Latest / Thinking Class / #026 - Carl Trueman - These Ideas Have Been Terrible For Our Humanity And Our Culture

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#026 - Carl Trueman - These Ideas Have Been Terrible For Our Humanity And Our Culture · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Carl Truman.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Carl is a Christian theologian and ecclesiastical historian.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: He is currently the professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, and has written many books, including The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and The Road to Sexual Revolution.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Carl contributes to the online magazine First Things, blogs regularly at Reformation 21, and is also the co-host of the Mortification of Spin podcast.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Carl and I talk about the importance of our cultural elite in shaping how the rest of us see the world, what the four ages of man are, and why we're now living in the age of psychological man, why modernity and the ideas of today make us less human, the impact the God-shaped whole has had on the Western world in modernity, how behavior in the public square has become increasingly coarse, even among our leaders, the surprising return of Christianity to the public sphere, why Richard Dawkins is in the horns of a dilemma now that he is part of Team Christianity, and the ideological and religious choices in front of us.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: This was a deeply engaging and heartfelt conversation.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: You could tell even through a conversation online through the digital ether that Carl is a wonderful soul, and I admire his ability to present such a clear-eyed analysis of the ideas and values that have shaped us for good and ill over the years and the centuries in such an everyday and human way.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever your beliefs, from all faiths or none, I'm sure that you'll find something to resonate with that Carl says here.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: But before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you clicked subscribe on whatever platform you are listening to or watching on.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because the more subscribers that we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster that thinking class grows.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:05
  unknown: Dr.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Carl Trubin, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks very much for joining me.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to be here, John.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks very much for having me on.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, no, my the thanks is all mine for responding to my email.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: It came out the blue.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Effectively, I was I was fanboying about your book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I I I really lapped it up when I read it the back end of last year.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I learned about it through Rod Dreyer, who I believe is a personal friend of yours, and he was writing about it on his Substack.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And within the book, uh you write about the history of humanity's search for identity and meaning.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And within it, you're, I suppose, you're trying to put forward the idea that elite thought impacts the way that we search for identity and meaning and how we see ourselves in the world.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And within it, you you try to create the uh or leads to the conclusion that it's our cultural elites of of today and recent decades and and centuries that have ultimately brought the rise of um you know this you do you culture, create your own meaning, be it be really expressive in your individualism, and the the idea that all we see in the world is is all there is.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we've also witnessed a sexual revolution, and and that's laid at the feet, I suppose, of um elites past and present.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And also this idea of cultural amnesia that we've um we've come to forget our own particular histories and ways of being, and that's through either denigration, destruction, and and purposeful erasure, or or just a letting go whilst we've we've pursued the the pleasures of the present.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And um anyway, you you you say that the changes in our social environment and how we see ourselves in the world are brought about by a social imaginary, and I think we should linger on that for a second.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, Carl, what is a social imaginary?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: How do elites form them and and what is ours made of now?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, the the term social imaginary is I think it's a very important concept.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's a little awkward because we generally use imaginary as an adjective, and in the social imaginary, we're using it as a noun.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: But it the term was really coined by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, he doesn't coin a very elegant term, we are doomed to have to use it.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: But social imaginary is Taylor deploys it to try to get at an issue that when you think about it, it's kind of puzzling.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the puzzling question would be you know, why do so many people, for example, today, you know, not believe in God?
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's not because they've read the great tomes of atheism, it's not because they've been persuaded by an argument.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's more because they've been taught to imagine the world and their place in it in a certain way.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the social imaginary is getting at the ideas that the idea that most of what all of us believe at some level is the result not of arguments, but of, for want of a better term, ways of life.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Our intuitions about the world are deeply shaped by rituals, uh, by things we see on the TV, by stories we tell or are told, uh, that the way we think is not the result of sitting down, reading an argument and being persuaded by it.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's the way we were brought up, it's what we were taught at school, it's what we see on the television, it's what we talk about when we're down the pub.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: So Social Imaginary on one level is a it's a it's a somewhat vague term, but the idea is to get us to think that actually the way that we think is not rooted in necessarily in logic and principles, so much as it is rooted in the intuitions that the culture has shaped within us.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's clear.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's about as clear a definition of something vaguely academic as you can you can get.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: So well done, because I am not a man of nutshells, and every time someone responds with a nutshell, I'm I'm dumbfounded, because I think I'd spend an hour on that.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, so so uh what what what is ours constituted of now?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: What are the various um ways of of thought that we um apply to the world?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, could you give us a whistle stop tour of of how ours came to be the way it is?
