:24.740 And I remember, I was even walking through Paris and my wife said, how come they get

00:05:29.260 this?

00:05:29.820 How come they get to have this and we don't get to have these beautiful things?

00:05:33.460 So I totally agree.

00:05:36.020 But why?

00:05:37.160 Why do we in particular have this cult of ugliness in North America?

00:05:41.120 I think it's because North America is really the product of the modern world.

00:05:46.640 It really is a modern country.

00:05:48.000 And it is founded on economic good, on economic progress, you know, on business.

00:05:54.060 These are the values that sustain us.

00:05:56.140 And so, you know, when we make these large, these huge glass towers, you know, that show

00:06:02.300 power and economic success, but they lack a connection to the transcendent that the older 1.00

00:06:08.860 buildings have.

00:06:10.160 So I really think that's what it is.

00:06:12.800 You know, we are very practical.

00:06:14.320 We make the best computers.

00:06:15.480 We make the best stuff, but that also has a corollary.

00:06:21.000 And there's also another aspect, which is that North American society in general has

00:06:26.400 moved away from community as being, let's say, the thing that binds us together.

00:06:31.520 And so because of that, urban planning has suffered tremendously.

00:06:35.260 You know, we've basically planned our cities based on cars.

00:06:39.060 And so that totally transforms the space.

00:06:41.380 Traditional towns are hierarchical in the way that they're structured.

00:06:46.360 So usually you'll have something like a church in the center.

00:06:49.680 It's the highest building, the tower.

00:06:51.580 Nothing is allowed to be higher than the church.

00:06:53.800 And everything is aligned towards that church.

00:06:57.420 So there's a sense in which the entire space, even the streets, the manner in which you walk

00:07:03.420 through has a human scale to it and has an orientation.

00:07:06.820 And you think, well, why does that make it beautiful?

00:07:09.480 But it's about orientation.

00:07:11.380 If you orient yourself properly, then things will lay themselves out almost naturally.

00:07:15.780 The beauty of a medieval village isn't planned.

00:07:18.560 It is this negotiation, this like organic negotiation of humans, you know, oriented towards the same

00:07:24.480 thing. 0.81

00:07:25.620 Our modern suburbs are monsters.

00:07:27.400 Like there are just these layouts of, you know, houses and houses and houses with no

00:07:33.000 center, no common project, nothing to bind us together.

00:07:37.000 And so we create, it's because of the car.

00:07:38.760 Like we create these huge shopping districts and then living districts.

00:07:42.740 And nobody even knows like where, you know, we don't have places to come together except

00:07:47.240 for maybe entertainment, sporting events, everything.

00:07:50.240 So it's a very deep, deep problem.

00:07:53.460 And it actually does start with architecture and urban planning.

00:07:55.940 And then everything kind of flows out of that where we're used to living in these inhuman

00:08:00.840 spaces.

00:08:02.720 And so because of it, we don't see beauty as a value that draws us together.

00:08:07.940 Here's where conservative, modern conservatives will push back too.

00:08:11.860 Because you're right.

00:08:13.200 I was thinking, I was walking around this town, Les Beaux in Provence.

00:08:16.580 And at the very tippy top of the town, there is the old church.

00:08:19.360 And it's a beautiful church.

00:08:20.260 And the whole rest of the town is kind of descending around that.

00:08:23.900 But a modern American conservative might say, well, I don't give a damn about that church.

00:08:30.160 Who are you to tell me that I can't build a building bigger than that church?

00:08:33.540 I'm going to build a skyscraper that's 10 zillion feet high.

00:08:36.320 And I'm going to fill it up with a bunch of bankers.

00:08:38.240 And I'm going to fill it up with a bunch of lawyers and a bunch of businesses.

00:08:40.940 And we're going to just make money, money, money.

00:08:43.080 And frankly, forget the office building for a second.

00:08:46.120 If I want to build my house 10,000 feet high, I'm going to do that too.

00:08:50.680 And you have no right to tell me otherwise.

00:08:53.660 Well, in the end, that might be true.

00:08:55.540 And that might be fine in the sense that, okay, yeah.

00:08:58.460 But then don't complain down the line when you see things falling apart.

00:09:02.380 And so don't complain down the line when you realize that everybody is doing their own thing

00:09:07.280 in terms of morality.

00:09:08.220 Everybody's doing their own things in terms of how they conceive of family,

00:09:11.920 how they conceive of what is good.

00:09:14.060 You know, all these things come together.

00:09:16.060 There's a reason why Plato has the three transcendentals.

00:09:18.780 It's because they actually are, you could say something like,

00:09:22.100 they're actually transparent manifestations of something infinite.

00:09:26.220 But you really need all three or else you can't have the other ones.

00:09:30.440 Or you can fight for the other ones, but they're slowly going to disintegrate.

00:09:33.600 It's difficult to hold that together.

00:09:35.740 But by the way, in the United States, there are counter movements.

00:09:39.860 And there are groups that are trying to think of the world differently.

00:09:45.080 And so there are some cities, for example, Charleston, South Carolina,

00:09:48.260 where there are many groups of developers and groups of architects

00:09:51.320 that are working to recreate human-sized cities.

00:09:55.640 So there's a neighborhood near Charleston called Ion,

00:09:58.760 where the developer built the whole neighborhood.

00:10:01.940 And the first thing he said is, we need a church, at least two.

00:10:05.220 So they've got two churches, and then they made everything human scale.

00:10:09.780 Like, the streets are narrow, so you have to wait for the other cars to kind of go.

00:10:12.900 And I'm hearing some conservatives, like, rip their hair out.

00:10:16.100 But there's something about, let's say, even how do you deal with the problem of cars?

00:10:20.120 If you have to slow down and you have to see the person in front of you

00:10:23.160 and negotiate a little bit all the time,

00:10:26.080 then the car doesn't become this, like, weird bubble that you're just alone in.

00:10:30.160 It becomes a space of relationship with others.

00:10:32.820 And that's really what we—so that's a way in which beauty can create community. 0.82

00:10:38.420 Making something more human-scale and beautiful is actually encouraging community.

00:10:42.760 Now, I can't help but notice the conversation keeps coming back to religion.

00:10:46.740 We didn't start it out with religion.

00:10:48.040 We were just talking about beauty.

00:10:49.140 But it keeps coming back to the position of the church, the way things ought to be.

00:10:55.260 We're living in a culture where religion is collapsing,

00:10:58.720 where people, the churches are emptying,

00:11:01.240 where the largest spike in religiosity is among the nuns.

00:11:06.040 And I'm not talking about Catholic sisters in a habit.

00:11:08.240 I'm talking about N-O-N-E-S, people who say they have no religion whatsoever. 1.00

00:11:13.040 How are we supposed to restore a sense of beauty

00:11:15.280 if you seem to think that religion is so central to it?

00:11:19.180 I think it—I mean, I'm not—how can I say this?

00:11:21.540 I'm afraid to say that I don't have a lot of hope for the big picture, at least for now.

00:11:27.360 I do have hope for something like a seed which is being planted.

00:11:32.000 So the reality is that truth always wins.

00:11:34.360 Sometimes it takes a while.

00:11:35.780 Sometimes it's painful.

00:11:37.280 And so I think that for now what we need to do is rather work locally, you know,

00:11:41.920 and try to plant seeds of the transcendentals, of beautiful things, you know, work on our families,

00:11:47.360 even our homes, like to just have a sense in which our homes are little sacred spaces, you know.

00:11:53.000 They have to be taken seriously.

00:11:54.780 We can't just treat them as something to be used, let's say.

00:11:58.300 But they are the place where we congregate, you know,

00:12:00.760 even in terms of setting the table, for example.

00:12:03.880 That's a little example, but it's like in our house we set the table every day for dinner.

00:12:08.460 And it's a little ritual, but it's something which reminds us that, you know, we're sitting together.

00:12:14.320 We have to care for the place in which we're sitting.

00:12:17.100 We have to treat it as if it's valuable.

