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Episode: Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith | Spencer Klavan

Author: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Duration: 01:41:02

Episode Shownotes

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with author, lecturer, and podcaster Spencer Klavan. They discuss the fruits and follies of the postmodern worldview, how our conscious and subconscious rank order data and form perceptions, where disparate creation myths and biblical depictions overlap, why God does not rule by force, and

how just about everything we uncover through science reaffirms the notion of an underlying unity Spencer A. Klavan is host of the Young Heretics podcast and associate editor of The Claremont Review of Books. A graduate of Yale, he earned his doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University. He is the author, most recently, of the acclaimed book Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith, as well as the editor of Gateway to the Stoics and Gateway to the Epicureans. He has written for many outlets, including The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, City Journal, Newsweek, The Federalist, The American Mind, and The Daily Wire. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee. This episode was recorded on October 4th, 2024 - Links - For Spencer Klavan: “Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith”(Newest book) https://www.amazon.com/Light-Mind-World-Science-Illuminating/dp/1684515335 On X https://x.com/SpencerKlavan?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sklavan/?hl=en On Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@YoungHereticsShow/featured Substack https://substack.com/@spencerklavan

Full Transcript

00:00:14 Speaker_01
So I had the opportunity today to speak with Spencer Claven.

00:00:19 Speaker_01
I met Spencer partly through my connections with The Daily Wire, but also more specifically, we filmed a documentary together for the Foundations of the West series that's now available on The Daily Wire. You could take a look at it there.

00:00:34 Speaker_01
There's a series of dinner meetings that go along with that as well that expand out the ideas that we analyze.

00:00:40 Speaker_01
The more proximal reason for speaking with Spencer today was that he has a new book coming out called Light of the Mind, Light of the World, which is available in mid-October 2024, just a couple of weeks after this episode in particular was taped.

00:00:55 Speaker_01
And we walked through his book, which is an analysis of the

00:01:00 Speaker_01
what would you say, of the development of the ideas of the scientific revolution and an examination of their relationship to the religious ideas that still surround them and that constitute their metaphysical basis, but also an analysis of the dynamic relationship between those systems of ideas, religion versus science, let's say, as

00:01:23 Speaker_01
Those ideas progressed through time since the dawn of the scientific revolution. For me, during the conversation, time flew by very rapidly and Spencer said he had the same experience.

00:01:34 Speaker_01
So we're hoping that that spirit of timelessness that encompasses you when you are investigating honestly things that you believe to be true will also surround you as you watch this discussion. So welcome to that.

00:01:49 Speaker_01
So Spencer, the last time we had any real opportunity to speak together was in Athens.

00:01:55 Speaker_00
That's right. Right in front of the Acropolis, which now we've got the Arizona mountains in the background, but it's a bit of a change.

00:02:01 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. Well, it was a good deal to meet in Athens. And that was part, for everybody watching and listening, that was part of the Foundations of the West documentary series, which has been recently released on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

00:02:16 Speaker_01
I did a series of documentaries, two in Jerusalem, one with Ben Shapiro and one with Jonathan Paggio, one in Rome with Bishop Barron, and one in Athens with Spencer Clavin. And so that was fun.

00:02:30 Speaker_01
So what's been the consequence for you or for The Daily Wire, as far as you know, of release of The Foundations of the West?

00:02:37 Speaker_00
Well, it's really fascinating. And first of all, you know, just looking back at that series when I got to rewatch it as it came out, to think what an honor and a privilege we had to be there together. I mean, just a gift.

00:02:51 Speaker_00
And it was a while back that we filmed that. show. And I was really struck by the fact that the logic of our conversation at dinner took us to this discussion of antisemitism, as you called it, the spirit of Cain.

00:03:08 Speaker_00
And we sort of arrived at, before the October 7th massacre, before all of the horrors that have unfolded since we had that talk, we kind of arrived at the spirit of the age that's moving.

00:03:22 Speaker_00
And so on one level, it's very sorrowful to look back and see how true that was, what we were talking about. On the other hand, it's sort of a confirmation that these ideas, these issues are so vital now. things that are supposedly so antiquated.

00:03:38 Speaker_00
Oh, it's ancient history and we're chasing it out of the academy because it's white and it's evil or supremacist or whatever.

00:03:45 Speaker_00
In fact, the ideas of the West and the principles of the West are so deeply under threat that they become ever more vital by the day. So it's been wonderful to hear from people that this has given them a kind of grounding

00:03:59 Speaker_00
in where they come from, because we feel so alone in time these days. We feel so cut off from our ancestry. And we've been told that everything basically before sometime in the middle of the 19th century is just backwards nonsense, if that.

00:04:16 Speaker_00
And now this leaves people without kind of any mooring in these extremely turbulent times.

00:04:23 Speaker_00
So I think, you know, besides just the joy of doing it ourselves and the wonderful conversation we had, it's great to know that we're giving people something and that is grounding in history and a connection to the past.

00:04:36 Speaker_01
It was really good of the editors. The editors did a very good job in linking together the conversations within each documentary section.

00:04:47 Speaker_01
in a manner that produced a coherent conversation, because it was a very spontaneous enterprise, and then also across all four.

00:04:55 Speaker_01
And then part of that, of course, was the dinners that we had afterwards in remarkably beautiful locations, crazily beautiful locations. And those turned out to be very coherent as well. And I think one of the things that made the documentary different

00:05:12 Speaker_01
from others of its type, let's say, is that we concentrated more on the meaning of the ideas than on the facts of the historical progression, the significance of the historical ideas rather than the nature of the ideas themselves or the historical events.

00:05:30 Speaker_01
And so that's also, I think, emblematic of this different conceptualization of the world that's starting to emerge in a way on the ashes of the Enlightenment.

00:05:41 Speaker_01
So, one of the things that I've been writing about and thinking about, and I believe this strikes right to the heart of the issue, is that the postmodern types were correct in one way. Not uniquely correct, but still correct. Even a stop clock.

00:06:00 Speaker_01
Well, right. But to give the devil his due, It's very interesting and worthy of consideration that a small group of essentially literary critics have upended the world. Foucault, for example, Derrida.

00:06:16 Speaker_01
And that that's at the bottom, that act of upending is at the bottom of the culture wars. Something like that doesn't happen by accident. And what the postmodernists got right in their suspicions was that

00:06:32 Speaker_01
we cannot see the world merely in consequence of apprehending the dead facts. It's not possible. And I've been looking into that a lot. I mean, there's a bunch of reasons it's not possible. I mean, the first reason is, there's way too many facts.

00:06:48 Speaker_01
There's a fact per phenomenon, or a fact per combination of phenomena, right? So, there's an infinite number of facts. And so you drown in facts alone. You have to prioritize them.

00:07:00 Speaker_00
You have to funnel. You have to have some sort of organized principle.

00:07:03 Speaker_01
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to. Just to look, you have to have some organizing principle. And this is where the science starts to reflect it as well.

00:07:12 Speaker_01
The strict empiricist types act as if what presents itself to you are unquestionable sensations, right, that the sensations themselves, the perceptions, have truth as part and parcel of their nature, self-evident truth. It's not true.

00:07:34 Speaker_01
And the reason it's not true is because you cannot separate perception physiologically from action.

00:07:41 Speaker_01
So, it's particularly interesting if you think about how your eyes work, because when you're looking at something, so you say, well, there it is right in front of me. It's like, no,

00:07:51 Speaker_01
To actually understand how vision works, it's better to think about it the way you might think about touch for a blind person.

00:07:59 Speaker_01
So you do, when you're using your fingers, if you're blind, you have to move them, and then you map out the contours of the thing that you're perceiving, and you aggregate those individual perceptions, let's say micro-perceptions, into a whole.

00:08:18 Speaker_01
And even if you're blind, the whole W-H-O-L-E manifests itself as a unity in your imagination. So, the idea that blind people don't see is wrong. They don't see light, but they perceive shape. Otherwise, they couldn't orient themselves in the world.

00:08:34 Speaker_01
You do the same with your eyes. You're feeling your way out with your eyes, by moving your eyes, like you're exploring and you piece the world together that way. And you cannot do that. without intent, without aim.

00:08:50 Speaker_01
So even to focus your eyes, because I could look at you and focus there, or I could look 30 feet away and focus there. Just the choice of focus is goal-directed and value-predicated. So perception itself is saturated by value.

00:09:05 Speaker_01
And the postmodernists figured this out. They figured out, and they were right, that either, there's two ways of looking at it, either We see the world through a story. That's one way of thinking about it.

00:09:18 Speaker_01
Or a description of the value structure through which we see the world is a story. It is a story. Okay, so they were right. Now, robotics engineers figured this out, and cognitive scientists figured it out, and neuropsychologists figured it out.

00:09:35 Speaker_01
Multiple disciplines converged on this. Where the postmodernists went wrong, and this is a serious error, was they said, well, we see the world through a story.

00:09:46 Speaker_01
There's no uniting story, so that's skepticism of meta-narratives, but power rules everything. They slipped into a kind of Marxism, right? So it's contradictory.

00:09:57 Speaker_00
It's extremely remarkable. Your thoughts on this subject are really dovetailing with something that I've been tangling with as well recently. I've got this book that's coming out called Light of the Mind, Light of the World.

00:10:10 Speaker_01
Right, Light of the Mind, Light of the World. That's coming out in, this is October 5th today?

00:10:15 Speaker_00
October 15th.

00:10:16 Speaker_01
So it's coming out October 15th?

00:10:18 Speaker_00
Yes, so within a couple weeks, essentially. And the subtitle is Illuminating Science Through Faith. So the book is effectively a new history of the scientific enterprise, told as if the question of spiritual matters is not yet resolved.

00:10:39 Speaker_00
Because we have sort of begun with this idea, or I at least grew up with this idea, that if you wanted to believe in anything religious, you basically had to throw your reason out the door.

00:10:52 Speaker_01
Right, so there's an implicit description of the nature of reality there, which you alluded to earlier, which is that We were in the dark ages until the scientific method emerged, and then we stepped into the light.

00:11:07 Speaker_01
And the scientific method is antithetical to the religious and vice versa.

00:11:14 Speaker_00
Yes, it has to do with exactly this separation that you're talking about between what I think we would now call the subjective and the objective world, and this kind of myth

00:11:25 Speaker_00
that there exists these bare facts out in the world with no interpreting mode available. You can just look at the world without any kind of human interpretation.

00:11:38 Speaker_01
That's what the rationalists objected to when they were objecting to the presumptions of the empiricists, right? They didn't like the idea of self-evident sense data.

00:11:47 Speaker_01
They knew that we imposed something like an a priori structure on the world, but they didn't...