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Who are the key protagonists?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it's an it's an interesting story.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if we were to go back to the Middle Ages, I mean, one of the good one of the best ways of realizing how we think about ourselves today is to go back and reflect on how people would have thought about themselves five, six, seven hundred years ago.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: Look at the social imaginary back then.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you were born in, let's say, my home village uh in Gloucestershire in the year 1200, uh, certain things would be true.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh your identity would be almost entirely given to you.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: You'd belong to a certain family.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you would not have a choice of career.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, born the son of a local blacksmith, guess what you're gonna be when you grow up?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna be the blacksmith.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you're gonna be baptized, uh, married, and buried in the same church, the same church that your ancestors and all your other friends in the village uh will be uh baptized, married, and buried in.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: You're probably not gonna travel in the entirety of your life more than 40 miles from where you were born.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so you know, if you're born in Gloucestershire, you know, Bath would be at the outer limits of your universe.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Oxford might be, if you went to Oxford once in your life, that would be an exceptional journey.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, think about that, how that makes you think about yourself.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: It gives you a very stable identity in a lot of ways.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: If you were to say to me, you know, who are you?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'd say, Well, I'm the son of so-and-so.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: I live in such and such a village.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, my family's trade is is this.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I am, you know, if you would say to me, Well, hey, do you fancy doing this?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: I might say to you, well, actually, I can't do that because I'm part of this family.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm obliged to my family at this point.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: I can't just choose my career path for myself or choose where I'm going to live.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: I have obligations.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say that the social imaginary in the in the uh Middle Ages is really one of fixed points of external authority.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, that's reinforced by the rhythm of life.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Every year you go through the four seasons.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you were to do an experiment, you know, if we're able to time travel between 1200, 1300, and 1400 in my home village of Gloucestershire, the faces would have changed.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: The families and the names would not have done.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: There'd be less change between Gloucestershire in the year 1200 and 1400 than in London or New York between 2010 and 2024.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: The solidity of the world shapes how you think about it and your place in it.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: Moved to the present day, almost none of those things that I've talked about apply anymore.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think of space as solid and authoritative.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: This time last week I was in Montana, like 2,000 miles to the west.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: I thought nothing of hopping on a plane and doing that.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: I live 4,000 miles from where I grew up.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: I chose my career.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: My dad was a chartered accountant.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a professor in a liberal arts college.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Everything about me is a matter of choice.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the world around me is also one of tremendous flux and change.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I would suggest, you know, the big difference, well, the big thing about the modern self is this.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: My imagination tells me that I'm free and autonomous, that I don't, that I'm not defined by my natural obligations towards others.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not defined by being stuck in a place.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not even defined by time in the same way as, say, my ancestors were, because they were peasant farmers and dependent upon the seasons.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: I can teach anywhere, anytime I wish, not seasonally dependent.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the big shift is one, I think, from I would say, thinking of myself as my identity as deriving from obligations and dependencies, to thinking of myself as autonomous, free, self-defining.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the intellectual narrative, you know, there are you we could look at a figure like Rousseau.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: And Rousseau, when he writes his autobiography, says, you know, all I need to do is look inside.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: All I gotta do is think about my feelings at any given point.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: And Rousseau also, in his political philosophy, will uh argue for a form of autonomy.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: A man is born free and everywhere is in chains.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: No man in the Middle Ages thought he was born free.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: And what I would say the way we get to the modern world is that the kind of the that the libertarian understanding of what it means to be human becomes plausible in the kind of technological world in which we now find ourselves.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: And in some ways, that's great.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: I enjoy the job I do.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: I love living in a world where, hey, if I go for a minor operation, they can give me an anaesthetic and I'm not dying of pain on the so it's not a Luddite argument so much as it's an argument to say, you know, technology and the things that come with it has profoundly transformed not merely my life, but the way I imagine myself to be as a human being.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that that is a point which I saw totally encapsulated um by uh Harold Macmillan.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: I saw a clip of the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Harold Macmillan, uh, not long before he passed away.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the clip was very short.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he was on a talk show, and he was he was asked uh what were the most transformational things that happened to him throughout the course of his career.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And he responded something like this It wasn't about what's happened in my career, but rather I was born in the age of the horse and cart trundling up and down the street, and I die in the age of the aeroplane.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it it's it's it's actually mind-boggling.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: The points you're making about um achieve having this identity ascribed to you when you're born, if we're looking at the Middle Ages up until probably that that period which Harold McMillan died in to a degree, and then now we're surrounded by the achieved identity culture, right?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's trying to build their resumes, they're all trying to show how they're particularly unique and and and achieve their characteristics.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh a little personal anecdote here is I'm from the northeast of England and I'd left school early.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And um, when I did that, I was working in some retail jobs and I was looking at all of my peers who had gone on to university, pretty much most of them.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is post-Tony Blair education, education, education policy.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And they were all going to get their achieved identities.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I was feeling pretty left behind.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: So in the end, I thought I'm gonna have to shake a tail feather here and get out of my small town because I don't have any um uh credentials, as it were, and my options are more supermarkets or the wood chip factory.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't fancy any of those.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I decided I'd go and work in some shops in Manchester instead.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where I went.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the thing that was driving me was I need to go and do something which is going to ultimately shake me up the career ladder, which might give me a sense of achievement, and try and sort myself out.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And over time, I, you know, I did.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: I started to explore academic interests and get better jobs or whatever.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: But there was a point when I found myself back in my home environment of Northumberland, lockdown had hit, we've all scuttled off back home because no one fancied staying in in London.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I'd been jumping around rootless.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I was feeling rootless without ever having put the money on it as to exactly what it was that I was feeling.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: But when I got home and I started to explore the place that I was from, and I started to engage with the history of how the Northumbrian peoples and the English peoples and all the culture came to be, and you know, the spirituality and everything, every aspect of it, I suddenly started to feel rooted and like I belonged.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas before I felt like this atom that was bouncing around.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean and it makes perfect sense because we are we are people who crave roots.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and and I think there's a sense in which technology's been, as I said before, you know, I'm not a Luddite.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think there'll be many great things about technology, not least, you know, we're able to talk to each other now, we're thousands of miles apart, but we're having an enjoyable conversation.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but you know, one of the things that technology has done, uh it is it has put us in a kind of frictionless world in some ways.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's downplayed the importance of the body.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a certain importance to the body, to which you're alluding here.