00:12:19.060 And these are little moments of beauty that can help work people up towards, you know,

00:12:24.380 understanding the importance of space, the importance of proportion in our human interactions even.

00:12:31.180 I think it was Christopher Alexander who said that every space that you are in

00:12:35.780 will either slightly elevate or slightly lower your spirits.

00:12:40.140 And so the home is so important here.

00:12:42.120 And this was the only time that my wife and I really bicker is over ordering furniture. 1.00

00:12:50.460 And it's not because we have different tastes in furniture.

00:12:53.180 We don't.

00:12:54.360 But it's because I drag out this process.

00:12:58.060 And sometimes, sweet little Elisa, my wife, she just says, we've just got to order a crib.

00:13:02.820 We've just got to get a lamp.

00:13:04.100 We've just got to, come on, just go.

00:13:05.920 And I say, no, because I'm going to have to look at that crib or that lamp.

00:13:10.520 And I'm going to have to look at it all the time.

00:13:12.380 And I need it to be beautiful.

00:13:14.260 And I need it to elevate the space.

00:13:16.280 And by the way, in her defense, it's very hard even to purchase beautiful things even for the home now.

00:13:21.980 And I'm not saying they've got to be super fancy or expensive.

00:13:24.340 There are plenty of beautiful things that are very, very inexpensive,

00:13:26.600 some of which are even free.

00:13:27.940 You can get them from nature and manipulate them.

00:13:30.180 But it's very difficult to find them because everything is mass-produced in some factory in China 0.97

00:13:34.700 following one of the stupidest maxims that has ever come to dominate a civilization, 0.96

00:13:41.100 which is form follows function. 1.00

00:13:44.340 Yeah, definitely.

00:13:46.140 I totally, we have the same issue at our house as well.

00:13:48.340 But we agree, though.

00:13:49.560 We're no bicker.

00:13:50.640 But at some point, I think about maybe six years ago,

00:13:53.500 we decided that whatever we get for the house,

00:13:57.780 we are going to get the best thing for that place, for that moment.

00:14:01.320 And yeah, sometimes that space remains empty for, sadly, sometimes a year.

00:14:07.500 But it's like, no, we're going to get it right.

00:14:09.340 Especially my wife. 0.99

00:14:10.080 She's really...

00:14:10.500 And when it happens, then it's like, it is like this, almost it's like family member

00:14:15.440 that enters into the house because we're careful.

00:14:17.840 We took time to really decide.

00:14:20.120 One of the problems we have, too, which is actually a big, let's say an enemy of beauty,

00:14:26.340 is fashion.

00:14:27.520 This is a big problem because people mistake the wow of the new

00:14:33.300 and the surprise of something unusual or something surprising.

00:14:37.560 They really tend to confuse that with beauty.

00:14:41.220 They're not the same.

00:14:42.620 And it's difficult because we really have to retrain ourselves to think outside of fashion.

00:14:47.780 It's not that things don't change.

00:14:49.800 I mean, forever, things have always changed.

00:14:51.960 You know, styles slowly change with time.

00:14:54.540 And there's that flow.

00:14:57.360 But we live in a world where things are so intense,

00:14:59.740 where we buy something and then two years later,

00:15:02.000 it's almost embarrassing to have that thing in the house.

00:15:05.240 And so I would...

00:15:06.220 People need to retrain themselves to learn to see through the fashions

00:15:10.960 and recognize, let's say, more stable patterns

00:15:13.680 that will be able to create beauty in your house without creating. 0.99

00:15:17.920 You will miss that, like, when people walk in and go,

00:15:20.040 wow, look at that thing you got because, you know,

00:15:22.680 it's so impressive and so exciting for the moment.

00:15:25.040 You'll miss that.

00:15:25.780 But you'll get a better sense of being in a space

00:15:29.360 that you can inhabit and that is going to...

00:15:32.460 How can I say this?

00:15:33.400 It's going to grow old with you.

00:15:34.900 And you can live in that space.

00:15:36.240 You know, a piece of furniture that has been lived with for years,

00:15:40.040 you know, almost becomes a part of your family,

00:15:42.880 like a part of your world.

00:15:43.860 And it has a life in your family.

00:15:46.480 So thinking of it that way can, I think,

00:15:48.880 help people to see through either the ugly,

00:15:52.840 practical, plastic fork, you know, aspect of our world,

00:15:56.800 but also this kind of high, glitzy fashion world.

00:16:00.280 We live in this insanity of extremes is what...

00:16:02.940 That's the problem.

00:16:03.900 And there is a financial motivation here as well,

00:16:07.660 which is that if you deck out your home in the green shag carpet

00:16:13.880 and you fill your closet with powder blue suits,

00:16:16.780 you're going to need to change that fashion within six months. 0.90

00:16:20.600 Well, really, you should change it immediately,

00:16:22.100 but certainly within six months or a couple of years.

00:16:23.960 Whereas if you have something that is more traditional,

00:16:26.880 it's not that you're just going back to something

00:16:28.280 that's old and stodgy and outdated.

00:16:30.460 That's not what tradition is.

00:16:31.600 Tradition is the opposite.

00:16:32.960 Tradition is that which has endured.

00:16:35.140 It's in many ways, it's the most vibrant, vivacious,

00:16:38.680 new thing in the world.

00:16:40.700 And, you know, I guess this brings us back

00:16:44.380 a little bit to Christianity,

00:16:45.560 which we keep sort of circling around,

00:16:48.080 described as the religion that is ever ancient, ever new.

00:16:52.180 You are not just an artist, you are an iconographer,

00:16:57.720 not just an iconographer, a Christian iconographer.

00:17:01.000 Is that just a coincidence?

00:17:02.720 Not at all.

00:17:03.600 You know, I studied fine art when I was in my 20s,

00:17:06.740 and I struggle a lot to find a way to integrate myself, let's say.

00:17:11.660 First of all, I was a Christian.

00:17:12.660 I was doing contemporary art, which is already a problem

00:17:15.520 because it's so cynical and so, you know, and so heady,

00:17:19.120 and it's difficult to make something.

00:17:21.220 You're always making a comment on something.

00:17:23.140 And I really wanted to create things that had a place in the world.

00:17:28.220 So already that was a problem.

00:17:30.080 And then also I needed to find a language.

00:17:32.440 And discovering the traditional,

00:17:34.500 call it the traditional language of the church,

00:17:37.500 you know, the church developed this powerful visual language

00:17:41.480 for like the first 1,000 years.

00:17:43.560 And it wasn't top down.

00:17:44.880 It was this really organic negotiation.

00:17:47.220 If you went in a church like in Spain or if you went to Syria or to England,

00:17:51.820 you would have recognized what you see.

00:17:54.360 There was like this universal language, I would say.

00:17:57.160 And so diving back into that universal language to me is very deliberate

00:18:00.540 because I think that our understanding of art

00:18:04.680 and our participation in culture,

00:18:06.340 if we want to renew it even at the level of entertainment

00:18:10.020 or at the level of, you know, of a furniture,

00:18:13.720 it has to start in the highest place.

00:18:16.300 And so for me, this was really a strategy.

00:18:18.840 So I make images for churches.

00:18:21.120 I make things, chalices, things that people use

00:18:24.400 within the traditional churches.

00:18:26.340 But I also make t-shirts.

00:18:28.060 And I wrote a graphic novel and I write fairy tales.

00:18:31.220 And so for me, all of this is connected together.

00:18:34.200 That is, nothing is bad.

00:18:37.300 Like t-shirts are fine.

00:18:38.320 It's okay to wear a t-shirt,

00:18:39.480 but don't wear a t-shirt when you go to church, let's say.

00:18:42.980 Right?

00:18:43.120 It's like just everything has to be in its place.

00:18:46.960 And I think for things to kind of flow down

00:18:50.020 and orient themselves properly,

00:18:51.800 they have to start in the highest.

00:18:53.780 And so for me, it was really important to rediscover

00:18:55.800 the Christian aesthetics and the Christian language of art

00:18:59.960 in order to then know that later

00:19:02.700 I would be making other things

00:19:04.080 and having them, let's say, flow down from that.