00:11:54 Speaker_01
they didn't, what would you say, they didn't take the step, they thought about that interpretive framework, and maybe this is mostly the Greek influence, as something that was rational. But it doesn't seem to be rational, it seems to be narrative.

00:12:09 Speaker_00
Yes, so it's during the scientific revolution, in fact it's Galileo who for the first time draws this division between what will come to be called primary and secondary qualities.

00:12:21 Speaker_00
And the primary qualities, you may know, are things like quantity, mass, position, these quantifiable things. So, primary qualities are actually quantities, and they're therefore supposed to be completely mind-independent.

00:12:34 Speaker_00
Which, if you think about it for a second, is a remarkable claim that numbers have nothing to do with the human mind.

00:12:42 Speaker_01
Well, mathematicians themselves differ on that interpretation, because some of them do believe that the mathematical realm is an independent reality that human beings discover, and others think, well, it's a subjective construction that bears some correspondence to the world.

00:13:01 Speaker_01
There's much to be said on both sides of those arguments, but merely presuming that, as you pointed out, that Numbers are self-evident and have nothing to do with the psyche, right, the way we structure things.

00:13:14 Speaker_00
And so there was this hope, this very exciting hope at the time, that you could draw a picture of the world from no human standpoint, that the world effectively could be reduced to this machine that operates entirely independently of our participation in it.

00:13:32 Speaker_00
And the secondary qualities, things like color and sound and all of those tactile sensations that you're describing and the way that we build our momentary impressions up into a picture of the world, all of that was secondary.

00:13:46 Speaker_00
In other words, more subjective, right? And gradually over time, as the scientific method demonstrated such enormous power, it began to seem as if that picture of the world, the primary qualities picture of the world,

00:14:02 Speaker_00
was all that was really real because everything else seemed so. Everything could be reduced to that. Exactly.

00:14:07 Speaker_01
Yeah well it's funny because those so-called primary qualities are something like what everything has in common and so there is there is something foundational about them but you know how the brain handles that to some degree is quite interesting.

00:14:20 Speaker_01
So if you look at the visual system, so your primary cortex extract out from the visual field some things that you might regard as primary. Edges, for example.

00:14:34 Speaker_01
And you can think of those edges, edge detection, as one of the primary constituent elements of visual perception. And then

00:14:42 Speaker_01
that information moves from the retina, say, to the first level of visual processing, and then it moves up a hierarchy of visual processing toward perception. Now, at the highest level, perception itself involves motor movement.

00:14:58 Speaker_01
So, for example, when I look at this glass, Although I don't know it, when I look at the glass, the grip I would use to grip that glass is activated by the perception.

00:15:12 Speaker_01
So, part of what I perceive as the glass is a grippable object of a certain mass with these dimensions that I could lift in this manner. activated by the perception without me thinking about it. It's part of the perception.

00:15:27 Speaker_01
Now, there's one other thing that's relevant. Okay, so you could imagine that when people first started to talk about the visual system, they thought, well, there are basic perceptions and they feed upward to the realm of emotion, motivation, thought,

00:15:41 Speaker_01
action one way upward. But the way the system is actually constructed is that all the different levels of the visual system feed back to one another. So even at the level of primary perception,

00:15:56 Speaker_01
Most of what you see, when you see something familiar, isn't the object. It's your memory of the object, right? So you start to substitute. That's part of what gives you that feeling of familiarity. I've seen this before.

00:16:09 Speaker_01
It's also, weirdly enough, one of the things that obscures the wonder of the world. Because as your perception automates,

00:16:18 Speaker_01
as a consequence of repeated familiarity with something, instead of seeing the thing in itself, whatever that is, you start to see the memory of your perception of the thing. Now that's super efficient. Here's a good way of thinking about it.

00:16:32 Speaker_01
You know, once you're literate, you can't look at a word without hearing it in your imagination.

00:16:37 Speaker_01
Okay, you hear it because your eyes, the part of the brain that's devoted to visual perception, and the part that's devoted to auditory perception in the cortex, overlap. So your eyes are actually working as ears. Wow.

00:16:51 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's so cool. It's a synesthetic. Yes, exactly. That's right.

00:16:55 Speaker_01
But once you've established that circuitry, you can't look at a word without hearing the word, right? Right. It's part of the perception. Well, you know, is the word on a page there as an objective entity? Well, yes, the answer is yes and no.

00:17:14 Speaker_01
So anyways, the problem with the primary and secondary model, neurophysiologically speaking, is that because there's feedback loops from every level to every other level, it isn't

00:17:25 Speaker_01
the idea of a one-way, of a stepped process towards higher level of perceptions just isn't right.

00:17:31 Speaker_01
There's so much top-down constraint even on the primary perceptions that it's almost impossible to disentangle the subjective from the objective in perception. And Francis Bacon worried about this actually when he

00:17:43 Speaker_00
Because his whole effort was to get back to what the Greeks would have called imperia, right? Direct experience. And this was going to be the touchstone of truth.

00:17:52 Speaker_00
And you were supposed to clear away every preconceived theory that you had before you arrived at the hard data. Then you could apply your theories.

00:18:00 Speaker_00
But there's a passage where Bacon says the mind is like a pair of glasses or rather like a notepad upon which you're writing. You can't clear something all the way until you've written in something new.

00:18:13 Speaker_01
In other words, there's always that length. Yeah, that's a major problem because it also implies that you almost never learn anything without subjecting something previous to a death, right?

00:18:28 Speaker_01
Which this is partly what makes a revelatory conversation or realization painful, is that, yeah. And so here's another neurophysiological and sociological problem with the idea of primary perception. You're constituted so that in your embodiment,

00:18:49 Speaker_01
the fact of skepticism about direct sense data is built in. Here's why. Well, you could see something and assume it was real. Well, then why don't we just have one sense?

00:19:04 Speaker_01
And you might say, well, because things happen behind you, let's say, which you can't see. Well, then why don't you have eyes all the way around your head?

00:19:13 Speaker_01
Okay, and why more profoundly is like why vision plus hearing plus touch plus taste plus smell and then proprioception as well. And the answer is because the data coming in from any given single sensory source is not determinative. It's sufficiently

00:19:32 Speaker_01
flawed so that if you relied on only that, you would die. But it's worse than that. It's worse than that because we have five dimensions that we use to triangulate, so to speak, on reality. But even that's not reliable enough.

00:19:49 Speaker_01
Even five qualitatively distinct sources of input, the senses, which are very different from one another, right? If they all report the same thing, we think, It's there. But no, we don't. We think maybe it's there. And then we ask other people, right?

00:20:07 Speaker_01
You have to corroborate. Yes. And then not only do we ask other people, but we refer to tradition. And then not only do we ask other people and refer to tradition, we also... This is something the scientific revolution really did produce.

00:20:21 Speaker_01
And Francis Bacon in particular. Bacon and Descartes together determined that there were ways that we could approach the problem of what was real that would be more rigorous. And so the scientific method came up.

00:20:34 Speaker_01
And the idea there would be if we're trying to account for something and there's a multiplicity of potential causal pathways, will reduce the causal pathway that's under question to one, and then systematically vary it.

00:20:50 Speaker_00
It's a brilliant thing to do. It's brilliant. And what's so, to me, tragic about the story, in the true sense, in that there's really no villain in this story. It's just there's a shadow that follows in the light of this discovery, I think.

00:21:04 Speaker_00
Maybe there's the villains of the French Revolution. Well, the French, we can always blame the French.

00:21:08 Speaker_00
And in fact, Pierre-Simon Laplace, who was Newton's greatest interpreter in France, who took Newtonian mechanics and applied it marvelously to astrophysics, is, if there is a villain of my book, for instance, it's Pierre-Simon Laplace, in that he's the guy who takes this method and these mathematical laws for organizing our observations, that is, Newtonian mechanics,

00:21:33 Speaker_00
And he draws out of that this claim that the world itself is exhaustively described in what we would now call purely objective terms. That it's all a bunch of particulate matter moving in these totally mind-independent ways.

00:21:49 Speaker_00
And he writes this essay on probabilities.

00:21:51 Speaker_01
That's Laplace's demon.

00:21:52 Speaker_00
He's Laplace of Laplace. On probabilities, that if you had a mind that knew the position and momentum of every particle in the world, past, present, and future would lay open like a book.

00:22:04 Speaker_00
So he's describing the mind of God, but attributing to mankind the possibility of finding this sort of knowledge, a zero standpoint.

00:22:14 Speaker_01
That's such an interesting claim there, too, because it shows that even in a claim that simple, There's an if, which is a proclamation, an a priori proclamation of a certain kind of faith.

00:22:26 Speaker_01
If this exists, and the problem with Laplace's demon, which is supposed to, let's say, be able to track the position and momentum of every microparticle, It can't, right? So the whole if is wrong, right?

00:22:40 Speaker_01
So the fundamental axiom of faith upon which the deterministic model of objective reality is predicated is false.

00:22:47 Speaker_00
And this is Ludwig Boltzmann, right? Yes, yes. When you start to talk about the second law of thermodynamics and why it is that things tend toward entropy and suddenly you've hit upon

00:22:58 Speaker_00
a rule of the material world that is nevertheless not, strictly speaking, a law in the sense of being something that must happen by necessity. And it's that discovery, actually, that's a precursor to the quantum revolution.

00:23:12 Speaker_00
It's not exactly the same, but the same mode of thought is operative in Boltzmann and in Max Planck, after whom we name the constant that describes the quantum. And that explosion

00:23:24 Speaker_00
of the atomistic, deterministic idea of the world that reduces everything outside of us, and ultimately us as well, to mere bodies in motion that can somehow be known from a zero standpoint, a God's eye view.

00:23:39 Speaker_00
That totally upends this way of thinking about the world and starts, I think, to point us back toward what you're describing. I think that what you're describing is, at a very deep and primordial level, also what the book of Genesis is describing.

00:23:57 Speaker_01
Well, let's delve into that for a bit.

00:24:01 Speaker_01
I mean, the problem with this sort of discussion is that when any pseudo-intellectuals get together to put forward a pseudo-intellectual enterprise, they always pull in some strange element of quantum mechanics and rip off that, often very badly understood.

00:24:15 Speaker_01
And I'm very aware that we could wander into the same territory. But there is the fundamental proclamation of the book of Genesis, which is echoed in many mythological traditions.

00:24:29 Speaker_01
Like there's a shared pattern, for example, in the Mesopotamian creation myths.

00:24:33 Speaker_01
And it's a very widespread idea that what gives rise to reality eternally, so at the beginning of time now and forever in the future, is something like an active force of apprehension or conception that interacts not with a deterministic

00:24:54 Speaker_01
world, but with a realm of possibility, a realm of structured possibility, and casts that into being. Now, to me, that's very reminiscent of what consciousness itself does. you're not conscious of what's predictable. So this is so cool, right?