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh to be in a certain place at a certain time is also important.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to chat on uh online as we're doing now, but how much greater would it be to be in a pub sharing a drink?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I talk to my mother every week or so on the telephone.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to hear her voice.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: How much greater is it for me to actually sit in her front room and have a cup of tea?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh space is important, and even as technology has has attenuated dramatically the authority of space, it remains something that is important to human beings.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it was it's very striking the way you talk about your your sort of pilgrimage there as an attempt to find roots, because that pilgrimage is intimately connected, it seems to me, to also being in a place, having a network of friends, having an identity that is recognized in the locale and not just online.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I I wonder then what the answers people have started to give themselves to the questions of meaning and identity are in this world which has become frictionless, seemingly freedom uh it's about freedom of choice, and you can do what you will.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's entirely up to you.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what's the answer that people have rely uh have landed upon as to how they bring meaning to their lives?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I think that you know many people have simply defaulted to consumption.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, uh in again, if you go back to the to the medieval times, uh you know, who's the blacksmith?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: The blacksmith's identity is grounded in the stuff that he makes.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and I'm not a Marxist at all, but Marx is on to something when he realizes, hmm, but we we make things.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that provides us with a lot of of our identity.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what we see in the modern world is we've shifted from grounding our identity in what we make to grounding it in the things we consume.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the interesting things to me over the last few years has has been to witness the fact that people are more and more beginning to realize that that comes up short.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Consumption is ultimately not a very satisfying way of thinking about oneself.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, one of the big answers, consumption.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think what's emerging uh more recently, perhaps, is a recapturing of community, real community in space and time.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm a I'm a Christian, so I I you know my mind immediately defaults here to the church.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, church communities are important.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh not simply for religious reasons, but also for social reasons, being in the same building with people, uh, looking into other people's faces, talking to people, being part of a community that you can depend upon and rely on when things go wrong.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: Not just churches, of course.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think of the the period of COVID.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: One of the pluses of the COVID period was that it made a lot of people realize that just chatting to somebody on the phone or looking at them on a screen, uh, that's not as satisfying as being with them in in real life.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: It amused me that colleges in the United States that went online, the administrators thought that the students were paying money for tuition.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: The students clearly thought they were paying tuition to be on campus and hang out with their pals.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: There was a big difference there.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I was encouraged by that.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'd had worried that when COVID hit, it would be the big time and everything moves online.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, in fact, there was this reaction against that.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because the classroom is a community, the campus is a community.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we're living in an era where, at least at the moment, people are asking the right questions, even if they're not giving the right answers.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: Beginning to think, okay, consumption doesn't work.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, frictionless online communication.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: Beginning to see that that has very serious consequences from everything from attention spans through to whether we actually have real enriching friendships.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we're seeing a move back to real self-conscious physical communities in certain areas.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned Rodre, of course, Rod Dre's Benedict option.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's one aspect of what he's arguing for there.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, I'd say, you know, this is why the church is one of the reasons why the church is important, because it's good to be with real people that you know, and to reflect that thing that we've lost.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if what we've lost is that sense of obligation and dependency.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: When you're part of a community, you begin to recapture that and you start to think about yourself not as a free-floating, ruthless, autonomous individual, but somebody, you know, ironically, who isn't free.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that lack of freedom can be a good thing in allowing us to know who we are.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the the point you were making about this realization, it seems, that people want community.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: They realize that they've been lacking it.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I uh Paul Kingsdorf, the orthodox writer, um, he he wrote really eloquently during the lockdowns, saying that COVID was this revelatory moment and it was this pulling away of the world that we had created in some respects, and I certainly felt it.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: So despite me starting to feel like I was reconnecting back home, ultimately it helped me get on to reconnect back home.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: But there was a whole bunch of things going on there, and actually it even led to me formerly being an atheist.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: I suddenly ended up having various conversion experiences, probably much in the in the way that um Chesterton had talked about, and I wish I had the quote and I had prepared it, but I read it the other day in his um in his um Apology Heretics, where he was talking about the diminishing religiosity of the Englishman.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: And effectively he was laying blame at the feet of uh urbanization.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he was saying if if if the reason why the Englishman is becoming less religious is because he's not standing on um on English land anymore, which what he's been is he's not out in the countryside.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: He made this analogy around turnip fields and being amongst them.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And um, what's quite interesting is this open-hearted, open-minded stuff, the things that I was going searching for when I realized that once it had all been stripped back under lockdowns, I found myself searching the roots of our past and why it is that we came to be and the bigger questions, and then it all just came rushing in.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it was in those moments where I wasn't um caught up with a full outlook calendar and rushing around on trains and on the bike to work, and effectively living in that cons that consumption driven environment that you were referencing earlier.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose that's a Nice sub segue to the age we live in now and the ages we we have lived in.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: And you've made some points about what it's like to lead the Christian life and the benefits of the community.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: But clearly, to be a Christian, you're orienting yourselves towards a certain uh way of life and what life is about and where you stand in the world.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: How does that compare to how what people see the world as and their place in it now?
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what are the various ages of man that we've gone through from when we were more religious to when we're just consumers now?
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, here I'm I'm very indebted to, again, to Charles Taylor, but I'll focus on another finger at this point, Philip Reef.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Philip Reef, who is he's actually, uh, as far as I can as I can make out, a kind of I think he's agnostic.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he was culturally Jewish.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: He grew up Jewish, but in terms of his religious beliefs, he's basically an agnostic.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: But it was very interested in how societies organize themselves, in how they justify their social orders, you know, the in other words, the the way societies behave.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: How do they justify uh the way they behave?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it he also touches on the social imaginary idea.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't use the term, it's Taylor's term, but Reeve talks about uh human societies, you could characterize them in four ways, and it's a little simplistic, because I don't think any society is purely one of these.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: But in any given human society, probably one of them will be the dominant normative model.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: He talks about political man, and he says, you know, political man is a society where uh people find their fulfillment through being informed and engaged in public life.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: And we might say, you know, fourth century Athens would be a world of political man where to be the fulfilled man in ancient Athens is to go to the assembly, to make a speech, to be informed, to engage in debate, to cast a vote.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: He then talks about religious man, and these are societies where the key thing is public religious ritual.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the example I use when I teach this in class is think about Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Here you have this ragtag bunch of people from all levels of society on their way from the Tabard Inn to uh the shrine of St.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thomas Abbeckett at Canterbury.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: And they tell these stories as they're on the way.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: But see, that that makes sense in its day because you have people they're on pilgrimage.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's an important thing.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: When are they, when you might say most English, if you like?
