Latest / Yaron Brook Show / Conversation w/ Don Watkins: Why the West Is Losing Confidence & How to Fix It | Yaron Brook Show

Transcript

Conversation w/ Don Watkins: Why the West Is Losing Confidence & How to Fix It | Yaron Brook Show · Yaron Brook Show

0:03
Speaker 1: A lot of fundamental principles of the widow, national self interest,
0:10
Speaker 1: and individual ones. This is the show. Oh right, everybody,
0:21
Speaker 1: welcome to your one book show on this Monday, March
0:25
Speaker 1: twenty third, shown number two two of today. And I'm
0:30
Speaker 1: really happy to have with me Don Watkins. Uh. Don,
0:35
Speaker 1: I think everybody's familiar with Don. He is the what
0:39
Speaker 1: I don't know is something in marketing at the institute,
0:43
Speaker 1: like runs marketing at the Iron End Institute. And he
0:48
Speaker 1: is the author of no this hand those books back there,
0:53
Speaker 1: that one and that one. All right, I got it
0:56
Speaker 1: right now with me, and also as a novel of
1:02
Speaker 1: his own. And of course we uh in the process
1:06
Speaker 1: of finishing and hopefully finding a publisher for our latest
1:09
Speaker 1: book on Western civilization and Christianity. So Don welcome, good
1:19
Speaker 1: to be back. All right. So we're going to talk about,
1:25
Speaker 1: you know, why the West has kind of lost its confidence,
1:30
Speaker 1: But maybe first we should kind of talk about what
1:33
Speaker 1: we mean by the West. What what what is the West?
1:37
Speaker 1: What do we consider kind of what do you consider
1:39
Speaker 1: the West?
1:42
Speaker 2: I mean, I think often two things get blended together
1:46
Speaker 2: that are important to distinguish. One is just there's a location, right,
1:50
Speaker 2: like there's Western Europe and then America as a derivation
1:56
Speaker 2: of that and the the idea of West and civilization
2:01
Speaker 2: I think of as there was a time period during which,
2:06
Speaker 2: if you think of civilization as just the ongoing process
2:09
Speaker 2: of human beings getting better at living human lives, there
2:12
Speaker 2: was a period certainly during the Enlightenment, but stretching before
2:16
Speaker 2: and after, in which the West was really the leading
2:20
Speaker 2: harbager of civilization. And other civilizations have played that role
2:24
Speaker 2: at various times, including Islamic civilization, but during that time,
2:32
Speaker 2: the West was the carrier, the forerunner, the cutting edge
2:36
Speaker 2: of civilization. I think today civilization has gone global, that
2:40
Speaker 2: people pushing humanity forward. You can find it in all
2:44
Speaker 2: parts of the globe in various ways. But when I
2:48
Speaker 2: think of the West, it's a location and Western civilization
2:51
Speaker 2: really you should think about it as civilization of human
2:54
Speaker 2: civilization of which the West has played an integral part.
2:58
Speaker 2: And the question is sort of what role are we
3:00
Speaker 2: playing today and what role are we going to play
3:03
Speaker 2: in the future. And the real tragedy, in my view,
3:08
Speaker 2: is that it's really there's nobody caring forward civilization on principle,
3:15
Speaker 2: consistently moving it forward, and you know, we'll talk about
3:19
Speaker 2: how the West has lost confidence, But it's not I
3:22
Speaker 2: don't think it is the West has lost confidence in
3:24
Speaker 2: the West. It's that the West has lost confidence in
3:28
Speaker 2: civilization and the values that make civilization possible.
3:33
Speaker 1: So what is civilization? So you know what are the
3:39
Speaker 1: characteristic civilization? And you know what is I guess what
3:44
Speaker 1: is necessary to carry it forward?
3:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean what I put is it's human beings
3:50
Speaker 2: getting better and better at living human lives. And you think, so,
3:56
Speaker 2: I'm about to have my third child in June, and
4:00
Speaker 2: and as you're a kid, right, you're learning more and
4:03
Speaker 2: more about how to live a human life, about how
4:05
Speaker 2: to think long rage, about how to do focused work,
4:09
Speaker 2: about how to relate with other people, about what values
4:13
Speaker 2: the world has to offer and how to enjoy and
4:15
Speaker 2: create those, And humanity as a whole, I think is
4:19
Speaker 2: undergoing that same kind of growth and process. If you're discovering,
4:23
Speaker 2: for example, if you think of ancient Greece, why we
4:27
Speaker 2: revere ancient Greece. They weren't the first people to use reason,
4:32
Speaker 2: but they were the first people to identify it as
4:35
Speaker 2: a distinct faculty, identify some of the most important laws
4:40
Speaker 2: about how to use it self consciously and on principle,
4:44
Speaker 2: or if you think about the laws of the rules
4:46
Speaker 2: of proper social organization and political organization, it's the discovery
4:52
Speaker 2: first that well, human beings aren't subjects properly, but they
4:56
Speaker 2: are citizens, self rulers who govern themselves. And then you discover, well,
5:02
Speaker 2: they need to govern themselves according to certain principles, and
5:05
Speaker 2: ultimately that culminates in individual rights. So it's this process
5:09
Speaker 2: of us learning more and more about how to live
5:12
Speaker 2: human lives and that, like to me, that is the
5:16
Speaker 2: great human endeavor. Or if you take the realm of technology,
5:20
Speaker 2: it's discovering that instead of you know, grabbing whatever animals
5:25
Speaker 2: and plants are around us, that we can cultivate crops,
5:28
Speaker 2: and then it's we can cultivate them by using different tools.
5:33
Speaker 2: And then it's we can cultivate them using the incredible
5:38
Speaker 2: power of hydrocarbons that allows us to have more food
5:44
Speaker 2: than any individual needs. Like the there's this process of progress,
5:50
Speaker 2: and the question is what are the values and principles
5:54
Speaker 2: that make progress possible and then how and then one
5:58
Speaker 2: of those values should be progress itself. How do we
6:00
Speaker 2: get better and better at doing that?
6:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it strikes me that the reason is
6:05
Speaker 1: at the corevid Right, I mean, it's a it's the
6:08
Speaker 1: starting point. It's a respectful reason that gets everything else started,
6:12
Speaker 1: because that's the the method by which we discovered the
6:16
Speaker 1: values that lead to everything else. And that goes back
6:22
Speaker 1: to the Greeks, right, Yeah.
6:25
Speaker 2: I mean I think about it as two things, and
6:27
Speaker 2: in the end I think they're one, but it's helpful
6:31
Speaker 2: to think about them as two. Is you have a goal,
6:34
Speaker 2: which is human happiness, and then you have a means,
6:38
Speaker 2: which is reason. And if you have those two fundamentals,
6:44
Speaker 2: and indeed, I think you can view history, you can
6:46
Speaker 2: track history, and I mean, you know, this is really
6:49
Speaker 2: the point of our book that people haven't read yet.
6:52
Speaker 2: But it's really if you look at the kind of
6:53
Speaker 2: rise and fall of those two essentials of being pro
6:56
Speaker 2: or anti reason and being pro earthly happiness or anti
7:00
Speaker 2: earthly happiness, that that explains whether you're on the side
7:04
Speaker 2: of civilization or whether you're against it.
7:07
Speaker 1: And it's totally happiness for the individual. Right. It's some
7:11
Speaker 1: utilitary And it was just watching something where they mentioned
7:14
Speaker 1: Bentham who.
7:16
Speaker 2: But I even regard that as part of the process
7:19
Speaker 2: of civilization, right, part of it is even isolating that
7:23
Speaker 2: that's an issue, that it's the individual because if you
7:26
Speaker 2: think about how like Aristotle thought about it, it's an
7:31
Speaker 2: individual view, but it's not individualism because that whole issue
7:35
Speaker 2: hadn't been isolated his views. Well, a human being lives
7:37
Speaker 2: a human life in a poulus in a city, like
7:40
Speaker 2: that's the best kind of life, and it's sort of blurred.
7:44
Speaker 2: He's not a collectivist that you should sacrifice your happiness
7:47
Speaker 2: for the good of the tribe, but it's not also
7:50
Speaker 2: not individualism, that you should never sacrifice yourself to others,
7:55
Speaker 2: nor others to yourself. That is the process of civilization
7:58
Speaker 2: is figuring that out and getting no, it's individual happiness,
8:02
Speaker 2: and it's true that we live socially, but we can
8:04
Speaker 2: live in a fully non sacrificial way that I think
8:07
Speaker 2: that's one of the things that had to be discovered.
8:09
Speaker 2: But you could still be on the premise of human
8:11
Speaker 2: happiness and get clearer and clear about what really that
8:14
Speaker 2: implied and what that means. And if you think about
8:17
Speaker 2: ain Rand, I think part of what she is seeing
8:21
Speaker 2: that nobody else had seen is that to be pro
8:24
Speaker 2: happiness and meant to be selfish. So it's getting not
8:28
Speaker 2: just that it's pro individual, but that it's pro selfish
8:32
Speaker 2: is kind of a further step in that whole process
8:35
Speaker 2: of working out the meaning of what it means to
8:37
Speaker 2: be committed to human happiness.
8:40
Speaker 1: So what are the key steps historically and philosophically in
8:45
Speaker 1: getting to what we call Western civilization or civilization as
8:52
Speaker 1: established if you by the Enlightenment? What a kind of
8:55
Speaker 1: the key moments to get there?
9:01
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, it depends on what level of
9:03
Speaker 2: abstraction you want to go to. But I think I
9:06
Speaker 2: think of big picture. I think of the biggest movements,
9:13
Speaker 2: and I really think of history in terms of these movements,
9:16
Speaker 2: because you have to take seriously that there's transitional periods,
9:21
Speaker 2: and the transitional periods are often more important or not
9:24
Speaker 2: more important. They're longer than the turning points. Like I
9:28
Speaker 2: think of the Roman Empire as a transitional period, but
9:31
Speaker 2: it's way longer than what it's transitioning from, and in
9:34
Speaker 2: many ways too right. But I think Greece is really
9:38
Speaker 2: the start of Western civilization. That's not a controversial view.
9:43
Speaker 2: It's where you first get reason science, the first steps
9:48
Speaker 2: towards political liberty philosophy.
9:51
Speaker 1: So there's civilization before Greece, but Greece is the first
9:56
Speaker 1: one to kind of really established conceptually the framework to
10:02
Speaker 1: what we recognize today as Western. So there's Mesopotamian and
10:05
Speaker 1: greet In Egyptian civilizations and Chinese civilization and Indian civilization
10:11
Speaker 1: that even predate Greece. But Greece is unique, I think because.
10:18
Speaker 2: Certainly if we're thinking about the West, right, I mean,
10:20
Speaker 2: if we're thinking about humanity, it's it's important, but it's
10:23
Speaker 2: not the starting point.
10:25
Speaker 1: You know.
10:25
Speaker 2: The starting point is best we can tell is pretty
10:27
Speaker 2: much like figuring out language and tools and then in.
10:32
Speaker 1: A legal system like Babu Wabi's laws in Mesopotamia and
10:37
Speaker 1: the Babylonians and things like that.
10:39
Speaker 2: And yeah, and I think if you were writing a
10:42
Speaker 2: history of civilization, you definitely wouldn't start with Greece, right, Like,
10:46
Speaker 2: those things are interesting, important and and they do come
10:50
Speaker 2: up not necessarily in our book, but like, for instance,
10:54
Speaker 2: I just wrote a piece or I'm in the process
10:56
Speaker 2: of writing a very long winded review of a book
10:59
Speaker 2: that's not that good called the Book that Made Your World.
11:04
Speaker 2: That was somebody threw me arguing that the Bible created everything,
11:08
Speaker 2: and it's oh, we got rule of law from the Hebrews,
11:13
Speaker 2: and as you mentioned, Humarami like.
11:16
Speaker 1: Had duel of law way before the Hebrews. Yeah.
11:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean in so far as we're taking that
11:20
Speaker 2: as a model, but yeah, in so far as we're
11:22
Speaker 2: thinking though about the crucial turning points of Western civilization,
11:26
Speaker 2: because Western civilization in fact has a very big anti
11:30
Speaker 2: civilization period, which is that you get ancient Greece, and
11:36
Speaker 2: I think you get a transition to the decline of
11:38
Speaker 2: civilization in the West with the dark Ages that Christianity
11:43
Speaker 2: takes over, the barbarians invade, and there's basically a complete
11:48
Speaker 2: collapse of civilization to as close as a primitive existence
11:52
Speaker 2: and people can get once they've already discovered language and
11:56
Speaker 2: farming and agriculture. And then the real re emergence of
12:03
Speaker 2: the West where it starts to become the leading frontier
12:09
Speaker 2: of civilization, is you get the rediscover rediscovery of the
12:14
Speaker 2: Greeks starting in the eleven hundreds and coming to fruition
12:18
Speaker 2: in the twelve hundreds. And it's during the stage that
12:21
Speaker 2: you get what's often called the Renaissance of the twelfth century,
12:29
Speaker 2: right and the a re emergence of learning that's going
12:34
Speaker 2: to culminate in the Renaissance, and after that the scientific
12:38
Speaker 2: Revolution leading into the Enlightenment, and you just get this
12:42
Speaker 2: continual and exponential growth in knowledge and in the principles
12:47
Speaker 2: of that human flourishing requires, leading ultimately to the industrial revolution.
12:54
Speaker 2: And in certain ways we've continued on that trajectory, right, Like,
12:57
Speaker 2: you know, we both love that graph, the you know,
13:00
Speaker 2: the hockey stick of everything going up into the right,
13:04
Speaker 2: the metrics of human flourishing.
13:06
Speaker 1: But you know that.
13:08
Speaker 2: We we should also talk about, and I think this
13:10
Speaker 2: will come out in some of the points that we'll
13:12
Speaker 2: get to later, is that the preconditions for what that
13:16
Speaker 2: requires were insecure and really melting away by the nineteenth
13:22
Speaker 2: century and certainly by the twentieth to where we are today,
13:27
Speaker 2: where in certain respects were coasting on the achievements of
13:30
Speaker 2: the past, and other respects, everything that allows that to
13:34
Speaker 2: continue is at best insecure and in many ways, I think,
13:40
Speaker 2: directly under attack.
13:43
Speaker 1: So you know when was when was Thelways confident in itself?
13:50
Speaker 1: And was the confidence at the time justified? That is,
13:54
Speaker 1: what were they confident in? Did they were they fully
13:57
Speaker 1: aware of of of of their own value?
14:04
Speaker 2: I mean, that's an interesting question. In certain respects. Yes,
14:11
Speaker 2: I think that is like if you look at the Enlightenment,
14:16
Speaker 2: there was an enormous confidence certainly early on in reason,
14:21
Speaker 2: in freedom, and and in the in the righteousness of
14:26
Speaker 2: earthly happiness. I mean it permeates everything they write, and
14:30
Speaker 2: it continues into the nineteenth century where uh, what was
14:35
Speaker 2: uh what was I watching? I always want to call
14:39
Speaker 2: the show robber Barons, but it's uh, guilded Age, guild Age,
14:44
Speaker 2: really great show. I love the show, But like just this,
14:48
Speaker 2: there's taking for granted that the world is just going
14:51
Speaker 2: to get better and better and that we're going to
14:53
Speaker 2: solve more and more problems. And so there was a
14:55
Speaker 2: real confidence that this was the right way to live,
15:00
Speaker 2: that this was good. But you know, there's a line
15:06
Speaker 2: from the fountain Head where Rourke talks about a pain
15:09
Speaker 2: that only goes down to a certain point, and I
15:12
Speaker 2: think it was a confidence that only went down to
15:14
Speaker 2: a certain point. I think there's always attention in the West,
15:19
Speaker 2: not necessarily about the value of civilization, but there there's
15:25
Speaker 2: definitely strains that are pulling against it. And certainly you
15:30
Speaker 2: have to think the West is come like the Enlightenment,
15:33
Speaker 2: it's it's still coming out of the medieval period. It
15:36
Speaker 2: inherits a whole bunch of questions about the pursuit of
15:39
Speaker 2: wealth and success and certainly the kind of self interest
15:45
Speaker 2: that underlies that that really, I think becomes explicit when
15:49
Speaker 2: you get industrial capitalism. When when the industrial revolution happens
15:54
Speaker 2: and you're seeing these people who are earning, you know,
15:58
Speaker 2: millions of dollars and building companies that you know, reach
16:03
Speaker 2: across the globe and employee tens of thousands of people.
16:07
Speaker 2: There's a lot of questioning of it, and there's also
16:10
Speaker 2: a questioning you have to think. It's also packaged with
16:14
Speaker 2: a lot of bad things that were going on in
16:16
Speaker 2: the West, And this is why it's so important to
16:17
Speaker 2: distinguish the West as a place from civilization, because the
16:21
Speaker 2: West also was a place where there was slavery, for instance,
16:25
Speaker 2: and there was anguish of over how can we say
16:27
Speaker 2: that we're good and that we're for liberty and we're
16:30
Speaker 2: enslaving a significant portion five or six percent of the
16:35
Speaker 2: entire population. So I think there's kind of wrestling with
16:39
Speaker 2: all of those issues that's going on, and certainly none
16:44
Speaker 2: of them fully, nobody fully I think, saw to the
16:47
Speaker 2: roots of like what we're doing is good, and we
16:52
Speaker 2: know why it's good, and we can defend why it's good.
16:55
Speaker 2: Because even during the Enlightenment, I stress that like the
16:59
Speaker 2: com reason, by the later parts of the Enlightenment, by
17:04
Speaker 2: the part time you get to David Hume, for instance,
17:07
Speaker 2: who's you know writing in the late eighteenth century. I mean,
17:11
Speaker 2: it's an explicit attack on reason. But even if you
17:14
Speaker 2: set Hume aside, who you know is a notorious skeptic,
17:18
Speaker 2: there's much more. Even in Adam Smith, there's much more
17:22
Speaker 2: of a kind of skepticism about well, how much can
17:24
Speaker 2: we really know by reason? It's important and so on.
17:28
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of uncertainty. And I think
17:33
Speaker 2: it's important or helpful to think about the confidence in
17:37
Speaker 2: a culture as a parallel to self esteem, because with
17:41
Speaker 2: self esteem you can go wrong. You can lose confidence
17:45
Speaker 2: in two ways. One is that you can be good
17:48
Speaker 2: but have wrong standards. And think of Atlas Shrugged. I
17:52
Speaker 2: won't give spoilers, but a character like Hank Reardon, he's good,
17:57
Speaker 2: he's honest, he's rational, he's productive, but he accepts, or
18:03
Speaker 2: at least doesn't reject, all kinds of wrong standards from
18:06
Speaker 2: the culture, and so he doesn't know that he's good.
18:10
Speaker 2: He's not. He lacks confidence in his righteousness. And then
18:15
Speaker 2: you take a character like James Taggert who he doesn't
18:18
Speaker 2: think he's good because he's not. And I think both
18:21
Speaker 2: things are going on in the West, and you have
18:24
Speaker 2: to distinguish between them. I think a lot most of
18:28
Speaker 2: what's going on in the West is that we're good,
18:31
Speaker 2: but we don't fully know it and can't fully defend it,
18:34
Speaker 2: and then that gets systematically attacked, really starting in the
18:40
Speaker 2: eighteenth century, but the nineteenth centuries where that's coming more
18:43
Speaker 2: and more to fruition and continuing to our day. But then,
18:47
Speaker 2: if you want to understand why today it's kind of
18:49
Speaker 2: come to a crisis point, I think you also have
18:52
Speaker 2: to take into account that we're not good in many ways.
18:55
Speaker 2: That if your standards are being pro reasoned, pro individual happiness,
18:59
Speaker 2: and therefore pro freedom and pro progress. I mean, you're
19:03
Speaker 2: on your show is kind of testament in the catalog
19:06
Speaker 2: of the ways in which, yeah, we shouldn't feel proud
19:09
Speaker 2: of that, we should feel proud of our core ideals
19:12
Speaker 2: and we should feel shamed that we don't live up
19:14
Speaker 2: to them. Now I'm putting it, we collectively, but in
19:17
Speaker 2: a certain way you should think about it. Collectively. I'm
19:21
Speaker 2: part of a society that is not living up to
19:23
Speaker 2: my ideals, and that's not something to be proud of.
19:27
Speaker 1: So, you know, we're losing confidence, which suggests that we
19:31
Speaker 1: used to have confidence. Do you have a sense of
19:36
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a sense of which World War two
19:40
Speaker 1: seems to me like this big defining war in the
19:45
Speaker 1: sense that it was the better elements in the West
19:50
Speaker 1: fighting against the evil elements in the West, the collectivism
19:56
Speaker 1: versus the individual's un reason versus reason, capitalism versus socialism
20:01
Speaker 1: and fascism, and we won. The good guys won, right,
20:07
Speaker 1: And yet it didn't result in a kind of an
20:14
Speaker 1: assertion of the values that made us good. It resulted
20:20
Speaker 1: kind of in a in a big damn compromise.