00:25:14 Speaker_01
Because if you think about that Laplacian world, it's deterministic. One thing follows another. It's rule-like. It can be turned into an algorithm. Okay, anything that you do that can be turned into an algorithm vanishes from consciousness, right?

00:25:29 Speaker_01
So really what your consciousness does as it operates, this is neurological reality, is it, It's an exploratory process that involves generally the activation of large areas of the brain.

00:25:42 Speaker_04
Yes.

00:25:43 Speaker_01
If you're learning a new word, for example, when you learn the new word, a fairly widespread pattern of neurological activation will accompany your initial perceptions. If it's a really new word, it's even hard to hear the first couple of times.

00:26:01 Speaker_01
You might have to have it repeated to you multiple times, and then you might have to say it multiple times, right? Okay, so what you're doing, well, you hear it repeatedly, and you say it repeatedly as you

00:26:13 Speaker_01
reduce the number of neurological operations that are necessary in order to specify that phenomena.

00:26:21 Speaker_01
And you build this little machine, left side of your brain, farther back in the brain, this little machine that's specialized for that now, and then from then on in, when you encounter that phenomena, you use that little specialized machine.

00:26:37 Speaker_01
But what consciousness itself is doing is concentrating on what isn't deterministic yet, what isn't predictable, what hasn't been established. And then if it can, it algorithmizes it and makes it automatic, but then you're not conscious of it.

00:26:56 Speaker_01
So for example, once you can read a word, you're not conscious, you don't have to sound it out.

00:27:01 Speaker_00
So it vanishes from your sight.

00:27:03 Speaker_01
Everything that you can predict, this is so important, everything you can predict vanishes from your sight. Right, right. So consciousness actually does seem to be the thing that lives on the edge of the transforming horizon of the future.

00:27:19 Speaker_01
And that, so the reality, this is what seems to be portrayed in the book of Genesis with the idea of tohu vabohu or teom is that what your consciousness apprehends is not the deterministic world that can be turned into an algorithm, but those elements of the world that are not yet revealed, but could be.

00:27:38 Speaker_00
That's what you're contending with. And I want to return to something you said about sort of pseudo-intellectuals bandying about these scientific ideas, because I think that's absolutely right.

00:27:46 Speaker_00
There's a very dangerous direction of travel here, where you end up saying something like, science has proved the book of Genesis. Right, right, right. And that's actually not what either of us is saying at all, but rather quite the reverse.

00:27:59 Speaker_00
The book of Genesis is describing here a pattern and indeed an allegorical template that ramifies out into every possible sphere of life. So this notion that you have that The world is invested, in some sense, from the beginning with language.

00:28:19 Speaker_00
Vayomer Elohim and God said, Yehi Or, Vayehi Or, right? Let there be light and there was light. And in the Hebrew, let there be light and there was light are almost the exact same word. It's impossible to capture this in the structures of English.

00:28:35 Speaker_00
But in Hebrew, because time is factored so differently into the verbal system, When God says let there be light he says yehi or and then when the text says and there was light it says by yehi or it's the same thing.

00:28:49 Speaker_00
So to me what we can... And light existed and light emerged. God said be light and light be or something like that. So, you know, if you could say it that way. What this implies I think is that the text is describing a situation in which mind

00:29:06 Speaker_00
invests matter with these implicit structures that you are illuminating from a cognitive and psychological perspective. And that when man is invited into the garden to name the animals, he's not simply inventing the Hebrew language or coming up with

00:29:26 Speaker_00
the particular sounds he's going to say. It's much, much deeper than that. His mind is formed in such a way as to draw out these implicit structures. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

00:29:35 Speaker_01
Definitely. Well, that's partly why there's an echo in Genesis where the word is what brings being into reality. And then human beings are said to be made in that image.

00:29:50 Speaker_01
And then that's reflected further in the text by God's granting to Adam the power to name. And God himself in the text brings the animals to Adam to see what he'll name them.

00:30:01 Speaker_00
And not only that, but you know what he does? He brings them to him each after its form and kind. So he's not bringing a cat. He's bringing cat as a category. which is a very different sort of thing.

00:30:14 Speaker_00
You know, the text is quite explicit that what's being presented to Adam is not any particulate entity so much as entities as members of the classes that we use to categorize our perceptions and to draw them into that form.

00:30:29 Speaker_00
I mean, you were talking earlier about touching the edge of the cup as a blind person. You think also, one of my favorite examples is hearing.

00:30:37 Speaker_00
Which, just at a basic kind of, you know, high school physics kind of level, we know that hearing is a wave, right? That is to say it's a pattern of change over time.

00:30:47 Speaker_00
And so even before you get to the quality of what you hear, that is, this is a song or this is speech or what have you.

00:30:55 Speaker_00
If you take a snapshot of every particle in your body, if you could, in that Laplacian way, at a moment in this conversation where we are discussing and the sound waves are vibrating between us, nowhere in that snapshot is anything resembling a sound wave, because the sound wave involves the pattern of change over time.

00:31:16 Speaker_00
And so in order to create even sound, you need this box into which you can gather and group individual moments of perception that form them together.

00:31:28 Speaker_01
That's that top-down process that brings things together in a unity. This is another one of the

00:31:35 Speaker_01
weaknesses of the postmodern claim that there's no transcendent unity, no metanarrative, which is another, which is a restatement of the idea of the collapse of the highest, the collapse of the unifying principle, the collapse of God, the death of God.

00:31:49 Speaker_01
See, one of the real problems with that hypothesis is that it's boundless. So there's no, there's no inevitable higher order unity. Okay. At what level of analysis are you speaking?

00:32:07 Speaker_01
Because if I'm going to perceive this as a glass, then all of the multitude of things that that glass is, the different molecular positions that the liquid inside it might take, all the different ways that a glass could make itself manifest, all that has to be subsumed into a unity that is the glass.

00:32:30 Speaker_01
Yes. There's a, I think it's Manet, but it might be Monet, I don't remember, French Impressionist who went out and painted haystacks, a whole series of them under different conditions of illumination.

00:32:43 Speaker_01
And the haystack is the same, but of course it's not because the colors that constitute the haystack shift dramatically, and that's what he was investigating. It's so interesting because

00:32:55 Speaker_01
two paintings of the same haystack, really at the micro-level, bear nothing in common, right? There's nothing in common.

00:33:03 Speaker_01
They're separate in time, they're separate in place, the constituent elements are completely different, but there's an emergent reality, which is the haystack, that unifies all those variants in form, and makes the perception possible.

00:33:18 Speaker_01
Now, the postmodern claim is that there's no overarching metanarrative. It's like, if there's no overarching metanarrative, you can never perceive a unity. And they might say, well, there's a limit to the manifestation of that unity, right?

00:33:32 Speaker_01
There's no ultimate unity. It's like, Oh yeah, fine. Draw the line. Tell me exactly where the unity stops.

00:33:42 Speaker_01
And it's worse than that, because let's assume that they're right, that there is no uniting metanarrative, so no single proper way of looking at the world. You can understand that something might be said about that.

00:33:54 Speaker_01
Well then, does that mean that the ultimate reality is disunified, that there are various forms of fundamental truth. And if reality itself can't be unified, because it's not unified in its essence, then

00:34:09 Speaker_01
Are we destined to conflict between our own motivations even? And how do you and I agree on anything if it doesn't point towards a unity that's actually apprehensible and in some way implicit in the world? This is a huge, huge problem.

00:34:24 Speaker_00
This is why I was so struck by what you were saying about Foucault and Derrida. I think we can kind of put Lacan in here too, because it mirrors something that happened to me at the end of writing this book.

00:34:36 Speaker_00
I, you always come to a few surprises if you're onto something in a good book. And to me, the biggest surprise was that I understood the postmodernists in a completely new way.

00:34:47 Speaker_00
And I understood them actually as part of a tradition that probably goes back to Heraclitus, speaking of the Greeks, right? Yeah, right. The river. Yes, but also runs through people like David Hume and even Bishop Barclay, who are reacting

00:35:03 Speaker_00
to this objectivist idea.

00:35:06 Speaker_01
Yeah, Hume's problem is you cannot compute a pathway forward merely by understanding the terrain. You can't get an ought from an is.

00:35:16 Speaker_00
And the whole thing is inference, essentially, and he's saying that the only thing that we have in front of us is the fact that the sun has always risen in our experience, in all recorded human experience.

00:35:27 Speaker_00
And it's only on that that we're able to base the idea that the sun's going to rise tomorrow, which shatters this idea of something that remains consistent from day to day.

00:35:38 Speaker_01
And that's his scandal of induction. Yes. problem the chicken has with the farmer. Right, exactly. The farmer is the chicken's best friend.

00:35:47 Speaker_01
Every day the farmer brings food until it's Thanksgiving, in which case the faith the chicken has in the structure of the world as a consequence of induction turns out to be painfully wrong.

00:36:00 Speaker_01
Yeah, and the problem is we never know, and Hume was pointing this to some degree, we never know when the rug is going to be pulled out from underneath us, or at what level.

00:36:11 Speaker_01
You know, you could even take the sun itself, I've thought, because you think, well, there's nothing more consistent than the sun.

00:36:18 Speaker_01
It's like, well, until it emits a solar flare that takes out our entire electrical system, which is a high probability event, right?

00:36:26 Speaker_01
In fact, there was a solar flare, I think two days ago, that's on its way to earth, and no one knows what the consequence of that storm will be. And so, yeah, yeah, well, so it seems to me that

00:36:37 Speaker_01
In reality itself, there are something like levels of predictability that have something to do with statistical regularity. You know, the sun is a fairly predictable entity because of its immense mass and because of its immense mass and size.

00:36:54 Speaker_01
the transformations that it undergoes can be predicted to some degree at a statistical level reliably, but not entirely. I guess that's also partly that turns us back to the reason that we evolved consciousness at all.

00:37:12 Speaker_01
If we could rely on induction, there'd be no reason for consciousness. Consciousness seems to be the mechanism that corrects for the fact that the world is not fundamentally predictable, like seriously not fundamentally predictable, irrevocably.

00:37:26 Speaker_01
Now, how do you understand if at all, and this is where we start to wander onto the dangerous quantum territory.

00:37:33 Speaker_01
And one of the things that's really struck me, and it's maybe only an analogy, is that the field, the tohu vabohu or the teom, the spirit of God that

00:37:45 Speaker_01
rests on the water, that field that that spirit interacts with seems to be something like the pool of infinite possibility. Like it's represented, for example, in the Mesopotamian stories. Yes, exactly, as a dragon, right?