00:19:07.820 And I think it's the same with architecture, for example.

00:19:10.040 Like if we recapture beautiful churches,

00:19:12.340 that's probably the best thing we can do.

00:19:15.340 And then the world will flow slowly out of that.

00:19:18.460 It's going to take time.

00:19:19.680 But we're going to at least have the place

00:19:21.420 where we gather together and we recognize what is highest.

00:19:24.760 That's what we're doing when we're in church.

00:19:26.160 We're like, this is what is highest.

00:19:27.300 So if the space is this ugly thing

00:19:30.700 that looks like a strip mall, we're not honoring.

00:19:34.640 Even if it's not overtly ugly,

00:19:37.060 even if it's not aggressively ugly,

00:19:39.220 even if it's just plain and ordinary and banal.

00:19:42.780 No, I totally agree.

00:19:44.080 I always tell people,

00:19:45.980 your church should really be nicer than your house.

00:19:49.840 Just keep that.

00:19:50.920 If you at least keep that hierarchy

00:19:52.320 and make sure that your church is nicer than your house,

00:19:54.660 then you should be okay.

00:19:55.940 There is, though, there is a traditional language

00:19:58.020 of Christianity, even in the architecture as well,

00:20:00.840 that is the most, I think, reflective of what a church is.

00:20:06.600 And you see that.

00:20:07.360 Like there's still plenty of churches that have that.

00:20:09.660 But it's difficult.

00:20:10.680 A lot of the modern churches,

00:20:12.240 they're going for the entertainment mode.

00:20:14.280 You know, they're going for a theater,

00:20:16.200 you know, or something that's more like a stadium.

00:20:19.640 And that, it's reflective of what you're doing.

00:20:23.540 You know, spaces aren't arbitrary.

00:20:26.340 Spaces have, the way we give our attention to things

00:20:30.220 and the way that things happen have meaning.

00:20:33.500 You can't avoid it.

00:20:34.900 You know, like let's say,

00:20:36.280 this is going to be hostile to a lot of people,

00:20:38.380 I understand.

00:20:39.020 But if you stand in front of people,

00:20:41.940 the way you dress is going to affect the impression you give.

00:20:45.940 It doesn't matter what you want.

00:20:48.700 So if you're standing in front of everybody

00:20:50.480 and you're saying,

00:20:51.500 well, I'm going to not,

00:20:52.080 I don't want my clothing to say something.

00:20:54.400 So I'm going to wear like ribbed jeans

00:20:55.960 and I'm going to have messy hair.

00:20:57.080 I'm going to sit on the side of the stage.

00:20:58.720 You're saying something, my friend.

00:21:00.660 Inevitably.

00:21:01.080 You're inevitably saying something by your demeanor,

00:21:03.320 by the way you're dressed.

00:21:04.720 And so I think that one of the powerful thing

00:21:06.640 of the traditional Christian churches

00:21:07.940 is that they were able to create a language

00:21:10.500 that every piece of clothing that a priest wears

00:21:14.560 in the Catholic church or the Orthodox church

00:21:16.160 is related to a psalm, like for sure in the Orthodox church.

00:21:19.800 When they wear, they put their clothing on,

00:21:22.140 they say prayers, they actually recite psalms

00:21:24.300 as they put on their clothing.

00:21:26.120 And so they're putting themselves in a space

00:21:27.700 where they're going to really represent

00:21:30.380 what it is they want to represent,

00:21:31.960 which is they want to gather the people

00:21:33.700 in attention to God.

00:21:35.660 And the space is the same.

00:21:36.900 The tripartite way that a traditional church is set up

00:21:40.200 is there specifically for a reason.

00:21:43.440 The altar is higher than the seats.

00:21:47.180 I know, you know, if you have a place

00:21:48.800 where all the seats are higher than the stage,

00:21:53.020 let's say, you're saying something.

00:21:55.460 You know, you can't avoid entering into

00:21:58.900 the language of hierarchy that's in scripture,

00:22:01.060 like going up the mountain, you know,

00:22:02.360 Jesus going up the mountain,

00:22:03.380 or Moses going up the mountain.

00:22:05.040 You have to think about that

00:22:06.180 because that's the world in which we have our experience.

00:22:08.780 So if you create a stadium where, you know,

00:22:10.620 all the viewers are higher than the pastor,

00:22:13.500 you're saying something.

00:22:14.560 And even if it's not explicit,

00:22:17.280 it's going to imbibe the culture

00:22:19.700 and it's going to affect the way you understand the world.

00:22:23.400 Because we have bodies.

00:22:24.940 That's right.

00:22:25.260 Because we're incarnate.

00:22:26.560 It's just unavoidable.

00:22:28.320 We perceive the world.

00:22:29.860 The same reason your head is at the top of your body,

00:22:32.500 you know, for the same reason

00:22:33.620 these hierarchies of attention are,

00:22:35.880 the same reason when you lift your head up,

00:22:37.620 you know, to look over something or to see the sun or to,

00:22:40.800 you know, these are all real embodied realities

00:22:44.000 that we deal with.

00:22:44.800 Well, you mentioned this big shift in the culture

00:22:47.000 and specifically in churches

00:22:48.820 from reverence and worship of God

00:22:51.260 to more entertainment.

00:22:54.560 And you see this, especially in the Catholic Church,

00:22:56.640 in the 1960, really 1970 and afterward,

00:22:59.820 the mass was changed radically

00:23:02.280 such that the priest,

00:23:04.360 who since time immemorial had faced the altar

00:23:07.400 and all the people in the priest

00:23:08.560 were facing the altar together, worshiping God,

00:23:10.640 the priest turned around and faced the people.

00:23:14.020 And a priest friend of mine,

00:23:15.320 Father George Rutler in New York,

00:23:17.120 described what happened then,

00:23:18.480 which is the priests would begin to entertain.

00:23:20.840 They would often tell jokes.

00:23:22.420 He said like a ham actor in a dying vaudeville show.

00:23:26.740 They would tell jokes.

00:23:28.200 They might consider, my priest friend suggested,

00:23:31.000 limiting their repertoire to the jokes

00:23:32.520 that St. John told the Blessed Mother

00:23:34.320 while her son bled on the cross.

00:23:35.920 You know, previously,

00:23:37.420 how's that imagery?

00:23:39.600 Yeah, there you go.

00:23:40.620 Previously, and I know this

00:23:43.660 because I attend the traditional Latin mass

00:23:45.480 and that had been robbed.

00:23:49.360 We had been robbed of that mass

00:23:51.040 for most of my life

00:23:52.420 until in the 2000s,

00:23:54.700 Pope Benedict started to loosen it up again

00:23:56.500 and allow people to go back to it.

00:23:58.380 It was a total revelation to me

00:24:00.220 because I grew up in the era 1.00

00:24:01.560 of priests making dumb jokes 0.99

00:24:03.380 and the hymns being lame little ditties 1.00

00:24:06.400 from the 70s

00:24:07.160 that weren't even cool in the 70s

00:24:08.680 and acoustic guitars and felt banners

00:24:10.320 and just ugly, banal, bland, whitewashed churches

00:24:14.640 and iconoclastic kind of moment 0.65

00:24:17.040 where you take out all of the beauty.

00:24:18.760 And then I began to glimpse a mass

00:24:21.400 where all of every syllable is a symbol.

00:24:25.480 Every article of the priest's clothing,

00:24:27.860 as you mentioned,

00:24:28.760 all of the language,

00:24:29.880 all of the chanting,

00:24:30.960 all of the orientation of everything

00:24:32.680 is symbolic of something.

00:24:34.680 It's imbued with meaning.

00:24:36.580 And I said, oh my gosh,

00:24:38.080 we're really doing something here.

00:24:39.400 This is really significant.

00:24:41.140 Oh, I totally agree.

00:24:42.060 I mean, I'm an Orthodox Christian

00:24:43.960 and so this is,

00:24:46.380 luckily we haven't had that change, let's say.