20:27
Speaker 2: No, And I think it's easy to whitewash that period. So, uh,
20:33
Speaker 2: you think about this, The the Soviets and the Americans get,
20:40
Speaker 2: you know, around Germany roughly the same time the Americans,
20:44
Speaker 2: if I recall correctly a little ahead. But basically, the
20:48
Speaker 2: Americans are making an explicit policy decision that we don't
20:51
Speaker 2: want to confront the Soviets, like let them you know,
20:54
Speaker 2: run into Berlin and the like. We're working with these
21:00
Speaker 2: moral monsters, and you can make an argument that that
21:03
Speaker 2: was practically necessary. I think it should be an argument.
21:06
Speaker 2: It's not obvious to me that that's true. But we're
21:09
Speaker 2: working with these moral monsters. And even at that moment
21:12
Speaker 2: where we've crushed the enemy, that we're scared to sert well, no,
21:16
Speaker 2: we're not going to let you take it over and
21:18
Speaker 2: turn it communist really reveals the weakness. But I think
21:22
Speaker 2: that goes back further. I think really you can see
21:24
Speaker 2: it even after World War One, where there's a real
21:28
Speaker 2: movement to the idea of self determination of countries. Not
21:33
Speaker 2: like countries should be pro liberty, but I think part
21:36
Speaker 2: of what you saw was a guild over empire, which
21:38
Speaker 2: in many ways is an earned guilt, right, like that
21:41
Speaker 2: having an empire's problematic, and the idea that well, it's
21:49
Speaker 2: not that country should be evil to be independent and free,
21:54
Speaker 2: but that every country should be able to determine the
21:56
Speaker 2: way that it runs itself and who are we to
21:58
Speaker 2: I mean, it really had a multi clist element before
22:01
Speaker 2: multiculturalism was a thing.
22:03
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, it's it's a consequence of kind of
22:05
Speaker 1: nineteenth century nationalism and which didn't really completely manifest itself
22:11
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century, and the post World War one
22:14
Speaker 1: was an opportunity. Can now we can get the project
22:16
Speaker 1: done right.
22:18
Speaker 2: But that's why what I'm saying is like, clearly, by
22:21
Speaker 2: this point, by the time you get to the twentieth century,
22:25
Speaker 2: there's there's not a clear idea of freedom and all
22:29
Speaker 2: of its preconditions are good, and we should stand for them,
22:32
Speaker 2: and we should support anybody who's on their side, and
22:35
Speaker 2: we should oppose anybody who's not. And then yeah, but
22:38
Speaker 2: by the time you get to World War two, and
22:40
Speaker 2: ein Ran made this point about I mentioned like there's
22:43
Speaker 2: a debate should we have partnered with the Soviet Union?
22:47
Speaker 2: And she had a I forget exactly how she formulated
22:50
Speaker 2: the point, but it was essentially like, whatever you do, though,
22:53
Speaker 2: you can't lie about their nature and pretend that their
22:58
Speaker 2: friends and like they could be allies in the sense
23:01
Speaker 2: of we need you to defeat a bigger enemy. Like
23:04
Speaker 2: that's an argument you can make, but not, Oh, uncle Joe,
23:07
Speaker 2: my friend, there's a really good I mean, if you
23:11
Speaker 2: want to feel angry for eight hundred pages, there's a
23:14
Speaker 2: book called Stalin's War, which is in many ways, there's
23:19
Speaker 2: an older book that iin Ran used to recommend, recommend
23:22
Speaker 2: East minus West equals zero. And this is really elaboration
23:26
Speaker 2: of that theme. Is how the US and the West
23:29
Speaker 2: propped up the Soviet Union every turn, and the way
23:33
Speaker 2: in which there was this kind of moral cowardice and
23:36
Speaker 2: view of that the Soviets were superior. And you can
23:40
Speaker 2: put that on FDR that he didn't that he but
23:45
Speaker 2: it was wider. FDR was a reflection of the West
23:47
Speaker 2: itself feeling like there's something morally superior about these butchers
23:54
Speaker 2: and where they felt on the defensive and the idea
23:59
Speaker 2: should be really striking, and it's certainly revealing that they
24:03
Speaker 2: felt on the defensive in the face of one of
24:07
Speaker 2: the most evil people in history.
24:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, I mean this brings us to kind of
24:12
Speaker 1: what is it what is the fatal flaw? That is,
24:16
Speaker 1: what are the ideas that are really in Western thought
24:22
Speaker 1: almost from the beginning, at least from the beginning of
24:25
Speaker 1: the or from the end of the Enlightenment, but really
24:27
Speaker 1: from the beginning, right because they're in Christianity. I think
24:30
Speaker 1: that that the Enlightenment doesn't get rid of and that
24:35
Speaker 1: therefore constantly undermining this confidence and undermining success at civilizing,
24:41
Speaker 1: at achieving civilization.
24:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean I think you know, one level
24:47
Speaker 2: you gave the answer is that I think the Enlightenment
24:51
Speaker 2: got the essentials of what of reason and earthly happiness,
24:57
Speaker 2: and then its major political consequence, free and then its
25:00
Speaker 2: major economic consequence progress. Like it was pro all the essentials,
25:06
Speaker 2: certainly all the essentials we've discovered so far of human flourishing.
25:11
Speaker 2: But when it came time to defend them and to
25:15
Speaker 2: explain what they were and why they worked and why
25:17
Speaker 2: they were right, I mean, it was a mess. You know,
25:21
Speaker 2: even reason. I indicated that by the time you get
25:24
Speaker 2: to the late eighteenth century, they're not virulently anti reason
25:29
Speaker 2: in the way that like cant and the Romantics are
25:31
Speaker 2: going to be. But it's yeah, we don't know that
25:35
Speaker 2: reason can discover all that much or achieve certainty, or
25:38
Speaker 2: even the people who are the kind of best defenders
25:41
Speaker 2: of it. If you take somebody like Locke, the more
25:44
Speaker 2: that like the closer you look like he was amazing
25:47
Speaker 2: at upholding reason as a value. So Locke was a
25:51
Speaker 2: Christian of an orthodox type, and his view was even
25:56
Speaker 2: revelation has to prove itself beyond the bar, to the
26:02
Speaker 2: bar of reason. That even it's if you think of
26:06
Speaker 2: a quietness as saying, oh, there's these domains in which
26:10
Speaker 2: faith speaks and reason speaks, and sometimes they overlap and
26:13
Speaker 2: they can't contradict. Lockewent further right, and he said, no,
26:17
Speaker 2: everything has to establish itself by reason, even revelation. But
26:21
Speaker 2: then when it comes time to say, well, what is
26:23
Speaker 2: reason and how does it work? I mean it's a
26:28
Speaker 2: I mean it's really a disaster in the sense that
26:31
Speaker 2: we don't even have access to reality, direct access to
26:35
Speaker 2: reality on lock. We have access to ideas, and to
26:37
Speaker 2: those ideas match reality, well, we can't ever really know,
26:41
Speaker 2: and so there's all kinds of problems with their understanding
26:45
Speaker 2: of reason. With happiness, it's the same thing of like
26:49
Speaker 2: there's a there's a way in which they get, of course,
26:52
Speaker 2: human life should be devoted to happiness, like it's self evident,
26:55
Speaker 2: and there is a way in which that's right, like
26:57
Speaker 2: it's it's very The world gives you so much evidence
27:04
Speaker 2: and beats you across the face that the good is
27:06
Speaker 2: tied to what's good for human life, but they can't
27:10
Speaker 2: articulate a case for that, and because they've inherited Christianity
27:14
Speaker 2: that undermines them. And so if you take Lock again,
27:17
Speaker 2: for instance, he's really good on saying that happiness is
27:20
Speaker 2: the purpose of life, and he thinks it's both earthly
27:22
Speaker 2: happiness and then the extra bonus is you can have
27:26
Speaker 2: other worldly happiness. But he also thinks that morality can't
27:31
Speaker 2: be all about happiness. Morality has to include self sacrifice
27:34
Speaker 2: because we all know that's one of the most noble
27:36
Speaker 2: things that you can do. And so there's a kind
27:41
Speaker 2: of ambivalence to it, and you see somebody like Adam
27:45
Speaker 2: Smith in theory of moral sentiments struggling to kind of
27:49
Speaker 2: put together well, look, clearly happiness is good, and clearly
27:55
Speaker 2: that involves self interest, but clearly self interest isn't good.
27:59
Speaker 2: Like it's he's again ambivalent towards it. And some passages
28:04
Speaker 2: you'll read in that book are like you and I
28:07
Speaker 2: uran would share that like we put them on little
28:10
Speaker 2: meme quotes, right There's they're that good on the issue
28:12
Speaker 2: of self interest. And then you'll read other passages that
28:15
Speaker 2: are outright altruistic, and so there's a real ambivalence to
28:20
Speaker 2: these things that then are going to get cashed in
28:22
Speaker 2: on by the real anti Enlightenment thinkers. And I think
28:27
Speaker 2: of Hume, Rousseau, and Kant as the big three who
28:31
Speaker 2: are gonna destroy the Enlightenment.
28:35
Speaker 1: What is it that makes it's so difficult for them
28:39
Speaker 1: to shake off? I mean, I say Christianity, to shake
28:43
Speaker 1: off altruism, Christian altruism, maybe the mysticism as well. Why
28:51
Speaker 1: does it have such a stronghold on them, and then
28:54
Speaker 1: on on the civilized world generally.
29:00
Speaker 2: You know, I used to think that the core issue was,
29:08
Speaker 2: you know, it will often be put now hearkening to Hume,
29:11
Speaker 2: that they couldn't derive a not from it is it's
29:14
Speaker 2: that they couldn't provide a philosophic proof of happiness and
29:19
Speaker 2: self interest as the goal. I don't think that's irrelevant,
29:23
Speaker 2: but I don't think that's really the case. I think
29:28
Speaker 2: that it's really an issue of being able to conceptualize
29:33
Speaker 2: the alternative. And what I mean by that is that
29:41
Speaker 2: true philosophic thinkers who can get that there's who can
29:46
Speaker 2: get that there's wrong fundamentals, what the fundamentals are at play,
29:50
Speaker 2: and how to conceptualize them right, are really really rare
29:55
Speaker 2: philosophers trying to get to fundamentals, and seeing the fundamentals
29:58
Speaker 2: at play are really really rare. And so I think
30:02
Speaker 2: of somebody like Adam Smith as it wasn't oh, I
30:06
Speaker 2: can't derive an from it. Is it's that he saw
30:09
Speaker 2: so much that's true about the nature of self interest,
30:13
Speaker 2: but he couldn't conceptualize it. He couldn't get what it
30:16
Speaker 2: would mean to be fully on a pro self principle,
30:21
Speaker 2: and that and then that the alternative principle was self sacrifice,
30:25
Speaker 2: and and so what you get is kind of a mishmash.
30:28
Speaker 2: You don't have a principle at play. And then if
30:31
Speaker 2: you contrast that with somebody like count, what makes him
30:35
Speaker 2: a real philosopher is that he does get the principle,
30:39
Speaker 2: and so he gives. But when he gets the wrong side,
30:41
Speaker 2: he takes the wrong side of it, and so he
30:44
Speaker 2: gets what self sacrifice is, and he rings every ounce
30:47
Speaker 2: of self interest out of morality, that any hint of
30:53
Speaker 2: self interest gets thrown out as this is not part
30:56
Speaker 2: of morality, it's and and so to me, the real
31:01
Speaker 2: answer is that there was no philosophic thinker capable of
31:04
Speaker 2: defining the alternatives of what it would truly mean to
31:08
Speaker 2: be pro self interest and what it means to be
31:11
Speaker 2: self sacrifice. And so when you have people who are
31:14
Speaker 2: inheriting an idea that self sacrifice is good and they're
31:18
Speaker 2: starting to challenge it, they get, well, they can't mean
31:21
Speaker 2: what the Christian mugs meant about just renouncing every bit
31:25
Speaker 2: of happiness and so on. Yeah, you couldn't even have
31:28
Speaker 2: society without people pursuing their interests in selling things because
31:33
Speaker 2: they make a profit and so on. But they can't
31:37
Speaker 2: work themselves out of it until you get a philosopher
31:40
Speaker 2: who can define the principle. And there was nobody who
31:43
Speaker 2: could get the principle until iron Rand. And to me,
31:48
Speaker 2: that's what's going on, is that you needed a philosopher
31:52
Speaker 2: to name it and that is and there just wasn't one.
31:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you see the Fench Enlightenment. You see
31:59
Speaker 1: all these characters who are atheists, and and you know
32:05
Speaker 1: they reject they claim to reject Christian morality and this,
32:08
Speaker 1: but they but they don't know how to replace it,
32:11
Speaker 1: you know. And and to them, self interest is emotion
32:14
Speaker 1: to themselves. It just is doing what you feel like.
32:16
Speaker 1: But that's not quite right. So they and they know
32:18
Speaker 1: it's not quite right, but they can't, as you said,
32:20
Speaker 1: they can't figure out what the principle is. They can't
32:23
Speaker 1: figure out a system of ethics that is different Christianity.
32:28
Speaker 1: And there's a sense in which they kind of give
32:31
Speaker 1: up an ethics. So there's a sense in which they
32:33
Speaker 1: they become you know, a hedonistic or in in in
32:38
Speaker 1: their personal lives and and and don't really advocate for
32:42
Speaker 1: a system of ethics. They still argue for pursuit of happiness,
32:45
Speaker 1: but they have no idea what that really means.
32:49
Speaker 2: Well, and that's partly why they can't get the principles.
32:52
Speaker 2: That they don't even get the genus exactly. That there's
32:54
Speaker 2: a blurring of the chosen and the non chosen, of
32:59
Speaker 2: the fundamental and the derivative. There's all kinds of like
33:03
Speaker 2: mistakes going on, and it's and look, I get it.
33:06
Speaker 2: If I had been during the Enlightenment, I would have
33:09
Speaker 2: been a Hodgepodge as well. I would have, you know,
33:11
Speaker 2: at my best, been kind of like Adam Smith going on, well,
33:14
Speaker 2: there's this you know, elements of self interest that it's
33:18
Speaker 2: really really it takes a profound mind. And then if
33:22
Speaker 2: you think about this is in an area of morality
33:25
Speaker 2: that they have to challenge Christian morality that has been
33:29
Speaker 2: dominating the West for two thousand years. It takes a
33:32
Speaker 2: philosophic mind, a profound mind, a genius mind, in a
33:35
Speaker 2: in an enormously independent, first handed mind, and a person
33:41
Speaker 2: of high self esteem. And that's like, I mean, if
33:46
Speaker 2: the number of if you name the number of great
33:48
Speaker 2: philosophers and history who redefine fundamentals, I mean you're talking,
33:53
Speaker 2: you know, for most two hands at most, right, yeah,
33:56
Speaker 2: I mean I think ultimately there's the Big four, but
34:00
Speaker 2: the at most you're dealing with two hands. And it
34:07
Speaker 2: just didn't happen.
34:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, and and it and they struggled with seeing the
34:11
Speaker 1: connection between the ease and the happiness. They you know that,
34:15
Speaker 1: And that's of course Rand's genius is to is to
34:18
Speaker 1: is to make that connection and to show how happiness
34:21
Speaker 1: depends on living as a as a rational animal. Is
34:25
Speaker 1: defining you Aristotle defying man as a rational animal. But
34:29
Speaker 1: it didn't go anywhere beyond that. It took Grand to
34:32
Speaker 1: make all those connections. So so we never really had confidence.
34:41
Speaker 1: There's a sense in which the West is always undermined itself.
34:45
Speaker 1: So even when it fought to World War two and
34:47
Speaker 1: and exhibited confidence in the battlefield, at least intellectually it
34:53
Speaker 1: was on quicksand, and intellectually it was very already very
34:57
Speaker 1: weak and and had weakening at least throughout the twentieth century.
35:04
Speaker 1: Was they have a period where you have a sense, yeah,
35:06
Speaker 1: they really knew what they stood for and really could
35:10
Speaker 1: could defend it well.
35:13
Speaker 2: I think there's periods where particular aspects of the values
35:19
Speaker 2: of civilization they thought they had the high ground and
35:25
Speaker 2: were unapologetic in defense of them. I mean, I think
35:28
Speaker 2: the Founding generation the idea that we're for freedom, liberty,
35:33
Speaker 2: individual rights, and that that's good and that anybody who
35:36
Speaker 2: challenges that is bad. I think there was that. I
35:40
Speaker 2: think the idea of we have progress and progress is
35:44
Speaker 2: good like that dominates the nineteenth century and even into
35:50
Speaker 2: the early twentieth century. So I think there's these periods.
35:54
Speaker 2: But to say that they don't have a full understanding
35:56
Speaker 2: is to say that's vulnerable to what happens when it's
35:59
Speaker 2: challenge And so what happens after the Founding is it's
36:04
Speaker 2: really not that long into the nineteenth century that it
36:07
Speaker 2: starts to become challenged. Challenged at the level of philosophy
36:11
Speaker 2: where the whole attack on individual rights that you get
36:14
Speaker 2: with Bentham and and and a whole bunch of other
36:17
Speaker 2: philosophers after and then progress getting challenged in various ways
36:22
Speaker 2: in the night in the twentieth century, and certainly you know,
36:26
Speaker 2: the early challenges are much more you know, progress is
36:29
Speaker 2: self defeating. So if you think about like where's the
36:31
Speaker 2: bomb going to lead us? And then ultimately the full
36:36
Speaker 2: open attack on progress with the rise of environmentalism. So
36:41
Speaker 2: I think there's periods where there is a like if
36:45
Speaker 2: you had you know, kind of pulled the champions of
36:50
Speaker 2: liberty and the champions of progress, they meant it. They
36:52
Speaker 2: did not have any doubts that this was right and
36:55
Speaker 2: that this was good, but it was it was not
37:01
Speaker 2: sufficient in the face of attacks the and that's the
37:06
Speaker 2: the vulnerability.
37:08
Speaker 1: That you see. Yeah, so when.
37:12
Speaker 2: When you I mean, it's worth pointing out, let's take
37:15
Speaker 2: a more recent example. I mean I even think today,
37:20
Speaker 2: like you know, uh, take something like this isn't a
37:26
Speaker 2: perfect analogy to the cases I gave before. But if
37:30
Speaker 2: you had gone five years ago and talked about free trade, oh,
37:35
Speaker 2: we all know that you know, free trade is good
37:38
Speaker 2: and leads to lower prices and the tariffs are stupid.
37:42
Speaker 2: But nobody really knew it, right, I mean aside from
37:45
Speaker 2: the economists and objectivists who did know it. And then
37:51
Speaker 2: what But no, that's because nobody was attacking it, right,
37:54
Speaker 2: like aside from Trump and you know a few people.
37:58
Speaker 1: Who ah, yeah, left, a bunch of left, yeah.
38:01
Speaker 2: Right, But it wasn't really attacked in a central way.
38:04
Speaker 2: And then once it became widely attacked, you realize, oh, no,
38:09
Speaker 2: it was based on nothing. Now that's not analogous in
38:12
Speaker 2: the case that I think, you know, the founders understood
38:15
Speaker 2: at a deep level why liberty was good, just not
38:17
Speaker 2: the deepest level. I think the nineteenth century understood why
38:21
Speaker 2: progress was good, but they just not at the deepest level. Here.
38:26
Speaker 2: It was more just we kind of all take it
38:29
Speaker 2: for granted. But it's the same dynamic at the level
38:32
Speaker 2: of it's easy to feel confident in something when everybody
38:36
Speaker 2: agrees with it. And if you have a culture where
38:39
Speaker 2: something is upheld as a value, and indeed, this is
38:42
Speaker 2: why you need philosophy. Philosophy arises precisely because cultures start
38:47
Speaker 2: interacting with one another and there becomes a live question
38:52
Speaker 2: of well, how do we know that we're right they
38:54
Speaker 2: live in a very different way than we do. They
38:56
Speaker 2: have different forms of political organization, different gods, even different
39:00
Speaker 2: ethical standards. How do we know we're right? And so
39:04
Speaker 2: it's the in so far as people just take the
39:07
Speaker 2: given as given, you don't have much of a problem.
39:12
Speaker 2: We all know this is true. But when that's challenged,
39:16
Speaker 2: as Iinran talked about in a kind of similar context,
39:18
Speaker 2: all hell breaks loose.