00:38:01 Speaker_01
And a dragon is an interesting representation because a dragon is something fearsome and predatory, but also something that contains the possibility of treasure. And so the underlying metaphor there is that

00:38:13 Speaker_01
what our consciousness confronts is something infinite in danger and possibility. Right, right. Which seems perfectly reasonable. And that the proper stance to adopt to that is one of something like a heroic endeavor towards fundamental truth.

00:38:29 Speaker_01
And that that's the best way of contending with that. And you see echoes of that in Genesis because God is also periodically characterized as the victor of the battle over Leviathan, for example, which looks like an analog of Tiamat.

00:38:44 Speaker_01
And so that's part of that heroic... interaction with reality that characterizes, well, the Logos, the spirit of the Logos itself.

00:38:54 Speaker_00
Right, the seething ocean of unresolved possibilities.

00:38:57 Speaker_01
Yeah, okay, so at the quantum level, so what's being discovered?

00:39:00 Speaker_00
Right, well, so this, I like to approach this through the debates that Niels Bohr used to have with Albert Einstein. So when quantum mechanics was first making itself known, first and foremost to these very men among others.

00:39:14 Speaker_00
Bohr and Einstein were two of the great architects of quantum along with Louis de Broglie and and any number of I mean Max Planck we've already mentioned.

00:39:22 Speaker_00
But it's between Einstein and Bohr that this fundamental irreducible tension emerges in which Bohr, sort of a Kantian philosopher, says we're banging up here against the inherently unknowable to the human mind.

00:39:41 Speaker_00
These waves that describe probabilities, this is Schrodinger's sort of, and Heisenberg also kind of managed to mathematically describe probability waves, which tell you where a particle is likely to be, but never where it actually is.

00:39:58 Speaker_00
Not because we don't know, but because in some fundamental sense, it isn't in any of those positions. And this is Bohr's idea. It is. It is possibility. And Heisenberg at one point wonderfully compares it to Aristotelian potentia, this ancient idea.

00:40:13 Speaker_00
Oh, really? Oh, yes. Oh, really? Oh, yes.

00:40:16 Speaker_01
To potential?

00:40:16 Speaker_00
Yes. Oh, that's so important. To pure right. Okay. Oh, yes. And so he brings back this old Aristotelian idea that the world is made of potential and energia and the realization of potential.

00:40:28 Speaker_00
And so this is the Copenhagen interpretation, which basically says, there are no holding places in your mind for that which is fundamentally unperceived.

00:40:38 Speaker_00
So Bohr is saying, of course, all of our measurements and observations are always going to be expressed in terms of classical mechanics because they're going to be making contact with our minds, which are shaped like classical mechanics in some way.

00:40:53 Speaker_00
These categories like space and time, location and position, these are baked into our minds. This is where you get the Kant of it all. And Einstein wonderfully says, if this is true, then it's the end of physics.

00:41:07 Speaker_00
Because to him, physics means- It's deterministic. Yes.

00:41:10 Speaker_00
And it also means that mathematics describes directly a reality that is independent of us entirely, and that the world can be blanketed over completely with these objective mathematical terms that describe whatever is most fundamentally real.

00:41:28 Speaker_00
And this dispute and its various tributaries are still going on today, which is one reason why this is such treacherous territory to venture into because there's always going to be an alternative possible interpretation.

00:41:40 Speaker_00
But if you accept something like Bohr's interpretation, which I believe remains the most philosophically coherent way of dealing with these discoveries, then what you have is a situation very much like what you're describing in Genesis.

00:41:58 Speaker_00
Now, that doesn't mean that the author of Genesis was told by God about the Schrodinger equations. That's sort of... That would be the sort of pseudoscience version of it.

00:42:08 Speaker_00
But it does mean that the pattern you're observing shot through Genesis, and as you indicate, through the whole Hebrew Bible, of God's mind as the resolver of a fundamentally unresolved possibility. The caster into order that's good or very good.

00:42:24 Speaker_00
Yes, and the idea of us as essentially, the image of God in us is essentially, yeah.

00:42:30 Speaker_01
Okay, well, so let me extend that supposition for a minute. There's a field of possibility that lays in front of you, and it, in a way, it surrounds and constitutes all the objects. So for example, this is a candle, but not if I throw it at you.

00:42:50 Speaker_01
Okay, right, right. So there's a non-zero possibility that one of the less probable manifestations of this object will occur. Okay, so then you might say, well, under what conditions does this remain a candle? Okay, well,

00:43:06 Speaker_01
That's very complicated because if I smash it, let's say on the edge here, now it's a knife, right? And it's just as much a potential knife as it is a continuing candle, just as much.

00:43:18 Speaker_01
Not quite, not quite just as much, partly because we have established an ethical framework between us that's a set of our aims that define the manner in which we're going to

00:43:34 Speaker_01
leave the possibilities of that object as they predictably and non-terrifyingly are. But that's entirely dependent on our, it's so interesting because it's dependent on our ethical aim.

00:43:48 Speaker_01
you can imagine a situation where you're in a bar where a beer bottle now becomes a spear or a club. And so that's within that realm of possibility.

00:43:57 Speaker_01
Now, the reason that possibility doesn't or does manifest itself is very much dependent, well, partly on the intrinsic possibility of the object, but it also depends on the aim of the perceivers. If our conversation

00:44:16 Speaker_01
starts to deteriorate into the depths, and we hit a fundamental place of disagreement, and we regard each other as enemies in consequence, then we're likely to make some of the unpleasant possibilities that surround us much more likely to be manifest.

00:44:34 Speaker_01
And one of the things that indicates is that the manner in which the factual itself reveals itself is inextricably dependent on aim.

00:44:44 Speaker_01
what the biblical texts insist upon in their injunction that we should walk with God is that if we oriented ourselves towards the highest possible aim, and we did that consistently and without pride, then the manner in which the world would unfold would be

00:45:08 Speaker_01
the manner that is good or very good, and that only when we deviate from that heavenly orientation is it the case that the possibilities of the world that tilt it towards a more fallen or hellish state manifest themselves.

00:45:22 Speaker_01
So, I've been thinking about this with regards to work. So, you know, when Adam and Eve succumb to the sin of pride. They want to usurp the highest place, right, under the temptation of the serpent.

00:45:37 Speaker_01
They fall, and God says, well, you're destined to toil, and the world is gonna bring forth obstacles, pricks, thorns, thistles to you. Well, so, I've been thinking about that a lot.

00:45:48 Speaker_01
It's like, if your effort is toilsome, and if the world you inhabit is fallen, How much of that is a consequence of your pride and your misaligned aim and your refusal to walk with God? See, when God calls to Adam in the garden after

00:46:09 Speaker_01
Adam and Eve fall. Adam hides from God. So he's alienated from the divine unity at that point. And he refuses to habitually walk with God as he had. So his aim is now seriously off, right? Tempted as he was by Eve and the serpent.

00:46:28 Speaker_01
That's when burdensome toil enters the world. And so one of the things I've really been thinking about is, this is something Job wrestles with too, is that

00:46:37 Speaker_01
The degree to which the possibilities of the world make themselves manifest as unjust suffering are in precise proportion to the misalignment of your aim. And you see that elaborated in the story of Cain and Abel, for example.

00:46:51 Speaker_01
Cain's aim is misaligned.

00:46:53 Speaker_00
Nothing works for him. He can't get the right sacrifice. Here's something that I've been going through that initially will sound like a real crash down from the lofty heights of our conversation, but actually I think it embodies it almost exactly.

00:47:11 Speaker_00
it suddenly occurred to me that if, instead of coming to my work with aspirations to some external reward, such as fame or money or any of these other things, which are good things that we would want, I think, for our friends and all that, but if you leave all of that at the door and you just try to love things for the right reasons, that is, you try to love the good,

00:47:39 Speaker_00
and invest yourself and your joy in the good of the task before you, everything transforms, the whole world transforms.

00:47:47 Speaker_01
Well, you know, that's actually, we can refer back to the neurophysiology, that's actually literally true. So, the way your perceptions work is that you establish a name, And then the world appears to you as a pathway toward that aim.

00:48:08 Speaker_01
Okay, and it's so subtle. So for example, if I want to walk, if I decide that I want to walk across a room, the fact that you're in the way now makes you tagged by my emotional systems as negative.

00:48:21 Speaker_01
The fact that I've established the aim of walking behind you makes you an obstacle, and the response to that is negative emotion. So it's so interesting. So you establish an aim, A pathway opens up.

00:48:32 Speaker_01
Okay, now that pathway is demarcated by obstacles and things that facilitate your movement forward. All the things that facilitate your movement forward are now positive to you.

00:48:43 Speaker_01
They invite, they fill you with enthusiasm, and everything that's an obstacle is tagged with negative emotion. So you can see, obstacle, facilitator, foe and friend. Right, okay, so what it means is that

00:49:01 Speaker_01
The, not only do the phenomena of the world make themselves manifest to you as perceptions in relation to your aim, so do your emotions. Yeah, yeah, so then you think, so that starts to beg a question. If you're suffering,

00:49:17 Speaker_01
How much of that suffering is a consequence of misaligned aim? It's a seriously open question. Now, you talked about work.

00:49:24 Speaker_00
Yes.

00:49:25 Speaker_00
Well, how much of your experience of the suffering, because I mean, I think that you will still experience what we would categorize as negative emotions, or at least that's been my own experience, is that in this state of attention toward the good for its own sake,

00:49:41 Speaker_00
It's not that all of the experiences we describe as toil, anxiety, disappointment, not that those don't come. It's that precisely as you are suggesting, your interpretative framework for them has radically altered the way that they land.

00:49:55 Speaker_01
Well, it's even more subtle than that. I would say, well, take this situation of a football player who's injured, well, in the important final game.

00:50:11 Speaker_01
When we have documentation of this occurs all the time, people will play with broken ankles or they'll play with broken thumbs. And do they feel the pain? It's very complicated because

00:50:24 Speaker_01
that the emotions are being experienced at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously.

00:50:28 Speaker_01
So, at one level, because the digit or the ankle is damaged, there's interference, there's obstacle with regards to its local movement, and that's going to manifest itself as pain.

00:50:43 Speaker_01
The overarching pattern of activity, which is to continue with the game, is directed towards a higher order and important goal. That produces positive emotion. That's incentive reward. physiological response that cocaine produces.

00:50:59 Speaker_01
Cocaine is powerfully analgesic. So at one level of analysis you've still got the pain, but at another level the fact that the activity that's causing pain is linked to a distal valuable goal produces a pharmacological counterposition to the pain.

00:51:17 Speaker_01
And so what you have then, I think that's what we experience when we say something like, that was difficult, painful, let's say, anxiety-provoking, but it was certainly worth it. So it's like proximally, pain.

00:51:31 Speaker_01
Distally, no, it was a pre... See, and this is kind of what Job decides in the book of Job. Job makes the case that

00:51:40 Speaker_01
He will not allow his proximal suffering to demolish his essential faith in himself or his essential faith in the goodness of the spirit that underlies reality. And it's a call to courage.