00:24:48.420 So we really,

00:24:49.020 we live in that world

00:24:51.040 where the purpose of church is to worship.

00:24:55.400 And it's not,

00:24:56.980 it's something which is,

00:24:59.380 it really does reflect North American culture.

00:25:01.580 And I think sometimes you could say that,

00:25:03.820 at least here,

00:25:04.680 it happened in ways that are insipid.

00:25:07.100 People didn't totally realize what was going on,

00:25:09.380 but there's a manner in which we view church

00:25:11.640 as something that we consume.

00:25:13.180 This is just an inevitable part of our,

00:25:15.660 the way we understand culture

00:25:17.800 as also entertainment.

00:25:19.460 We've reduced culture to entertainment.

00:25:21.760 And so that gets brought into the church

00:25:24.340 where we're there to consume

00:25:26.060 whatever it is that is going to be presented to us.

00:25:29.280 And that is a problem.

00:25:32.040 It is a problem.

00:25:33.540 And it's definitely helpful

00:25:36.340 to have properly oriented spaces

00:25:39.100 and properly oriented liturgies

00:25:42.100 to help us understand that,

00:25:43.220 no, we need to orient ourselves towards God.

00:25:45.900 Everything, and if we do that,

00:25:48.000 then the world will, it's funny.

00:25:51.040 If we orient ourselves towards God properly,

00:25:53.440 then everything will kind of flow,

00:25:55.160 even in terms of beauty.

00:25:56.480 That's what I was saying before,

00:25:58.160 is that for me,

00:25:59.540 becoming an iconographer

00:26:01.240 was about orienting my art practice

00:26:03.540 in the highest way possible.

00:26:05.580 In a world also where it was so weird to do that.

00:26:07.780 It's like, okay, you're an iconographer,

00:26:09.440 you're, I'm an icon carver,

00:26:11.120 who, how many of those are there in North America?

00:26:13.580 Yeah, I can count them on two fingers, really.

00:26:16.520 And so, but still, it was like,

00:26:18.880 it was a very strange thing to do,

00:26:20.120 but I knew that I had to,

00:26:22.060 in order for anything else that I do to flow,

00:26:24.960 I had to be oriented properly.

00:26:26.940 And it's the same with our family.

00:26:28.500 So if we think of church as a place to consume,

00:26:33.600 let's say songs and messages or whatever,

00:26:36.160 then when we go home and we sit at the table,

00:26:38.440 we think that food is just there to consume.

00:26:40.640 And so we'll watch our family dinners erode,

00:26:44.440 you know, in for this downstream

00:26:47.220 from the manner in which we worship.

00:26:49.480 And it's going to happen in the culture generally, right?

00:26:51.420 It's not something, it's not a direct correlation,

00:26:53.680 but you will see it kind of happen,

00:26:55.540 where as we don't orient ourselves properly,

00:26:57.700 then things are going to start to fragment.

00:26:59.460 You'll come to a point where people,

00:27:01.040 families don't even sit together at all.

00:27:03.000 There's a principle,

00:27:04.560 lexarandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi.

00:27:07.720 The way that we worship affects the way that we believe.

00:27:11.840 It determines the way that we believe,

00:27:12.940 and it determines the way that we live.

00:27:14.780 So you're talking about this orientation all coming down.

00:27:18.080 It affects the whole rest of life.

00:27:21.540 I can't help but think that when God is asked what his name is,

00:27:27.520 the burning bush, Moses asks God, who are you?

00:27:29.260 He says, I am who I am.

00:27:30.980 I am being himself, right?

00:27:33.320 And when we find our identity in I am who I am,

00:27:39.340 things make sense.

00:27:40.720 When we reject I am who I am,

00:27:42.940 when we reject being himself,

00:27:44.800 we're left with this question, which is, who am I?

00:27:46.840 And we've got this identity crisis,

00:27:48.220 and right now, specifically,

00:27:49.700 that identity crisis is manifesting in gender.

00:27:53.540 This transgender moment,

00:27:55.160 where more than one in five Zoomers are identifying as LGBT,

00:28:01.540 and where you've got a huge spike in even childhood transvestitism

00:28:06.560 and gender dysphoria.

00:28:07.740 Who am I?

00:28:08.240 Who am I?

00:28:08.640 Who am I?

00:28:09.500 I can't help but notice that symbol is at the very heart of that question.

00:28:16.540 The body is a symbol of our soul, for instance.

00:28:19.760 No, you're absolutely right.

00:28:21.240 And it's something which,

00:28:22.820 the way that you framed it is perfect,

00:28:26.180 because it does have to do with the problem of being.

00:28:29.360 And so, you can think about it,

00:28:31.220 fractally, about anything.

00:28:32.560 Like, it doesn't have to be just God, let's say.

00:28:34.980 You know, there is a way in which you recognize the being of something.

00:28:39.900 So, let's say, like a chair.

00:28:42.040 You have a way to recognize it.

00:28:43.520 And you have multiplicity.

00:28:45.260 Like, there's variation, right?

00:28:46.340 There's variation of chairs.

00:28:47.400 There's all kinds of different chairs.

00:28:48.980 But the further you get away, let's say,

00:28:50.720 from what you recognize as a chair,

00:28:52.400 you're going to start to see things get weird,

00:28:54.600 where you're going to start to see, let's say,

00:28:56.700 or it's kind of like a chair, kind of like a stool.

00:28:59.140 It's kind of in between.

00:29:00.200 It's like a hybrid between a chair and a bench.

00:29:02.840 And so, you start to see exceptions and strangeness.

00:29:06.440 And those are, in some ways, they're actually okay

00:29:08.920 if we're all oriented towards, you know,

00:29:12.040 the being in the first place.

00:29:14.900 And so, this is what we're seeing happening everywhere,

00:29:18.140 which is that we're moving into exception, hybridity.

00:29:23.060 So, that's the difference.

00:29:23.900 That's the opposite of being, is that if you move away from being,

00:29:26.860 you move into confusion, into things that have different identities.

00:29:31.000 So, if you think about, so I like to help people understand,

00:29:34.620 let's say you think about a traditional church.

00:29:36.140 A traditional church is built exactly like this.

00:29:39.060 Like a Gothic church, for example, is a good way to say it.

00:29:41.260 So, at the center, we have the altar.

00:29:43.080 It's the highest place.

00:29:44.260 It's the place where the heaven and earth meet, right?

00:29:46.140 The priest lifts up the chalice.

00:29:47.920 And he shows you, like, heaven and earth is meeting right here.

00:29:50.680 This is the spot where being is manifesting itself in its fullness.

00:29:54.560 And then we have the people that are there,

00:29:57.680 and there's multiplicity, and there's all this stuff.

00:29:59.520 Then in the corners, and in the edges, and on the outside,

00:30:02.740 that's where we have gargoyles. 1.00

00:30:04.320 And gargoyles are fine, right?

00:30:06.660 In their proper place.

00:30:07.860 And that's what they are.

00:30:08.660 They're ambiguous, they're humorous, they're confused,

00:30:12.060 they're a strange mixture of different identities.

00:30:14.720 They usually have a kind of irreverent nature to them.

00:30:19.460 Sometimes they're even kind of, even off-key,

00:30:22.340 like a little salty, let's say.

00:30:24.620 And they have their place in the structure,

00:30:27.040 but only if they're in their proper place.

00:30:29.760 If you take a gargoyle and you put it on the altar,

00:30:32.380 like, you're in trouble.

00:30:33.360 And I think that this is what's going on,

00:30:36.260 is that exceptions will always exist.

00:30:38.980 So there's a sense in which the argument of the,

00:30:41.800 of let's say the LGBT argument,

00:30:44.000 to say that there's some fluidity, it's true.

00:30:47.040 But the fluidity is on the edges.

00:30:49.180 It's always in the exceptions, and on the edges,

00:30:51.260 and in strangeness.

00:30:52.500 But you can't make strangeness the thing that you worship,

00:30:56.620 because then everything falls apart.