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's when they're on a religious pilgrimage.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we we have something of that today.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Catholics will still go on pilgrimages.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh obviously, in Islam, you know, in Islam, you are supposed to go to Mecca at least once in your lifetime, on the harj.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: So uh Islam still has this religious man sensibility.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Reef then says that economic man sort of supplants religious man, and that's when religion ceases to be the glue that holds society together, and economic activity does.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: And if you read any Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens's books are full of economic men, Mr.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: Gradgrind in Hard Times, Old Man Dombey in Dombey and Son, most famously Scrooge, of course.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: These are all characters who they are fulfilled by being involved in the economic activity of society.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: And Reeve says that all three of these, though, uh the the key thing about them is that what society does is it it directs people outward.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: In the political society, the religious society, the economic society, education is about giving you the skills that allow you to be a real person within the society you have.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: The last phase, Reeve says, is that of therapeutic man or psychological man.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is the therapeutic society.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: And here he says an interesting thing takes place that no longer is culture that which directs you outwardly, shapes your social imaginary so you can fit into what is.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, everything switches 180 degrees.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the purpose of society and culture is to make you feel good about yourself.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore it becomes, its purpose becomes therapeutic.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: If somebody holds a belief that makes you feel uncomfortable, then it's society's job to stop that person holding that belief so that you can feel good about yourself.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: If there are laws out there that make you feel oppressed, then those laws must change.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting enough, Reef says that institutions change.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: They move from being places, we might say, of formation.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: You don't go to school to have your individuality bashed out of you and made into a member of the team, as I did at my grammar school in the 70s and 80s, way back when.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: You go to school to be allowed to express your self-expression, child-centered learning.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: And Reef also says too, there's another phenomenon that happens.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: Some institutions fade in importance.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: For example, religious institutions, uh, the nation and the family.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: Because all of these things demand a sacrifice of the self.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: If you belong to the church, you have to stop behaving in certain ways, even if you want to.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we've all heard that phrase, nobody in this family behaves that way.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, if you're going to be a member of a family, you've got to follow the family rules.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: My house, my rules.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: That was my one of my dad's sort of mantra kind of thing growing up.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Reef says these will fade away, and two other institutions will become very, very powerful and prominent.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he calls them a hospital and theatre.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: We might perhaps update the language and say the medical industry and the entertainment industry.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Why do they become more and more important?
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because they don't demand a sacrifice of the self.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: They actually stop the self feeling pain or being bored.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: They're very psychologically therapeutic, Reef would say.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so, again, circling back to where we began, you know, what is the hallmark of today's culture?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: Today's culture uh uh puts human psychological comfort and well-being at the center, rather than, we might say, the well-being of the team or the nation.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: The therapeutic culture is a point I think anyone listening or watching would be able to see out there.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you look closely enough, listen closely enough, you can hear therapeutic language just entering modern parlance.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's lots of stuff about validation and affirmation.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what's also quite interesting, and you you you make this point on on multiple levels within the book, is this inversion of values or a change of how we see things.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: So previously uh virtuous characteristics, and I mean properly virtuous characteristics, things that are about good character and um right conduct rather than the virtue signalling we become used to, is things like being stately stoic, you know, patience, secrecy, secrecy, concealment.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: They were once seen as virtues, and now they're seen as weakness, and we must therapise them and get them out and help you overcome them.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: What other values have we been inverting over time?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because you you've you've written that you know people have come to define themselves as well by what's forbidden, and they seek to shock and to degrade at times.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so you've got this kind of unholy dance, I suppose, between those who are saying, you know, you do you, and then also attaching themselves to this value system, which is turned inside out from the one that we used to conform ourselves to.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, they're available you know, to add to the list of previous virtues that have now, you know, come to be seen as not so much as weakness, but sinister.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: I was talking just this morning in class actually about how uh social media, combined with this notion of the expressive individual, like you know, that we have to express outwardly our inward feelings, has led to a world where uh not expressing our feelings seems sinister.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the example I used a couple of years ago when I was teaching this class, uh young woman came up to me after the class and laughed and said, I've got to tell you this story.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: She said, uh, this guy asked me how we're on a date.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: And of course she said, Being uh, you know, being the generation I am, first thing I did was I Googled him, you know, to see see what he's been up to online.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and she said, uh, he has no social media profile, she said.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then she laughed and she said, and my intuition was, I said, that's creepy.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, my intuition was, what's he hiding?
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: So privacy uh disappears.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: The other side of it is coarseness, I think, comes to be seen as a virtue.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh why?
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you are reserved, then you're seen as inauthentic.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: Secondly, if the real you is the real you and any external limits are sources of inauthenticity, then you will tilt, your social imaginary will tilt towards transgression.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I would use I I can't speak about British politics now, but I would use any American politics.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: In the early 70s, uh, Richard Nixon, Watergate crisis, one of the things that most damaged Richard Nixon's reputation in the public eye were the Watergate tapes, where in the transcripts the little phrase expleted deleted was used.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it was shocking to the American people that the American president would swear, even in a private meeting.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is not a public.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm hard pressed today to think of a politician, right or left in America, uh, who doesn't use profanity.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Many of them will even use the F-word.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, words that would have gotten you fired in my dad's day from where you worked and are now routinely used in public discourse.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say to the I would say to the students, you know, why is that?