00:51:53 Speaker_01
What the story of Job indicates, I believe, at least in part, is that no matter what happens to you in your life, no matter how deep the suffering is,

00:52:03 Speaker_01
Your best stance is one that helps you maintain your faith, your optimism, in the essential goodness of yourself as a human being. Job is portrayed as a good man in the text.

00:52:16 Speaker_01
Your essential faith in humanity itself and your distal faith in the ultimate benevolence of reality. Now, it seems to me also that without that, we wouldn't be able to move forward in difficult times. They would just stop us.

00:52:33 Speaker_01
And it's also the case that if you lose that faith, so let's say you're suffering, and even unjustly, as occurred with Job. So you're being tortured, and you don't know why, and it's hurting your faith.

00:52:43 Speaker_01
Let's say you do lose faith in yourself, and you lose faith in God. You do what Job's wife tells him to do, which is to curse God and die. Right, right. It seems to me indisputable

00:52:55 Speaker_01
that all that does is open up a new hell under the one that you're already suffering. And it would be because you're already in pain and things are going badly for you. And now you demolish your faith in that distal goal.

00:53:09 Speaker_01
Well, then all of that pharmacological, remediation that would go along with your sense that this is hard but worth it, that vanishes and there's nothing left but the theater of pain.

00:53:22 Speaker_00
I mean that condition that you describe that underneath you is a new hell deeper than the one you're in, that's exactly the condition of Satan in Milton's Paradox.

00:53:31 Speaker_01
Right, right, exactly.

00:53:32 Speaker_00
Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell, and under that another hell opens up. Right, and in fact... That's his pride, eh?

00:53:40 Speaker_01
His pride and desire to usurp produces that, right? Unwillingness to change in the face of... that's to bring a mind unchanged by time and place.

00:53:51 Speaker_00
Right, and that is one of the things that Milton shares actually with Marlow, Dr. Faust, Mephistopheles says, do you think, thinks thou that I, who saw the face of God, can go anywhere now without pain?

00:54:02 Speaker_00
That having turned away from that distal goal you're describing, everything, even things that we would account pleasures, becomes sort of more pain.

00:54:13 Speaker_01
That's what happens to Cain, I think. Cain, in killing Abel, in consequence of resentment, which is not the only way to respond to the failure of Cain's life. He chooses that and God accuses him of choosing that.

00:54:27 Speaker_01
He invites sin in to have its way with him. Cain decides to kill his ideal. Right? Because Cain is bitter because he's not able.

00:54:34 Speaker_03
Yes.

00:54:35 Speaker_01
And so then he kills Abel. And then he says to God, my suffering is more than I can bear.

00:54:40 Speaker_01
It's like, well, obviously it's more than you can bear because now you've demolished the very thing upon which your redemption, your salvation, your enthusiasm, your shielding from pain depends. Right. destined to become a wanderer, right?

00:54:56 Speaker_01
So interesting. He's destined to become a wanderer, a vagabond, and in the land of Nod. It's so cool. So he's a wanderer for the same reason that psychopaths are itinerant.

00:55:07 Speaker_01
is that once you violate the implicit moral order, you have to seek out new victims because your reputation precedes you and no one will play with you, so you have to be a wanderer. That's the classic literary trope of the itinerant bad guy.

00:55:21 Speaker_01
He has to move from place to place. Okay, and then he's a wanderer in the land of Nod, which Robert Louis Stevenson associated with sleep and unconsciousness. It's like, well, of course, because the way that people

00:55:36 Speaker_01
react to the evidence of their own criminality is to degenerate into unconsciousness. They allow themselves to become willfully blind. And so he's a psychopathic wanderer in the land of unconsciousness with nothing but pain as his companion.

00:55:54 Speaker_01
That's very reminiscent of the figure of Satan in the Miltonic story. Yes.

00:56:00 Speaker_01
You see that in Dante too, that the image of the inferno, there's a hell, but underneath that there's another hell, and then underneath that there's another hell, and then in Dante you do get to the bottom of things.

00:56:12 Speaker_01
It's betrayal, which I think is quite brilliant. That's what Dante identified as the cardinal malevolence of Satan. It's brilliant because Betrayal inverts trust, and civilization depends on trust.

00:56:31 Speaker_01
Love depends on trust, family depends on trust, your relationship with yourself depends on trust, and so people often become traumatized by a profound betrayal of trust.

00:56:42 Speaker_01
So Dante got that right, but the idea that there are these descending levels of suffering with something ultimately malevolent at the bottom. That is a vision of hell. And I think it's right.

00:56:54 Speaker_01
You know, in my clinical practice, now and then, I would encounter people who had the deepest of existential problems. Like, there were murderous impulses afoot in their household for multiple generations. Brutal situations.

00:57:08 Speaker_01
And in those situations, completely contaminated by Thousands of lies, thousands of lies.

00:57:16 Speaker_01
We'd get to the bottom of something, terrible as that was, and then something new would open up that showed that where we had got was nowhere near the bottom yet. Like an infinite landscape of faithless pain.

00:57:28 Speaker_00
Terrible, terrible, terrible thing to see. I mean, unimaginable.

00:57:35 Speaker_01
You see this in relationships. People often won't communicate with their wife or husband because they don't want to start an argument. And what happens is there's a surface disagreement, right? And that produces a certain amount of emotional tension.

00:57:50 Speaker_01
And then maybe you start to talk about it and you find that under that there's a slightly more profound disagreement. And you investigate that, and underneath that there's a slightly more profound disagreement.

00:58:00 Speaker_01
And people stop the inquiry when they hit the point of depth that they can no longer tolerate, right? Here's a way of thinking about it. So imagine that your wife has had a history of a certain amount of abuse at the hands of men.

00:58:16 Speaker_01
That's a very common situation and even more common becoming even more common all the time.

00:58:22 Speaker_00
I believe that.

00:58:23 Speaker_01
You don't know how much of whatever proximal disagreement you have is a consequence of some fundamental betrayal in her history, or even, I would say, the history of her mother, her aunts, because people talk, you know, and these spirits of betrayal

00:58:42 Speaker_01
lurk and haunt across generations. And it's terrible to go down into the substructure of a specific disagreement, because to solve it, you have to take a journey down to the depths, and you often discover a profound betrayal.

00:58:58 Speaker_01
You know how when you hash something out with someone you're close to, sometime during that process, it's very likely, if the conversation is sincere and deep, that someone will break into tears. Right, right. Yeah, exactly.

00:59:12 Speaker_01
That's a dissolution of their perceptions, right, and a potential restructuring. I think that's what tears signify. Anyways, that is a descent into the abyss.

00:59:21 Speaker_00
And Dante has so much to say here, too, with what he does with what we would call gravity and the direction of gravity. So, what happens when you get down to the bottom of the inferno past Judas in the mouth of

00:59:32 Speaker_00
Satan, is that the world flips upside down and we move from Inferno to Purgatorio. So they go past the pit of hell and begin to climb upwards toward paradise. But there's two stages to that, right? There's the stage where the weight, the gravity of

00:59:50 Speaker_00
the situation you're describing, that betrayal that has basically ripped the ground out from underneath you, that's still pulling you downward. And so everything is toil and exertion. It's kind of our condition that you work your way.

01:00:01 Speaker_00
You know, there's a reason, I think, that you call what you do doing the work or work, you know, when you sit with people and kind of hash these things out. that by the time you get down to the bottom of it, then your journey can begin, right?

01:00:17 Speaker_00
Then you start to climb your way out. Rebuild. Yes.

01:00:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, that's a symbolic death and rebirth too, right?

01:00:23 Speaker_00
And then, beautifully, magnificently, once you reach the pinnacle of purgatory, then move into the third

01:00:33 Speaker_00
of this sort of triptych that Dante is giving us, and that's paradise, where Beatrice descends to lift Dante up, and they start to move of their own accord at light speed up toward the heavens, toward the planets. And she says to him wonderfully,

01:00:49 Speaker_00
This is what it looks like to your human perception, but really this is an allegory of what's going on with us spiritually.

01:00:56 Speaker_00
She says this is the force, the same force that carries fire up towards the stars is now carrying us up toward God because there's one love, the last line of the poem, the love that moves the sun and other stars.

01:01:09 Speaker_00
There's one motive force in the universe

01:01:12 Speaker_01
Right, so that's the monotheistic claim united with the notion that the fundamental unity is something positive and benevolent.

01:01:21 Speaker_00
Yes, right.

01:01:22 Speaker_01
See, I also think, and I talked to Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, about this recently, so tell me what you think about this, because one of the things I hashed out with Dawkins, to some degree, was the fact that

01:01:36 Speaker_01
in my estimation, and I think in his, the metaphysics that made science itself possible has been demolished.

01:01:45 Speaker_01
So, okay, so then I was thinking, now he tends to lose in, he knows that, but he tends to lose interest in what that metaphysical demolition constitutes.

01:01:55 Speaker_01
So one of the things I've been trying to lay out is what is the metaphysics, what's the narrative frame of science itself? Now Jung tried to figure this out, right? That's why Jung was so interested in alchemy.

01:02:06 Speaker_01
So, okay, so Jung's idea was that there was an, An unconscious fantasy emerged in counterposition to the spiritualization of Christianity that highlighted a lurking possibility that still existed in the material world that hadn't been explored.

01:02:26 Speaker_01
And so that would be something like the call of the transmutation, that there's a substance, a material substance that could give us

01:02:37 Speaker_01
make us healthy, that could grant us immortality, and that would transmute everything base into what was highest, lead into gold. Okay, so there's a potential in the material world that has that as its promise.

01:02:51 Speaker_00
That's the treasure. Prime matter, right? Prime materia, yeah, okay. Which is exactly the thing with no qualities. Right, right. It's the thing with the stripped bare of everything.

01:03:00 Speaker_01
Okay, so Jung's proposition was that there had to be a fantasy, very widely distributed, that There was something of immense value still lurking in the material world before the scientific enterprise could get started.

01:03:13 Speaker_01
You need a motivation for spending your whole life analyzing the mating habits of fruit flies because it isn't something that has obvious, immediate motivational or emotional significance. It has to be linked to something else.

01:03:27 Speaker_01
Okay, so what's it linked to? Well, here, tell me what you think about this. And this is also why I think that science, which is another problem Jung was trying to solve, why did science emerge in Europe? And once, what were the preconditions?

01:03:41 Speaker_01
Okay, so let's lay this out. Tell me what you think. The cosmos has a logos, so it has an order, okay? The order is intelligible to the mind of man. The order is good, such that understanding it better makes things better, not worse.