00:30:59.120 So if you, if you, if you have like a whole month

00:31:02.340 where you're celebrating idiosyncrasy,

00:31:06.160 and strangeness, and, and ambiguity,

00:31:09.140 and it actually becomes the only thing

00:31:12.220 you're allowed to celebrate.

00:31:13.080 Like, if you want to know where a culture is,

00:31:15.260 look at what you're allowed to celebrate.

00:31:17.700 And so as there's a war on, let's say,

00:31:21.020 the 4th of July for you, for Americans,

00:31:23.040 a war on the idea of saying the holidays

00:31:25.820 instead of saying Christmas,

00:31:26.580 like all this kind of little, this little fight in language,

00:31:29.360 and what it is that we are,

00:31:31.520 that we should and are allowed to celebrate.

00:31:33.140 And at the same time, that there's rising up

00:31:35.480 of entire swaths of our liturgical year,

00:31:38.960 we could say, to worship ambiguity,

00:31:42.040 and idiosyncrasy, and strangeness.

00:31:44.780 That's a sign.

00:31:45.720 It's related to being itself.

00:31:46.980 It's related to the manner in which being

00:31:48.380 reaches its edge.

00:31:50.420 And, and, and, yeah.

00:31:51.740 So, and you're, you're getting

00:31:53.720 contradictory protestations

00:31:56.860 coming out of the left,

00:31:57.700 I've noticed, specifically on this question.

00:31:59.420 The left will try to change all of our language

00:32:01.340 and force us to call men her, 0.99

00:32:03.600 and women he, 0.99

00:32:05.340 and they will, they will force us to say

00:32:07.700 happy holidays instead of Christmas.

00:32:09.620 What holiday are we talking about, folks?

00:32:11.760 There's one big holiday here

00:32:13.040 that we're all talking about.

00:32:13.940 We're not allowed to say it.

00:32:15.780 They'll say, this is so important.

00:32:17.140 Change the language, change the language,

00:32:18.440 change the language.

00:32:19.200 And also, what do you conservatives care about?

00:32:21.060 Come on, it's just words.

00:32:21.900 It's just symbols.

00:32:22.620 Who cares?

00:32:23.680 You care.

00:32:24.600 You're the one who's making me 0.99

00:32:25.620 change all of the language.

00:32:26.760 So, and, and, yeah.

00:32:27.680 And also, I mean, like, the language becomes,

00:32:30.440 the idiosyncratic language is so precise.

00:32:33.200 Like, the whole pronoun thing,

00:32:34.500 you have to use this pronoun,

00:32:35.580 you have to use this,

00:32:36.180 and, and then there's the, you know,

00:32:37.900 and then there's all these multiple terms,

00:32:40.640 like, exploding multiple terms

00:32:42.940 of how to define someone.

00:32:44.200 And if you don't use that,

00:32:45.580 like, you're actually making them not exist.

00:32:47.720 Like, you're, you're refusing

00:32:48.880 their actual existence.

00:32:49.900 And so, no, I mean, it really is,

00:32:52.540 it was never about, it doesn't matter.

00:32:55.220 It really is about what matters.

00:32:57.080 I mean, humans can't live without things

00:33:00.240 that are important in a hierarchy of values.

00:33:02.360 And so it was never,

00:33:03.580 although people will say,

00:33:04.520 oh, we just have to flatten everything,

00:33:06.500 we have to make everything kind of like this.

00:33:08.700 It's never true.

00:33:09.680 That's always a lie.

00:33:10.720 It always ends up with a kind of hierarchy of values.

00:33:13.580 And in a way, the way to,

00:33:17.340 right now what we're seeing is something

00:33:18.420 like an upside-down hierarchy

00:33:19.860 is the best way to understand it.

00:33:21.900 And so it's like where the exception is the rule.

00:33:25.260 You know, we used to say the exception proves the rule.

00:33:27.460 It's like there's exceptions,

00:33:28.540 and so you can see the rule,

00:33:29.700 and so now, no, no, no,

00:33:30.600 it's like the exception,

00:33:31.580 not only did the exception invalidate the rule,

00:33:35.100 it becomes the new rule,

00:33:36.700 and everything is kind of directed towards the exception.

00:33:39.360 They'll say this with hermaphrodites. 0.70

00:33:40.700 They will say, well, because there are like four hermaphrodites

00:33:43.560 in the entire world,

00:33:44.800 this proves that men and women

00:33:45.940 are not discrete categories that really exist.

00:33:48.740 And I think, first of all,

00:33:51.260 even hermaphrodites can be classified as man or woman

00:33:53.980 in virtually all cases,

00:33:56.060 but ligers exist.

00:33:58.540 There's such a thing as a liger.

00:34:00.000 It is a hybrid of a lion and a tiger.

00:34:03.080 The existence of probably a similar number of ligers

00:34:06.660 that there are hermaphrodites,

00:34:08.100 it does not negate the existence of lions and tigers.

00:34:12.320 Well, it's because people can't think

00:34:14.260 in hierarchies anymore, in a way.

00:34:16.020 Well, they do, secretly,

00:34:17.240 but publicly, they don't really think in hierarchies.

00:34:20.560 They do think in these weird, radical opposites.

00:34:24.200 And so, but it's a trick.

00:34:25.360 Like, the postmodern trick has been

00:34:27.000 to take everything ambiguous,

00:34:30.520 everything that's kind of in the margin,

00:34:32.580 and use it as a tool to devour. 1.00

00:34:35.180 It's like a parasite. 0.77

00:34:35.860 Like, it's like a, but, and I say that, 0.92

00:34:38.520 people go, like, oh, Jonathan's saying it's a parasite.

00:34:40.400 No, the postmoderns are very much aware.

00:34:42.200 Like, Jacques Derrida has a famous interview

00:34:44.240 where he said that his whole work

00:34:46.380 is about parasitology.

00:34:48.380 It's about virology.

00:34:49.480 And that it's about introducing a parasite

00:34:51.900 that slowly devours the host.

00:34:54.400 And the exception devours the rule, right?

00:34:56.580 The thing that's writing the world

00:34:58.360 is slowly kind of deconstructing

00:35:00.180 the main body, let's say.

00:35:03.800 And this is, so it's not,

00:35:05.460 this is something that is weaponized.

00:35:07.500 Like, it's deliberate.

00:35:08.960 When we're talking about these exceptions, then,

00:35:11.260 I have to wonder if conservatives are,

00:35:15.040 if we're taking the wrong tack here,

00:35:17.280 if we're taking the wrong strategy.

00:35:18.100 I think they are.

00:35:19.000 Because, you know, there's,

00:35:20.860 especially when it comes to gender,

00:35:22.340 we deny gender expression.

00:35:24.940 We say gender expression is this totally bogus thing. 1.00

00:35:27.100 I've said this myself.

00:35:28.000 It's this bogus thing. 0.99

00:35:29.120 It's ridiculous. 0.99

00:35:29.660 There's just sex, there's boys and girls, 0.99

00:35:32.000 XX, and XY chromosomes, and that's that.

00:35:34.860 But it's an ancient,

00:35:35.900 it's actually a very ancient way of thinking.

00:35:38.440 It is.

00:35:38.680 That gender and sex are not exactly the same. 0.99

00:35:41.120 I mean, they're-

00:35:41.560 You find it in, like, the Byzantine Empire.

00:35:43.120 They had this notion that they weren't exactly the same.

00:35:45.640 Well, and it only makes sense

00:35:47.900 because symbols and the symbolized

00:35:52.100 are not exactly the same.

00:35:53.900 I am of the opinion that symbols should precisely

00:35:58.420 and accurately reflect that which is symbolized.

00:36:01.280 And the further a symbol gets from what it is symbolizing,

00:36:04.080 the more trouble you're going to have.

00:36:05.760 But they are different things.

00:36:08.000 You know, if gender expression is the symbol,

00:36:11.880 that which is symbolized is biological sex.

00:36:15.240 Just as if my body is the symbol,

00:36:17.940 my soul is that which is being symbolized.