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one reason is this uh everybody knows that everybody's language is less than it should be in private.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: We use words in private, we would never use in public.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're only ever polite in public, you look inauthentic and suspicious.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: You can establish your authenticity, you can establish your cred by dropping the F-bomb in a public speech.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: And both the present president of the United States and the previous incumbent, very foul-mouthed individuals, would not have made it in the 70s using that same vocabulary.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: And yet now that vocabulary is somehow seen as a sign of their strength, their authenticity to their followers.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: I would say it's a sign of how expressive individualism tilts us towards transgression.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: The problem, of course, is once everybody does it, it becomes a new conformity.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to find a new way of transgressing.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that's, I think, what has created a kind of death spiral in the culture where we just go down and down and down to more and more crudity.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because as soon as somebody establishes a norm, you've got to transgress it because it becomes a source of inauthenticity.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Dear classmate John here.
• 33:20
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• 33:23
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• 33:32
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• 33:35
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• 33:47
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• 33:50
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• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I heard someone opining on the current protests that are taking place on American campuses that are led by, at least nominally, pro-Palestine protesters.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: And they're forming encampments, they're defacing things, they're stopping people from moving around.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: And this links nicely, I suppose, to your social imaginary concept where the person opining, can't remember who it was, had said, these kids aren't doing anything now at this point, very transgressive, even to the social imaginary, because really they're just taking cues from what has formed over the last 60, 70 years, but they're just trying to take it as far as possible because the the adults have have basically said this is what you need to do, and they're saying, Well, that doesn't go far enough, so we're going to take it into our own hands.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: That that coarseness, though, you're absolutely right.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you see it in so many different ways, besides people using it in in a kind of expressively individual, how authentic I am.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's a there is a degradation, I would say, of the culture.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you know, you you're talking about people being um shocked and scandalized to see expletive deleted written in a transcript.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you just go and look on any day, any news sites now and go flicking through, you know, if it's a tabloid that has its own web page, what do you see?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you see loads of nakedness, you see swear words, you see lots of the course slang, and you can just find it on tap.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing I've noticed is a recent development, which I find pretty worrying actually, is clearly when we are subject or witness to uh victims of, as nations, regions, cultures, horrific attacks, or whether something's happened, whether it's you know, a terror attack or a serial murder or whatever.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, because we take image, there's images of everything that we do, is I notice that these sites show clips of the moment up to the moment before someone's about to be killed.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: And people just scroll through it as though it's nothing.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: But that to me, when I think about it, you know, once I've scrolled past it mindlessly myself, I go, how have we become desensitized to that?
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and that's another issue.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're saying, you know, horror has become entertainment on that level.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: And as I say, there's a dehumanizing uh dimension to that.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, the big question is, you know, and these protests are a good example.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: I I I I I was in a discussion just yesterday with a Muslim friend, actually.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm convinced that anti-Semitism drives a lot of these uh protests, and he's less convinced by that.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: And he was saying, no, no, it's it's actually post-colonial theory, it's it's critical theory.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think he made a I I actually think that our two approaches are complementary.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: They don't necessarily contradict each other, but I think they're complementary.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, but I think he's landing uh making a good point there because what is the essence of something like critical theory?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's it's it's criticism.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: Critical theory does not really offer a positive vision, it merely tears down that which is.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: And when you see signs like queers for Palestine, uh, that's interesting because the only safe place, generally speaking, for a queer person in the in the Middle East would be Israel.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're not going to be safe in any jurisdiction run by Hamas or Hezbollah or any conservative Muslim regime.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so what is it that's binding together Hamas and queers and drag queens?
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: There is no positive vision.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: They are merely united by that which they oppose, which is essentially Western culture.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we could we could argue about the details, but essentially they agree that what the West has stood for is bad and needs to be torn down.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: They can offer no positive vision that they would agree on about what it should look like afterwards.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: Should it look like Sharia law or should it look like Judith Butler reading groups?
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're not going to agree on which of those two it should be.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: What unites them is that spirit of negation.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's the most worrying thing about our culture, that when transgression becomes the virtue, there's nothing there upon which to build.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: You end up with what the late Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce referred to as total revolution, which is just a continual cycle of destabilization, which ultimately will lead to the collapse of everything.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: Whether we'll end up there, I mean the thing about societies is you can't tell whether society is going to pull back from the brink or commit suicide until it does one thing or the other.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: So there's no reason to despair.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: We could pull back from the brink, but we won't know we're going to pull back from the brink until we do pull back from the brink.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and maybe a little bit later on we can proffer some ideas, maybe even advice for the cultural elite who we think are responsible for creating the social imaginary of how we might pull back from the brink.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: Picking up on the thread of this expressive individualism and authenticity that you talked about, there's a really nice um expression and use of language at the beginning of the book where you bring in some ancient Greek and you talk about mimesis and poesis, and one of them being um that the world is raw material and it's up to you to make of it what you will.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the other being, uh, and you'll have to remind me which one's which, hence I'm being vague.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: The other being that the world has an intrinsic meaning, the universe has an intrinsic meaning.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's up to us to discover it and conform ourselves to that.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um so you said that meaning for a lot of people now are giving into their own feelings, desires, self-creation.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there are probably people out there like Patrick Denine of the post-liberal bent, who'd say, well, the project of liberalism is to enable this.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I guess my question is, besides the remind me which one it is of mimesis and poesis, is what's the what do you think the impact on the soul, regardless of whether there are secular people listening to this as well, which there will be, what's the impact on the soul to think for a human to think that there are no intrinsic ends to human existence and it's just to be created at your own whims?