39:20
Speaker 1: Yep. So when do you think, I mean, when you
39:25
Speaker 1: think we really lost confidence? I mean we never completely
39:30
Speaker 1: had it, and maybe we had in certain realms, but
39:33
Speaker 1: not completely. But there was definitely a sense right now that, yeah,
39:39
Speaker 1: there's nothing special about Western civilization. There's nothing special about
39:42
Speaker 1: the West. Civilization is not worth fighting for. What do
39:47
Speaker 1: you think is the turning point? If there is one?
39:50
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I wish I could remember the exact
39:55
Speaker 2: because I no I could give you it's not literally
39:59
Speaker 2: an exact. But if you go back and look at
40:02
Speaker 2: like the Crisis of the West genre, you know, so
40:06
Speaker 2: we're writing a book that's in this genre, and if
40:10
Speaker 2: you wanted to guess when the first book was, you know,
40:13
Speaker 2: maybe you go back, Oh maybe people were talking about
40:15
Speaker 2: this in the nineties. I think it was somewhere between
40:20
Speaker 2: like eighteen ninety and nineteen thirty that the First Crisis
40:24
Speaker 2: of the West book was written. So this has been
40:28
Speaker 2: like a long standing theme, you know, for at least
40:33
Speaker 2: a century, probably more than a century.
40:38
Speaker 1: And the.
40:41
Speaker 2: But I think if my view of where's the real
40:45
Speaker 2: turning point was with the rise of egalitarianism, in particular multiculturalism.
40:51
Speaker 2: I think that was the most explicit attack on the
40:55
Speaker 2: value of Western civilization and the deepest attack. And I
41:00
Speaker 2: think the so it's really been what's it now been
41:06
Speaker 2: probably seventy eighty years since multiculturalism got off the ground
41:11
Speaker 2: that you really saw the open turn against it in
41:15
Speaker 2: the West.
41:18
Speaker 1: So how many years did you say, well.
41:21
Speaker 2: What's it? I mean, that's kind of sixties, sixties, sixty
41:25
Speaker 2: seventies something in there.
41:27
Speaker 1: And then you get a certain recognition with Alan Bloom,
41:29
Speaker 1: and there's a bunch of books written during that period
41:33
Speaker 1: of kind of recognizing something's wrong, something's very wrong, and
41:36
Speaker 1: we're losing something. That's probably what late seventies early eighties.
41:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think Bloom was into which which Bloom,
41:45
Speaker 2: Alan or Harold.
41:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know. Now.
41:49
Speaker 2: I think Closing the Western Mind was what late eighties,
41:52
Speaker 2: early night but yes, late eighties. Yeah, you definitely there's
41:57
Speaker 2: a counter reaction to it starting, you know, a deck
42:00
Speaker 2: or so after people starting to question it, but it
42:05
Speaker 2: continues growing, and then the question is, you know, was
42:07
Speaker 2: the counter good? And I think part of what made
42:10
Speaker 2: the counter bad is that often involved a kind of
42:18
Speaker 2: whitewashing of the West Quah place yep. So if we
42:23
Speaker 2: think of what we're defending as not the West but
42:27
Speaker 2: civilization and wanting the West to take part in that
42:30
Speaker 2: and be a leader in it, well, guess what the
42:33
Speaker 2: West is a place has been pro civilization but had
42:36
Speaker 2: plenty of anti civilization efforts. And I think the and
42:40
Speaker 2: when multiculturalism arises, they don't make that distinction and it
42:45
Speaker 2: and all of what they write, And if you take
42:47
Speaker 2: Alan Bloom for instance, closing the Western mind, closing in
42:51
Speaker 2: the American mind, I know there's many of these closings
42:54
Speaker 2: openings American Western, but his is one example of many
42:59
Speaker 2: of we need to go back, and it all has
43:02
Speaker 2: the flavor of we need to go back, we had
43:04
Speaker 2: it right, and we need to go backwards, and that's
43:06
Speaker 2: an anti civilization idea and it's not true because there
43:11
Speaker 2: was no Golden Age. Wherever you go back to all
43:15
Speaker 2: of our favorite periods, you and I could give five
43:18
Speaker 2: hours on everything wrong with them. And you know, I
43:23
Speaker 2: often think of like my close friends and it's like, yeah,
43:26
Speaker 2: the Enlightenment would have been great, except my friend would
43:29
Speaker 2: have been enslaved. My other friend wouldn't have been led
43:32
Speaker 2: into the country like that. There's plenty of things to
43:35
Speaker 2: be you know, purely upset.
43:38
Speaker 1: Not to mention your wife. You know, women women, women
43:42
Speaker 1: did not exactly have full rights when the country was founded.
43:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, to say the least. And so there is no
43:49
Speaker 2: Golden Age. And so to answer those attacks, you have
43:52
Speaker 2: to be pro civilization, not pro a place. I want
43:56
Speaker 2: my I want my place because I value my place.
43:59
Speaker 2: I wanted to live up to the ideals of civilization,
44:03
Speaker 2: and that to get there is not about going back,
44:05
Speaker 2: it's about going forward. And that there was I mean,
44:10
Speaker 2: it was only objectivists in my view who were making
44:13
Speaker 2: the case to go forward.
44:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's a fate of foreign conservatism. And what
44:17
Speaker 1: are you conserving well, you know, and it's tradition. It's
44:20
Speaker 1: it's always backward looking. Everything they do is backward looking.
44:24
Speaker 1: And I think al Alan Bloom was part of that
44:26
Speaker 1: conservative tradition of looking to the past instead of looking
44:31
Speaker 1: at the past to take out the good stuff and
44:33
Speaker 1: project it into the future. It's accepting the past. And
44:37
Speaker 1: of course the West, the place is where we got
44:40
Speaker 1: communism and we got the Nazis, and we got slavery,
44:43
Speaker 1: and we got all these things a part of the West.
44:46
Speaker 1: They're not part of civilization. The anti civilization forces within
44:50
Speaker 1: the West that are constantly fighting. And of course the
44:53
Speaker 1: West is where Christianity is and came from. And you know,
44:57
Speaker 1: we argue it's an anti civilizing still is an anti
45:01
Speaker 1: civilizing force. So it seems like things only getting worse. Oh,
45:07
Speaker 1: I wanted you before we get to say a little
45:11
Speaker 1: bit about multiculturalism. What is it because it's it's it's
45:15
Speaker 1: sometimes conflated with well, you know, I like pizza and
45:19
Speaker 1: Chinese food and lots of different cultures, and I like
45:24
Speaker 1: I love traveling and seeing a lot of different places.
45:27
Speaker 1: But what is it about multiculturalism that is different than
45:32
Speaker 1: appreciating other cultures or or you know, valuing different aspects
45:37
Speaker 1: in different cultures.
45:39
Speaker 2: Well, I mean the examples you gave are revealing, and
45:42
Speaker 2: a good parallel would be to take something like environmentalism.
45:46
Speaker 2: So environmentalism starts up by saying like, hey, don't you
45:50
Speaker 2: want clean water and don't you want to not choke
45:53
Speaker 2: on smoggy air? And people go yeah, and they said, okay, great,
45:58
Speaker 2: Well then you need to be against human impact on
46:01
Speaker 2: nature which led to these things. So they take things
46:05
Speaker 2: that are that are good and they use that to
46:07
Speaker 2: sell a principle that's evil. They take something that because
46:12
Speaker 2: the right principle is, well, what we need to do
46:16
Speaker 2: is continue having human progress so that we can have
46:19
Speaker 2: not just energy and food and technology, but cleaner air
46:23
Speaker 2: and cleaner water, and they use it to sell an
46:25
Speaker 2: anti technology idea. And if you take multiculturalism, it takes
46:30
Speaker 2: a thing that's true, which is there's a lot of
46:33
Speaker 2: really cool stuff that you can find in every part
46:35
Speaker 2: of the globe, and not just like good food and
46:38
Speaker 2: awesome clothing, but ideas right like if you I mean,
46:43
Speaker 2: we've been stressing this idea that civilization is a human project.
46:47
Speaker 2: Where would math be without India, without the.
46:53
Speaker 1: Islamic Empire, likean was a thriving place and a you
46:58
Speaker 1: know of scholarly activity, particular math in the in like
47:02
Speaker 1: the tenth century, eleventh century.
47:04
Speaker 2: And there's all sorts of technology that got it start
47:06
Speaker 2: in China, and not just got it start, but like
47:09
Speaker 2: got imported from China and played a part in the way,
47:12
Speaker 2: like all the things have come from all over the place,
47:16
Speaker 2: and they can start with that superficial point that guess
47:19
Speaker 2: what human beings can do amazing cool things and discover
47:22
Speaker 2: amazing things all throughout the globe and have throughout history,
47:25
Speaker 2: and use it to sell the idea that no culture
47:28
Speaker 2: all cultures are equal and when and the that itself
47:35
Speaker 2: is based on a on a packaged deal, which is
47:39
Speaker 2: that all human beings have the same rights versus that
47:44
Speaker 2: there's no moral distinction between a culture that protects those
47:49
Speaker 2: rights and values those rights and one that violates them.
47:52
Speaker 2: There's no difference between a culture that's pro reason and
47:55
Speaker 2: a culture that's completely primitive and mystic. There's no difference
48:00
Speaker 2: between a culture in which women have rights and one
48:04
Speaker 2: in which they get female circumcision and child marriage and
48:09
Speaker 2: honor killings if they get raped. And and it says
48:13
Speaker 2: that we can't make any of those distinctions, and if
48:15
Speaker 2: you and since you can't actually maintain that kind of view,
48:19
Speaker 2: and nobody really holds that view. What it really is
48:22
Speaker 2: amounting to is it saying you can't say the West
48:25
Speaker 2: is good, or you can't say that anything is good.
48:31
Speaker 2: It's really attempt to cut down what's good. And and
48:35
Speaker 2: that's like with egalitarianism. It says all human beings are
48:39
Speaker 2: equal along every metric, every spectrum, every access And since
48:44
Speaker 2: you can't actually maintain that, Steve Jobs and Bernie made Off, well,
48:50
Speaker 2: they're equal, you can't make any distinctions between them. In
48:53
Speaker 2: the end. The only kind of meaning that that can
48:55
Speaker 2: have is, oh, don't say you're so good Steve Jobs,
48:59
Speaker 2: like you're not. You don't have a right to your money,
49:01
Speaker 2: you don't have a right to admiration and adulation for
49:06
Speaker 2: your achievements.
49:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, we see today in that the multicultures are not
49:12
Speaker 1: like they love foreign cultures, is that they hate America
49:16
Speaker 1: and it's pulling down America. That really is what interests them.
49:21
Speaker 1: And they're willing to support the most barbaric actions of
49:24
Speaker 1: anybody else as long as they're not American.
49:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think you know we're seeing this, you know,
49:31
Speaker 2: the Iran War and the way in which Iran will
49:37
Speaker 2: be not by all of them, but by many people,
49:40
Speaker 2: particularly in the left, like they'll even praise Iran, or
49:44
Speaker 2: at least not object to it. So this is a
49:47
Speaker 2: funny story. The first time I ever got a little
49:52
Speaker 2: fame and notoriety you're on is you know, I was
49:55
Speaker 2: a kid blogger my early twenties, and this is in
50:00
Speaker 2: two thousand and two, two thousand and three, and I
50:04
Speaker 2: wrote something about how on my blog, about how it's
50:11
Speaker 2: shocking to me that nobody in the left was cheering
50:15
Speaker 2: the Iranian protesters at that time who were speaking out
50:20
Speaker 2: against the regime. I said, like, they love protesters. They
50:24
Speaker 2: you know, they say they love people standing up against tyranny.
50:27
Speaker 2: And shoot, what's the It starts within a very famous
50:35
Speaker 2: he was the leading voice of gay marriage. Help me
50:41
Speaker 2: out what it was, the famous Andrew Sullivan. He quoted
50:45
Speaker 2: me in one of his columns as a result of that. Right,
50:49
Speaker 2: But like, so, none of these they won't speak out
50:52
Speaker 2: against that, and then they'll speak out against Israel for
50:56
Speaker 2: every every blameworthy thing that they do, and most of
51:03
Speaker 2: the blameworthy things are actually good or made up right,
51:06
Speaker 2: Like so there's a complete double standard. And that that's
51:09
Speaker 2: how galitarianism works. If you judged a poor person by
51:13
Speaker 2: the same standards you judge Steve Jobs, right, like the
51:17
Speaker 2: critics of Jobs. You know, Oh Steve Jobs got angry
51:22
Speaker 2: at his underlings. Oh we can't judge a drug addicted
51:28
Speaker 2: father who ignores his kids and you know, lets them
51:34
Speaker 2: suffer in poverty because he's just a victim of the system.
51:38
Speaker 2: Like there's always that kind of double standard that's at play.
51:43
Speaker 1: So how do we so that's e gala, that's a multiculturalism,
51:50
Speaker 1: which is a basically an expression of the Galatianism is
51:53
Speaker 1: dominant in our culture. That's the source of the lack
51:55
Speaker 1: of confidence. How do how do we fix it?
52:00
Speaker 2: Well, it's a source, right, Like, I think part of
52:02
Speaker 2: what you have to get to is what's the source?
52:05
Speaker 2: And I think you want to identify kind of two things.
52:10
Speaker 2: One is the lack of a positive and the other
52:12
Speaker 2: is a negative. The lack of a positive is that
52:17
Speaker 2: there was never a full philosophic justification of the values
52:20
Speaker 2: of civilization. And then the negative is that there was
52:25
Speaker 2: a crusade for the values that are anti civilization. And
52:32
Speaker 2: my view is that the most important anti civilization crusading
52:38
Speaker 2: anti civilization force is Christianity. And I don't think and
52:43
Speaker 2: in part because what Christianity did I think philosophically you
52:46
Speaker 2: would probably would say it's Platoism ultimately, right, like that
52:50
Speaker 2: is the source of everything bad in the West. But
52:54
Speaker 2: Platonism really influenced the West through Christianity and then comes
53:00
Speaker 2: to its kind of culmination in kant But and so
53:05
Speaker 2: and I don't think you can understand egalitarianism and it's
53:08
Speaker 2: derivative phenomenos like multiculturalism, except for these are the secularization
53:13
Speaker 2: of Christianity. And you see, like explicitly, that's what's going
53:17
Speaker 2: on in the nineteenth century is they said, well, we
53:19
Speaker 2: don't really believe in religion anymore because the Enlightenment killed that.
53:22
Speaker 2: So how do we keep all of the trappings of
53:25
Speaker 2: Christianity without the mystical aspects? And like this was an
53:30
Speaker 2: explicit program. And if you know objectivists, we all know,
53:35
Speaker 2: even if we haven't read him the name cult because
53:38
Speaker 2: he coined the term altruism. But he's laying out what
53:41
Speaker 2: he calls it a religion of humanity. That is just
53:45
Speaker 2: it's how do we keep Christianity but drop out the
53:49
Speaker 2: religion side of it. And indeed he's critical of religion
53:54
Speaker 2: for being even too selfish. It's oh you still get
53:57
Speaker 2: heaven after death. That's way like, no, you can't have
53:59
Speaker 2: any rewards, which is a very contient idea. But the
54:03
Speaker 2: so there's the negative force was there's Christianity, but Christianity
54:09
Speaker 2: would have withered. I mean, I think it would have
54:13
Speaker 2: remained for a long time and both in terms of
54:16
Speaker 2: there would have been a lot of people going to church,
54:18
Speaker 2: but it would have still you know, had you know,
54:24
Speaker 2: some impact if there is, but it would have not
54:27
Speaker 2: been as poisonous if you had had a positive and
54:31
Speaker 2: the positive being if the Enlightenment had gotten a full
54:35
Speaker 2: philosophic defense.
54:37
Speaker 1: Yep.
54:38
Speaker 2: And I don't think and I think that's exactly what
54:40
Speaker 2: I Ran provided is that she took the best ideas
54:43
Speaker 2: in the Enlightenment, added to them, refined them, got rid
54:46
Speaker 2: of everything bad, and gave it a full philosophic defense.
54:49
Speaker 2: And that's the real achievement. And and so the solution
54:54
Speaker 2: ultimately is that you need to the the culture needs
55:01
Speaker 2: to be influenced by those ideals in a context where
55:05
Speaker 2: those ideals can be sustainably to use it, to borrow
55:10
Speaker 2: a term uh injected into a culture because they are.
55:20
Speaker 1: Mhm.
55:21
Speaker 2: You can defend them consistently if you look at the Enlightenment.
55:25
Speaker 2: It really I mean Rand made this point, but it
55:27
Speaker 2: really is true, Like it was vulnerable because it didn't
55:31
Speaker 2: have a full philosophic defense, and that you see the
55:36
Speaker 2: critics of the Enlightenment exposed finding and exposing its lack
55:43
Speaker 2: of its contradictions, its lack of a defense, and that
55:48
Speaker 2: like that's not going to happen or you have the
55:51
Speaker 2: ability to avoid it happening with a with a fully
55:56
Speaker 2: worked out philosophy.
55:59
Speaker 1: So the fixes is A is a objectivist crusade, a
56:03
Speaker 1: crusade for objectivism.
56:06
Speaker 2: I hope, so that's what I do for a living.
56:08
Speaker 2: But no, but seriously, I really believe it's true. And
56:14
Speaker 2: working in this book with you on like we're really
56:17
Speaker 2: delving into the West and the history of it and
56:20
Speaker 2: the particular thinkers and not just the ones that everybody
56:23
Speaker 2: knows about, but like really seeing the detailed working out
56:27
Speaker 2: of the trajectory of the West over the last few years,
56:31
Speaker 2: I've like, it's really true, it really is. What happened
56:36
Speaker 2: is that you did that you had reason individual happiness
56:41
Speaker 2: on earth as philosophically undefended, and that is what unraveled
56:48
Speaker 2: the whole thing and part you know, our books, Christianity
56:54
Speaker 2: versus the West. But I think for your kind of
56:56
Speaker 2: objectivist audience another way to that, I think another value
57:00
Speaker 2: that they'll get is, I really think what we're doing
57:03
Speaker 2: is just concretizing and fleshing out Einrand's overall arching story
57:08
Speaker 2: that she tells in Faith and Force and in other
57:12
Speaker 2: places like for the New Intellectual and kind of showing
57:16
Speaker 2: like no, if you guys delve into the history and not,
57:18
Speaker 2: like you know, we cite a few friendly historians, but
57:22
Speaker 2: mostly it's just pure reviewed literature and primary sources like
57:27
Speaker 2: it that really is what happened.
57:29
Speaker 1: Yep. I mean, it's amazing how much of the detailed
57:34
Speaker 1: history actually plays out the way iron Rand kind of
57:38
Speaker 1: in a very broad way described it.
57:42
Speaker 2: Oh, can I tell you something that like this is
57:44
Speaker 2: kind of a small point, but I was just I've
57:47
Speaker 2: been thinking about it this week where I thought that
57:52
Speaker 2: Iinran wasn't necessarily fully right about a point that it's
57:57
Speaker 2: fine if she wasn't right about, And now I think
57:59
Speaker 2: she actually she was right the more I looked at it.
58:02
Speaker 2: So there's been you know, she said that it was
58:07
Speaker 2: Thomas Aquinas, who you know, reintroduced Aristotle really brought about
58:12
Speaker 2: the Renaissance and if and historians recently have not like
58:20
Speaker 2: they've dismissed Thomas Aquinas, but there there were all kinds
58:24
Speaker 2: of Aristotelians who were writing and doing work, and that's true,
58:27
Speaker 2: and that's important, and I think and for a while
58:31
Speaker 2: it was like, Okay, well, Aquinas is, let's call it,
58:33
Speaker 2: you know, the most important or the greatest of these.
58:38
Speaker 2: But I actually think if you understand how she thinks
58:41
Speaker 2: about things, and I think she's right about this. For Aristotle,
58:46
Speaker 2: it had to be put into a system, yep. That
58:50
Speaker 2: for it to really be influential, that it had to
58:56
Speaker 2: be part of an integrated system. And my view is
58:59
Speaker 2: that he's the person who did that in a in
59:01
Speaker 2: a context where it could be influential in a really
59:04
Speaker 2: deep and abiding way. So I'm open to my philosopher
59:09
Speaker 2: friends convincing me that I'm wrong. Yeah, but I think
59:13
Speaker 2: that if you understand how philosophy works and the way
59:17
Speaker 2: in which it's not enough just like, hey, this Aristotle
59:19
Speaker 2: guy is awesome and he's right about science and he
59:21
Speaker 2: has so many cool things to say about logic, but
59:24
Speaker 2: you need a system and people having confidence in a system,
59:27
Speaker 2: even if they don't just even if they don't agree
59:30
Speaker 2: with every aspect of it, but that somebody puts it
59:32
Speaker 2: in systematic, fundamental form. I think in the end she'd
59:37
Speaker 2: probably write about that too.
59:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, it probably, you know, if everyone is probably also
59:43
Speaker 1: integrated Astoto into kind of the system in the Islamic context.
59:47
Speaker 1: But he he comes at the very end of kind
59:51
Speaker 1: of the Islami Golden Age, so he's it's too late.
59:55
Speaker 1: It has no impact on ISLAMI gualth. It has an
59:58
Speaker 1: impact on aquitness because he reads his commentaries in Aristotle
1:00:03
Speaker 1: he doesn't read, so he's impacted by it, but quite
1:00:08
Speaker 1: us in a sense, because he comes at the beginning,
1:00:14
Speaker 1: or not at the beginning exactly, but kind of at
1:00:16
Speaker 1: a low point of Christianity or just as it's starting
1:00:19
Speaker 1: to rise, as civilization is starting to be reintroduced into
1:00:24
Speaker 1: the West, has a huge impact on everything that happens
1:00:27
Speaker 1: after him. Timing is important. I mean, imagine nine Rand
1:00:31
Speaker 1: one hundred years earlier.
1:00:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, I think it's important that there were cultural
1:00:39
Speaker 2: conditions that enabled him to exist and enabled him to
1:00:44
Speaker 2: have an impact.
1:00:45
Speaker 1: And so yeah, I and the fact that other people
1:00:51
Speaker 1: reading Aristotle and teaching Aristotle probably made it possible for
1:00:53
Speaker 1: him to exist, right to him, to be able to
1:00:56
Speaker 1: have to do what he did and to have the
1:00:58
Speaker 1: influence that he had. It wasn't a completely foreign agent
1:01:02
Speaker 1: that was coming into the Catholic world. All right, So
1:01:09
Speaker 1: we have a bunch of questions, right, Cob has like
1:01:14
Speaker 1: ten of them. Ah wait, let's start with that.
1:01:18
Speaker 2: We got about one hundred dollars for every question that's.
1:01:20
Speaker 1: I wish that day for No, Cob is just ten
1:01:23
Speaker 1: dollars each question. So he has he has two, four, six,
1:01:30
Speaker 1: eight nine, some of them five dollars questions nine questions,
1:01:34
Speaker 1: all basically the same theme. We'll get to him in
1:01:36
Speaker 1: a minute. Let's those start without fifty dollars questions. So
1:01:39
Speaker 1: we'll start with Schutzbut speaking of civilization, he says, what's
1:01:45
Speaker 1: your favorite post apocalyptic story?
1:01:50
Speaker 2: Post apocalyptic? I don't know what are the options? Nothing
1:01:56
Speaker 2: is even coming to mind of the genre.
1:01:58
Speaker 1: Anthem.
1:02:00
Speaker 2: Huh yeah, well.
1:02:02
Speaker 1: That's the that's an easy one. Nineteen eighty four. Uh,
1:02:08
Speaker 1: what do you call it? God Huxley?
1:02:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, if I mean, if you if you're including
1:02:16
Speaker 2: the uh, I mean, those aren't exactly a post apoptalyptic, right,
1:02:22
Speaker 2: Like those are much more the.
1:02:25
Speaker 1: Uh okay, so this dystopian dystopian, so what would be
1:02:32
Speaker 1: post apocalyptic would be some of the TV shows I
1:02:36
Speaker 1: watch a post a buckalyptic.
1:02:37
Speaker 2: But uh yeah, what's the what's the I was gonna say,
1:02:41
Speaker 2: what's the zombie one? Which is a dumb question.
1:02:44
Speaker 1: A bunch of zombie ones, but I don't like the
1:02:45
Speaker 1: zombie ones.
1:02:47
Speaker 2: I watched The Walking Dead. Uh well, I will.
1:02:50
Speaker 1: Say that mad Max has to be the greatest post
1:02:54
Speaker 1: It's way too violent for you don't but uh yeah, no.
1:02:59
Speaker 2: I I am watching Pluribus, which is the Vince Gilligan
1:03:03
Speaker 2: show that came out in this last year, and I
1:03:08
Speaker 2: have some criticisms you know of of it, but what
1:03:15
Speaker 2: I liked about it is that it is uh it
1:03:22
Speaker 2: felt fresh where it wasn't. Zombies is trying to do
1:03:26
Speaker 2: something new and creative. But I'm also, I think overly
1:03:32
Speaker 2: biased to like anything that Racy Orn is in, So
1:03:35
Speaker 2: we'll have to wait for a few more seasons before
1:03:38
Speaker 2: I know, but.
1:03:38
Speaker 1: I definitely think it's fresh. And you you know, yes,
1:03:42
Speaker 1: I mean it would have been easy to make the
1:03:44
Speaker 1: blob blog, you know, the thing spooky and scary and
1:03:50
Speaker 1: to make it happy and and uh, and kind of
1:03:54
Speaker 1: spookily benevolent is uh is original? I mean, that's that's.
1:04:00
Speaker 2: And and it raises I think it's it's also just
1:04:03
Speaker 2: really interesting philosophically. So the way I the way I
1:04:07
Speaker 2: was put it, I think on Twitter right after I
1:04:09
Speaker 2: started watching it, was it's like, what would you think
1:04:13
Speaker 2: about the society of Anthem except that there really was
1:04:16
Speaker 2: a collective mind? Yeah, Like like, what what are the
1:04:21
Speaker 2: implications of that if if like we really were, you know,
1:04:26
Speaker 2: an organism that survived and uh, we're all cells in
1:04:30
Speaker 2: a larger society. Part of what's interesting about it is
1:04:34
Speaker 2: it's revealing of how that's so not what we are, right, Like,
1:04:38
Speaker 2: how radically different we would be if we weren't individuals
1:04:43
Speaker 2: who had to think and who valued as individuals and
1:04:47
Speaker 2: so it like in many ways, that's that shows a
1:04:50
Speaker 2: great refutation of collectivism, just in the grounds of we
1:04:54
Speaker 2: would look, we would look and live nothing like how
1:04:57
Speaker 2: we look and live.
1:04:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they have problems because they have a hot
1:05:01
Speaker 1: time feeding themselves. I mean, there's a bunch of things
1:05:04
Speaker 1: like that that that it because it's one mind. They
1:05:07
Speaker 1: just can't solve. They're stuck. There's no progress, right, in
1:05:11
Speaker 1: a place like that, there's no you know.
1:05:14
Speaker 2: To me that to me, the bigger thing is it's
1:05:17
Speaker 2: not clear that there's a beneficiary. Yeah, who's enjoying, who's
1:05:23
Speaker 2: benefiting from this?
1:05:24
Speaker 1: Who's the happy one?
1:05:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not it's not obvious that there's a real answer.
1:05:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a it's a good show. I mean, I
1:05:32
Speaker 1: wish they hadn't chosen as the one human who survives,
1:05:37
Speaker 1: you know, a cynic. I mean, it makes it funny
1:05:41
Speaker 1: and it makes it entertaining, but it also kind of
1:05:44
Speaker 1: it'll be interesting to see season two. Have you seen
1:05:47
Speaker 1: the end of season one? Yeah, so it would be
1:05:49
Speaker 1: interesting to see in season two how she and the
1:05:52
Speaker 1: was the Ecuadorian Paraguayan or whatever, how they interact because
1:05:56
Speaker 1: he's kind of the idealist, you know, you know, individualist,
1:06:01
Speaker 1: and it's going to be interesting to see how she
1:06:05
Speaker 1: and him get along and what they actually do together.
1:06:08
Speaker 1: It could go and in many many directions.
1:06:11
Speaker 2: And I'm even okay with her starting out as kind
1:06:14
Speaker 2: of a mess of a person if part of the
1:06:17
Speaker 2: thing is how is she going to rise and grow
1:06:18
Speaker 2: to the occasion? And with Vin Skill, again, he's an
1:06:22
Speaker 2: interesting writer, and that it could go either way. The
1:06:25
Speaker 2: thing he's most famous for was deliberately about a human
1:06:28
Speaker 2: being's descent. But I don't think his view like I've
1:06:32
Speaker 2: listened to a lot of interviews with him, I don't
1:06:33
Speaker 2: think he has a cynical view of humanity that you
1:06:36
Speaker 2: might think, Oh, you know, he's obsessed with evil. He
1:06:39
Speaker 2: was interested in.
1:06:41
Speaker 1: The anything positive about human beings.
1:06:48
Speaker 2: I'll get back to you.
1:06:49
Speaker 1: I can't think of a positive character he's written, which
1:06:53
Speaker 1: which makes me suspicious of his sense of life deep
1:06:58
Speaker 1: down right fair enough, But we'll see, we'll see, all right, Wes.
1:07:05
Speaker 1: Wes asks any plans to turn to fiction writing anytime soon,
1:07:10
Speaker 1: Got any interesting stories waiting to put pen to paper?
1:07:16
Speaker 2: Uh, definitely not soon. You know. I had a follow
1:07:21
Speaker 2: up to my first novel that I have a draft up,
1:07:23
Speaker 2: but it would need a lot more work to finish.
1:07:25
Speaker 2: But it's just so hard. And really, if I was
1:07:31
Speaker 2: going to write fiction again, I don't know that I'd
1:07:35
Speaker 2: be motivated enough to just write like another thriller. I
1:07:39
Speaker 2: think I'd want to write something that I regarded as
1:07:42
Speaker 2: like real literature, and I suspect that that's much more
1:07:48
Speaker 2: a kind of late career retirement move st novel now.
1:07:55
Speaker 1: Ah, I I thought about it.
1:07:58
Speaker 2: I just started finally reading. Have you read umberto Echoes
1:08:02
Speaker 2: the Name of the Rose?
1:08:03
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, years and years and years ago. I read
1:08:06
Speaker 1: it a long term and I loved it. I thought
1:08:10
Speaker 1: it was fantastic.
1:08:11
Speaker 2: You know, I'm early on in it, but like reading
1:08:15
Speaker 2: knowing the history of Okham and the all that's going
1:08:19
Speaker 2: on in that time period, it's immersive. It's philosophical. It
1:08:23
Speaker 2: doesn't mean you agree with everything, but it's just relentlessly interesting.
1:08:28
Speaker 1: It's such a smart it's a clever book, and I
1:08:31
Speaker 1: don't think I knew I didn't know anyone you as
1:08:33
Speaker 1: much as I know today about the history. And I
1:08:35
Speaker 1: still really enjoyed it because it was so intellectual and interesting.
1:08:41
Speaker 1: And the movie is good. I don't know if you
1:08:42
Speaker 1: ever sawd the movie with Sean Connery.
1:08:44
Speaker 2: No, after I read the book, after you.
1:08:46
Speaker 1: Read the book, definitely, definitely right. Wes also asks to
1:08:51
Speaker 1: add to what you were saying, I'm very disappointed that
1:08:54
Speaker 1: our culture today is so pessimistic on the future of humanity.
1:08:59
Speaker 1: Very educated and smart people are convinced that we are
1:09:02
Speaker 1: heading towards some inevitable apocalypse. It is interesting, though, that
1:09:09
Speaker 1: that seems to be prevalent in every era, right. I
1:09:13
Speaker 1: mean when you study Christianity, so much is about you know,
1:09:20
Speaker 1: Jesus tells us that, you know the world is going
1:09:22
Speaker 1: to end soon, and then and then every time they're
1:09:25
Speaker 1: expecting it. Constantly there's an expectation of the end of
1:09:28
Speaker 1: the world. And I don't know if it's just Christianity,
1:09:32
Speaker 1: if other religions have it quite as as much. But
1:09:36
Speaker 1: in the West this pessimism has always existed.
1:09:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, millennialism. It's not distinctively Christian phenomenon.
1:09:52
Speaker 2: Though Christian it's been a heavily influence in Christianity. I mean,
1:09:59
Speaker 2: isis respect that it's a form of well, one, you
1:10:05
Speaker 2: can just have a negative view of human beings, but
1:10:07
Speaker 2: then you pair that with there's a certain sense of
1:10:10
Speaker 2: kind of control, like it's a form of make believe
1:10:14
Speaker 2: of it's all doomed, but something you know magically good,
1:10:19
Speaker 2: like you know we're headed to the end time so
1:10:22
Speaker 2: that something good will emerge and save us.
1:10:28
Speaker 1: Ye.
1:10:30
Speaker 2: I so can't relate to it. I just have a
1:10:32
Speaker 2: completely different view. So to go back to art. So,
1:10:36
Speaker 2: my wife and I just saw the new movie Project
1:10:41
Speaker 2: Tail Mary and There was an interview with Ryan Gosling,
1:10:45
Speaker 2: who was part of part of it, and he said
1:10:50
Speaker 2: that he won. He took the role because he had
1:10:53
Speaker 2: a view that the quote is, the future isn't something
1:10:57
Speaker 2: to be feared, it's something to be figured out.
1:11:00
Speaker 1: Good for him and.
1:11:01
Speaker 2: For and I really hope that film just does amazing
1:11:04
Speaker 2: and breaks box office records. It's good. It's not the
1:11:07
Speaker 2: greatest thing I've ever seen, but it's refreshing to have
1:11:09
Speaker 2: something that has a positive view of humanity, the future,
1:11:13
Speaker 2: technology and it is. It's uh, you know, part of
1:11:19
Speaker 2: why I like watching historical fiction and reading is go
1:11:23
Speaker 2: back to periods where there was that kind of oh
1:11:26
Speaker 2: my god, we're building a bridge. This is amazing. Let's
1:11:28
Speaker 2: go have a party and a celebration, because the kind of.
1:11:35
Speaker 1: You know, Oliridge said, yeah, don't have babies, you'll kill everybody. Yeah,
1:11:43
Speaker 1: I mean that that excitement about progress that Ironman so
1:11:49
Speaker 1: beautifully captures in Apollo and Dionysus, right when she writes
1:11:54
Speaker 1: about Apolo, the Apollo mission is in peace of our culture.
1:12:00
Speaker 1: But it's like everything in our culture's there's pieces of
1:12:03
Speaker 1: it that the pieces are the good, and it's not
1:12:06
Speaker 1: not fully integrated.
1:12:08
Speaker 2: But it's I mean, so Rand has a whole view
1:12:16
Speaker 2: of She'll put it sometimes as a mongrel philosophy that
1:12:20
Speaker 2: all of us form growing up. It's kind of implicit
1:12:25
Speaker 2: view of the world. And what she calls the sense
1:12:30
Speaker 2: of life is your implicit metaphysics and what the the
1:12:40
Speaker 2: It's very easy and really tragic when kids growing up
1:12:45
Speaker 2: for a view that the world's not open to achievement,
1:12:49
Speaker 2: it's not knowable, things don't make sense, and it creates
1:12:55
Speaker 2: it that those kinds of conclusions that can be reached
1:12:59
Speaker 2: for all sorts of reasons, but particularly in a culture
1:13:03
Speaker 2: like ours, it leads you to the view of, well,
1:13:06
Speaker 2: what happens in a world that doesn't make sense, where
1:13:09
Speaker 2: it's not open to achievement, where it's not noble, where
1:13:11
Speaker 2: effort and nobility don't pay off, where hard work isn't
1:13:15
Speaker 2: the key to success, Well, things are hopeless. And so
1:13:19
Speaker 2: we're kind of manufacturing a So it's a philosophic issue,
1:13:24
Speaker 2: and we're manufacturing it by not helping people cultivate the foundations,
1:13:29
Speaker 2: which I mean is you know, we can come back
1:13:31
Speaker 2: to the point we started off with. It's really reason
1:13:35
Speaker 2: that gives you optimism optimism is not just saying, oh,
1:13:39
Speaker 2: there's no problems, it's there's problems. There's always problems, and
1:13:43
Speaker 2: we're going to get better and better at solving them.
1:13:46
Speaker 1: Yep, Mica. For each of you, when is the last
1:13:54
Speaker 1: time you had autless shrugged? How many times have you
1:13:56
Speaker 1: at it? Well?
1:13:59
Speaker 2: My wife and I off and on have been reading
1:14:01
Speaker 2: it together, which is a really amazing experience. And I
1:14:08
Speaker 2: think this is for me. I don't it's I think
1:14:12
Speaker 2: I've read it like cover to cover maybe six or
1:14:17
Speaker 2: seven times, and but I read pieces all the time,
1:14:22
Speaker 2: like it's just an ongoing part of my life. So
1:14:24
Speaker 2: it's hard to put a number to it, but probably seven.
1:14:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm probably five. And it's been it's been a while,
1:14:35
Speaker 1: like I don't know exactly, but it's been years. And
1:14:37
Speaker 1: again I've bed pieces of it. I sometimes start it
1:14:40
Speaker 1: and don't finish it, or just skip to some of
1:14:44
Speaker 1: the pot so part of tell.
1:14:48
Speaker 2: But audiobooks helped me with the last two.
1:14:51
Speaker 1: Uh, I haven't heard it on audiobook. That's my big project.
1:14:55
Speaker 1: But to do that, I have to stop listening to
1:14:59
Speaker 1: all the other boks that I've gotten my pile for audiobooks,
1:15:02
Speaker 1: and it's like I've read Adlas Shrugtavity, all these books
1:15:04
Speaker 1: I haven't read. But Alas Shrugs are a unique experience,
1:15:07
Speaker 1: you know. So I'm constantly torn between.
1:15:10
Speaker 2: I don't do well with literature and audio books. But
1:15:13
Speaker 2: I did knowing the book like that that made it
1:15:17
Speaker 2: actually really pot It was a different way to experience it.
1:15:21
Speaker 2: But like I I can. I can listen to nonfiction
1:15:24
Speaker 2: on audio. I can't listen to unfamiliar fiction because if
1:15:28
Speaker 2: you lose a few lines in nonfiction usually can pick
1:15:31
Speaker 2: up the thread pretty easily. With with fiction, I'm just done.
1:15:36
Speaker 1: You have to constantly rewind it. It's a painting.
1:15:38
Speaker 2: But yeah, maybe Dan Brown I could listen to in fiction.
1:15:44
Speaker 1: Or if you miss a few lines, you're not missing too.
1:15:47
Speaker 2: It's the more you miss, the better off you are.
1:15:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I don't think i've ever read it Dan
1:15:53
Speaker 1: Brown Books.
1:15:53
Speaker 2: So I read one and it was on it was
1:15:56
Speaker 2: on audiobook, Okay, now that I.
1:15:58
Speaker 1: Remember, James asked, don is Donald Trump worse than you
1:16:03
Speaker 1: thought he was going to be? Oh?
1:16:06
Speaker 2: My gosh, no. But with a caveat, if if I
1:16:14
Speaker 2: would have said, you know, in abstract terms, oh, he's
1:16:17
Speaker 2: going to be a disaster and had some sense of,
1:16:20
Speaker 2: you know, what was possible for the disaster. Living through
1:16:24
Speaker 2: it is just very different. There's a sense in which
1:16:30
Speaker 2: like actually seeing things happen that I mean, this is
1:16:33
Speaker 2: the like philosophy gives you principles that allow you to
1:16:36
Speaker 2: predict in broad terms long range consequences, and it's one
1:16:43
Speaker 2: thing to know this. The long range consequences of our
1:16:46
Speaker 2: course will be bad to really see, like like we're
1:16:51
Speaker 2: passing tariffs and we're doing and we're throwing people in
1:16:59
Speaker 2: prison without like proper rule of law because they might
1:17:04
Speaker 2: be immigrants, and like all of this stuff. Seeing it happen,
1:17:09
Speaker 2: I wasn't prepared for it, even though the scale of
1:17:13
Speaker 2: it wouldn't have surprised me in abstract terms. But I'm
1:17:18
Speaker 2: I'm continually shocked. I shouldn't be, but you know, not
1:17:23
Speaker 2: surprised in the sense of that's what I thought this
1:17:27
Speaker 2: kind of mentality could do. But to really see it
1:17:34
Speaker 2: is I'm still not used to it.
1:17:38
Speaker 1: Yep, hopefully we'll never get used to it. Kluk says,
1:17:43
Speaker 1: is the West losing confidenial has had lost it. Will
1:17:46
Speaker 1: America still be semi free in the next twenty years?