00:36:21.300 Just the idea that the soul is the form of the body.

00:36:25.540 And actually, it keeps coming back to religion.

00:36:28.740 I mean, this has been a real point of great significance

00:36:33.640 between the Catholics and the Protestants, 0.72

00:36:36.180 and the Orthodox too, I suppose,

00:36:37.480 which is that in the Eucharist,

00:36:39.880 you have the total unity of the symbol and the symbolized.

00:36:43.680 The bread is the symbol.

00:36:45.860 Jesus Christ's body and blood is the symbolized.

00:36:48.560 And the Catholics and the Orthodox believe there they are both together.

00:36:52.180 And some Protestants believe there they are both together.

00:36:55.160 And after the Protestant Revolution,

00:36:56.720 you see different Christian groups move further and further away from this.

00:36:59.700 And you say, no, it's merely a symbol.

00:37:01.680 And you're rending these two things apart.

00:37:04.180 No, I totally agree.

00:37:05.280 There's definitely something about the breakdown of Eucharistic theology.

00:37:09.520 I mean, this is going very far in the past,

00:37:11.420 but it's definitely part of how why our vision of the world has broken down

00:37:16.940 and why these weird separations, radical separations between exactly that,

00:37:23.040 between, let's say, the referent and that which is referenced has come together.

00:37:27.140 But in terms of, let's say, in terms of the difficult situation with gender

00:37:31.420 and desire that we're dealing with now,

00:37:33.600 we have to understand that modernism is a funny thing,

00:37:36.820 that modernism is extreme.

00:37:38.700 It tends towards extremes.

00:37:40.480 So what we're going through now for all the difficulty that it's bringing

00:37:45.740 is a reaction to something that happened at the beginning of the early 20th century,

00:37:50.880 which is that we pathologized everything.

00:37:54.120 And so men were being castrated in the 1950s.

00:37:57.060 We have to remember that.

00:37:58.420 And that a lot of the things that are going on now are like a reaction to that,

00:38:02.620 where we had a black and white, crazy black and white world after World War II.

00:38:07.660 It was like this, this, this, this.

00:38:09.540 Everything was completely hermetic and black and white.

00:38:13.360 The world doesn't work that way.

00:38:14.740 There is, fluidity does exist.

00:38:16.720 It only exists on the edges.

00:38:18.760 And if we try to eliminate fluidity, if we try to eliminate exceptions and strangeness,

00:38:23.840 then it'll come back with a vengeance.

00:38:26.600 So in the Bible, you have this image, for example, of the field.

00:38:30.280 And, you know, the Israelites were supposed to till their field, but leave the corners untilled.

00:38:36.860 So you're supposed to leave the corners untilled for the stranger and the poor and the stranger.

00:38:41.480 So the sense in which the world can't be completely, can't be completely filled.

00:38:48.380 You have to leave a remainder on the edge.

00:38:50.800 And, you know, the idea of having a fringe on your vestment, for example, is a good example.

00:38:54.140 So it's like you have the hem of your vestment stops, then you leave a little bit of wild on the edge.

00:38:59.500 That's something that has always existed in all societies.

00:39:02.920 So I'm not trying to justify morally this or that behavior, but there's a man in which traditional societies would always recognize that exceptions happen.

00:39:10.100 And that we just have to kind of deal with it privately and in our, you know, not deal with it publicly in a way that is related to law,

00:39:18.200 but deal with it privately in the world of exceptions and strangeness and in the places where our own symbols don't totally fit with that which is symbolized.

00:39:26.840 And now the fringes are at the center of society.

00:39:29.700 That's right.

00:39:30.280 People who frequently, I hate to be offensive, they frequently look like gargoyles, are at the center of society.

00:39:35.620 And I also can't help but notice that the people who mutilate themselves in these ways and who, it's not merely that a man is dressing up like Donna Reed, okay?

00:39:47.760 It's usually a man mutilating himself in ways that often seem to have very little to do with sex or that are extraordinary caricatures of what a woman is or very frequently that involve occult symbolism.

00:40:01.440 I mean, overtly occult symbolism here.

00:40:04.500 And if you put that sort of ugliness, if you make yourself uglier than you otherwise would be and you put that ugliness at the center of a society,

00:40:16.040 my question that I struggle with is, why don't we all just reject it out of hand and say,

00:40:20.980 yuck, between a beautiful artistic environment and this cult of ugliness, give me the beauty.

00:40:29.020 Why are we still being drawn into this?

00:40:30.980 I think it's actually, this is more something like a sign of the times.

00:40:36.360 So think about, okay, so a normal society will always have some of that.

00:40:42.800 It's there in every traditional society.

00:40:44.860 So think about carnival.

00:40:46.380 So traditional societies had a carnival.

00:40:48.260 And that carnival would be the place where all the idiosyncrasy, upside-down behavior, strangeness, a little bit of lewdness, a little bit of that, a little bit of drunkenness.

00:40:57.440 It's like, okay, we kind of open the valve a little bit, let some of that out, then we close it down and we go back into normal world.

00:41:04.300 And so this is something you see in the Jewish tradition, the Apurim.

00:41:07.360 We have things like Mardi Gras, and we still have, let's say, Halloween as an example of that moment where we kind of embody monstrosity and strangeness and exception.

00:41:17.080 So this is something that has always been part of every single traditional society in the history of the world.

00:41:23.140 Now, think about as if this was a really, really big version of that cycle, and now the whole world is just a giant carnival.

00:41:33.260 It's all Mardi Gras. 0.67

00:41:34.060 It's all Mardi Gras all the time, right?

00:41:36.760 So I think that that's the best way to understand it.

00:41:38.900 So there is a manner in which, just like in a normal Mardi Gras, we would leave a little bit of space for that.

00:41:46.040 And there's something about understanding the reality of idiosyncrasy, which is necessary.

00:41:51.620 That's why there are gargoyles.

00:41:52.800 That's why, like on the edge of manuscripts, there'd be like all these funny figures doing weird things.

00:41:57.260 Because that is actually part of reality.

00:41:59.120 If we deny it, we're denying a part of reality and it's going to, the world is going to fix and crystallize and it's going to shatter.

00:42:09.060 And so that's it.

00:42:10.060 Like that's where we are.

00:42:10.720 We're basically in the massive carnival.

00:42:12.380 Now, the problem is that living in a carnival is not, for a very long time, is not good for your soul.

00:42:18.220 And making a carnival your identity.

00:42:20.620 I mean, think of a carny, for example.

00:42:21.940 We have an image of the carnies and those images are not just cliches.

00:42:27.260 Like people who live in the carnival all the time, they tend to degenerate and fall into their own passions and have very dangerous lifestyles, I'd say.

00:42:36.460 And so it's like, think about it now, a whole society that is worshiping the carny.

00:42:41.480 This is, it's not a good moment.

00:42:44.460 It's not a good spot.

00:42:45.220 But the solution, I honestly think that the solution is not to just bring the knife down and say, chop.

00:42:54.500 The solution is really to say, we need to find a way to understand the inevitability of strangeness and find ways to integrate it.

00:43:03.860 So having proper Mardi Gras, like having proper celebrations, but then also then saying, okay, well, we're done.

00:43:10.580 Now let's move into normality.

00:43:12.540 So I think that's, I think that conservatives have to, I know it's, it's difficult because conservatives have a very large disgust mechanism.

00:43:22.000 Like they tend to get disgusted with, which I understand.

00:43:25.100 But we can't just rely on that.

00:43:27.860 We need to, we need to, if we want to find like a better world, we need to be able to,

00:43:33.320 to understand the inevitability of strangeness.

00:43:38.540 This is going to be part of your world, no matter what.

00:43:41.860 You can't get away from it.

00:43:43.300 But you, but you have to put it in its proper place.

00:43:45.220 That's right.

00:43:45.540 It has to be in its proper place, which is on the fringe, on the, that's what all the language, it's already that.

00:43:50.180 Like the fringe, the margin, the exception, like the, the, the, the water on the edge of the world, right?