01:04:00 Speaker_01
Contrary, let's say, to the story of Frankenstein.

01:04:03 Speaker_00
You're not going to uncover man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

01:04:06 Speaker_01
Exactly. That's right. Or you build a technological enterprise like Prometheus that dooms you. That can happen. The idea would be that wouldn't happen if your aim was true. And then the final

01:04:19 Speaker_01
piece of the puzzle is that through dedicated submission to that logos, you can explore in a manner that reveals it, and that will be redemptive to you as a scientist, but also broadly beneficial.

01:04:33 Speaker_01
Okay, those look to me like the necessary metaphysical foundations of science, because And none of them, those are starting points. They're game rules. Like, you can't get to those within the scientific enterprise. They have to be laid down.

01:04:46 Speaker_01
Now, I think they were laid down fundamentally in the Judeo-Christian system, right, is that there is a logos to the world.

01:04:53 Speaker_01
that Logos is apprehensible to man, that it's fundamentally good, that you can approach it in the proper spirit, and if you do, that'll be redemptive.

01:05:02 Speaker_01
This is why, although I don't think Dawkins knows, and I tried to push him on this, I think this is why he found himself compelled to state, relatively recently, that he was a cultural Christian. Yes, and I pushed him on that. I said, okay, well,

01:05:16 Speaker_01
That implies that the Christians got something right. What? It's like, we got nowhere with that.

01:05:22 Speaker_00
We got nowhere with that. So, I don't know if you're familiar with the three-body problem, the Chinese science fiction novel. made a big splash as a Netflix series recently, but it's the novels that really grapple with what you are talking about.

01:05:38 Speaker_00
And what's so remarkable about this series to me is that unlike a lot of American science fiction, you get Star Trek, Star Wars, which kind of give you this misty, secular pseudoscience, where it's the midichlorians that hold things together, or it's our humanist values in Star Trek.

01:05:57 Speaker_00
In... this trilogy of novels, Remembrance of Earth's Past, the first book is named after famously an unresolvable problem in astrophysics, in Newtonian mechanics. If you have three bodies mutually attracting each other, it's impossible to lay out

01:06:14 Speaker_00
a Logos, exactly what you're describing, that is a consistent system that can be reduced to abstract principles, comprehended by the human mind, and then used to fly to outer space, to navigate through whatever situation you find yourself in.

01:06:30 Speaker_00
And the reason that Xi Xinliu named began with this is because he is genuinely peering into the abyss of what science looks like once you pull the rug of those five principles out from underneath us.

01:06:46 Speaker_00
That you might hit a point at which actually the whole structure of reality simply scrambles your monkey brain. It just doesn't

01:06:56 Speaker_00
compute inside of us because we no longer have this conviction that the imprint on our brain is effectively the hand of God. And so that's the same imprint that writ large is pressed across the whole universe. When Newton came up with his laws,

01:07:13 Speaker_00
there was a widespread belief derived from Aristotle that there were two sets of rules for the physical world. It was called the superlunary and the sublunary spheres.

01:07:22 Speaker_00
And that there was named that because the barrier was supposed to be at the moon where the moon's orbit is there starts to obtain a whole new set of laws. And the reason people thought this was quite reasonable is that

01:07:35 Speaker_00
you look at the stars and they're following these very regular patterns that we can chart and know more and more through observations. You look at things around here, they don't move like that kind of clockwork.

01:07:44 Speaker_00
Surely you get stones falling to the earth, you get fire moving up into the air. And so people thought they're just a different, Christians would say fallen order down here. And there is a pristine reason, logos of the spheres.

01:07:59 Speaker_00
Yes, operating even perhaps the angels are pushing them around, whatever.

01:08:03 Speaker_01
As opposed to forces.

01:08:06 Speaker_00
Exactly. In my book, I call them ghosts in exile. And this idea is what, when Newton comes out with the Principia for the first time, we now think, oh, he discovered gravity. Yes, of course.

01:08:20 Speaker_00
He outlines the way of calculating the force of gravity between two masses. But at a much, much deeper level, what he does is he shatters the barrier between the sublunar and the superlunary spheres. Right. Showing an underlying unity. Right.

01:08:34 Speaker_00
Here's the three rules that will govern not only the arc of a comet across the sky, but the descent of an apple from a tree. Why did Newton have any right to expect that he could do that? Why were people working on that problem at that time?

01:08:51 Speaker_00
It's because of the assumptions that you're describing, that the world is not only organized according to a logos, which is sort of the pagan claim that we talked about.

01:09:01 Speaker_00
Greece, but also that that logos is answerable to the patterns that are in our minds, however they came about. You talk about evolution, you talk about whatever, but we now have, and this is what we experience them as.

01:09:13 Speaker_00
It's dishonest, I think, to describe our experience of these principles as anything else. When we see math, we think we're looking at something universally valid, and that something that not only hangs together in our brains, but will also

01:09:28 Speaker_00
send a rocket ship to Mars one day. And that's because of this faith.

01:09:34 Speaker_01
And that is something like a transposed monotheistic phase. Exactly. It's the notion that at the foundation or at the pinnacle, there is an ultimate unity in which resides all things in the absence of contradiction.

01:09:48 Speaker_00
Yes. And so now we're up against, we wouldn't recognize it this way, but we're up against another superlunary, sublunary barrier. And that is the puzzle of how to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics.

01:10:01 Speaker_00
and I know that you've talked to scientists about this on your podcast and I would I would say of course that like I am not going to be the person that resolves this puzzle but from the outside as a scholar of the history of science and also a classicist I can see that this is the exact same issue.

01:10:15 Speaker_00
This is two realms that answer to two different and contradictory set of apparently contradictory set of laws and scientists are currently hammering away some of them working in string theory others in other

01:10:27 Speaker_00
versions of quantum gravity and so forth, are hammering away at that barrier.

01:10:32 Speaker_01
Right, under the presumption that they're going to break through.

01:10:34 Speaker_00
Yes, exactly.

01:10:35 Speaker_01
That the fact that they can't detect the unity is actually a consequence of their ignorance, not of the fact that reality itself is disjointed.

01:10:44 Speaker_00
That there's a seam in the fabric that we will never bring back together. Or, alternatively, that there's a seam in our minds that we can never reconcile, that there's something, I mean, you need both of these convictions.

01:10:55 Speaker_00
And I think that anybody that does science is still operating on these convictions, even if outwardly they would deny it.

01:11:01 Speaker_01
Well, if the hypothesis of Jung is true in the broad sense, and that, you see, it implies something very interesting that I also saw as a practicing scientist. So, I was involved, and still am, in a lot of research enterprises. Right.

01:11:18 Speaker_01
The production of approximately the equivalent of 30 PhDs. It's something like that. And I watched scientists who were genuine scientists and scientists who were careerists and hucksters, and I watched how they operate.

01:11:32 Speaker_01
And it's so interesting because the scientists that actually discover

01:11:37 Speaker_01
something of value, and I would say the ones that have the deepest careers and the best relations with their students, the ones that are on the right path, they're suffused by religious ethos, and it's very deep.

01:11:55 Speaker_01
I spent a lot of time, I wouldn't say mastering statistics because I'm no statistical genius, but understanding how to conduct a statistical analysis well enough so that I could do it and actually do it and actually understand it.

01:12:11 Speaker_01
And one of the things that I realized was like, if you have a spreadsheet that's full of data, 100,000 data points, let's say, there is an indefinite number of ways that you can apprehend that matrix, that you can see it. Right?

01:12:25 Speaker_01
There's all the possible combinations of the numbers in the matrix. Right. Okay. So then, out of that, you can draw a discovery, let's say, that's revealed in the patterns.

01:12:38 Speaker_01
But you cannot do that if your orientation to the spreadsheet is the progression of your career. The pathways that make themselves manifest in the numbers will be those that further your career. So this is part of the problem of replicability.

01:12:54 Speaker_01
P-hacking, right? Exactly. You can do an infinite number of correlational analysis, and if you do a hundred of them, five of them will be statistically significant. Well, you can just ignore the fact that 95%

01:13:06 Speaker_01
percent of them weren't and report on those five percent. And the thing is, there's a profound pull to do that because in any given experiment, you might have, to any given experiment, you might have devoted two years of your life.

01:13:20 Speaker_01
For a graduate student, the success of the analysis might determine whether or not they get their PhD. Like there's a lot at stake. And so then you might say, well,

01:13:30 Speaker_01
Why not just discover within the matrix of numbers the pathway that furthers your career? And the answer to that is, well, that's a complicated problem. It's like, is there anything other than self-promotion?

01:13:42 Speaker_01
Well, I told my students, if you allow your careerist interests to determine the decisions you make when you're conducting your statistics, which will be well hidden, from everyone else, but also from yourself.

01:13:59 Speaker_01
One of the negative consequences is that, well, you betray the spirit of science, so you pull the rug out from underneath yourself, but you also convince yourself of the existence of a delusion that you might then chase for the rest of your life.

01:14:15 Speaker_01
Right? Yeah, yeah. So it's so interesting. And this is something that scientists don't really concentrate on.

01:14:21 Speaker_01
It's like, how do you inculcate in the scientific investigator the ethos that produces the desire to search for truth and not career success, let's say, at every micro level of the scientific endeavor.

01:14:36 Speaker_01
And I think that once the scientific endeavor becomes sufficiently dissociated from its underlying Judeo-Christian narrative, There is no protection against that. And I also think that's why the scientific enterprise is corrupting so rapidly.

01:14:51 Speaker_00
Well, what is the greatest example of the phenomenon you're describing that's recently been in the public eye? I would argue it's Ketanji Brown Jackson in the Supreme Court.

01:15:03 Speaker_00
saying, citing a study that black babies have better health outcomes when they're in danger if they go to black doctors.

01:15:12 Speaker_00
And she cites this in defense of all sorts of things like affirmative action and race conscious preferences in hiring and so forth. Now, I doubt, I rather doubt that Ketanji Brown-Jackson realizes this, but that's a junk study.

01:15:27 Speaker_00
And it's a junk study for exactly the reason that you're describing, which is that there's a hidden variable, and the hidden variable is birth weight. Infinite number of hidden variables. Exactly. But the one that really counts here is birth weight.

01:15:40 Speaker_00
So when babies have a low or dangerous birth weight, they are more likely to be taken to white doctors, whatever the reason for that is.

01:15:49 Speaker_00
And so in that case, they'll have worse health outcomes because you're dealing with- Because more of the specialists are white. Yes.

01:15:56 Speaker_01
The authors of the- That's why, well, that's so much of medical science and social science is corrupted by the fact of specious correlations.