1:17:53
Speaker 2: Well, those different questions. So I do think it is
1:18:00
Speaker 2: it's easy to be too pessimistic in that you could
1:18:05
Speaker 2: be too focused on whatever you read in the news
1:18:09
Speaker 2: and see on Twitter. H and if you have to
1:18:15
Speaker 2: take seriously that a culture is a very complicated, rich environment,
1:18:23
Speaker 2: if you will, And that my actual day to day
1:18:27
Speaker 2: experience of people. And I don't just mean like people
1:18:29
Speaker 2: in the small town I live in, but like, there's
1:18:32
Speaker 2: people building things and working and who value freedom and
1:18:35
Speaker 2: who don't like that there's two nihilistic tribes in charge
1:18:38
Speaker 2: of the country. There's there is a there's way more
1:18:47
Speaker 2: in the mix, if you will, than just the Republicans
1:18:52
Speaker 2: suck and the Democrats suck and therefore aren't we all doomed?
1:18:56
Speaker 2: And the people who speak the most online mostly suck.
1:18:59
Speaker 2: Like that that matters, and it does impact the long
1:19:03
Speaker 2: term trajectory. But I mean, I like, I just think
1:19:11
Speaker 2: if you if you look at what was going on
1:19:13
Speaker 2: in the in the sixties and seventies, it was really bad.
1:19:19
Speaker 2: Ten years ago, I would have said, way worse than
1:19:21
Speaker 2: what we have today. I don't know. Today, I think
1:19:24
Speaker 2: we're like arguably a little worse off. But if you
1:19:28
Speaker 2: had been in our if I had you know been
1:19:31
Speaker 2: around there, Like, would I've predicted the eighties and nineties.
1:19:35
Speaker 2: There's no way I would have predicted. And no objectivist
1:19:38
Speaker 2: I know predicted the eighties and the nineties. The nobody
1:19:43
Speaker 2: I know predicted the eighties and the nineties. That that's
1:19:48
Speaker 2: not grounds for just saying, oh, don't worry too much.
1:19:50
Speaker 2: It's you know, these things just will it'll flip back around.
1:19:53
Speaker 2: That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is
1:19:55
Speaker 2: I don't make predictions because I think so much can change,
1:20:01
Speaker 2: so at the risk of saying, you know, embracing the
1:20:06
Speaker 2: virtue of humility, I view it as I don't know.
1:20:09
Speaker 2: I know what the long term trajectory we're on. I
1:20:12
Speaker 2: know it's bad, and I know that you have to
1:20:14
Speaker 2: fight it through better ideas. But what's going to happen
1:20:17
Speaker 2: at what time scale?
1:20:18
Speaker 1: I don't know. Richard as will your book cover the
1:20:23
Speaker 1: decline of agency in modern society? For example, I've hood
1:20:27
Speaker 1: argument that capitalism is bad because advertising makes us buy things.
1:20:31
Speaker 1: I'm not making that up. Yeah, I mean that's a
1:20:33
Speaker 1: pretty old argument. I remember, even in the seventies and eighties,
1:20:37
Speaker 1: the idea of subliminal messages at super markets. In the music,
1:20:41
Speaker 1: they're telling you what to buy, and I think that
1:20:44
Speaker 1: was debunked and nobody talks about that anymore. But there's
1:20:47
Speaker 1: other ways in which I'm sure you're being manipulated by
1:20:51
Speaker 1: the advertiser.
1:20:52
Speaker 2: I wish that were true. Air. I would like, as
1:20:55
Speaker 2: the person who runs Air Eyes advertising, if we could
1:20:59
Speaker 2: just control everybody through dollar spend, life would be great. No, no,
1:21:08
Speaker 2: at that level, but if you just about agency more broadly,
1:21:12
Speaker 2: Definitely part of the story is free will and how
1:21:17
Speaker 2: people are thinking about free will, and not just the
1:21:19
Speaker 2: philosophic question of are we determined or not? But how
1:21:22
Speaker 2: much control does it individual have over his or her
1:21:26
Speaker 2: own life. I mean, the most striking thing to me
1:21:30
Speaker 2: about the Renaissance, aside from the art itself, is that
1:21:34
Speaker 2: they're like, you're coming out of a medieval view of
1:21:37
Speaker 2: man that said, we're a worthless sinner who can't know anything,
1:21:42
Speaker 2: can't do anything, and is you know, the should have
1:21:47
Speaker 2: eyes cast downward. You get to the Renaissance where they're
1:21:51
Speaker 2: like leading thinkers are explicitly comparing us to God and
1:21:56
Speaker 2: saying that human beings are godlike and control our fate
1:21:58
Speaker 2: in all sorts of ways. That is such a crucial
1:22:04
Speaker 2: part of the story. And one way you can track
1:22:08
Speaker 2: good guys and bad guys, it is often by tracking
1:22:10
Speaker 2: are they the degree to which they're pro or anti
1:22:13
Speaker 2: free will? I mentioned I'm critiquing this, this this book,
1:22:22
Speaker 2: the book that made your world about the Bible. He
1:22:25
Speaker 2: had the biggest whopper where he had like I couldn't
1:22:28
Speaker 2: even work into the review because I said, if I
1:22:30
Speaker 2: if I tell people that he said this, They're going
1:22:32
Speaker 2: to think I'm just picking the lamest book I could
1:22:35
Speaker 2: find to attack Christianity. But where he put Martin Luther
1:22:39
Speaker 2: as one of the great defenders of free will in
1:22:42
Speaker 2: Western society, Martin Luther wrote one of the most explicit
1:22:47
Speaker 2: virulin attacks on free will. Now, he wasn't talking he
1:22:51
Speaker 2: wasn't focused on like philosophic determinism that like, oh well
1:22:54
Speaker 2: you can't decide what you want to watch on Netflix.
1:22:56
Speaker 2: He's talking about like you can do nothing for salvation.
1:22:59
Speaker 2: But it's the most anti free will thing that you
1:23:03
Speaker 2: can imagine, aside from like Sam Harris and uh so
1:23:08
Speaker 2: I was just jaw on the floor.
1:23:11
Speaker 1: Yep, yeah, I mean yeah, I mean you basically, Peter Tubman,
1:23:15
Speaker 1: whether you go to Hell of Heaven. Everything is Peter
1:23:19
Speaker 1: Tuman in that in everything that's Maury all right becas
1:23:25
Speaker 1: ays Don, I got a huge value from your OPA
1:23:28
Speaker 1: commentary videos. Any thoughts plans to promote these even if
1:23:32
Speaker 1: someone hasn't read opah. They're a fantastic reisos for anyone
1:23:36
Speaker 1: wanting the subject matter.
1:23:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, so a few years ago, basically I wanted to
1:23:43
Speaker 2: you know, I had written a lot on politics, but
1:23:46
Speaker 2: my interest has always been in more fundamental philosophy, and
1:23:50
Speaker 2: I really wanted to kind of solidify my understanding and
1:23:53
Speaker 2: start thinking about how I would formulate different points. And
1:23:57
Speaker 2: so I did a YouTube series where I went section
1:24:01
Speaker 2: by section through o par which people can find on
1:24:05
Speaker 2: my YouTube channel, which I haven't put anything up since
1:24:09
Speaker 2: I started back at Aari God four years ago, now
1:24:13
Speaker 2: coming up in four years. It's worth checking out. But
1:24:17
Speaker 2: what I did is I took the best of it,
1:24:20
Speaker 2: and it's in my book Effective Egoism, So that that
1:24:22
Speaker 2: was really the cashing in on it is I wanted
1:24:26
Speaker 2: to write a book for a non objectivist who had
1:24:28
Speaker 2: maybe never even heard of Iinran and Uran, and I
1:24:31
Speaker 2: did a show on that book, So you can look
1:24:33
Speaker 2: that up for details.
1:24:37
Speaker 1: Woman, How did the re opening of the Western mind proceed?
1:24:43
Speaker 2: You have to read the book, I mean, so you know,
1:24:49
Speaker 2: the easiest version of it to tell is, oh, they
1:24:52
Speaker 2: rediscovered Aristotle and the Ancients and then became pro reason.
1:24:57
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot more interesting, like the if
1:25:00
Speaker 2: you go down a level on what's happening, I think
1:25:03
Speaker 2: there's a lot that's interesting. There is an element of
1:25:08
Speaker 2: there was some there were some improvements that were happening
1:25:13
Speaker 2: even before then, growth in population after the decline during
1:25:17
Speaker 2: the Dark Ages that we really don't have an explanation for.
1:25:21
Speaker 2: There was the Carolingian Renaissance that I don't think was
1:25:29
Speaker 2: too influential, didn't really have a long term impact, but
1:25:33
Speaker 2: you can at least see what that illustrated is. There
1:25:36
Speaker 2: was at least like people don't want to just die,
1:25:40
Speaker 2: as some do, right, but like if you give people
1:25:44
Speaker 2: even a glimmer of hope, they'll try to do something,
1:25:46
Speaker 2: And so there's these little kind of hints of trying
1:25:51
Speaker 2: to recreate civilization or rediscover civilization. I just don't think
1:25:58
Speaker 2: they would have gotten anywhere on anything like the timescale
1:26:01
Speaker 2: without the fact that they basically discovered people who were
1:26:04
Speaker 2: eons ahead of them, and they could have stuck stayed
1:26:09
Speaker 2: stuck a lot longer, but there's even go ahead.
1:26:14
Speaker 1: I mean, it was partially they discover the the fact
1:26:18
Speaker 1: that the Muslim world is far more advanced than they are,
1:26:21
Speaker 1: and they're interacting with it. And you know, it's no
1:26:24
Speaker 1: accident that Italy is way ahead of everywhere else because
1:26:27
Speaker 1: Italy is actually the place that trades with with the
1:26:30
Speaker 1: Muslim world. And they're seeing the math, and they're seeing
1:26:34
Speaker 1: the wealth, and they're seeing and and then and then
1:26:38
Speaker 1: they you know, they discover the source of all that
1:26:40
Speaker 1: which is, which is you know, the Greek ideas, which
1:26:45
Speaker 1: they primarily get from Spain. But you know, they send
1:26:51
Speaker 1: it's it's amazing they you know, they they send scholars
1:26:54
Speaker 1: to the Spanish libraries to start copying task text and
1:26:58
Speaker 1: translate them.
1:27:00
Speaker 2: And and I mean the I think it's really relevant though,
1:27:08
Speaker 2: that some aspects of the Greek world were still in
1:27:14
Speaker 2: christiandom in the West. So Boethius had translated some of
1:27:19
Speaker 2: Aristotle's logical works, and so you had a bunch of
1:27:22
Speaker 2: the leading Christian intellectuals, such as they were, were really
1:27:27
Speaker 2: interested in logic, and so they you know, it wasn't
1:27:33
Speaker 2: as if you had a bunch of barbarians who encounter
1:27:36
Speaker 2: encountered Aristotle's logic and his works and wouldn't know what
1:27:41
Speaker 2: to do with them. They had in effect gotten a
1:27:44
Speaker 2: flavor of this is amazing, and then fuel was added
1:27:47
Speaker 2: to the fire. So the like, once you start digging
1:27:52
Speaker 2: into how exactly it happened, why did it, why did
1:27:56
Speaker 2: they embrace it? Why did it take off? And I
1:27:58
Speaker 2: do think Uran's point it is really well taken. It's
1:28:02
Speaker 2: not just they discovered all of this knowledge from the past,
1:28:05
Speaker 2: but they looked around them and saw weird, like we're
1:28:07
Speaker 2: not advanced, Like you know, they're crusading into the east,
1:28:11
Speaker 2: and they are the barbarians at the gates. They are
1:28:14
Speaker 2: the people who don't wash, don't know any science like that,
1:28:18
Speaker 2: are being out technologied. And there's a way which they
1:28:23
Speaker 2: said like maybe we have something to learn.
1:28:27
Speaker 1: Yep. I mean, there's a good book on the Closing
1:28:34
Speaker 1: of the Western Mind by what's his name, Charles Freeman,
1:28:39
Speaker 1: Charles Freeman, and then the Reopening of the Western Mind,
1:28:43
Speaker 1: and as a combination, those two books are excellent and
1:28:47
Speaker 1: some of the resources we used in.
1:28:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think if you want the kind of
1:28:52
Speaker 2: whole story of the West. That's a good one of
1:28:55
Speaker 2: the best starting places. And then if you want to
1:28:58
Speaker 2: go deeper, just start with his foot his references. He's
1:29:04
Speaker 2: really leveraging reliable research, which not there's a lot of
1:29:09
Speaker 2: popular histories, even ones I like that aren't I think
1:29:13
Speaker 2: is reliable in what they're referencing and building upon. And then,
1:29:18
Speaker 2: of course our book.
1:29:22
Speaker 1: Jacob says, thanks Don, how does his stoic Asia, India, China,
1:29:26
Speaker 1: et cetera play into the progression of civilization, reason and
1:29:29
Speaker 1: oathly happiness?
1:29:33
Speaker 2: I would I just confess I don't know enough. It's
1:29:37
Speaker 2: something I think you've had this experience even doing research
1:29:41
Speaker 2: for this book of we've just started touching on like
1:29:43
Speaker 2: what the Islamic world was doing, what China was doing.
1:29:48
Speaker 2: You know what India was doing, and it's fascinating, But
1:29:52
Speaker 2: I know so little of it, and I would love
1:29:55
Speaker 2: to know a lot more. Unfortunately, I regard myself as
1:29:59
Speaker 2: the cent ignorant on everything but Western Europe and America.
1:30:03
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's right. I think you can
1:30:06
Speaker 1: see it in in kind of the trade flows, so
1:30:10
Speaker 1: suddenly the West benefits and almostly from Indian civilizations. Math
1:30:14
Speaker 1: and some of the science. And sometimes it's hard to
1:30:18
Speaker 1: differentiate between India and the Islamic world because they're conquering
1:30:22
Speaker 1: each other, and you know, at any given point someplace
1:30:26
Speaker 1: might be Indian and someplace might it might be Muslim.
1:30:30
Speaker 1: The Islamic civilization was also pretty multicultural, not in the
1:30:34
Speaker 1: e ggalitarian sense, but in the sense of many cultures,
1:30:37
Speaker 1: and and they were because it was it was really
1:30:40
Speaker 1: which is new to me. I didn't know this, but
1:30:42
Speaker 1: it was mainly centered in Central Asia, not in the
1:30:45
Speaker 1: Middle East, and therefore it was very influenced by India
1:30:49
Speaker 1: and China. And then of course things like the printing
1:30:51
Speaker 1: press came from China, right, so so much of what
1:30:57
Speaker 1: you don't help the West along. In terms of the canoege,
1:31:00
Speaker 1: she came from China. And then people like Marco Polo
1:31:04
Speaker 1: who went to China and came back and reported again,
1:31:07
Speaker 1: they had these stories about, hey, they're these other civilizations
1:31:11
Speaker 1: that are doing amazingly well. And I think the I
1:31:14
Speaker 1: think Friedman makes this point in the reopening of the
1:31:19
Speaker 1: Western mind, discovery of other worlds and other civilizations really
1:31:24
Speaker 1: helped Europe kind of say, okay, you know, we're not
1:31:29
Speaker 1: the only people on the planet. What else is going
1:31:31
Speaker 1: on here? The Bible doesn't describe the Chinese. The Bible
1:31:35
Speaker 1: doesn't describe the Incas or whatever. Maybe there's something beyond
1:31:40
Speaker 1: just just this. You know, the Bible is a source
1:31:43
Speaker 1: of knowledge. The Greeks that know about a lot of
1:31:46
Speaker 1: these things. So the Greeks are not the source of knowledge.
1:31:48
Speaker 1: Maybe we actually have to go out there and discover
1:31:50
Speaker 1: stuff for ourselves. And I think having contact with other
1:31:54
Speaker 1: civilizations is very beneficial in that sense. I'm for other
1:32:00
Speaker 1: cultures not just because of the food, but because you
1:32:03
Speaker 1: can learn stuff. And the interaction is incredibly unofficial. And
1:32:07
Speaker 1: I think that interaction happens really throughout human history. But
1:32:13
Speaker 1: in the Dark Ages, there's a period in which the
1:32:16
Speaker 1: West becomes very isolated, fragmented, nobody travels, nobody goes anywhere.
1:32:20
Speaker 1: And then as it opens up and expose more to
1:32:24
Speaker 1: thess in the world, that's when I think it starts
1:32:27
Speaker 1: developing and improving. Right, all right, So here's a series
1:32:34
Speaker 1: of questions from Cobb. They all have the same theme. Right,
1:32:38
Speaker 1: don you argue the dignity, liberty reason developed in spite
1:32:42
Speaker 1: of Christianity? What standard of historical causation are you using
1:32:47
Speaker 1: and why does it rule out Christianity as an indirect contributor.
1:32:54
Speaker 2: It's a good question, and this is a core point
1:32:59
Speaker 2: in that, you know, we had to think about how
1:33:04
Speaker 2: to formulate in the book and think about what the
1:33:08
Speaker 2: view is. You have to make a big distinction between
1:33:14
Speaker 2: Christianity and Christians. First of all, Christians have contributed incredible
1:33:19
Speaker 2: things to civilization. You know, many of the things that
1:33:23
Speaker 2: are most important to me Christians played a huge role in.
1:33:28
Speaker 2: But Christianity is a set of ideas, or at least
1:33:33
Speaker 2: that's one aspect of what Christianity is is you can
1:33:36
Speaker 2: think about it as a source of ideas and the
1:33:41
Speaker 2: what are those ideas?
1:33:43
Speaker 1: Well?
1:33:44
Speaker 2: At one level you can talk about as it's a
1:33:47
Speaker 2: religion and it's a religion with certain doctrines, and Christians
1:33:51
Speaker 2: will have different kind of lists of what are the essentials?
1:33:55
Speaker 1: But I think the.
1:33:57
Speaker 2: One way one Christian author put is that the who
1:34:00
Speaker 2: boil it down to three essentials the creation, the Fall,
1:34:04
Speaker 2: and redemption through Christ. And if you think about what
1:34:07
Speaker 2: that means, it's that like God created this world which
1:34:12
Speaker 2: is inferior to this higher supernatural realm that he created.
1:34:15
Speaker 2: It's the inferial material world, the fall, that man was
1:34:20
Speaker 2: born in perfection and fell from grace through disobedience to God,
1:34:29
Speaker 2: and that the way to and that what's moral is
1:34:36
Speaker 2: to show fealty to Christ and through him were redeemed.
1:34:42
Speaker 2: And I'm trying to put it in as general terms
1:34:45
Speaker 2: as I can, because there's all different versions of what
1:34:48
Speaker 2: each three of those things mean. But notice that all
1:34:51
Speaker 2: of them are essentially otherworldly. It's that this world and
1:34:55
Speaker 2: the pursuit of happiness in it are subort need to
1:34:58
Speaker 2: be subordinated to the higher world and the and the
1:35:03
Speaker 2: only distinction, the fundamental distinction, or let me put that differently.
1:35:09
Speaker 2: Christians vary in how much and in what ways they
1:35:13
Speaker 2: subordinate this world to the next. So take the issue
1:35:18
Speaker 2: of reason, which is our means of knowing this world.
1:35:21
Speaker 2: Christianity subordinates reason to faith, but some people subordinate it
1:35:27
Speaker 2: like way a lot, like a Tertullian who is spitting
1:35:30
Speaker 2: in the face of reason. And then you can have
1:35:34
Speaker 2: somebody like a Quinas who says, no reason is you know,
1:35:39
Speaker 2: it cannot be overruled, and it's chief in its domain
1:35:43
Speaker 2: of understanding this world. But there's still a subordination that Ultimately,
1:35:48
Speaker 2: faith and revelation is higher than reason. And my point
1:35:57
Speaker 2: in saying that you can't give Christianity the credit for
1:36:00
Speaker 2: the West is that the ideas that it introduced, the
1:36:06
Speaker 2: other worldly ideas of faith above reason, of loyalty to
1:36:11
Speaker 2: God and obedience to God over the pursuit of worldly happiness,
1:36:16
Speaker 2: that the those ideas had no positive impact. That all
1:36:22
Speaker 2: of the positives came from the fact that it gave
1:36:26
Speaker 2: more or lesser, that it was able to take in
1:36:31
Speaker 2: or absorb this worldly values and this worldly ideas, and
1:36:36
Speaker 2: it doesn't get credit for that. What was new in
1:36:41
Speaker 2: Christianity that the Pagans didn't have was bad. And what
1:36:46
Speaker 2: it took over from the Pagans who had reason, who
1:36:48
Speaker 2: had earthly happiness, it can't take credit for. So that's
1:36:52
Speaker 2: my basic view is that what was new and distinctive
1:36:55
Speaker 2: in Christianity, which was its otherworldly element, is an anti
1:36:59
Speaker 2: civilization force and that and so I'm talking about it
1:37:04
Speaker 2: only in the deepest most philosophic terms, not in the
1:37:07
Speaker 2: sense that like, oh, Christians didn't create great art, or
1:37:11
Speaker 2: they didn't I mean, there's all kinds of things that
1:37:14
Speaker 2: you could say they figured out, but I don't think
1:37:16
Speaker 2: it came from the Christian It didn't came from it
1:37:18
Speaker 2: didn't come from the core of the doctrine.