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, first of all, just the distinction.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: Mimesis is the idea that the world has a shape, poiesis is that we we can we construct meaning.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and I would say obviously the world is in some sense a mixture of both.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, human beings, we're free, we're intentional creatures, we transform the environment.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: We don't, you know, if I see a river, I can build a bridge over it.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: I can cross the river by building a bridge, I can transform the environment.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: In in building a bridge over the river, though, I kind of respect the integrity of the river as river.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that action is both uh a poetic one in terms of transforming the environment, but also rests upon a deeper mimesis in that, okay, the river's here.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: Let me respect the river.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: German philosopher Heidegger uses that example and says, you know, there's a big difference if we dam up the river to generate hydroelectric power.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: Then we're seeing the river as raw material to do something completely different with.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's him sort of getting at the distinction Taylor makes between mimesis and poiesis.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think the sense of the meaninglessness of the world, well, we've got a hundred and or a hundred and fifty years in the West of literature and uh cultural artifacts that speak to that.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, that the question, the big question becomes, can life be worth living in a context where there is no meaning or shape?
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's even if Nietzsche makes the comment somewhere that it's not suffering that's unbearable, it's meaningless suffering that is unbearable.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I think if you if you see the world as lacking any meaning or shape, the the existential burden is massively increased upon you.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's it's easy to understand where Franz Kafka is coming from in the trial.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's easy to see where an Albert Camus is coming from in the myth of Sisyphus or in the outsider.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, if you want to know what the world, you know, how to think about the world when it has no meaning or shape, we've got a wealth of literature uh that you can look at for that.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think for the ordinary person in the street, it leads to a less reflective but equally damaging kind of malaise.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: Life becomes what you consume.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: Life becomes going through the motions.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, life becomes what Nietzsche calls mechanical activity.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: Or, Nietzsche would say it becomes a kind of nihilism.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: Nietzsche's often decried as a nihilist, but he's not really a nihilist.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: Nihilists for him are people who just carry on doing what they're doing with values that are either being proved to be untenable or values they've never actually questioned or owned for themselves.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think human beings become kind of what we are as a society at the moment.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, if I was chatting to somebody who wasn't uh a Christian or a theist here, I'd say, you know, you have now the kind of society that you will inevitably have when you have no sacred order behind it.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: And interesting enough, we're seeing some interesting figures.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, I can't comment on the degree of seriousness with which they're engaging Christianity, but I saw Russell Brand was baptized last Sunday, apparently.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, who'd have thought Russell Brand would ever take religion seriously?
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: Richard Dawkins is now saying he's a cultural Christian.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: To me, Richard Dawkins have caught the horns of a real dilemma.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he spent his entire life demolishing the foundations of the sacred order.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then suddenly it's dawned on him, which he could have spotted straight away if he'd read Nietzsche's Getty Science.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: Suddenly it's dawned on him that a whole heap of the stuff that he actually appreciates.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Was originally grounded on a transcendent sacred order.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that's not to say that the transcendent sacred order is true, but it is to say if you're going to demolish it, you've got to accept the fact that everything else is going to come crashing down as well.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this point of nihilism, uh, this malaise.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: I do often wonder when I see the advance of certain policies.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_00: For example, the clamor now to make euthanasia widespread, you know, assisted suicide.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: And who knows?
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, from from those who've implemented those already, I think you know, the state of Victoria and Australia have done so.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: The safeguards that were put in have now been removed.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and to bring some reality into that so people aren't just listening to to me talking about assisted suicide in a in a in an abstract policy manner.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: I read this um story um or an article that featured this 28-year-old Dutch girl.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, she is um cohabiting uh with her partner, and they have a dog together, pretty normal life.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: She's arranged for um her assisted suicide next year because she's decided that life won't get much better.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's not going to be that happy.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's pretty much nothing to live for.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems to me that what we're headed toward, because of having destroyed that sacred order, as it were, and and and the civilization, I guess, that that it was uh built upon, is we're we're being tempted in this direction um because we only see things through the lens of things like efficiency and pleasure, and and and as you have um made the point um implied earlier on, is that because of the technological progress we've made, it's given us this idea that we are just in control of everything, that we can that we because we are materially in control of things, then we ought to be in control of everything else.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then when we realise that that's not really the case, it leaves us lots of questions unanswered.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: And because we don't have the moral spiritual architecture to deal with any of that stuff anymore, is we just start going, all right, so how do we deal with unhappiness um or melancholy?
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, just press the button.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: And um, it makes me ask the question, I suppose, Carlos, if we don't want to deepen this age of nihilism, if we want to call it that, maybe it's something else.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: And and perhaps we're still seeing a cultural movement away from it.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: You've mentioned some key figures, and I think that surprising rebirth of the belief in God, as Justin Brianly has been popularizing recently, seems to be a thing.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: But if we don't want to deepen that age of nihilism, not be bewitched by technological advancements and think that we know everything, what what is it, what is it that we could be doing individually, societally?
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so I I I wonder, you know, what what are we going to do to stop us from deepening that malaise?
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if if you had to advise people in uh individually or those in positions of leadership, you know, what would be your creed a cœur, the cry of the heart?
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, part of I mean, going back to that Dutch girl, you when we think about that, that's a very emblematic thing.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because I would say what's interesting about her is she clearly feels that her life is all about her.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, presumably she has parents, she has friends, uh, she's got a boyfriend she's living with, maybe she's got children.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the question becomes uh your life is not all about your happiness.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: The problem here is you think of yourself as the center of the universe with no obligations or dependencies upon other people, uh, such that you know, you may want to die, but that's gonna break the hearts of your parents, for example.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that has to be taken account.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, why does her desire make sense in the Netherlands or in the West today, precisely because we've come to think of ourselves as isolated individuals?
