Latest / Mahon McCann / Paul Kingsnorth: How HUMANITY beats the MACHINE

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Paul Kingsnorth: How HUMANITY beats the MACHINE · Mahon McCann

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Mr. Paul Kingsnorth, thank you very much for joining me on the podcast today.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Beforehand, I was saying, you know, you're kind of a white whale of mine.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's been for a very long time I've wanted to get you on and,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: yeah, to discuss some of your ideas and particularly be talking about this book.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Against the Machine,
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: you know, on the unmaking of humanity, amazing work on a very important topic.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll put the link in the description,
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: encourage people to get a copy of it and check out the Substack because it's,
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: you know, I mean, it's everywhere.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: We're in the machine right now, unfortunately.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Alas, yeah.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Having this.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, thank you.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's great.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to be here, actually.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: We have been going back and forth for a while, so I'm glad we finally got to talk.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, totally.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so I suppose to start off,
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: maybe I'd said before as well,
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: I want to focus on kind of the better story beyond the machine for a good part of
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: the conversation,
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: but maybe to set the scene, I think, how would you tell the story of the machine?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: You talk about the dream of the machine a lot in the book as well.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what do you think is that the motivation behind it that's kind
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: of driving this whole thing?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's interesting you refer to the white whale because I kind
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: of feel like I've been pursuing the machine like a white whale for about 30 years.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I've had to write a 350 page book on it just to try and define what it is
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: and what it isn't and what we're living through.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: So this phrase, the machine, the first thing to say is it's not my phrase.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's a phrase I've used.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: A phrase that's been used by writers and thinkers for probably at least 200 years,
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: at least since the Industrial Revolution.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can certainly see some of my favorite writers and poets using it a lot.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I reference quite a lot of them in the book.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: So what we're talking about really is a system.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I would say the machine is.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's a system of, I mean,
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: when people talk about the machine,
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: when they hear this word, they often think of technology.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we might think of laptops,
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: the internet,
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: smartphones, et cetera, and whether we think those are good or bad things.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the machine is much bigger than that.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: The machine is a system.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's a way of thinking.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's a way of seeing.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the digital tech that is kind of enveloping and enslaving us now,
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: that's a manifestation of it, if you like.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: I would say that what we call the machine is a way of thinking and it's a way of seeing.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very,
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: very left hemisphere,
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: very analytical,
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: very logical,
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: very focused on notions of,
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: say, economic growth and progress and kind of the fulfillment of individual desire.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's very much tied up with capitalist economics, but I wouldn't say exclusively.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we can look at, say,
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: the Soviet Union and say that that was a very machine like society in many ways.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we're really looking at a way of thinking and the system that emerges from
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: that way of thinking,
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: which has come about,
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you could argue that it's been around for a very long time.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: In the book, I quote Lewis Mumford, who traces it back at least to the Egyptian pyramid age.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: But if we were to look at the modern manifestation of the thing we're living
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: through now, we would have to say it probably comes from the Industrial Revolution.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of trends in Western Europe that are kind of tied up with that,
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: the Enlightenment,
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: the Renaissance,
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: the Scientific Revolution,
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: all of which create A society which is profoundly materialistic,
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: profoundly anti-spiritual or at least anti-religious,
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: very focused on moving forward and very focused on the control of nature.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so I would say the machine is a system,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: a way of thinking,
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: a way of seeing that manifests in this very big technological society,
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: which is now kind of entrapping us within it.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it has a direction of travel and the direction of travel.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's where the transhumanists are going.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these are the people really who are creating the digital tech that we use every day.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And what they're really after is immortality and the replacement of nature
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: by technology and the creation of intelligence and the creation of killer robots
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: and all the rest of it.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: So interestingly,
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think the machine in one sense looks like just a sort of materialist project.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's very much about technology and growth and productivity and measurements and yada yada.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also almost a theology behind it.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if you listen to, again,
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: the guys creating the systems that we're using,
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: say, for example, Google, what's Google?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a web search.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a bit of software.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bunch of people who are looking to create artificial intelligence
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: and effectively new forms of life.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a strange kind of technological theology behind it, if you like.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: It almost starts to look like a religious system from a certain angle.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm trying to explore all these different strands in the book, sort of pull them together.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then, as you say, look at how you might live differently.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's quite a big project.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it works, but I hope it does.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, there's I mean, there's so much in there.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many levels of there's something I don't know
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: if you've you've probably read Heidegger's essay on technology where he talks about
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: the technological mindset as in in frame and it's a way of looking at things as
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: a standing reserve.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: You're basically like instrumentalizing everything in a way.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: You're looking at everything about what can I do with it or what can I do to it
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: to achieve something.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: I really think something that's behind it is this power mindset.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's a way of like, how can I have power over everything?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: In contrast to love,
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: which is encountering things as actual beings,
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: as actual having a reality of their own.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Our human beings and creatures are ends rather than just means,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: whereas the technological mindset is employing everything as a means to a
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: A particular end, everything becomes kind of valid to use as resources.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And even now, like with the internet, human attention is considered as a resource.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: In my own work,
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: I critique that idea because you're basically saying a human consciousness is
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: a resource that can be mined.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's actually part of the machine itself that people are using to try and critique
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: the machine, but it's like we're actually using the same mindset.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's a really good way of putting it.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Power is one of the things behind it.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: One of the chapters in the book compares the history of science with the history
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: of magic and concludes that actually they have basically the same drive behind them,
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: which is this kind of...