1:37:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean even the great art that they create
1:37:25
Speaker 1: is this worldly creation. It is it is their observation
1:37:29
Speaker 1: of this world. It is an understanding of things like perspective,
1:37:34
Speaker 1: it's science, it's it's the adoption of this worldy perspectives
1:37:38
Speaker 1: that allows them to create that great art.
1:37:41
Speaker 2: And in many ways you can like it's even a
1:37:43
Speaker 2: pulling away from the Bible, right, Like the Eastern Christians
1:37:48
Speaker 2: the whole thing, the whole break was no, we can't
1:37:50
Speaker 2: form graven images and so on, and the West said, well,
1:37:54
Speaker 2: that kind of sucks. And I think the East was
1:37:57
Speaker 2: more consistent. They were being more loyal to the word
1:38:02
Speaker 2: of the Bible. So the way I think of it,
1:38:05
Speaker 2: it is the more consistent you are with what's distinctive
1:38:08
Speaker 2: about Christianity, the more anti civilization you are.
1:38:14
Speaker 1: All Right, Cup continues, If the Enlightenment is an extension
1:38:18
Speaker 1: of the Renaissance, how do you address the argument that
1:38:21
Speaker 1: the Renaissance subjectivity, especially the ideas of conscious and into
1:38:28
Speaker 1: intuioity tuia, was shaped in part by Christianity. So this is.
1:38:39
Speaker 2: I think I know who's asking these questions, because I
1:38:41
Speaker 2: think he's left a lot of comments on my sub stack.
1:38:46
Speaker 1: So this is a.
1:38:49
Speaker 2: View that goes back to a very famous historian of philosophy,
1:38:55
Speaker 2: and I might butcher his last name because I've never
1:38:57
Speaker 2: heard it pronounced, but I have his books, Ernst cass
1:39:00
Speaker 2: cass Cassat, who is a neocontient. Now, he was a
1:39:05
Speaker 2: great historian of ideas. He wrote and we cite this
1:39:08
Speaker 2: in our book. He wrote the best book in the
1:39:11
Speaker 2: philosophy of the Enlightenment. But he has this kind of
1:39:14
Speaker 2: view that he outlines in a in a famous book
1:39:18
Speaker 2: he wrote on the Renaissance and Renaissance philosophy. To actually
1:39:25
Speaker 2: untangle that question would take a long time. I promised
1:39:29
Speaker 2: that I would write something more in detail about it
1:39:32
Speaker 2: on my sub stack, Earthly Idealism. What I what what
1:39:37
Speaker 2: I will say here is that what I think the
1:39:42
Speaker 2: I think the Renaissance is a transition period and the
1:39:47
Speaker 2: core thing that you get is a that the human
1:39:54
Speaker 2: mind is powerful and that human beings are transformers of
1:40:01
Speaker 2: nature in a way that's going to make possible progress.
1:40:08
Speaker 2: And that's the core innovation that is going to lay
1:40:11
Speaker 2: the help lay the groundwork for the Enlightenment, and that
1:40:15
Speaker 2: is a breakaway from ancient Greece in any way that
1:40:18
Speaker 2: they didn't have the notion of progress in that way,
1:40:20
Speaker 2: I don't think. I don't think that came from Christianity though,
1:40:25
Speaker 2: But the.
1:40:28
Speaker 1: The the.
1:40:30
Speaker 2: Some of the other aspects that are being put under
1:40:33
Speaker 2: subjective there. I think we're many of them are bad
1:40:39
Speaker 2: and aren't contributing to the progress. But I'm I'm, I
1:40:45
Speaker 2: know I'm being oversimplifying right now and not addressing everything
1:40:49
Speaker 2: that's embedded in that question. But there's just no way
1:40:51
Speaker 2: to do it, uh in this context. Yeah, at least
1:40:54
Speaker 2: I can't.
1:40:55
Speaker 1: And there's an argument to be made in that what
1:41:00
Speaker 1: area that the Renaissance is more about the art and
1:41:03
Speaker 1: the spirit than it is about explicit ideas. I mean,
1:41:06
Speaker 1: there are explosive ideas, they're important, and suddenly the beginnings
1:41:09
Speaker 1: of science are there. But there is a certain vision
1:41:14
Speaker 1: that is that is being brought forward through the art.
1:41:18
Speaker 1: That is that I think shapes the consciousness of the
1:41:21
Speaker 1: generation that comes after. That is makes the Enlightenment in
1:41:25
Speaker 1: some way possible. There's a I mean, just think about
1:41:28
Speaker 1: it in the sense of beauty, you know, beauty becomes important. Uh,
1:41:33
Speaker 1: there's no beauty in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages
1:41:37
Speaker 1: are mostly ugliness and and and and terror and horror,
1:41:42
Speaker 1: and the Renaissance suddenly creates and projects a beautiful world,
1:41:48
Speaker 1: you know, world of of of and the heroic world
1:41:52
Speaker 1: in many ways. I mean, obviously the example is michelangel
1:41:55
Speaker 1: Is David, but there are lots of examples of just
1:41:58
Speaker 1: of just efficaciousness and human success and even when it's
1:42:04
Speaker 1: a biblical story, healthy, happy, you know, competent people in
1:42:11
Speaker 1: the picture. It it's just a it's such a break
1:42:15
Speaker 1: from everything that happened before. And in many ways it's
1:42:20
Speaker 1: it's in its spirit, it's it builds on Roman Greece
1:42:24
Speaker 1: but takes it even further. That is, it is an
1:42:26
Speaker 1: improvement in Roman Greece in terms of esthetics, and I
1:42:29
Speaker 1: think esthetics play a huge role in shaping consciousness, in
1:42:34
Speaker 1: shaping the way people think about the world.
1:42:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, so my view is basically, at the
1:42:43
Speaker 2: highest level, the you it's the late Medieval period is
1:42:49
Speaker 2: reintroducing reason onto the scene. You see its products in
1:42:53
Speaker 2: the culture during the Renaissance or part of its projects.
1:42:57
Speaker 2: The Renaissance philosophy is a complete like mass it's a
1:43:01
Speaker 2: complete mixture. They're trying to work themselves out of the
1:43:03
Speaker 2: medieval period. In some ways, they're worse than the Scholastics
1:43:07
Speaker 2: that came before. Many of them. There's some people who
1:43:10
Speaker 2: are good. Pompa Nazi is a really interesting arisk Italian.
1:43:14
Speaker 2: But it's not like if you looked at their philosophy,
1:43:17
Speaker 2: you wouldn't be like, oh, we're headed for heaven now. Yeah,
1:43:19
Speaker 2: But it's the workings into the culture that are laying
1:43:22
Speaker 2: the groundwork I think for the Enlightenment more than oh,
1:43:29
Speaker 2: this is a philosophic development that the Enlightenment's building on.
1:43:35
Speaker 1: Right, cop continues, you emphasize biblical themes of obedience and hierarchy.
1:43:41
Speaker 1: How do you justify privileging those strands over Christian traditions
1:43:47
Speaker 1: that also developed conscience, equality, and limits on earthly authority.
1:43:56
Speaker 2: Well, I think it gave sort of the answer to that.
1:44:00
Speaker 2: I'm not privileging those like So, if you take the
1:44:05
Speaker 2: hierarchy point, like, it's really true that from the beginning
1:44:08
Speaker 2: of Christianity that they took equality to be purely spiritual,
1:44:14
Speaker 2: and that they thought that was perfectly consistent after the
1:44:17
Speaker 2: fall with hierarchy on earth, and you know, slave obeys
1:44:21
Speaker 2: the master, the master obeys his king, and so on,
1:44:23
Speaker 2: and they didn't see any contradiction there. And it was
1:44:26
Speaker 2: a long time before that the idea of equality got
1:44:31
Speaker 2: had acendency. I'm not saying that one of those is
1:44:34
Speaker 2: real Christianity and one of them isn't. I'm saying that
1:44:38
Speaker 2: the core point of Christianity, that we're privileging faith over reason,
1:44:44
Speaker 2: and we're subordinating earthly happiness to obedience to God. Those
1:44:51
Speaker 2: essentials did not produce whatever better elements are evolving out
1:44:56
Speaker 2: of it. Like, that's the the key point, and that
1:45:01
Speaker 2: that the and within that spectrum you get better and
1:45:06
Speaker 2: worse Christian ideas and Christian thinkers, and that what you
1:45:11
Speaker 2: what is And when you see improvements, what you see
1:45:15
Speaker 2: is them inevitably breaking away from or taking Christianity less seriously,
1:45:21
Speaker 2: less consistently, and that like, that's the real key insight,
1:45:25
Speaker 2: is that things are not improving because oh this you know, uh,
1:45:30
Speaker 2: this Christian group got the upper hand, but because Christian
1:45:34
Speaker 2: people are putting religion less and less at the center
1:45:37
Speaker 2: of their thinking.
1:45:39
Speaker 1: And they were real innovative thinkers who happened to be
1:45:41
Speaker 1: Christian and and a discovering new discoveries in philosophy or
1:45:47
Speaker 1: with regard to ideas, the fact that they're Christian doesn't
1:45:50
Speaker 1: make those ideas Christian ideas. They are they are discovering
1:45:55
Speaker 1: these new ideas because the marginalizing their own Christianity. Oh,
1:45:59
Speaker 1: they marginalizing the world of Christianity. Yeah.
1:46:03
Speaker 2: And so if you take somebody like Newton, Now, Newton
1:46:07
Speaker 2: saw his project as consistent with Christianity. I think it's
1:46:10
Speaker 2: sometimes overstated about the people do a lot with Newton,
1:46:17
Speaker 2: but he was explicit that he was hopeful that what
1:46:20
Speaker 2: he discovered in science would bolster the Christian faith. But
1:46:25
Speaker 2: what did he do in science? He did not look
1:46:27
Speaker 2: at the Bible and read out the Bible. He followed
1:46:30
Speaker 2: an earthly method of reasoning, inductive inference, measurement, you know,
1:46:35
Speaker 2: mathematical reasoning. He followed reason, and that's where all the
1:46:40
Speaker 2: good stuff came. And indeed he spent so much of
1:46:45
Speaker 2: his life not doing that, but just looking in the
1:46:48
Speaker 2: Bible to unearth hidden meanings of things that we missed
1:46:51
Speaker 2: out on. God knows what he could have discovered if
1:46:54
Speaker 2: he didn't take Christianity as seriously as he did. So
1:46:57
Speaker 2: even somebody who achieved some of the most monumental achievements
1:47:01
Speaker 2: in human history, was hurt by the fact that he
1:47:04
Speaker 2: still took the Bible somewhat seriously and it played somewhat
1:47:08
Speaker 2: of an important view in his life.
1:47:11
Speaker 1: All right, cubb you say Christianity merely adapted modern values
1:47:15
Speaker 1: rather than contributing to them. What would count as a
1:47:19
Speaker 1: genuine contribution. Why would shaping the preconditions for the lead
1:47:24
Speaker 1: of development not qualify Because it doesn't. It doesn't shape
1:47:30
Speaker 1: to preconditioned.
1:47:32
Speaker 2: No, it's what's hurting them. So it's holding them back.
1:47:35
Speaker 2: It's what's distorting them. And even when good ideas come through,
1:47:38
Speaker 2: they're they're marred in all sorts of ways. And so
1:47:41
Speaker 2: like you get individual rights, for instance, developed, but you
1:47:44
Speaker 2: get them developed by a bunch of people to think, well,
1:47:46
Speaker 2: it's wrong or at least it's not fully right to
1:47:49
Speaker 2: pursue your happiness and your success.
1:47:52
Speaker 1: And so.
1:47:54
Speaker 2: Part of what's going on in all of these questions,
1:47:57
Speaker 2: and this is something I want to flesh out in
1:47:59
Speaker 2: a or you know, a larger response is it's not distinguishing,
1:48:06
Speaker 2: it's not paying attention to fundamentals. It's too focused on
1:48:10
Speaker 2: a bunch of derivative issues like hierarchy versus equality or
1:48:14
Speaker 2: something like that. But if you're focused on fundamentals, like
1:48:18
Speaker 2: what are the fundamentals driving things? And it's really reason
1:48:22
Speaker 2: versus faith and earthly happiness versus otherworldly submission and obedience,
1:48:28
Speaker 2: and that the the If you grasp that that's the
1:48:32
Speaker 2: fundamental kind of viewpoint that's getting put on the table
1:48:36
Speaker 2: and shaping people's thinking at a deep level, then you
1:48:41
Speaker 2: can have all sorts of derivative issues that you're better
1:48:43
Speaker 2: on than other people, and even better on than people
1:48:46
Speaker 2: who had good fundamentals. And we're making big mistakes, but
1:48:50
Speaker 2: they're still derivative.
1:48:52
Speaker 1: And so the.
1:48:54
Speaker 2: If you're focused on the fundamentals that are driving human
1:48:58
Speaker 2: life forward, then introducing bad fundamentals makes everything else worse.
1:49:04
Speaker 2: And like that's the that's the kind of key insight, Cobbagan.
1:49:11
Speaker 1: If both revolutionaries and loyalists appeal to the Bible, why
1:49:17
Speaker 1: does that show Biblical influence was negligible rather than histoically powerful.
1:49:23
Speaker 2: Oh well, that's just a misinterpret So I mist interpretation.
1:49:26
Speaker 2: So I wrote a piece where it's part of this
1:49:31
Speaker 2: series that I'm writing on the the book where I'm
1:49:35
Speaker 2: talking that this piece was on the issue of liberty,
1:49:39
Speaker 2: and I point out that this author, Mangwadi says, oh,
1:49:47
Speaker 2: the Bible was the most cited thing during the revolutionary period,
1:49:51
Speaker 2: which is true. But I made the point of, well,
1:49:55
Speaker 2: you can't just count up citations, and I said, like, look,
1:49:59
Speaker 2: the loyalists were citing the Bible as much as the revolutionaries.
1:50:04
Speaker 2: And what I was trying to show there was simply
1:50:07
Speaker 2: that the fact that people are citing something doesn't necessarily
1:50:12
Speaker 2: say what they're citing actually led.
1:50:15
Speaker 1: To that view.
1:50:17
Speaker 2: So like the like, that's the only point I was making.
1:50:20
Speaker 2: It's not that, well, they're citing the Bible, therefore the
1:50:23
Speaker 2: Bible influences leads to liberty. That can't follow because the
1:50:28
Speaker 2: people who were against the American costs were citing the
1:50:31
Speaker 2: Bible as well. So how did he put it? Does
1:50:34
Speaker 2: doesn't that show that the Bible was really influential? Yeah,
1:50:39
Speaker 2: the Bible was really influential. It was I mean, it
1:50:41
Speaker 2: was like Homer for the Greeks, right, like everybody cited
1:50:45
Speaker 2: the Bible about everything, even the people who thought like
1:50:48
Speaker 2: in Greece, like the best thinkers. Yeah, the Greek gods
1:50:50
Speaker 2: aren't real or something. This is still the central text
1:50:54
Speaker 2: of our culture. It's part of our conversation, and it's
1:50:57
Speaker 2: gonna get woven into all of our conver like, that's
1:51:01
Speaker 2: just true. But that doesn't say that the good insights
1:51:07
Speaker 2: the idea that a human being should has a right
1:51:10
Speaker 2: to exist for his own sake and pursue his own
1:51:12
Speaker 2: happiness free from force. That doesn't mean that it comes
1:51:15
Speaker 2: from the Bible at all, even if everybody was citing it.
1:51:18
Speaker 1: Yep, would you consider Tom Holland's dominion the strongest popular
1:51:26
Speaker 1: cational Christianity's positive influence on Western civilization? And if not,
1:51:31
Speaker 1: which wook do you think makes that case better?
1:51:36
Speaker 2: I wouldn't say it's the strongest, it's it's and here
1:51:40
Speaker 2: it is the part why, well, in part I just
1:51:42
Speaker 2: think he's sloppy in many places. And you know, he's
1:51:46
Speaker 2: writing a total history of the West, so it has
1:51:48
Speaker 2: to be selected. But I think he leaves out all
1:51:50
Speaker 2: kinds of like counterexamples to what he's trying to show
1:51:53
Speaker 2: that he really should know better than that. And it's
1:51:57
Speaker 2: also not the best in the sense that I don't
1:52:00
Speaker 2: think that's really he's not a crusading Christian in the
1:52:03
Speaker 2: sense that he also talks about, you know, the kind
1:52:07
Speaker 2: of evils of Christianity. Uh, And doesn't kind of put
1:52:11
Speaker 2: it together into coherent case for anything except for the
1:52:14
Speaker 2: Christianity was really important. It's more important than you knew. Okay, fine.
1:52:21
Speaker 2: I think there's the the better books, and I cited
1:52:25
Speaker 2: two of them on my substack piece.
1:52:28
Speaker 3: Uh.
1:52:28
Speaker 2: There's one called The Atheist Delusion, which sounds kind of
1:52:31
Speaker 2: like a like a cheap polemical book, but it's but
1:52:35
Speaker 2: it's by a philosopher who's pretty well, he is meaningful
1:52:43
Speaker 2: historical depth and seriousness that I thought was better the
1:52:48
Speaker 2: the The other one that I think is quite good,
1:52:50
Speaker 2: though it's not it's partially on this theme, but it's
1:52:53
Speaker 2: a little narrower. Uh is Inventing the Individual by Larry
1:52:58
Speaker 2: Side and Top And again, I think none of these
1:53:02
Speaker 2: things are convincing, but these are serious works by people
1:53:06
Speaker 2: who have some amount of philosophic depth and historical seriousness.
1:53:14
Speaker 2: I think Holland's biggest weakness is he doesn't have any
1:53:17
Speaker 2: philosophic depth and and I think for me to really
1:53:21
Speaker 2: respect a book in that genre, they have to know
1:53:25
Speaker 2: something about it. They have to really have at least
1:53:28
Speaker 2: some depth in their understanding of ideas.
1:53:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's so on the coalition, he's equals causation.
1:53:36
Speaker 1: I mean, it's so he doesn't even try to give
1:53:39
Speaker 1: you causation. It's it's it's almost like, yeah, it was
1:53:42
Speaker 1: just here, so it must be therefore that it caused it.
1:53:48
Speaker 1: Woman says, when will they I become a publicly traded company.
1:53:52
Speaker 1: I think that's I'll take that. Never. Uh, it''s not
1:53:56
Speaker 1: in that business, and I don't think it will ever
1:53:59
Speaker 1: be in that business, all right, Cobb Again, Christianity was
1:54:05
Speaker 1: primarily an obstacle to reason, liberty and human dignity. Why
1:54:09
Speaker 1: did the Enlightenment wise with in Christian Europe rather than Buddhist,
1:54:14
Speaker 1: Muslim or Pagan civilizations.
1:54:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I would go back to that.
1:54:22
Speaker 1: I just don't know.
1:54:23
Speaker 2: And I mean I could say some things kind of
1:54:26
Speaker 2: shooting from the hip about why I think that's so,
1:54:30
Speaker 2: but they'd be pretty uninformed, so I wouldn't. I wouldn't
1:54:34
Speaker 2: spect that. I do think it's an interesting question. I
1:54:37
Speaker 2: think not enough comparative work has been done on the
1:54:45
Speaker 2: in this area, at least none that I've seen. There's
1:54:48
Speaker 2: a book that our mutual friend Jason Ryans recommended that
1:54:52
Speaker 2: did it on China versus the West on science. It's
1:55:01
Speaker 2: on my shelf, but I can't see that.
1:55:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it's important note that it almost
1:55:05
Speaker 1: did happen in the Muslim world, and you could debate
1:55:08
Speaker 1: on why it didn't happen, but primarily it didn't happen
1:55:11
Speaker 1: was because at some point, for whatever reason, they took
1:55:15
Speaker 1: religion more seriously and they forkilled it. So they killed
1:55:19
Speaker 1: the movement towards Enlightenment because they took religion more seriously
1:55:26
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, because of the timing, because of the
1:55:30
Speaker 1: experience maybe with the Dark Ages, when Christianity was exposed
1:55:36
Speaker 1: to these better ideas, certain people were willing to embrace
1:55:41
Speaker 1: them and move them forward. So I mean, partially it's
1:55:45
Speaker 1: historical accident. It's when and you know, there's no there's
1:55:50
Speaker 1: no you know, you could argue that there certain things
1:55:54
Speaker 1: about Buddhism or Islam or that hold them back even
1:55:59
Speaker 1: more than CHRISTI Chianity holds the West back, right, you
1:56:02
Speaker 1: could argue those things, but they it could have happened
1:56:06
Speaker 1: somewhere else. There's no, there's no. Again, the fact that
1:56:12
Speaker 1: things happened the way they did doesn't mean they have
1:56:14
Speaker 1: to happen the way they did. Cobb, you argue Christianity
1:56:21
Speaker 1: adapted modernity after the Enlightenment. How do you rule out
1:56:25
Speaker 1: the possibility that the adaptation was actually the unfolding of
1:56:29
Speaker 1: tensions present within the Christian tradition.