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: So part of the way that we've got to push back on this is we've got to tilt the social imaginary away from this free, unencumbered, autonomous notion of what it means to be a human being, back to understanding uh proper dependencies and obligations upon other people.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that means we have to start rebuilding community.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that can't be done.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: You can't legislate that.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think that you know, legislation can help, but we've really got to start it from the ground up.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I can't stop legislation on assisted suicide.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: What I can do is try to make sure that everybody in my community circle has a life where they would never go for that option, precisely because they see themselves not as isolated individuals, but as connected to others.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: I had a very good friend recently whose wife actually I gave the homily at her funeral just a couple of weeks ago, and she'd had terminal cancer for a year.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: And what really struck me about her was that she was, every time we met, she was determined not to say goodbye.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: She was in a lot of pain, but she was determined to live life because it wasn't about her, it was about the friendship she had, it was about the children she had, it was about the husband she had.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he was a person who she didn't think of her illness as her own private business and nothing but her own, even down to decisions on what treatment to take.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: She would she discussed those with her loved ones because she knew that whatever her desire was, it had to be coordinated with those of others.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: So what we need to do is recapture the idea of human beings as being, uh, to use uh other language, being encumbered selves, not unencumbered selves.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: That I have obligations to my children, to my wife, to my colleagues, too much, different levels of obligation at all.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: But at no point in my life is it all just about me.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: How we recapture that, that's that's difficult.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I think we can start by modeling that in our own families, modeling that in our own communities, be they religious communities or the street we live in.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: We all have opportunities to embody in our own lives a better and truer vision of what it means to be a human being.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think people, even without having thought about it, would recognize that if they are spending most of their time only speaking to people digitally, whether it's because they do lots of work from home or because most people just send little strings of text to each other, or we speak on FaceTime, is that once you've had a few days of that and you've not actually seen any real people or had any real interactions, is when you do get out and you're going to have those little interactions with people in the street and you exchange some pleasantries, the feeling that you actually get from that, um, you know, even if you did want to look at it from a pleasure perspective, actually you get quite a lot out of it and you feel quite good.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: But when you are actually contributing to community, and I've got to say, this is only something I'm slowly learning over the years.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's not something I've done before.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: I've been, I have been the classic atom, the one who is not really a part of anything, and I just go about my business.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the feeling of sharing, um sharing a dinner with people that you've literally just been thrown together in the middle of the church group is really quite something.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you come away very energized, you learn a little bit about everyone, and you see people providing the emotional support to one another, and even just going through the day-to-day, you know, the the the usual stuff that we all talk about.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: In Britain, we love to talk about the weather, so usually there's a lot of lot of that stuff.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings me to the question, I suppose.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: You've brought up Richard Dawkins, who effectively, in the face of the question of look, we're seeing rising progressivism, we're seeing the influence of Islamism within the West.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, this is all happening in the rubble of the world that I suppose your very good polemics and um evolutionarily uh evolutionarily based arguments and logic arguments contributed to.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's gone, no, I'd be culturally, I'm culturally Christian, and if I had to choose on that basis, you know, I would choose that every single time over any of the other options.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I I heard Louise Perry, um, the the British author who writes a lot about um uh w women's issues, I guess, um, and and makes the case against the sexual revolution, although this is tangential to that point, where she is talking more openly around Christianity as so many others have, and she's like, look, I can days I have moments of of faith, days of moments of doubt, but there's one thing I'm absolutely sure of is that Christianity is sociologically true.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: We only have to look at how well the societies function in comparison to all other historical societies.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, my question after that long preamble, Carl, is you know, do we need to rediscover our Christian and classical roots in the West in the face of the these challenging ideologies that are bringing it down?
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think we do, but I think the problem with with Richard Dawkins, and I I'm not so uh I've not kept, I read Louise Perry's book, but I've not kept up with what she's been saying since.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think the problem that those who wish to say, well, we want Christianity because it it works, because it gives us the society we're like.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is they've not moved beyond the real challenge that Friedrich Nietzsche raises in the 19th century.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: When Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, he has this famous passage where the madman runs into the town square and declares that God is dead.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he's actually haranguing atheists at that point.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's not, he only gets to the church, the churches are so irrelevant, he doesn't go to the churches till later on in the day.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: He's haranguing atheists, and the atheists laugh at him.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and and the madman says, no, you don't understand, God is dead, we've killed him.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then to summarize what the madman says, he says, so everything's changed.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: You simply can't continue as if nothing's changed.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: All this stuff that was built on the idea of Christianity was built on the idea of Christianity being true.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say to Richard Dawkins, you know, at this point I sort of play the critical theory card in some ways, say, oh, you think Christianity works because it happens to justify the kind of society that you like.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: All you're doing is expressing your emotional preference.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because even your definition of what works is simply that which conforms to the tastes of Richard Dawkins.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: So my challenge to those who want to have Christianity because it delivers culturally is I you know, I'm hearing the voice of Nietzsche's madman in the back of my head saying, but you can't do that.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: Excuse me, everything changes.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, yes, you got rid of God.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now you've got to rethink the values that were built upon God at that point.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say, yeah, we do need to rediscover our roots, but it's not as easy as you might think, because it's gonna make intellectual demands upon us that a Dawkins is gonna say, no, belief in God, that's you're you're an idiot if you do that.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you you it's it's idiotic.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: I would say, well, I I don't think the choice is between uh you know Dawkins, transgender progressivism, or Christianity.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think the choice is between Christianity and progressivism.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think the kind of polite humanism that Richard Dawkins represents is really, I think I think it's being exposed as a non-viable option at this point.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: The very fact that he's having to use the language of Christianity now to express what is essentially secular humanism tells you that he knows he's in a bind at this point.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: He knows he's in a bind.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: The real battle is between a full-blooded theism and a full-blooded Nietzschean atheism.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's where the struggle is.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then the struggle becomes: does God exist or not?