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Famous sort of Alistair Crowley quote about the necessity of enslaving nature
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: and Francis Bacon saying much of the same thing and all the rest of it.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it is absolutely about power.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: C.S.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis says human nature will be the last part of nature that falls to man.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so ultimately what we are trying to do,
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I see it as an attempt to conquer nature, but also...
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: An attempt to conquer human nature and then to recreate it.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's almost symbolically best seen in the desire that all
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: the tech overlords have to colonize Mars.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: I find this fascinating, the fact that they're all so desperate to go to space.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as you make yourself a billion dollars, what do you spend it on?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: You spend it on making your own space rocket.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: You don't spend it on making the Earth better or solving poverty or preventing
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: the forests from being destroyed or stopping climate change.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: You spend it on flying off to another planet because you've already wrecked this one.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And why do you do that?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: You do that because if you were to go to Mars, you would find a planet that is completely dead.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we get to start right from the beginning.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: We don't even have to conquer nature.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: We just get to build in our image right at the beginning and create our own world,
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: which is ultimately what this is about.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see that in religious terms.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you and I are both Christians.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, I think you would see that as a species of astonishing pride.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I also think you would almost see it as something that was already happening in
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: the Garden of Eden.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you don't have to be a Christian.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: You can look back at the story of Prometheus.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: You can look at almost any myth about what happens when humans try to take power
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: from the gods and become gods themselves.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of stories about that because humans have always been doing that.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: So in that sense, the machine is actually very old as well.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: The impulse behind it to become gods,
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: as you say,
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: to have power over everything,
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: to create a world,
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: to build a new Tower of Babel,
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: as I think the Pope recently called it,
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: which actually I think I call it that in my book as well, interestingly.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: So Yeah,
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: so the impulse is very old,
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: but the technology is...
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there's something behind, I mean,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: there's so much good stuff there,
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: like the Garden of Eden,
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: the kind of sin of pride,
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: but taking on to say,
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: I am the maker of good and evil,
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: or I am the maker of reality,
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: you know, I can, it's,
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: there's a very nominalist or kind of anti-realist move that it's like,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: there's not a mind independent reality that we have to like conform our will to.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: The basis of every kind of tradition.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, I don't make reality.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: I have to get in alignment with it or else I'm sinning and I'm off track.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas for these guys, it's almost like they're saying, no, no, there's nothing else out there.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's like putty and I'm just going to remake it into the perfect kind of shape,
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: which obviously we know kind of goes awry typically in history.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no,
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's the key as well,
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: because,
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: and again, I mean,
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: the more you start exploring these questions,
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: the more you end up in a spiritual place,
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: if you like,
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: or in a religious place,
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: and people might have different religions and spiritual understandings.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: But what it comes down to is the question of what reality is.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And if you,
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: as you say,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: think the reality is just a standing reserve,
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: or it's just putty,
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: in other words,
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: that you're a modern materialist,
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: you believe that Say the whole of the universe has just exploded into existence
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: by accident for no reason because of the Big Bang, whatever that is.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Let's not explore that too closely.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Let's ignore the fact that it looks a bit like the thereby light command
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: the beginning of Genesis, but never mind that.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: So the Big Bang happens and then evolution randomly happens
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: and consciousness randomly emerges and we're all just floating,
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: spinning through space on a rock that happens to have some consciousness on it.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you see the world like that, it's pretty much the modern story now.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Then it it kind of makes sense to treat it like putty, because what is it?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's no as you say, there's no greater reality behind it.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's no ethics.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's no morality.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's no there's no creator saying this is how you have to live and this is
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: the wrong way to live.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: There are no rules.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Dostoevsky's famous quote from the brothers Karamazov,
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: without God, everything is anything is permitted.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's where you end up.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, why not colonize Mars?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why not?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Create new intelligences.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Why not have eugenics?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Why not have anything?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no answer.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's no reason to say no.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's no ethical, moral reason.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's only limits that you think you can bust through with tech.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: So unless you believe there is a bigger reality of some kind that you're supposed
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: to align yourself with,
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: and that there's something spiritually wrong with doing this stuff, then...