1:56:37
Speaker 2: I just don't know what that means. Like it's one
1:56:40
Speaker 2: of those things that sounds profound. There's tensions in that the.
1:56:46
Speaker 1: I've got a good example, sure, right in the late
1:56:49
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, the Catholic Church finally decides that usury is okay,
1:56:55
Speaker 1: not because of tensions within the church, but because the
1:56:58
Speaker 1: world around them had developed institutions of banking and commerce
1:57:02
Speaker 1: and things that they were obviously woking and that they
1:57:04
Speaker 1: had to They had to figure out how to integrate
1:57:07
Speaker 1: themselves into the modern world, into the world created by
1:57:10
Speaker 1: the Enlightenment. Uh. You see it today in the Catholic
1:57:13
Speaker 1: Church trying to adopt I don't know, trying to figure
1:57:17
Speaker 1: out what to do with homosexuality or whatever. It's not
1:57:20
Speaker 1: tension within the Catholic Church. It's tension between the Catholic
1:57:23
Speaker 1: Church and the rest of the world that has moved forward,
1:57:27
Speaker 1: in a sense, between the Catholic Church and civilization. They
1:57:30
Speaker 1: have to keep catching up.
1:57:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's what I was going to say, is
1:57:34
Speaker 2: if you have, like if you just read the literature
1:57:38
Speaker 2: from the period, it's just you have a bunch of
1:57:41
Speaker 2: people showing how backwards the people who take religion seriously are,
1:57:48
Speaker 2: and like that gets a response of well, don't we
1:57:53
Speaker 2: don't want to look stupid or we recognize that there's
1:57:58
Speaker 2: some value here that we don't want to like we
1:58:00
Speaker 2: have to get in on this. I'm making it sound conspiratorial.
1:58:03
Speaker 2: I don't mean that, but it's much more the flavor
1:58:05
Speaker 2: you're talking about, where the like the cultures moving in
1:58:11
Speaker 2: another direction, and these people are growing up in that
1:58:14
Speaker 2: culture and trying to understand the religion in the context
1:58:18
Speaker 2: of these other ideas that are in the air and
1:58:20
Speaker 2: that like have a certain status and that are making
1:58:24
Speaker 2: better arguments than they can make. And the adapting just means, well,
1:58:28
Speaker 2: how do I put these two things together? But it's
1:58:32
Speaker 2: not as if what you don't Here's what you don't
1:58:36
Speaker 2: see is that there's just kind of like Christians in
1:58:39
Speaker 2: a vacuum working out their tensions together, and oh, the
1:58:42
Speaker 2: rational side is suddenly able to marshal better arguments. No,
1:58:46
Speaker 2: it's that it's an exogenous kind of force of like
1:58:48
Speaker 2: being of people articulating a pro reason viewpoint and then
1:58:53
Speaker 2: the more religious people getting on board with it.
1:59:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, how do you distinguish between Christianity as a textual
1:59:07
Speaker 1: source as a lived civilization and is interpreted through centuries
1:59:12
Speaker 1: of theological reflection.
1:59:18
Speaker 2: Well, what I tried to get across is I'm talking about, like,
1:59:22
Speaker 2: what are the philosophic essentials that Christianity is introducing and
1:59:30
Speaker 2: the and are those good for human life? Are bad
1:59:33
Speaker 2: for human life? That's the basic question I'm asking. And
1:59:38
Speaker 2: then I do think there's you do need to and
1:59:45
Speaker 2: the basic distinction I offered is between that and Christians. Now,
1:59:48
Speaker 2: you can create all kinds of other subdivisions and whatnot.
1:59:52
Speaker 2: But like this is coming from way too academic a context,
1:59:56
Speaker 2: which is we need to chop things into three thousand
1:59:59
Speaker 2: pieces that we can never integrate together again, and we
2:00:01
Speaker 2: can never form any big picture of views or evaluations.
2:00:05
Speaker 2: And like I think that's something actually bad in academia.
2:00:08
Speaker 2: I don't think it's I don't think you can gain
2:00:10
Speaker 2: clarity and you can gain any insight from doing that.
2:00:18
Speaker 2: Here's forty meanings of christian break them all apart. In
2:00:21
Speaker 2: their most subtlest shades and have whole theories about them
2:00:25
Speaker 2: and then put them back. You can't you can't get
2:00:27
Speaker 2: anywhere doing that.
2:00:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is I mean, this is the thing. Christianity
2:00:33
Speaker 1: as a system to govern your life is an absolute,
2:00:36
Speaker 1: unmitigated failure because it's not this worldly. And yet people
2:00:43
Speaker 1: people have to survive. So they constantly and this has
2:00:47
Speaker 1: lived Christianity, whatever the hell that means. So they constantly
2:00:50
Speaker 1: adapting to the reality that they face in order to
2:00:54
Speaker 1: try to live in this world and survive somehow in
2:00:57
Speaker 1: spite of the Christianities constantly holding them back. And then
2:01:02
Speaker 1: they rationalize it in terms of Christianity. So they have
2:01:05
Speaker 1: to find explanations within Christianity to justify them living a
2:01:11
Speaker 1: more earthly life in order to progress in some way.
2:01:14
Speaker 1: And it's this spiral. Christianity in a sense keeps getting
2:01:18
Speaker 1: better because if it doesn't, it's it's so miserable that
2:01:24
Speaker 1: people would reject it completely. So there's this. As we
2:01:27
Speaker 1: particularly exit the dark ages, people are trying to live better,
2:01:33
Speaker 1: they're trying to make something of the world, and they
2:01:37
Speaker 1: find it in Christianity because they have nothing else.
2:01:41
Speaker 2: To look for.
2:01:42
Speaker 1: They have nowhere else to find it, right, so they
2:01:45
Speaker 1: artificially find it.
2:01:46
Speaker 2: In the book, But it is relevant also to look
2:01:50
Speaker 2: at like what were the earliest Christians that we have
2:01:52
Speaker 2: a record of, Like how did they live and what
2:01:55
Speaker 2: was their And it was much like they took the
2:01:58
Speaker 2: anti earthliness seriously and that's partly why everybody looked at
2:02:01
Speaker 2: them and said, like, these people are crazy. I mean,
2:02:05
Speaker 2: like here's a view that you know, the only people
2:02:11
Speaker 2: are allowed to have sex that the ones already married.
2:02:13
Speaker 2: The world's gonna end soon, so nobody else should really
2:02:15
Speaker 2: get married. And even like you take somebody like Jerome right,
2:02:18
Speaker 2: who's not a minor figure, and he's coming a little
2:02:21
Speaker 2: bit later than even the period I'm talking about, which
2:02:23
Speaker 2: is like, all right, the only reason that sex can
2:02:28
Speaker 2: be tolerated to manufacture new virgins. Like like this was
2:02:32
Speaker 2: an anti pleasure, anti happy, anti world, anti this world
2:02:37
Speaker 2: cult that thought the world was going to end tomorrow.
2:02:40
Speaker 2: I mean, that was the whole kind of perspective that
2:02:43
Speaker 2: is behind Paul. And the only reason that it started
2:02:49
Speaker 2: making any kind of concessions to this world is because
2:02:53
Speaker 2: it didn't. It kept not ending. So like you know,
2:02:57
Speaker 2: Christ is saying there's people live right now, who are
2:03:01
Speaker 2: going to see the end times And that didn't turn
2:03:04
Speaker 2: out to be true, and so they had to start
2:03:06
Speaker 2: coming to terms with this earth. But it's like the
2:03:09
Speaker 2: the the you know, this was an apocalyptic cult that
2:03:12
Speaker 2: thought like there is no tomorrow and that and therefore, yeah,
2:03:16
Speaker 2: of course we don't have to worry about how to
2:03:18
Speaker 2: make concessions to the world. There's not going to be
2:03:20
Speaker 2: a world. So it's like part of what I think
2:03:23
Speaker 2: reveals that it is an essentially other worldly forces. That's
2:03:26
Speaker 2: how it was taken in its earliest days, and it's
2:03:29
Speaker 2: only as it had to make concessions that you get
2:03:33
Speaker 2: this whole proliferation of various strategies for making some accommodation
2:03:40
Speaker 2: to not being suicidal and that and and and that's
2:03:44
Speaker 2: really how I understand the trajectory of Christianity throughout history.
2:03:47
Speaker 2: And there's some people who like, well, I really don't
2:03:50
Speaker 2: want to be suicidal. I kind of like life. How
2:03:52
Speaker 2: do I make turn this into Christianity? And then there's
2:03:54
Speaker 2: some who are the kinds of James Taggart killers who
2:03:58
Speaker 2: they don't value life. All. Yeah, they're not gonna like
2:04:03
Speaker 2: immediately commit suicide just like Taggart doesn't, but they're essentially
2:04:06
Speaker 2: anti life and the and you can I think of
2:04:09
Speaker 2: if there's a tension in Christianity, it's much more the
2:04:13
Speaker 2: people who are essentially mixed and they want to live,
2:04:16
Speaker 2: but they also want their nice afterlife and they want
2:04:19
Speaker 2: forgiveness and they don't want to be held to too
2:04:21
Speaker 2: high a standard and so on to the real uh
2:04:25
Speaker 2: haters of the good. And I think like that's the tension.
2:04:29
Speaker 2: And the part of what you'd have to think about
2:04:32
Speaker 2: is is that is that really attention or is that
2:04:36
Speaker 2: a difference between more and less consistent?
2:04:39
Speaker 1: Yep? All right. You emphasize the Enlightenments break with Christianity,
2:04:44
Speaker 1: but you treat rapture and inheritance as mutually exclusive. Can
2:04:53
Speaker 1: the Enlightenment have been both critique of Christianity and development
2:04:57
Speaker 1: out of categories? Could Ristianity shaped I don't know what
2:05:03
Speaker 1: that means. Yeah, and again I think you're mixing Christianity
2:05:06
Speaker 1: with Christians. Christianity didn't shape categories. Christianity didn't you know? Right?
2:05:16
Speaker 1: Do you think your account gives enough way to the
2:05:19
Speaker 1: fact that pagan societies generally did not produce the doctor
2:05:22
Speaker 1: and of human rights? If not Christianity what do you
2:05:25
Speaker 1: think explains that shift in the West. So I think.
2:05:36
Speaker 2: Part of my view is that there's a certain ingratitude
2:05:38
Speaker 2: about that, Like Greece for the first time is saying, like,
2:05:44
Speaker 2: individuals should, or at least citizens, and there's a restrictive
2:05:49
Speaker 2: version they should have control over their own fate, and
2:05:52
Speaker 2: we're going to let them or not let them, but
2:05:55
Speaker 2: like we together are going to make our own political
2:05:57
Speaker 2: decisions and drive our political direction, and we're even going
2:06:04
Speaker 2: to institute some forms of kind of checks on the
2:06:08
Speaker 2: mob that that could unleash. And they're the best we
2:06:11
Speaker 2: can come up with so far. And to say, oh, well,
2:06:14
Speaker 2: you didn't come up with a whole theory of individual rights,
2:06:18
Speaker 2: like that's like it's so non obvious the principle of
2:06:22
Speaker 2: individual rights, because what individual rights do is they're saying
2:06:26
Speaker 2: there's a moral way of life, there's a way of
2:06:29
Speaker 2: life that's morally good that has to be protected, but
2:06:32
Speaker 2: it's not going to be forced, it's not going to
2:06:34
Speaker 2: be imposed. And getting that perspective that we can say
2:06:37
Speaker 2: this is the right way to live and you don't
2:06:39
Speaker 2: have to do it like that, is that, like that
2:06:43
Speaker 2: is such an achievement to be able to hold both
2:06:45
Speaker 2: of those and integrate those perspectives. And so the idea
2:06:49
Speaker 2: of why didn't the agents do that? There's things to
2:06:51
Speaker 2: say I think about barriers to them doing it, including
2:06:54
Speaker 2: the fact of I think you had to have a
2:06:58
Speaker 2: better view of production and than they did. I think
2:07:02
Speaker 2: you couldn't have the view of like, there's a bunch
2:07:04
Speaker 2: of slaves, and then they support the people who are
2:07:08
Speaker 2: going to go off and engage in political thought all day.
2:07:14
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of development that I think had
2:07:16
Speaker 2: to happen and that had not happened while the pagans
2:07:20
Speaker 2: Uh were still in power. And so but there's a
2:07:26
Speaker 2: certain way in which like, didn't they do enough?
2:07:31
Speaker 1: But there's also a real sense of ungratefulness towards the
2:07:36
Speaker 1: genius of a John Locke and and maybe even the
2:07:40
Speaker 1: minded geniuses of Puppendorf and Gotious and the people who
2:07:44
Speaker 1: kind of set it up. So they're not just Christians, right,
2:07:49
Speaker 1: They didn't just pluck it out of Christianity. Yo. Look,
2:07:52
Speaker 1: you know, John Locke just saw it in the Old
2:07:53
Speaker 1: Testament and you just pulled it out in the New
2:07:56
Speaker 1: Testement or whatever. It's like kids a genius really thinking
2:07:59
Speaker 1: about issues and thinking about the world and discovering a
2:08:04
Speaker 1: new truth that people didn't discover before. And it's it's like, no,
2:08:10
Speaker 1: he was a Christian, there was Christianity around him. So
2:08:13
Speaker 1: individual rights come from Christianity. I mean, that's just bizarre
2:08:18
Speaker 1: any more than the physics of Newton come from Christianity.
2:08:21
Speaker 1: Physics of Newton come from his application of reason to
2:08:25
Speaker 1: the physical matter. The individual rights come the application of
2:08:28
Speaker 1: John Luck of reason to human relationships. And so it's
2:08:35
Speaker 1: his genius, not Christianity.
2:08:38
Speaker 2: And if you look at the development, so most most
2:08:43
Speaker 2: scholars who study the development of the idea of individual
2:08:48
Speaker 2: rights think that ats like the earliest that you get
2:08:52
Speaker 2: something like a modern concept of rights is with Akham.
2:08:57
Speaker 2: Some people go a little bit, Brian Tyranny goes a
2:09:01
Speaker 2: little bit earlier, some people later, but the around that time.
2:09:06
Speaker 2: But if you look at what's going on in there, thinking,
2:09:09
Speaker 2: what you're beaten over the head with is how much
2:09:11
Speaker 2: Christianity is holding them back. So remember, what rights are
2:09:15
Speaker 2: doing is saying they're protecting the moral way of life. Well,
2:09:19
Speaker 2: part of that they have is what we would regard
2:09:22
Speaker 2: as a moral way of life, like securing your life
2:09:25
Speaker 2: and creating peaceful coexistence. But part of it is also
2:09:28
Speaker 2: the sermon in the mouth and so well, okay, so
2:09:33
Speaker 2: a poor person has to be able to go into
2:09:35
Speaker 2: a rich person's property and take their food. So like
2:09:39
Speaker 2: it's distorting how they're thinking about property and so on.
2:09:42
Speaker 2: It's this huge barrier because it's introducing a wild contradiction
2:09:46
Speaker 2: into the whole perspective of rights and so to say, oh, well,
2:09:50
Speaker 2: they're getting it from Christianity. No, they're thinking about, in
2:09:53
Speaker 2: their terms, what does right reason enable a proper kind
2:09:59
Speaker 2: of del lineation of justice in his social context? And
2:10:04
Speaker 2: then the they're thinking that through in really deep ways,
2:10:08
Speaker 2: and the religion is throwing them off track all the time.
2:10:14
Speaker 1: That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, all right,
2:10:17
Speaker 1: Cowbos asked thoughts on Project Hail Mary. I guess you
2:10:20
Speaker 1: said a little bit about it already. You liked it.
2:10:25
Speaker 2: I liked it more than is justified by the movie itself.
2:10:28
Speaker 2: I liked it just because it was refreshing to have
2:10:31
Speaker 2: something that I thought was essentially positive it I didn't
2:10:35
Speaker 2: I couldn't guess always where it was gonna gonna go
2:10:38
Speaker 2: it it it just felt benevolent and like I feel
2:10:45
Speaker 2: starved for that from movies, but I don't think it
2:10:50
Speaker 2: was revolutionary, and you know, if you asked me in
2:10:54
Speaker 2: five years, I probably won't remember it very well. Whereas
2:10:57
Speaker 2: like Andy Wears now, I haven't read the book, but
2:11:02
Speaker 2: I did read and Andy Wear's first book, The Martian,
2:11:07
Speaker 2: which was turned into a great movie, but nowhere near
2:11:10
Speaker 2: as good as the book. The book is all about
2:11:12
Speaker 2: the actual thinking that this guy in Mars is doing,
2:11:16
Speaker 2: and somebody equated it to uh, if you ever watched
2:11:19
Speaker 2: Apollo eleven, that moment where they throw all of the
2:11:23
Speaker 2: pieces of what's on the ship on the table and say,
2:11:27
Speaker 2: use this to solve this problem. They say, do you
2:11:29
Speaker 2: want a whole book like that? And I was like, yes,
2:11:31
Speaker 2: I want a whole book like that. And in this
2:11:35
Speaker 2: movie they didn't show as much of the thought and
2:11:37
Speaker 2: problem solving. They kind of waved, you know, indicated that
2:11:41
Speaker 2: it happened. And I bet the book is probably a
2:11:44
Speaker 2: lot better than that. And I did miss that aspect
2:11:48
Speaker 2: of it. Anything else would be a spoiler, and I
2:11:50
Speaker 2: don't want to give it's still I still think it's worse.
2:11:55
Speaker 1: Right, woman says, is Peter Chiel an ally or mystic demagogue? Neither?
2:12:02
Speaker 1: Why do you have to be one of the other.
2:12:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I don't know my view Peter is.
2:12:08
Speaker 2: I think, well, I'll say one aspect of my view
2:12:12
Speaker 2: of Peters. He's just an interesting thinker.
2:12:16
Speaker 1: He says.
2:12:19
Speaker 2: Surprising things that I've never heard before, and some of
2:12:22
Speaker 2: them are really really profound. Not as much anymore, I find,
2:12:27
Speaker 2: but certainly, you know the You know, he was one
2:12:30
Speaker 2: of the people who was at the forefront of the
2:12:34
Speaker 2: idea of the stagnation hypothesis, which I don't even necessarily
2:12:39
Speaker 2: think was right, or at least I think there was
2:12:41
Speaker 2: a lot of questions to ask about it. But he
2:12:43
Speaker 2: was asking really interesting questions about what was going on
2:12:46
Speaker 2: in the culture, and I learned a lot from him
2:12:48
Speaker 2: about how to ask better questions of the culture. You know.
2:12:52
Speaker 2: I come from things from an objectivist view, which teaches
2:12:55
Speaker 2: us to look for philosophic fundamentals, which I think is
2:12:58
Speaker 2: a really important and undervalued skill in the culture. But
2:13:02
Speaker 2: he is a whole like I got from him a
2:13:05
Speaker 2: whole new thinking toolkit of like how to look at
2:13:08
Speaker 2: other aspects of the culture that are still causally important,
2:13:11
Speaker 2: even if not fundamental, and bring those into play. I
2:13:14
Speaker 2: don't think he's always the best model of how to
2:13:17
Speaker 2: do it. But it enriched my my toolkit for for
2:13:22
Speaker 2: looking at the world, So I have always have a
2:13:25
Speaker 2: positive view of him from that perspective.
2:13:29
Speaker 1: All Right, Cob again, if Christianity's fundamentally opposed to individual
2:13:33
Speaker 1: rights and free markets, how do you explain the fact
2:13:36
Speaker 1: that in America, Christian Conservatives have often been among the
2:13:39
Speaker 1: strongest defenders, you know, with defenders like this, who needs enemies?
2:13:44
Speaker 2: But well that yeah, so first of all, like that's
2:13:50
Speaker 2: even I don't agree with that. It's like, what does
2:13:55
Speaker 2: it mean by defenders? Most of the time they sell
2:13:59
Speaker 2: out on capitalism, Now if you mean some kind of
2:14:02
Speaker 2: half assed form of capitalism, like they like the word Yeah. Sure,
2:14:05
Speaker 2: some people vociferously.
2:14:07
Speaker 1: Said that against Texas.