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it becomes not so much a cultural struggle as a metaphysical struggle at that point.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the bind we find ourselves in.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm delighted as a Christian that opportunities for conversation are opening up with guys like Richard Dawkins and Louise Perry and Mary Harrington.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: I would throw, I know Mary would throw Mary Harrington into that pile as well.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: Delighted that I'm able to talk and be taken seriously now to some extent by by those that I would never have dreamed of having a point of contact with 10 years ago.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I hope those conversations go somewhere.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: But bottom line is if the sacred order isn't true, the social order is merely, as Nietzsche would say, a matter of the tastes whoever's ever's in charge.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that that point about it becoming feeling well, it feels normal to have conversations about religion once more without it immediately descending into a snorting, uh, uh sneering contest.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: And look, I I was guilty of that.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was the big Dawkins and Hitchens acolyte in my late teens and early 20s.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, you know, I've I've seen this, and yeah, here I am as a Christian.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_00: And um, anyway, in the last few years, it has been really interesting to watch how within the culture, whether it's on big podcasts like trigonometry or or whatever, people are having this serious comment.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you're on.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: I I was on trigonometry.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: What interested me there was those guys, one of the questions they asked was, you know, can you have a moral society without without God?
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I I I gave a typical academic kind of answer, and I said, Well, you know, I can't hypothetically conceptualize every society.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I just I said, I think you're really making it very, very difficult for yourself.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: And what interested me about those guys was that they I think they've both recently become fathers.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, when you have children, that raises the stakes.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_01: Suddenly, you know, the iconoclasm of one's youth, when you're extrapolating it 50, 60, 70 years into the future, it becomes a whole lot more serious at that point.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I yeah, the trigonometry, I love the trigonometry guys, they're great fun.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and yeah, I I they would never have had me on their show in in the world of 20 years ago.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, crazy guy like me who believes in God.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, what's he doing on a show like that?
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and you know, I it's it's been building ever since you went on the show.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, um I think Constantin just released uh a video which has been viewed, I mean, hundreds of thousands of times at this stage, eight minutes long, the atheist delusion.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: And um I I mean, we're we're clearly seeing it come back into the conversation, which is good.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm sure I'm sure listeners and watchers would know what you'd suggest people should go and explore with regards to you know if they don't like the current malaise, what they should go and explore.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_00: But perhaps this is a final question, Kyle.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: Is we've talked a lot about the ways in which we think that the society and the culture has degraded and that it has led us astray, and that it has placed a huge existential burden on us, and we are conforming our lives to something which is not going to lead to good ends.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, who would you say people should be wary of?
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_00: What and who are the false prophets in the modern world?
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that there are a number.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think that the the those pushing gender ideology are perhaps the ones that need most immediate attention because there we have a situation where young children's lives are being jeopardized.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: And the great thing about that is I actually think that the tide is turning on that, not in the States yet.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it will take a lawsuit, you know, that the America is different.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: It will take somebody suing somebody.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the the caste report needs to land on the desk of a lawyer over here.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm very encouraged that the gender ideology is is, I think it will be shoved back into the hole from which it crawled at some point.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, in saying that, by the way, I don't wish to be heard saying that people struggling with gender dysphoria are not struggling with something very real to them and and that's causing them great heartache.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about the ideology, not the condition.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't want to be heard to be uh to to sound uh uncompassionate about people for whom that is a very real struggle.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I do think gender ideology needs uh uh attention.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think all of those who are working to destroy our institutions uh we need to be very wary of those as well.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_01: Those who are saying, you know, everything is bad and needs to be dismantled.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's not to say that the past is idyllic or a golden age.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's not to say in America that the constitution is perfect, but it is to say that we need to revise our institutions, not destroy them.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_01: So the real iconoclasts, uh, the really passionate advocates of critical theory, for example, the real, not the Twitter people who think they understand it, but those who really understand it and push it, we need to be very wary of that as well.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that, of course, brings my own field of higher education into the crosshairs.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, be wary of higher education at this point.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, choose your colleges carefully, choose your professors carefully.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_00: Carl, it's been an honor and delight to be able to have such a wide-ranging conversation with you.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_00: It is really deep flow.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_00: I I I've enjoyed it immensely.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_00: I I know people will be interested in being able to follow your work.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: Where can they find you online?
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_00: What can we expect from you next?
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I don't do social media.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I like everything that I write that goes up online to be edited by somebody else in order to protect me from myself.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you can find uh my my regular slot is at firstthings.com, which is an American magazine.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: It has a print version but also has an online website uh that deals with really religion and public life.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's not exclusively Christian, but there have been, I think, one or two Muslim writers on the site and quite a number of Jewish contributors as well.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's a sort of conservative, religious conservatives and public life.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_01: I have a piece there every two weeks.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: Every other Thursday I have uh an opinion piece there.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I also write for world opinions.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: You can find it via WN for Nigel.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's an English audience, so I can use the name Nigel, wng.org.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I do a piece there every every two weeks.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: So probably about once a week I'll have an opinion piece uh up on the web somewhere.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: But world and first things would be my primary, primary locations.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, listeners, watchers, definitely go and keep an eye on Carl's publications and those um in those uh publications, so yeah, double publications.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: It there first things is particularly good and wide range of authors.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_00: Carl, it's been a real pleasure.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy what comes next.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to catching up again in in future, and um and I hope we get another uh ground shaking book from you.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, well, it'd be great to chat again, John.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_00: Take good care.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: Engage with me on YouTube or X, or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.