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's no reason not to do it.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I'll tell you what's interesting is that a lot of people
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: who certainly wouldn't consider themselves to be religious still get very icky
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: about what's going on.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And they'll say it's wrong.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't think eugenics is right.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we should be, you know, putting chips in our brains.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we should be creating intelligent robots.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then you say, well, why not?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no answer that they can necessarily pin down.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: But it just feels wrong to people, which I think in itself is very telling.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah,
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: that is what it comes down to in the end,
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: actually, is what you think reality is and also what you think humans are.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because once again, to go back to that Garden of Eden, what do you do in the Garden of Eden?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're told that if you steal the fruit of the tree of knowledge, you can become as gods.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's very simple.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I want knowledge.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: I want it given to me free.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to earn it so that I can be like a god.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what we're up to.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing new at all.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not,
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was Jonathan Pajot and Matthew Pajot had referred to it sometimes as
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: the second fall.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: With the kind of move into modernity,
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: we had a second fall where we rejected the structure,
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: the realism,
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose,
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: even of the classical tradition and of the medieval tradition in favor of this.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: There is no kind of order to reality.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's no logos.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think materialism,
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: if things are just atoms and stuff,
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Bouncing around, you know, form is just accidental.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: It kind of comes out of the stuff rather than form being an actual reality
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: that constrains the stuff.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: In which case, you know, human beings have a form.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: We have to like that whole ancient structure.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as you reject that,
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: you kind of end up in this,
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: you know, we are the masters of all things kind of reality.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And we've been playing that out,
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: since kind of the dawn of I bring it back a lot to the mechanical philosophy or like
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: the The origins of the kind of scientific revolution,
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: but probably the seeds of it were there anyway.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, somehow we just managed to not do it for a while since the Garden of Eden.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: mean, I don't know.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I see it as something that's always in.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, look, again,
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: if you see it from a Christian point of view, you see that humans have fallen.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: That means that we have.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it means that we have sinned.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what does that mean?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: It means we've missed the mark because that's the original meaning of the Greek word.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a martyr or martyr or something.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Sin comes from an archery term.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: So again, that means that you're out of alignment with reality.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: So if you see that as basically the state of humans,
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: and again,
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think you can see other traditions and mythologies saying that that's the state
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: of humans as well,
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: even though they don't use the same term,
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: then we're going to keep constantly coming back to that state
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: unless we correct ourselves out of it.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And what I think maybe is, in one sense, the story is very old.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's as old as people.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: But what's new now, maybe,
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: is I can't think of another society in human history that has had no spiritual core
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: to it.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I can't think.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you mentioned,
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: let's say,
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: the classical Greek philosophers,
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: and they're all arguing about the nature of reality.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: But they all assume that there's a God or there are gods.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's a divinity.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: There are forms.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's something out there.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying to work out what it is.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're arguing about what it is.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know of any of them who say, well, there's nothing.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a great giant material accident.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can go to the smallest indigenous tribe.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can go to even the Romans with their enormous empire.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Every one of them has got a spiritual tradition.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Every one of them is worshipping.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Every one of them is paying obeisance to what they consider to be the right form of divinity.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we can all have arguments and discussions about what the right form
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: of divinity is, and we'll disagree on that.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: But has there ever been a culture in history,
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: certainly one that's big and powerful,
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: that basically at its core is fundamentally atheistic, materialistic?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think there has.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And in one sense,
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: obviously,
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: there are lots of religious people around and people have all sorts of beliefs.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's a kind of free country, if you like, in Western nations.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: But the core of what we are pursuing is profoundly just materialist and atheistic.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's unique.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have that, then, as I say, there's no reason Yeah.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly, yeah,
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: you talk about it in the book in terms of progress and like the idea of progress,
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: progressing towards like this utopic state that's kind of super vague and not like,
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what it is,