2:14:10
Speaker 2: They yeah, like that's that's that's the one thing that
2:14:13
Speaker 2: a couple of times they've they've done. But the the
2:14:18
Speaker 2: the deeper issue is this, I actually think that was
2:14:23
Speaker 2: mostly a historical accident.
2:14:26
Speaker 1: I think the the.
2:14:30
Speaker 2: Well Uran and I talk a little bit about the
2:14:33
Speaker 2: dynamics of like the kind of formation of the modern
2:14:38
Speaker 2: American right during the twentieth century, but I think essentially
2:14:43
Speaker 2: what you had, uh is after World War two. The
2:14:51
Speaker 2: you know, the Democrats had been in power for a
2:14:53
Speaker 2: while and there was no actual movement on the right.
2:14:57
Speaker 1: You know, there was.
2:15:00
Speaker 2: Republican politicians and so on, but there was the me
2:15:02
Speaker 2: too democrats, right like this is when you get Eisenhower's
2:15:06
Speaker 2: a sentencye. There was no actual right and in order
2:15:10
Speaker 2: to and and what happened was you got a kind
2:15:15
Speaker 2: of coalition that came together that really was united by
2:15:19
Speaker 2: one thing. And what they were united by was we
2:15:22
Speaker 2: don't like communism. And so you had the anti communists
2:15:25
Speaker 2: who were mostly like ex communists who said, yeah, communism
2:15:28
Speaker 2: is bad. You had the traditionalists who wanted to take
2:15:31
Speaker 2: us back to you know, Burke and even the dark ages.
2:15:35
Speaker 2: And then you had free market and free market leaning people.
2:15:41
Speaker 2: And I think that it really came out of that
2:15:45
Speaker 2: and that what happened is that the by forging that
2:15:51
Speaker 2: kind of coalition, it just had a tribal element where
2:15:55
Speaker 2: people who were anti communists or people who were religious
2:15:59
Speaker 2: became more pro capitalists. People were pro capitalists thought, well,
2:16:03
Speaker 2: I got to embrace religion because that's what our tribe does.
2:16:06
Speaker 2: I think it had a lot of those elements and
2:16:09
Speaker 2: that their pro capitalism was always skin deep, not for
2:16:13
Speaker 2: every individual. I think some you know, there were some
2:16:17
Speaker 2: Christians who like, if you gave them a choice between
2:16:20
Speaker 2: capitalism and God, they choose capitalism. But that clearly that's
2:16:25
Speaker 2: the exception, because look at what they did whenever they
2:16:28
Speaker 2: got power. What did they actually implement whenever they got power?
2:16:33
Speaker 2: And take even somebody like Reagan who in many senses
2:16:36
Speaker 2: one of the better people because he was not really
2:16:38
Speaker 2: personally that religious, though he is the one who let
2:16:43
Speaker 2: the worst of the religionists in the door of the
2:16:46
Speaker 2: GOP and gave them control over the party. But like,
2:16:50
Speaker 2: what did he do to actually cut government? Almost nothing
2:16:56
Speaker 2: and certainly nothing of consequence. And he was, you know,
2:16:59
Speaker 2: like ourankily one of the best, and and it only
2:17:04
Speaker 2: goes downhill from there. But mostly what they tried to
2:17:06
Speaker 2: do when they get political power is ban abortion. Like
2:17:10
Speaker 2: that's been the major thing that they've tried to do
2:17:12
Speaker 2: whenever they get political power. And that tells you everything
2:17:14
Speaker 2: you need to know about what their real driving motives are.
2:17:17
Speaker 1: Is there if you have individual rights, right, I mean,
2:17:20
Speaker 1: if you have individual rights, Ben, thank you for that stick,
2:17:24
Speaker 1: I really appreciate it. Yeah, I mean there's a lot
2:17:29
Speaker 1: to be said about American Christian conservatives. But I think
2:17:34
Speaker 1: that's what Don says, absolutely right, shows bot for after shrugged.
2:17:40
Speaker 1: You can hear the audiobook segment of a certain persons
2:17:43
Speaker 1: three our speech on this platform that is YouTube highly recommended.
2:17:48
Speaker 1: All right, thank you, Shas. But he also send me
2:17:50
Speaker 1: the link.
2:17:52
Speaker 2: It's stolen intellectual property, so you can also.
2:17:57
Speaker 1: It's not there's no right to that's the if it's
2:18:00
Speaker 1: the whole speech. Well, I don't know if it's if
2:18:05
Speaker 1: it's the publisher doing it or I'm sure I guess not. Okay.
2:18:13
Speaker 2: There's also this incredible ability to shell out five bucks
2:18:18
Speaker 2: a month or whatever it is for audible and yeah.
2:18:21
Speaker 1: No, I'm going to pay the whole thing for audible. Absolutely. Wait.
2:18:26
Speaker 1: A woman says, does American need a liberal party? I
2:18:29
Speaker 1: assume you mean liberal in the classical sense?
2:18:33
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, but that's I don't even know what
2:18:37
Speaker 2: that means. No, who's going to come to the party.
2:18:42
Speaker 2: What it needs is people who want pro freedom ideas,
2:18:47
Speaker 2: who want pro freedom policies, and then you'll have a
2:18:50
Speaker 2: party for it. But if you have a party and
2:18:53
Speaker 2: nobody comes, it's you know, the people who do you
2:18:58
Speaker 2: still get people saying you should run for office.
2:19:00
Speaker 1: You're on not in a while?
2:19:02
Speaker 2: No, no, yeah, because you certainly used to. And I
2:19:06
Speaker 2: mean your response is great, nobody would vote for me,
2:19:09
Speaker 2: and you know you can have a party that What
2:19:15
Speaker 2: I wish is that there was a liberal constituency. Now,
2:19:19
Speaker 2: to be clear what I mean, I think liberalism was
2:19:25
Speaker 2: an underdefined, vague term that had all kinds of problems
2:19:29
Speaker 2: with it, but it was still really good. And I
2:19:33
Speaker 2: think it's fine to say even like we're in the
2:19:34
Speaker 2: liberal tradition, Like I think that's right, but that would
2:19:41
Speaker 2: be a step in the right direction. I think ultimately
2:19:44
Speaker 2: what I wanted something way.
2:19:45
Speaker 1: Better and the.
2:19:50
Speaker 2: We're just a long way from there.
2:19:53
Speaker 1: Cobb says, well, then you film The Odyssey revive appreciation
2:19:58
Speaker 1: for ancient Greek civiliza.
2:20:03
Speaker 2: Uh probably not probably. I mean, like if the movie
2:20:09
Speaker 2: does well, what will happen is that sales for the
2:20:12
Speaker 2: Odyssey will go way up and then they'll track the
2:20:16
Speaker 2: Kindle highlights. They'll get three pages in because the Odyssey
2:20:21
Speaker 2: is really really rewarding. But it's one of those books
2:20:24
Speaker 2: that like you have to be toad, like you have
2:20:26
Speaker 2: to have a great teacher. I think to get what's
2:20:29
Speaker 2: rewarding about it. Now. Thankfully there's great teachers online. So, oh,
2:20:34
Speaker 2: you're on My wife and I watched ham Knet. Yes, Jay,
2:20:37
Speaker 2: have you seen that? I haven't seen it yet. I
2:20:41
Speaker 2: watch it and it made me think, like, I really
2:20:44
Speaker 2: need to find a great teacher of Shakespeare.
2:20:47
Speaker 1: Now.
2:20:47
Speaker 2: Leonard does a great job on a Fella and but
2:20:52
Speaker 2: I need a great teacher to walk me through Hamlet
2:20:56
Speaker 2: and more broadly, like how to appreciate edit more line
2:21:00
Speaker 2: by line function what he's doing. And then Harold Bloom
2:21:03
Speaker 2: of all people, has this incredible lecture on YouTube. I
2:21:07
Speaker 2: hope it's not stolen Internet stolen intellectual property, because then
2:21:11
Speaker 2: your audience will mock me from my inconsistency. But I
2:21:16
Speaker 2: only got to listen about twenty minutes of it yesterday,
2:21:18
Speaker 2: but it was incredible, Like just somebody who can bring
2:21:22
Speaker 2: you into that author's world and help you see what's
2:21:26
Speaker 2: going on there. You need something like that for the Odyssey,
2:21:28
Speaker 2: I think for people to do I.
2:21:30
Speaker 1: Think there's a lot of that of Shakespeare because there's
2:21:32
Speaker 1: so many people who've done it. But I love watching
2:21:36
Speaker 1: Shakespeare plays. I can't read it. I can't understand half
2:21:39
Speaker 1: the woods, but in the context of somebody performing it.
2:21:44
Speaker 1: It's I can get it right. But I love watching
2:21:48
Speaker 1: Shakespeare plays and I'm looking forward to watching Hamnet. But yes,
2:21:53
Speaker 1: if somebody gives you the provides the context, it's so
2:21:57
Speaker 1: much richer. It's amazing.
2:22:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I would say, here's a good tip
2:22:03
Speaker 2: for people for really hard literature. Don't worry about spoilers.
2:22:13
Speaker 2: Try it with Let me put it differently, if you
2:22:17
Speaker 2: can't get through it on your own, stop worrying about spoilers.
2:22:21
Speaker 2: Read some summaries, find a great teacher, go through that first,
2:22:24
Speaker 2: and then you can immerse yourself and learn it. And
2:22:30
Speaker 2: but that said, I mean, the Odyssey is like, you know,
2:22:36
Speaker 2: that's just the beginnings of what we think of as
2:22:39
Speaker 2: Greek culture. You're a long way from the height of
2:22:42
Speaker 2: Greek culture. I mean, I much rather than make an
2:22:45
Speaker 2: antigony movie, right, like something like that made.
2:22:52
Speaker 1: A vagular collection that there is one, maybe the Silent
2:22:56
Speaker 1: It was something, but I don't know of any kind
2:22:58
Speaker 1: of modern antigony now. And and generally the Greek plays.
2:23:06
Speaker 2: Under leverage source.
2:23:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was, there's some Italian movies in the seventies
2:23:13
Speaker 1: made of some of the Greek plays.
2:23:15
Speaker 2: I'm just shocked, like even like Death of Socrates seems
2:23:19
Speaker 2: like that's just like waiting for like that's a way
2:23:22
Speaker 2: better like like trial and and murder story than the Bible. Nothing.
2:23:30
Speaker 1: All right, Samnet's is streaming now? Wait, yeah, it's on Peacock,
2:23:37
Speaker 1: all right. I can't get Peacock in Puerto Rico.
2:23:41
Speaker 2: All right, Well, then in Peacock on Amazon.
2:23:43
Speaker 1: You know, I think I get Peacock. I don't get
2:23:44
Speaker 1: the other one, one of them I don't get. I'll
2:23:46
Speaker 1: check it out, all right, cop gone. Is Michael Connley
2:23:51
Speaker 1: the best crying fiction writer of life today? In your opinion?
2:23:56
Speaker 2: No, Don Winslow, Don Winslow, Okay, So I love Michael Connolly.
2:24:04
Speaker 2: I think he's written some great books. Don Winslow wrote,
2:24:12
Speaker 2: I've read many things of his, but the the two best.
2:24:17
Speaker 2: If you want one thing, he wrote a book called
2:24:19
Speaker 2: The Force, which is a standalone book about a corrupt
2:24:23
Speaker 2: police officer. And he's just a combination of everything I
2:24:28
Speaker 2: write like. The writing is lean, it has a memorable voice.
2:24:32
Speaker 2: The stories are plot like, they're not plots you've heard before,
2:24:35
Speaker 2: even well told ones, like he's just doing things in
2:24:38
Speaker 2: the story that you haven't seen before. And making real
2:24:42
Speaker 2: intellectual points, and then has a real realism, the kind
2:24:46
Speaker 2: of realism I like where you feel like I know this,
2:24:48
Speaker 2: like this is the real world, and I'm seeing inside
2:24:51
Speaker 2: of it in a way I haven't before. You'ran as
2:24:53
Speaker 2: somebody who likes the wire. It's that kind of taking
2:24:56
Speaker 2: you into a world. But then his his greatest achievement
2:25:01
Speaker 2: is he wrote a trilogy on the drug cartels. And
2:25:04
Speaker 2: it's outside of like quote unquote serious fiction. It's the
2:25:10
Speaker 2: greatest series of is the greatest thing I've read in
2:25:17
Speaker 2: kind of on the more crime side, what's called at
2:25:20
Speaker 2: least so the first one is called The Power of
2:25:23
Speaker 2: the Dog, and then there's two others after that, and
2:25:29
Speaker 2: he's he's kind of loosely basing it on the history
2:25:33
Speaker 2: of the cartel, the real history of the cartels. But
2:25:38
Speaker 2: it's I mean, it's it's rough stuff in many ways,
2:25:41
Speaker 2: but it's just so the writing. I just remember reading
2:25:48
Speaker 2: it and saying, like God, I'll never write anything that good,
2:25:54
Speaker 2: and just being in awe of it. And I did
2:25:58
Speaker 2: have a chance to meet him briefly while he was
2:26:01
Speaker 2: out here in Michigan. And don't look him up on Twitter.
2:26:06
Speaker 2: If you're you're a Trump is because he's kind of
2:26:09
Speaker 2: maniacally almost in a in a unhinged way, you know,
2:26:14
Speaker 2: anti anti Trump. Well, but this is even you know,
2:26:21
Speaker 2: like I'm I'm more with you, but even to me,
2:26:23
Speaker 2: it's like a little settle them. But uh, those books
2:26:29
Speaker 2: are just outstandingly magnificent. In fact, he just had a
2:26:35
Speaker 2: movie just came out, I think called Crime one oh one,
2:26:37
Speaker 2: based on one of his works, but I haven't seen
2:26:39
Speaker 2: that yet.
2:26:42
Speaker 1: Let's see formal questions. Would he go in two and
2:26:47
Speaker 1: a half hours? Religious philosophy this is called religious philosophy
2:26:52
Speaker 1: equals faith, feeling emotions, believing as epistemology, living for God
2:26:57
Speaker 1: for others in ethics, magical world, unseen forces for good
2:27:01
Speaker 1: and evil as metaphysics. Any comments.
2:27:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, but if we're going to go at that level
2:27:10
Speaker 2: of detail, we could go all night, right like, once
2:27:13
Speaker 2: you're getting down to you know, magic. H No, I
2:27:18
Speaker 2: think the like I think of it as there's philosophic
2:27:23
Speaker 2: fundamentals and then you want to have in order to distinguish.
2:27:28
Speaker 2: But the you know, the philosophic fundamentals of any religion
2:27:31
Speaker 2: are going to be essentially similar, right, Like you're you're
2:27:34
Speaker 2: going to have essentially like the some form of faith
2:27:42
Speaker 2: versus reason in some form of subordination of individual happiness,
2:27:49
Speaker 2: certainly at least in Western religions.
2:27:52
Speaker 1: But the.
2:27:55
Speaker 2: And then you want some flavor of what are the
2:27:58
Speaker 2: kind of essential doctrines, They give it some specificity or
2:28:02
Speaker 2: its own content or character. And so I would go
2:28:08
Speaker 2: a little bit beyond faith versus reason and and the
2:28:14
Speaker 2: individual and earthly happiness versus obedience. But you know, I
2:28:25
Speaker 2: gave the kind of big three of the creation, fall,
2:28:28
Speaker 2: and redemption through Christ. Those would probably be what I
2:28:31
Speaker 2: would pick out is essentials and then all that other stuff, yes,
2:28:35
Speaker 2: and a million other things.
2:28:39
Speaker 1: Okay, Roman says is the dictatorship of Roman invention.
2:28:48
Speaker 2: I don't know that it's a Roman invention. If we
2:28:51
Speaker 2: just mean like one person has authoritarian power, I mean
2:28:58
Speaker 2: the concept I don't know personally even earlier source. I mean,
2:29:02
Speaker 2: you know, because dictator for them was like it wasn't
2:29:05
Speaker 2: an authoritarian ruler controlling everything. It was like, hey, we're
2:29:09
Speaker 2: going to temporarily give this person the position of dictator
2:29:12
Speaker 2: because we need them to perform a certain function in
2:29:15
Speaker 2: an unusual emergency context or something like that. So in
2:29:21
Speaker 2: that sense, it might be the beginning. But you know,
2:29:23
Speaker 2: the idea of one person has all the power that
2:29:26
Speaker 2: that seems like a pretty pretty longstanding phenomenon in human
2:29:30
Speaker 2: in human life.
2:29:32
Speaker 1: Right. Roman says, where would Western civilization be today? If
2:29:35
Speaker 1: the Library of Alexandria survived? I know, you could write
2:29:42
Speaker 1: an his stoical novel, you know, around that premise.
2:29:46
Speaker 2: No, it does always pain me, and but it doesn't
2:29:53
Speaker 2: really get you anywhere. It does remind me of a
2:29:57
Speaker 2: movie that's not very historically accurate, but gets to the
2:30:01
Speaker 2: core it's spiritually accurate. Yeah, we'll put it that way.
2:30:05
Speaker 2: A GOA, it's a it's a good movie.
2:30:09
Speaker 1: It's it's beautiful. Yeah, I mean that one.
2:30:14
Speaker 2: It conquertizes for me, the the like what I hate
2:30:17
Speaker 2: about Christianity, even though I recognized for those out there,
2:30:20
Speaker 2: no that's not.
2:30:22
Speaker 1: Well, it's not exactly how it happened, but in spirit,
2:30:25
Speaker 1: it is what happened, right, Yeah, I mean.
2:30:28
Speaker 2: It's tearing down civilization. But they didn't burn that particular library.
2:30:33
Speaker 1: And yeah, yeah they melted down the statues. They destroyed
2:30:41
Speaker 1: so much.
2:30:43
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, they burned plenty of plenty of books.
2:30:46
Speaker 1: And lots of other libraries. I mean there were a
2:30:48
Speaker 1: lot of libraries. Alexandria was just the is the most
2:30:51
Speaker 1: famous of all of them. But a lot of libraries disappeared.
2:30:54
Speaker 1: And and that's true in the Muslim world as well.
2:30:57
Speaker 1: All the libraries in Baghdad who were which was the
2:30:59
Speaker 1: largest in the world, were all destroyed at some point. Now,
2:31:05
Speaker 1: any one of those library surviving would have given us
2:31:08
Speaker 1: access to stuff that we only vaguely know existed but
2:31:13
Speaker 1: don't know the content of.
2:31:14
Speaker 2: I mean, the thing that kills me is I just
2:31:16
Speaker 2: wish we had one of Aristotle's popular works, right, just
2:31:21
Speaker 2: one example, because you know, they said, you know, he's
2:31:24
Speaker 2: an amazing writer, you know he like Instead we get
2:31:27
Speaker 2: his like lecture notes. I would just love one example
2:31:32
Speaker 2: to see what it would have been like to you know,
2:31:38
Speaker 2: back open when he was writing for the Populace.
2:31:42
Speaker 1: Carl has the last wood, final Wood. Thank you for
2:31:45
Speaker 1: your work in this topic. Religious philosophy is a source
2:31:47
Speaker 1: of all evil. Religion cripples the young. Please kip up
2:31:52
Speaker 1: the good work. Thank you. Call uh Enwick asks views
2:31:58
Speaker 1: in the pakas reached by Richard Stock.
2:32:03
Speaker 2: Not familiar with it.
2:32:05
Speaker 1: Okay, oh guys, thank you, don it's yeah. Two and
2:32:10
Speaker 1: a half hours thank you guys for being here. Thanks
2:32:14
Speaker 1: to all the super Shatters. I will see you guys tomorrow.
2:32:19
Speaker 1: I will see don An maybe before.
2:32:24
Speaker 2: No, I'm having a I'm having to do baby during OCON.
2:32:27
Speaker 1: Oh you're not gonna be at OCON.
2:32:28
Speaker 2: Not going to be at o'con.
2:32:30
Speaker 1: Oh wow. So I don't know when.
2:32:31
Speaker 2: Which as somebody, as somebody who's success at my work
2:32:34
Speaker 2: depends on getting people to come to OCON. Maybe I
2:32:37
Speaker 2: shouldn't tell you guys. On the other hand, maybe a
2:32:40
Speaker 2: lot of people will buy tickets if I'm not there,
2:32:42
Speaker 2: So who has to be?
2:32:43
Speaker 1: You should come to OCON.
2:32:45
Speaker 2: Absolutely, somebody's got to keep your own.
2:32:47
Speaker 3: Company, absolutely, absolutely, all right. I know it's way past
2:32:51
Speaker 3: your bedtime. It's at my bedtime, so it's time to
2:32:55
Speaker 3: go to sleep. See it hi, everybody, See guys tomorrow.
2:33:01
Speaker 1: Two