00:43:54.920 The fluidity that exists on the edge of reality.

00:43:57.560 Why is everybody getting tattoos?

00:44:00.180 Everybody is getting tattoos.

00:44:01.280 It has to do with, it has to do with idiosyncrasy.

00:44:04.180 It has to do with the fact of, let's say, emphasizing idiosyncrasy to a level that is so completely insane, you know.

00:44:11.560 That it's, that it's no longer idiosyncratic.

00:44:12.800 That it's all, exactly.

00:44:13.800 It becomes like a strange new rule.

00:44:16.000 There's, there's something about that.

00:44:17.220 But there's also something about, one of the things we're seeing, and this is difficult,

00:44:22.360 is that we're kind of seeing religion pour back into the world.

00:44:25.660 And this is happening in very strange ways that anybody who followed the George Floyd protest

00:44:31.300 will have noticed to what extent those were religious in tone, the, you know, the processions,

00:44:37.440 the people flocking themselves, like kneeling and doing all these things.

00:44:41.100 And so there's a way in which people are hungry for the sacred.

00:44:45.680 They're hungry for sacred things.

00:44:47.080 Well, they, they literally made icons of George Floyd that you can see in cities around the country.

00:44:51.540 And they, they, they even framed it as a human sacrifice, like a few people, of politicians.

00:44:55.660 And so this is happening, like this is inevitable.

00:44:58.560 Now, the problem is that we are making the idiosyncratic sacred.

00:45:04.400 And so I think that people who get tattoos, they really see it or they experience it as something

00:45:10.400 of a sacred thing.

00:45:11.940 Like they're, it's like they're marking themselves, right?

00:45:14.220 It's part of their identity.

00:45:15.160 Yeah, they're, they're, they're adjusting their identity.

00:45:17.400 They're marking their bodies in ways to, to like, I don't know, like a circumcision, 0.72

00:45:22.280 but like idiosyncratic circumcision, right?

00:45:24.440 Something like that.

00:45:25.660 And so I think it's also part of the sacred kind of flooding back in to the world.

00:45:30.520 I was in, at the Apple store in Grand Central years ago, and I had to buy a computer charger.

00:45:36.160 And I was talking to the guy who's the salesman.

00:45:38.620 And I noticed he's got two tattoos.

00:45:40.740 I'm sure he had many more tattoos, but he had two on his fingers.

00:45:43.200 On the index finger, he had a little tiny mustache. 0.94

00:45:47.520 And on the side of the ring finger, it said in a beautiful little cursive, shit cray. 0.95

00:45:53.580 And I thought, you know, that's very descriptive. 0.96

00:45:58.760 That's, that's precise.

00:46:00.160 Yeah.

00:46:00.560 It is cray.

00:46:01.420 Yeah.

00:46:01.780 You're, you're, and I, I racked, I'm thinking about it to this day.

00:46:05.700 This was probably 10 years ago.

00:46:06.700 I bought this computer charger.

00:46:07.800 Why you would brand yourself with a symbol essentially of meaninglessness.

00:46:16.460 Nobody's lying.

00:46:17.980 That's the thing.

00:46:18.800 It's like people tell you.

00:46:19.540 He feels the meaninglessness.

00:46:20.280 People tell you what they're up to if you, if you know how to pay attention, you know.

00:46:25.360 And so, so I think that, that a lot of things that are happening today are just basic people

00:46:30.260 just saying what they're doing.

00:46:31.420 It's not a, and so that's it.

00:46:33.380 Like you could say it's like a fetishization of, of idiosyncrasy in a way that it's almost 0.98

00:46:39.520 like a making sacred of the, of stupidity and banality and, and absurdity. 0.99

00:46:46.640 Yeah. 1.00

00:46:46.900 Absurdity.

00:46:47.300 And also like the thing, the thing about, this is getting a little deep.

00:46:50.420 I didn't think we'd go this deep, but so there's a sense in which, there's a sense in which

00:46:54.440 there are two taboos, right?

00:46:55.980 And you see that in the Bible, you see that in every culture, there's a sacred taboo, right?

00:47:00.240 And so the sacred taboo is something like something, which is too high.

00:47:03.480 I don't have access to, it's hidden behind veils.

00:47:06.080 It's hidden behind.

00:47:07.320 Sublimity.

00:47:08.200 Exactly.

00:47:09.020 But there's another taboo, which is all the things that you, let's say, push away from yourself.

00:47:14.760 So everything, all the fecal stuff, all the, like the, the, the things that are meant to

00:47:19.500 be in private, that are meant to be hidden, like, like nakedness, you know, and, and also

00:47:24.980 like if you had some kind of deformity or whatever, like you would tend to want to, to not put that

00:47:30.360 out there, like to kind of hide it or whatever.

00:47:32.420 And so those two taboos, so there's a, there's a way in which, in an extremely high, high

00:47:41.580 manner, Christ transcends that and brings them together in ways that are, is crazy.

00:47:48.160 So Christ on the cross, naked on the cross, beaten, you know, with the, with the sign saying

00:47:53.720 that he's the king, you know, with the crown of thorns, he joins it all together.

00:47:57.040 Like it's, it's wild, but in a normal world, those are separate, right?

00:48:01.700 And you want to keep them separate, but there's a little trick that people can play is to, to,

00:48:07.200 to confuse one for the other.

00:48:09.000 And that's a lot of what we're seeing.

00:48:10.740 There's a sense in which revealing the taboo of that, which is dirty and disgusting and,

00:48:15.640 and the things that you're usually hide and cut off gives them a little sense of sublimity.

00:48:21.940 It makes them feel like they're participating in something sacred.

00:48:25.540 So it's like, it really is like a kind of satanic.

00:48:27.660 That's why, that's why the occult is part of this.

00:48:30.420 It is like a weird kind of satanic secret, which if I, if I expose the dark taboos, then

00:48:37.220 I can trick people in thinking it's the same as the, as the secret, the divine secret, let's

00:48:43.620 say.

00:48:44.260 That's a beautiful point.

00:48:46.460 The, the conservatives over the last 10 or so years have driven me crazy because they've,

00:48:50.900 they've, they, they drive me crazy all the time, but, but because I love them and I don't

00:48:55.040 want to see them do the wrong thing.

00:48:56.620 They've adopted this position of free speech absolutism.

00:48:59.920 And they'll say, we should be, we should be able to say whatever we want, whenever we

00:49:03.080 want to say it at all times, that's a good, free flourishing society.

00:49:07.440 And I say, have you ever read a history book or thought about human nature or even just looked

00:49:12.860 around with your own two eyes?

00:49:14.720 Every society has taboos.

00:49:16.660 Society necessarily has not just standards, but overt taboos, things that cannot be uttered,

00:49:23.460 things that will be held either sacred or so incredibly profane that we, and vulgar that

00:49:28.560 we just keep it away.

00:49:30.220 And the, so conservatives just completely miss the boat of what's going on as so often they

00:49:35.320 do.

00:49:35.740 And your observation that the left, their little trick is they'll flip those things.

00:49:41.240 Oh yeah.

00:49:41.540 And that's why, like, that's why people are talking about cannibalism right now.

00:49:44.860 This is not arbitrary.

00:49:46.320 These are, these are real, let's say moments where the world is being, is being invaded by

00:49:54.120 meaningful things.

00:49:55.100 And so the fact that the, the weird kind of leftist people are, are obsessed with like

00:50:00.480 bringing up cannibalism constantly, they just keep doing it.

00:50:03.340 Or just in the idea of eating bugs, for example, like all of this type of thing where we want

00:50:07.520 to take the strangeness and the weirdness and we want to elevate it up to the top.

00:50:12.620 It's like, these all have coherence.

00:50:14.240 Like these are, the nothing of this is accidental.

00:50:16.900 It doesn't mean that it's like a conspiracy that people are controlling.

00:50:19.260 It's like these patterns play themselves out.

00:50:21.560 We fall under principalities and, and we play things out even without knowing what we're

00:50:26.540 doing.