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: but it does seem to be just like purely hedonic satisfaction.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like we just control everything.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: We can get rid of death.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: We can get rid of suffering.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: We can just feel good forever or something like that,
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: which is like, because I guess they don't have any other idea of
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: always
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: interesting to me as well,
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: this stuff,
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: the ideology of progress comes from Western nations and Western nations
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: and Christian nations,
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: or at least all their theology is,
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: their way of seeing is formed by Christianity, even if people may not be Christian.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens if you take Christian eschatology and just take Christ out, take God out?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you still have a sense of linear time.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's a beginning and there's going to be an end.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: You have a sense of, you know, there is a heaven that you want to get to.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: There is a closeness to God that you can achieve through changing your behavior.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: There is a salvation.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: There's a kind of there's a hell, there's a heaven, etc.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you take Christ out,
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: take God out and you turn that into an atheistic story,
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: you get the story of progress, which is we are moving forward all the time.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Things used to be terrible.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now they're better.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: In the future, they'll be even better still.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the primary driver of that is science and technology and reason through
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: which we can control nature and make this utopia.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: So as you say, the utopia is very vague.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: There's no actual end point,
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: but it does end up with immortality,
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: which, of course, is where the Christian story also ends up.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: You have an immortal soul and you're going to be either with God or you're not.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what we've got in the technological story as well.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: We just haven't got the soul.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: We've just got the body.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we try to make the body live forever.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we're going to upload our minds into mind files.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole religion I mentioned in the book called Terasem,
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: this kind of technological religion,
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: which is fascinating,
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: started by a couple of transhumanists who believe
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: in uploading everybody's mind files into an immortal cloud.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we get to live forever.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we are literally living in the cloud,
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: which is the sort of classical picture of heaven, right?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: You're up there on the cloud, strumming your harps with the angels.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we want to be in the cloud, only we've made the cloud.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Not the irony.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Not the irony of it.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: So you're going to end up in the cloud.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'd rather end up in the other type of cloud, personally.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: But so it's almost like Christian eschatology without Christ.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it is.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm with no cross either.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: No cross.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely no cross.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: There's no sacrifice.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so this time around, you don't have to be crucified, right?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to die to the world.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to do the things that Christians are supposed to do, at least.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: You just get to do it for free.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's brilliant.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: The tech will save you.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if it's necessarily that it's hedonism that's being pursued as
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: a world without suffering.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's the idea.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, hedonism might be included in that,
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: but ideally,
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: it's this,
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: you always hear this argument, technology is good because it reduces suffering.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if people want to argue back at people like me,
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: they will say,
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: oh, right, so would you like to live in a world with no modern medicine?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Would you like to die of cancer?
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Would you like children to die, women to die in childbirth and things?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: and it's a perfectly fair argument because obviously technology does,
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: to some degree anyway, reduce suffering.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, you can do that.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: But can it reduce all suffering?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: And should it?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what would we be if we were transformed into the sort of beings
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: that never suffered either emotionally or physically?
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: How would that even be possible?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: You listen to people like, say, Peter Thiel or.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Zoltanist fan,
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: some of these transhumanists,
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: and they've got this astonishingly sort of naive utopian view of a world
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: with no suffering.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's happy.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of singing, singing on the clouds.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, it's a it's a mad idea, but they think they can do it.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what they're after.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: It seems the exact opposite of like the Christian liberation through the pain,
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: you know, that are.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Our humanity is like a broken bone that has to be rebroken in order to be set properly.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: You have to go through the cross to get back to paradise.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: If we just remove that, it's like, yeah, well, maybe we can just have it.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: It strikes me how much technology is trying to solve the fall,
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: but without the redemption of Christ.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: You're going to solve death, you're going to solve work, no pain in childbirth, all this stuff.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: A technological solution,
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: but again, they're running that experiment in real time to be like, can we do it?