01:16:06 Speaker_00
Yes and this the authors of the study were aware of this variable and as were the the reviewers and and discounted it purposefully so it's an instance of exactly the sort of thing that you are describing of filtering out that data and yes in that context of course

01:16:25 Speaker_00
science, real science, the handmaiden of knowledge, one of the most ancient and beautiful human practices, is going to become the science, capital T and capital S, and endorse Kamala Harris in scientific narrative.

01:16:37 Speaker_00
Because then you've got to serve something, right? You've got to attach this enterprise to some sort of purpose.

01:16:43 Speaker_01
So then you might ask as a mentor to scientists, well, I'm telling you to do something difficult. I'm saying that If the data reveals, for example, that your study is flawed, fatally, you're going to have to accept that.

01:17:02 Speaker_01
If the study indicates that the hypothesis upon whose promotion you've staked your reputation is wrong, you're going to have to admit that. And you're going to have to suffer the consequences of both of those. Maybe you won't get your PhD.

01:17:18 Speaker_01
Maybe you'll have to do another series of studies. Maybe your career won't advance properly. Maybe you'll be humiliated as a consequence of your previous claims. Okay, so then you might say, well, if that's the cost, then, well, why not just falsify?

01:17:33 Speaker_01
This is the temptation of the lie constantly. Why not just falsify? And I would say on the positive side, The negative side is, well, that's wrong, and maybe you'll get caught, and that'll be a catastrophe, and the abyss is there, and all of that.

01:17:46 Speaker_01
But you could say, well, I don't care. Like Raskolnikov says in Crime and Punishment, I'm not gonna get caught, so we're not worried about that. And if I can lie to further my career, then so be it. Okay, so then you might say, well, why not do that?

01:18:00 Speaker_01
Because I think the question isn't ever why lie. The question always is, why not lie? And in the scientific realm,

01:18:08 Speaker_01
what you sacrifice if you deceive yourself and others in the service of your career is the discovery of the concordance between your soul and the logos of the world.

01:18:20 Speaker_01
Because there isn't anything more enthusiasm-provoking than actually discovering something new. And it's because you get a sense of the eternal harmony between things.

01:18:33 Speaker_01
You think, oh, that realization, which is a new form of truth, is of so much value that the price I paid for that, sacrificed my old presumptions, that my career has taken a strange path as I pursued the truth, that's irrelevant in comparison to the profundity of

01:18:51 Speaker_01
I think it's the establishment of that harmony between soul and cosmos.

01:18:55 Speaker_00
It's something like that. It's raw joy. I mean, that's the treasure in the field. That's right.

01:18:59 Speaker_01
That's the pearl of great price.

01:19:01 Speaker_00
That's exactly right. And one of the most striking things you said to me in Athens was when you told the story of realizing that most of what you said early on in your career, you didn't

01:19:13 Speaker_00
believe or you didn't have the reason to believe or there was there was some element of dishonesty of lies yes and and you said i decided to tell the truth and see where it would take me and that whatever happens to you because of the truth is going to be better than anything else even if you don't know it that's that's i think that's really the conclusion that jobe draws it's that and it's also the act of faith that abraham

01:19:42 Speaker_01
performs when he makes his multitude of sacrifices because God comes to Abraham as the spirit of adventure, right? God comes to say to Abraham, you're content and satiated, but that's not enough. Leave everything behind. That's right. Well, why? Right.

01:19:59 Speaker_01
Well, okay. So now Abraham agrees he's going to do this. So he follows the divine path of adventure. Now he has to make sequential sacrifices as he moves up because he has to dispense with what's no longer appropriate as his capacity expands.

01:20:17 Speaker_01
He transforms so radically that he gets a new name, right? And he kind of encounters every adventure in the world as he grows. And that's also what makes him the father of nations. So he starts, it's so cool, it's such a great idea. The idea is that

01:20:33 Speaker_01
the forthright adherence to the clarion call of divine adventure is the same pathway that radically increases what the evolutionary biologists would describe as reproductive success, right? Construed over a very long period of time.

01:20:50 Speaker_01
But it makes sense, right? Imagine that you have, that your deepest instinct pulls you out into the world beyond your zone of comfort and impels you to develop.

01:21:02 Speaker_01
Well, obviously that's going to make you more attractive to people of the opposite sex, but then also obviously, if you're a contender in that manner, you can wrestle with serpents, you can handle serpents without being bitten, and you teach your children that.

01:21:16 Speaker_01
Well, You established that ethos of divine patriarchy. That's a good way of thinking about it. Well, why wouldn't your descendants be numerous and take over the world, so to speak? That's the promise of the covenant in the Old Testament.

01:21:33 Speaker_00
Oh, yeah. I mean, all these things shall be added unto you. Right, right.

01:21:37 Speaker_00
All the stuff that you just talked about, that you give up, all your career advancement, all your readiness to throw yourself at the feet of the first person that's going to give you a Nobel Prize or whatever shiny thing you're chasing after.

01:21:50 Speaker_00
You've got to get rid of all of that in order to seek the kingdom of heaven first, in order to love the good for its own sake. Right. That stripping that you're describing in sacrifice is kind of

01:21:58 Speaker_01
Well, if Christ extends that, because he says that also, that extends beyond your commitments to career, let's say, or even to the benefits of life more abundant and material prosperity, he said, you also have to do that even in relationship to your own family, right, is that every single thing that's good,

01:22:20 Speaker_01
has to be sacrificeable to the highest possible.

01:22:23 Speaker_00
Exactly. And then out of that source will arise all the other goods.

01:22:26 Speaker_01
That's why Abraham gets Isaac back, as far as I'm concerned, right? Because he's willing to offer his son to the same process that impelled him out of his immature satiation. He offers his son fully, and the consequence of that is he gets him back.

01:22:44 Speaker_01
And I think that's exactly right, is that I do believe that, and I see that all the time, is that the more you try to conserve your children and pull them to you and shelter them from the adventure of their life, the more they're going to struggle to get away from you and to have nothing to do with you.

01:22:59 Speaker_01
And if instead you throw them out into the world, then That paradoxically increases the probability that you'll establish a relationship with them that will be sustainable through the entire course of your existence. Yeah.

01:23:14 Speaker_00
Well, I suspect that there's a reason why it's Christ who does this because this is, I think, also what God does in endowing Adam and Eve with the ability to choose.

01:23:25 Speaker_00
to rebel if you think of God as knowing in advance that he's bringing these creatures into the world. You know, in the Quran, the choice on God's part to create man is greeted with utter bewilderment by the angels. They say, why would you bring

01:23:40 Speaker_00
into the world, this creature that is going to spread bloodshed in the land, when you already have perfect spiritual beings, us, the angels, to worship you and sing your praises at all times.

01:23:52 Speaker_00
And God in the Quran just says, I know what you do not know. He basically responds that it's a mystery. But I suspect that the answer to this in the Christian tradition is,

01:24:03 Speaker_00
God desires you around so much that he is willing to let you go, that he's willing to put you in the garden, as Milton says, sufficient to have stood but free to fall, and that this is the sort of primordial fatherly act that you're describing in your own right.

01:24:20 Speaker_01
It's the essence of of what we mean when we say father, right? The word father implies a commonality of spirit across all instantiations of fatherhood, right? So then you might say, well, father as a category implies an essence of

01:24:37 Speaker_01
of an essential element of the patriarchy could be power. That's not a great way of establishing relationship with your children. It could instead be something like encouragement of courage, right? And faith in the ability of your children

01:24:55 Speaker_01
to contend with whatever comes their way, and not to shield them from it, knowing that they will expand in the most optimal manner if they face their challenges forthrightly.

01:25:08 Speaker_00
Yes, I think the confusion of this with power, and of course it can be abused and turned into Yes, of course. No question.

01:25:16 Speaker_00
But to say that because of that it simply is fatherhood or patriarchy is oppression, that is the exertion of force over another is... Yeah, well that's where the postmodernists went way off the rails.

01:25:27 Speaker_01
Foucault in particular. It's all power. It's like, that's pretty goddamn convenient for you, buddy. You know, and I see that terrible alliance with hedonism, right?

01:25:37 Speaker_01
If your orientation is just to get what the narrowest part of you wants now, think about sexual hedonism in that regard, and that's particularly relevant to Foucault as far as I'm concerned. Why do you want power?

01:25:52 Speaker_01
Well, so that people will do what you compel them to do. Okay, well, what do you want to compel them to do?

01:25:58 Speaker_01
Well, obviously, if you have to compel them to do something, it's going to be radically to your benefit, and not at all to theirs, because that's the only situation under which force would be required.

01:26:10 Speaker_01
Like, if I make you a good deal, I don't have to use power. So power is the handmaiden of hedonism, fundamentally. And hedonism is the sacrifice of others to your short-term whims. Yeah, that's no principle on which to found the world.

01:26:24 Speaker_01
That doesn't even work for chimpanzees, by the way. Franz de Waal showed this quite clearly. If you track the stability of chimp patriarchies across time, the rulers who exert force

01:26:36 Speaker_01
die a bitter and premature end because their underlings rebel and in a moment of weakness, tear the tyrant to shreds.

01:26:45 Speaker_00
It's like something out of Machiavelli. Yeah, definitely. I think we discussed this in Athens. This is what Plato describes as the tyrant. Because what have you done the minute you've forced somebody into doing your will?

01:26:57 Speaker_00
You've effectively made that person into an appendage of your own soul. You've turned them into some part of yourself.

01:27:03 Speaker_01
Even the worst elements of your own soul.

01:27:06 Speaker_00
And so you live in a world now that increasingly, to the extent that you have power over it, includes only you. You are inherently the most narrow part of you.

01:27:16 Speaker_01
So that's a very good description of hell, is that what you're doing first is you're allowing yourself to be possessed by your most immature and self-centered momentary whims. Those are your God.

01:27:30 Speaker_01
Now you need to use power because other people won't go along with that. Just like kids in a playground won't go along with the bossy kid who only wants to play his game.

01:27:39 Speaker_01
So we found that the so-called dark triad traits, Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, they clump together. That that conceptualization had to be expanded to include sadism, which is the positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others.

01:27:59 Speaker_01
And I think the reason for that is that if you start to instrumentalize other people and they go along with it or are unable to withstand your tyrannical force, you end up absolutely contemptuous of them.

01:28:14 Speaker_01
And not least because their acquiescence to your idiot hedonistic tyranny makes you suffer terribly. Like they're not standing up to you and setting you right.

01:28:24 Speaker_01
And so you start to, just like this is what happened to Hitler who ended his life with full contempt for the German people for not being the sort of people who deserved his stellar leadership. Right? Right.

01:28:35 Speaker_01
Well, Berlin was burning and Europe was in ruins.

01:28:39 Speaker_00
Right. There's hell. That's a good image of hell. Absolutely. Now, the thing that you said about Cain and Abel, that in order to escape his sense of inferiority, Abel destroys his ideal. You bet.