00:50:27.060 But the idea of cannibalism, for example, is a good example.

00:50:29.380 Like we have the Eucharist.

00:50:32.460 That is the highest.

00:50:34.060 It is taboo.

00:50:34.860 It is hidden.

00:50:35.340 It is secret.

00:50:36.600 It is, and then you have vulgar, like breakdown of causality where you're going to eat, not

00:50:42.500 only cannibalism, but you know, you know how they wrote these, these articles about like

00:50:46.720 growing your own meat of your own body and eating it.

00:50:49.320 It's like, do you understand that you're at the end of the world when you do that?

00:50:53.100 Like when you have self-causing, like self, like you have a breakdown of causality where

00:50:58.460 it's just circularity.

00:50:59.580 It's like the serpent eating its tail.

00:51:01.080 It's like, you really want to engage in that?

00:51:02.920 That you're bringing about the end of the world, people.

00:51:04.560 Like, this is not good.

00:51:05.720 Yeah, but it's so titillating.

00:51:07.120 That's right.

00:51:07.520 Exactly.

00:51:07.980 It has that kind of taboo titillation to it.

00:51:10.880 Because I think you see this especially in porn.

00:51:16.020 This is a major cultural shift that over the last, what, 10 or 15 years, porn is everywhere.

00:51:22.000 And it's because of the internet and because of cell phones and laptops.

00:51:25.100 People just have access to anything they could possibly imagine or not even imagine.

00:51:32.020 They've got that at their fingertips for free, blazing fast.

00:51:35.000 People write into my show constantly.

00:51:37.860 And it's young men who say, I got hooked on porn.

00:51:40.140 My life has been destroyed by porn.

00:51:41.620 I'm addicted. 0.98

00:51:42.280 It's perverted.

00:51:43.560 Not even just my relationships, but the whole way that I view the world.

00:51:47.840 I read some study.

00:51:49.400 It's like 92% of men have looked at porn a lot in their life. 0.75

00:51:54.820 Presumably 8% are liars.

00:51:56.900 That's the caveat to the study.

00:51:59.100 And especially in pornography since time immemorial, you see a lot of this overt, occult kind of imagery.

00:52:07.120 It would seem to me that the way to understand porn is that porn is an act of worship.

00:52:15.260 Yeah.

00:52:15.880 It's definitely sacred.

00:52:17.460 Like there's something sacred.

00:52:18.580 Well, sexuality is sacred.

00:52:20.700 But there's a man, you could understand that Christian sexuality is sacred and sublimated. 0.99

00:52:27.020 Like it moves towards sublimation.

00:52:28.740 So it's not completely sublimated, but it moved towards, like let's say ultimately you're,

00:52:33.180 the highest point of sexuality is to be the bride of Christ. 0.53

00:52:37.780 Like that would be like the highest point of sexuality.

00:52:39.340 The church is the bride of Christ.

00:52:40.380 You think of Dante, his erotic love for Beatrice, his lover, leads him directly to this vision of God.

00:52:47.360 Yeah, exactly.

00:52:48.240 So that's a beautiful image of that.

00:52:50.720 But now, so porn is a, so if you want to understand in the Middle Ages when they talked about like incubi and succubi,

00:53:00.780 like you can understand that pretty well right now.

00:53:03.440 Like we, this is what's going on.

00:53:05.000 We're being invaded by, by, by succubi and incubi. 0.84

00:53:10.100 And these, and the porn is a medium by which sexuality is being, our attention and our sexual attention

00:53:17.160 is being pulled as far away as possible from the sublimation of it.

00:53:23.940 But what it means is that it's also being pulled away from the lower levels,

00:53:27.340 which we, which means just having normal sexual relationships with your spouse, you know, having children, all this.

00:53:32.860 And so it's like, it's pulling us away into a kind of worship that is, people are going to, maybe not, I hope they understand,

00:53:40.480 but it is in a way a kind of demon worship.

00:53:43.020 Of course it is.

00:53:43.680 Because, because the, obviously the people, you're not engaging with the people that you see in the porn.

00:53:48.720 Like they're just disembodied images.

00:53:50.680 Spirits.

00:53:51.260 Yeah, that they're vehicles for this, this like breakdown of sexuality into all these idiosyncrasies.

00:53:57.280 So it's a, it's a perfect example.

00:53:58.600 Like if you, if you want to understand when the, in the Middle Ages, when they talked about these demons,

00:54:03.040 like, we got them now.

00:54:04.220 Like this is actually what's going on.

00:54:06.560 And so, and the purpose, if you read in the Middle Ages, if you read like the books that talk about these things,

00:54:11.220 they were saying that the purpose is to undo the world.

00:54:13.820 Like that's the purpose is to, the purpose of the incubus and the succubus is to take the male seed, 0.99

00:54:20.260 you know, and to, let's say, have, also it's, have women not have normal relationships with their husband 0.99

00:54:26.300 so that the world will be undone basically.

00:54:29.720 And this is, I mean, we're seeing it happen for our very eyes.

00:54:32.260 Like it's, you know, the birth rates are falling like crazy.

00:54:34.700 People, like young, young, healthy people, like they're just not having,

00:54:38.180 entering into normal relationships with people from the opposite sex.

00:54:41.780 And it's just ripping us all apart.

00:54:44.400 And it's part of, and it's just weird.

00:54:46.020 It's so weird because it's so clear now.

00:54:48.440 It's actually a good time to be alive in some ways because, you know, 30 years ago or 20 years ago,

00:54:53.300 if you had said, oh, this is anti-human.

00:54:55.680 Like people actually want humans to exist as little as possible.

00:54:59.400 You said, oh, come on, Jonathan, you're making it up.

00:55:01.440 It's like, well, at this point, it's pretty clear because now they're just saying it straight out.

00:55:05.700 Like we just want humans to exist as little as possible and to remove them,

00:55:10.100 to like remove them from the earth as much as we can.

00:55:12.720 And it's like, it's an actual agenda that is up there in the, you know,

00:55:16.140 in the official agendas of the UN or whatever big organization.

00:55:20.220 Well, you see the two images of sexuality in our culture.

00:55:23.160 You've got the one you've just described of sublimating our sexuality to be the bride of Christ. 0.86

00:55:28.760 You know, Dante looking up at Beatrice leads him right up to God.

00:55:30.920 And then the other one is Fifty Shades of Grey.

00:55:32.920 That's right.

00:55:33.220 And I can't help but notice the former, the Dante and the Beatrice and the bride of Christ, 0.80

00:55:38.900 it's full of angels and harps and bright light and beauty.

00:55:42.640 And then the Fifty Shades of Grey is full of, you're just whipping people and chains.

00:55:47.540 It looks like hell.

00:55:48.320 No one's pretending anymore.

00:55:50.160 Like look at an image of hell, like from the Middle Ages, 0.99

00:55:53.420 the one that your professors made fun of Christians for believing.

00:55:56.220 And then that's the world.

00:55:58.360 That's it.

00:55:58.820 These are the images that entice people today.

00:56:01.420 And so what are you going to do?

00:56:02.680 It's like, nobody's lying anymore.

00:56:05.620 Nobody's lying.

00:56:06.620 I love that line.

00:56:07.760 Nobody's lying.

00:56:08.440 You can't escape it.

00:56:09.480 You can't escape meaning.

00:56:11.060 You can't escape symbolism.

00:56:12.600 Like that old political philosopher Bob Dylan pointed out.

00:56:15.840 That moral philosophy, theologian.

00:56:17.640 Everybody's got to serve somebody.

00:56:19.420 And there is no neutrality here.

00:56:21.600 You're going one way or the other.

00:56:24.260 Jonathan, I could stay here all day, but my producers won't let me.

00:56:27.860 Thank you so much for coming on.

00:56:29.100 It was great.

00:56:29.540 Thanks for the opportunity.

00:56:30.460 Wonderful.

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The Michael Knowles Show - September 02, 2022

“Sh＊t Cray” ｜ Jonathan Pageau

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