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't think it's going anywhere good anyway.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a really good way of putting it.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're trying to reverse the fall.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think from a Christian perspective, that's exactly what's going on.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's as simple as that.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: But again,
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: you can look at the stories of, say,
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: the Tower of Babel,
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: which would be the obvious one from Genesis and go,
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: well, we tried that before as well.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's a certain amount you can do with technology.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's a certain amount you can do with human ingenuity to reduce suffering and
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: to make things more convenient.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we like those things.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: The question that the book pursues to some degree,
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: and I don't really know what the answer is, is can you ever stop that?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Is this process just something that once you've started it,
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: you can't get off the train, which is what I tend to think?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Could you say, okay, well, I think we've had a lot of technological progress now.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: We've got some good medicine and we've got these systems,
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: but maybe we won't go down the path of killer robots and building giant brains
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: and uploading our minds.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we'll stop here.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting that it doesn't seem possible to stop once you get on that train.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't seem possible to have a kind of Butlerian jihad against technology
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: because it's got its own momentum.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it seems to be there's something behind it that it's got a teleology.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's going somewhere.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: one of the things that fascinates me here is the fact that so many of
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: the people creating AI systems are scared of them.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you see this again and again.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's some of it in the book, but you see it all over the place.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's going very fast.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: The people creating,
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: putting together petitions that say we need a pause
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: on AI development are mostly AI developers.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I've never come across a situation with a possible exception of nuclear weapons
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: where the people creating the thing are saying,
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: this is a scary thing that's going to destroy us.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: Please stop.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody needs to stop me from building this thing.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: None of them do stop because they think,
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: oh, well, if I stop, then the other guys will get ahead of us.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we can't have the Chinese getting AI killer robots before us.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to keep doing it.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, it goes on like that.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: But it's the fact that the people who are creating these things are disturbed
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: by them, don't quite know what they are and would like us to pause, but don't.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: That in itself is spiritually disturbing,
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: but also practically disturbing,
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: you know, because nobody seems to be in control of this.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's just running away on its own.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of think, I don't know if you agree, that AI is like the high point of the machine.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost like,
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: I almost feel like that's so built into the dream in some sense that you could have.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Cause it's like,
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: you can automate,
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know, you can automate certain features of our lives that make it easier.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: But like,
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: if you can create an intelligence that can do problem solving for you,
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: you've then automated everything.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Basically that Nick Bostrom book where deep utopia, he talks about a solved world.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you get this super intelligence, it will just solve.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: All the problems.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's like,
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: and then we can just do, you know, we'll paint paintings and sing songs or whatever.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like,
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: it's almost like the final furlong or something of like,
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: can we actually machine ourselves?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was always going in this direction.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I said, that C.S.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis quote is the key to it.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the last part of nature that's going to fall to the conquest of man is human nature.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's the ultimate logical endpoint.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: And again, with AI...
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: They're creating these things before they know what they're for,
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: which again is quite a different thing from a lot of technological development.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you might create a machine, say a tractor or something to do a particular job.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then it will do that job and it might have bad side effects.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: It might compact the soil and all sorts of bad stuff, but it's created to do a job, right?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you know what that's for.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: What job is AI created to do?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody really knows.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, potentially it can do lots of things.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: It can make lots of people redundant and do this and the other.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think that's the driver behind it.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think the driver behind it is this kind of theological or spiritual
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: or just utopian desire to do it.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is the end point of the technological system.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, we're going to create basically gods.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Ray Kurzweil,
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: who's the director of engineering at Google, famously, he was asked, does God exist?