01:28:52 Speaker_00
I mean, I've often thought about what we call wokeness as a kind of global war on archetypes, right? It's like this, your beauty standards make me feel bad.

01:29:01 Speaker_00
So, instead of addressing that through my own personal change, I'm going to try to basically tear the whole fabric of spiritual reality or absolute truth or something down out of the sky.

01:29:16 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, and the ethos underneath that is something like, any axis of comparison where I'm lesser has to be demolished. Now, part of the reason that's so self-devouring is, well, let's say you're a young person who's not particularly attractive.

01:29:31 Speaker_01
Okay, that's a trouble. And the attractive, the beauty standard is an ideal and a judge, and a harsh one. But then you think, well, you're young.

01:29:41 Speaker_01
Like, there's an undeserved advantage, and there's a multitude of dimensions on which you're unfairly healthy compared to many people in the world. You're going to subvert the terrible standards of the judge until none of those differences remain?

01:29:59 Speaker_01
Well, I think that's why you get, in the communist societies, a degeneration into, well, everyone's equal with nothing. Right, that's where you make people equal, is when everyone has nothing.

01:30:10 Speaker_00
You know where this is really beautifully depicted is in the Screwtape letters, C.S. Lewis's sort of letters from demons to one another.

01:30:18 Speaker_00
He basically makes of them a totalitarian society, describes hell as a totalitarian society, and there's this wonderful moment where, you know, Screwtape is writing to Wormwood, his, I believe it's his nephew, so a younger demon, and he's coaching him.

01:30:31 Speaker_00
And at one point he says, The thing that most confounds us about the enemy that is God is that he really does love the little vermin. That is, this is the thing we cannot understand.

01:30:41 Speaker_01
That's by definition.

01:30:42 Speaker_00
Yes. By definition. Right. And in his fatherly nature and in his definition as God.

01:30:48 Speaker_00
In the next letter he says, I hope you haven't shown my letters to anybody because of course if I were taken to mean that there really is such a thing as love, that would be heresy and I would be very much condemned in hell. Love is impossible.

01:31:04 Speaker_00
We in hell know that love is impossible because everything expands by eating up what is around it.

01:31:11 Speaker_01
Right, right, right. That's the rapacious hordes of devastating mankind motivated by nothing other than power, which was really, as far as I'm concerned, a complete confession on the part of Foucault. It's like, really, there's nothing but power, eh?

01:31:26 Speaker_01
Really. That's what you think. That's what you think about everyone. And there's no actual dialogue between people. There's just the competition between plays for power. That's your world. You're definitely

01:31:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, you might be successful, Mr. Foucault, but that just made you the biggest devil in hell. And that's a pretty weird definition of success.

01:31:45 Speaker_01
And there's something even more pathological about that, because if there is no game but power, so there's no love, let's say, if there is no game but power, I'm a fool to do anything but play a power game with you.

01:31:57 Speaker_01
And I'm also a fool not to win, right, at whatever cost, right? And so, That's, I think, the unconscious motivation that underlies the claim that the ruler of the earthly realm is the spirit of power.

01:32:11 Speaker_01
It's like, okay, if that's the case, then clearly, if I can, I should. Now, I know as a clinician, if you're the kind of person who thinks, I can, And therefore I should, I should get the hell away from you as rapidly as possible.

01:32:26 Speaker_01
Because that is the core proclamation of the possessed psychopath. It's like, you are nothing but a field of opportunities. Not only for me, but for my deepest, darkest, and most fragmented desires.

01:32:40 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, that's that legion of devils that constitutes hell.

01:32:46 Speaker_00
And the idea that this force, or Satan, is the prince of the world basically sets us up to understand ourselves as either slipstreaming into that logic, operating according to our most base desires, you say, dissolving ourselves effectively into raw material power,

01:33:08 Speaker_00
or positing the existence of a separate principle from the raw mechanical workings of the material world.

01:33:17 Speaker_01
Well, I think the Old and New Testaments are investigations into what that alternative to power is. And I think you can sum it up, actually. It took a long time to figure out how to sum it up.

01:33:29 Speaker_01
Well, it's something like the spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice. Because the biblical stories are an investigation into what sacrifices best please God. It's a millennia-long investigation. What is the right work?

01:33:45 Speaker_01
Which is the same thing as the right sacrificial pattern. And there isn't anything more diametrically opposed to the claim of power than the proclamation that the proper community is founded on the highest possible spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice.

01:33:59 Speaker_01
And that is what's emblematic about the crucifixion. God himself sacrifices himself as voluntarily to hoist the future and the community onto his shoulders. It's like, yes, that's a complete inversion of the notion of power.

01:34:16 Speaker_01
And I think I can't see how you can possibly claim that the healthy community can, in fact, be founded on anything other than sacrifice.

01:34:28 Speaker_01
I mean, to the degree that you love your wife, you give up everything that's only local to you for the relationship. That's sacrificial. That's what you do with your children. That's what you do with your friends. That is the antithesis of power.

01:34:43 Speaker_01
I think the postmodernist realization, unconscious though it may be, that Christianity is directly opposed to the postmodernist claim that power rules is the ultimate driving force of the culture war.

01:34:58 Speaker_00
That's what it looks like to me. Absolutely. And what you're describing, in one sense, of course, it's the most functional thing in the world because it's the only way to found a healthy community.

01:35:07 Speaker_00
In the other sense that we've been talking about more, it's extremely inexpedient. to propose that you should leave, you should shelve all of these immediate desires that you have and trust, right?

01:35:20 Speaker_00
Believe that you're going on the other side of that to receive blessing. Yeah, right.

01:35:25 Speaker_01
Definitely. Well, I don't, I actually don't think there's any difference between that and cortical maturation. Well, because you start out in the world as a plethora of competing impulses, right?

01:35:38 Speaker_01
And those are integrated across time by your development of the ability to share, to engage in reciprocal action, and by your ability to forego immediate gratification so that you can stabilize the future.

01:35:52 Speaker_01
It's cortical maturation that allows that to occur on the physiological plane. It's like these, and it isn't the Freudian repression of the motivations and the emotions. It's the integration of the motivations and emotions.

01:36:05 Speaker_01
That's their sub-doing, right, that Adam's called upon to do. It's their integration that makes them a higher order unity that is in fact the best way of even providing for those motivational systems

01:36:20 Speaker_01
what they want in the broadest range of places and across the longest span of time.

01:36:25 Speaker_00
Does that include that cortical maturation, the establishment of these sort of perceptual categories that we've been talking about? That is the building of the pathways that would enable us to do things like look at this glass? Well, it is.

01:36:41 Speaker_01
So imagine that

01:36:43 Speaker_01
as you mature as a child, if you're properly socialized, so you become an increasingly desirable play partner, which is like the definition of proper socialization, all the categories that you automatize, so that become part of your, not only your character, but your physiology,

01:37:02 Speaker_01
Our categories that you build as you pursue that aim become what you practice. This is true neurophysiologically. You bloody well become what you practice. And you practice in accordance with your aim.

01:37:15 Speaker_01
So the aim, that's the Jacob's Ladder story, the aim should be to the ineffable that reigns above everything supreme. Right, right.

01:37:24 Speaker_00
So in a sense the whole conversation kind of comes full circle if you think about it. We've talked about so many things and yet we're really talking, I think, about one thing.

01:37:35 Speaker_00
And this is what I mean when I say that the book of Genesis at this very profound level provides you with this template that you can use to understand and interpret any number of things. You talk about like, you know, is it about quantum physics?

01:37:50 Speaker_00
No, it's not about quantum physics, but is quantum physics uncovering in the material sphere the pattern that we also uncover in the psychological sphere that we also uncover?

01:37:59 Speaker_01
Well, that's what you'd expect if there's an underlying unity, is that the most ancient stories of mankind the orienting stories from a multitude of different cultures would dovetail with what we're actually discovering about reality.

01:38:12 Speaker_01
I mean, what's the counter-hypothesis?

01:38:14 Speaker_00
Right, that this is all just—I mean, the counter-hypothesis is the postmodern.

01:38:18 Speaker_01
Yeah, right, or even the Enlightenment idea that that's all superstition, that it's now being supplanted by this rationalist orientation. All right, well, that's good. That's a good place to stop.

01:38:27 Speaker_01
I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side, for those of you who are watching and listening, I think what I'll do is I'll interrogate Spencer further about his new book. Let's walk through it.

01:38:37 Speaker_01
And I would also like to find out, as we walk through the book, why those topics interested you, you know, why they gripped you and compelled you.

01:38:46 Speaker_01
And so let's, we can do an analysis of the book, but also a psychological analysis of the motivations underneath it. So let's do that. All right. So thank you everyone for watching and listening and thank you.

01:38:57 Speaker_01
It was very nice to see you again, by the way.

01:38:59 Speaker_00
That was fun.

01:39:00 Speaker_01
There's something new being born, you know, it's, it's, it's really something powerful to see. I can see it making itself manifest everywhere. And it is, whatever's going to, we're either going to devolve into a world that is in fact

01:39:15 Speaker_01
ruled by the spirit of power, like the Chinese society, for example, with the all-seeing eye of Sauron everywhere, or we're going to revaluate our wisdom and pull out of it what we need to move forward properly.

01:39:30 Speaker_01
And you know, you can see that, those two proclivities battling at the moment, but I see more and more reason to be optimistic.

01:39:37 Speaker_01
So we can all pray for that if we have any sense, because the alternative is pretty damn dreadful, or even unimaginably dreadful.

01:39:45 Speaker_00
But I see the light breaking, too, actually, I think.

01:39:47 Speaker_00
You know, I know you've been thinking a lot about the Tower of Babel story lately, and the Chinese system that you're describing sounds a lot like the kinds of Near Eastern societies that I think the Tower of Babel story refers to.

01:39:57 Speaker_00
Yes, yes, definitely.

01:39:59 Speaker_01
It's the eternal Babylon.

01:40:00 Speaker_00
Eternal Babylon, right. And I also feel, despite the apparent darkness around us, I look at, for example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I think about, you know... Neil Ferguson. Yes, who are sort of unexcavating Russell Brand for that matter. Russell Brand, I know.

01:40:18 Speaker_00
As you say, it's in many different locations. That's for sure. It's a kind of revival. And it's something that a lot of people have been praying for, actually, for a long time. Something that has to happen organically from the ground up.

01:40:28 Speaker_00
I think something we don't necessarily understand or we wish weren't true is that you can't hammer this down into people's minds. That's Moses' sin. Yeah, interesting.

01:40:38 Speaker_01
Too heavy use of the rod. Yes. All right, sir. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. It was lovely talking to you today. Much appreciated. And to all of you watching and listening, we appreciate your time and your attention. Bye-bye.