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think God exists?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, not yet.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: Which, you know, that's it.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is what they're up to.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: And these are not fringe figures.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that always is the end point.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, interestingly, you can go and read George Orwell writing in the 1930s.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: And he's critiquing the technological society of, say, the 1890s.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: People like H.G.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Wells and the Fabians.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: And all these people have exactly the same utopian dreams.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is where the word robot actually comes from.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: It comes from Yevgeny Zamyutin's novel, We.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: He invented the word robot.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a satire of this kind of very progressive utopian world in which,
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: yeah, the machines are going to do everything.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we're just going to be free to do anything we want.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, that world was supposed to have arrived by the middle of the 20th century.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember growing up in England, say,
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: in the 1970s and watching like Tomorrow's World on the TV and hearing
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: about how fantastic the 2000s were going to be.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: We'd all have our own jetpacks and no one would have to work and all this stuff.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it's always sort of pushed into the future slightly further.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, at the moment, we're probably working longer hours than we've ever worked.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's more stressed than ever before.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're all controlled by machines.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: We're still a very long way from this paradise in which we can just get up in
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: the morning and paint a picture and the machines do what I work for.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of Jetson's world.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: It never seems to arrive.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: But what does arrive is kind of sinister talking robots and things.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Terrified.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: That was what my granddad would say.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: In the 90s,
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: all everyone would talk about is what they were going to do once
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: the computers could do everything and they would do all the work for them.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just panned out that we actually just have more work and people are more stressed.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: Funny how it always works.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still old enough to remember when email was invented.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember all the discussion about this and how brilliant this was going to be
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: because it was going to be so convenient because you wouldn't have to sit down
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: and write your letter with a pen and paper and then put it in an envelope and put
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: a stamp on it,
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: go to the post box, You just press a button and you send off your letter.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: And of course you do,
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: but then you get 4,000 more letters a day than you were ever getting before.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you end up spending six hours a day on email and all the rest of it.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so actually it's much less convenient.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't quite pan out that way.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: No, it didn't.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: There's always a glitch in the machine.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well,
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've gotten a good,
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's a pretty good grounding, I think, in the machine.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: And you reference in the book,
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: you say, like,
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: what we need is a better story,
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: which really resonated with me, because I think that's what people are looking for.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: And there is kind of,
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: in strange pockets of the internet and different places,
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: people are kind of trying to figure out what this better story is.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: I figured maybe, yeah, to spend some time on trying to think about what is the better story.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think, as we both agree, it's the Christian story.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: But since we're both converts,
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: it's also not that easy to live in the Christian story in some sense.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: It can be hard.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: It can take time to actually inhabit the Christian story and how to inhabit properly.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe there's some logs to the fire.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I think people have spent 2,000 years trying to work out how to inhabit
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: the Christian story.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's very hard.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's a good story I like about Saint Sophrony of Essex, who's an Orthodox saint.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: He's a Russian and he actually came to England in the 1950s and he helped
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: to set up England first.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I think maybe so far only Orthodox Monastery, which is in Essex.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: And he was canonized by the church a few years ago.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's a story about he's at the end of his life.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: He's approached by this excitable young Orthodox convert who's just been baptized.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, he says, Father, I'm very excited.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: I just become an Orthodox Christian.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: Saint-Sophony says, well, that's very nice for you.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still trying to work out how to be one.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the way to do it.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it is hard.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: So in the book,
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: it's not, I mean, it's a slightly awkward book in the sense that I'm a Christian.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was becoming a Christian in the process of writing the book.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously the Christian story is informing it deeply,
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: but it's also a book that is written for a mainstream audience.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't want it just to be a Christian book,
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: but at the same time,
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: I want it to be informed by Christianity, which is sort of a tricky balance.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: But I came up with this little formula in the book.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, firstly,
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: to say new story is exactly what we need,
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: but maybe more than one, maybe new stories.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: Spiritually,
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: certainly if you're a Christian,
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: there's only one story, but there's also lots of different ways you can live it.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's lots of different cultures and ways of being.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you can distinguish between,
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: the boundaries are fuzzy sometimes,
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: but I think you can distinguish between how to live as a human and how to live in
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: the machine.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: The machine fundamentally dehumanizes us.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: And as I say,
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: I came up with this formula in the book, the four P's and the four S's, if you like.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: The four S's are the world that the machine is creating.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I have sex, science, self, and the screen.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: So you have sex, which is your pursuit of pleasure.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: You have science, which is the thing that replaces spirituality or religion, the authority.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: The way of understanding the world.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: You have the self, the individualism that we are all instructed to pursue.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: What matters in life is your self-realization.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: As you say, it's all about being happy and hedonistic.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have the screen,
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: which is kind of your portal to this giant consciousness that's being created
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: that we're all just absolutely locked into.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: And increasingly, it's impossible to live without and hard to resist.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the more traditional world is what I would call the four P's,
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: which is people, place, prayer and the past.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if you look at those four things, you can almost translate them into any culture.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: So you could certainly translate them into, say, the future.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's interesting to look at the past in Ireland and the past in England,
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: because Ireland is a slower developer than England.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: Which some people might take as an insult, but obviously I see as a bonus.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because Ireland doesn't go through the Industrial Revolution, right?
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of negatives to that, a lot of poverty.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously it's under the thumb of the British government.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of problems going on.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time,
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: the Irish managed to maintain a kind of rooted folk culture that
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: the English had kind of ripped up by the factory system 200 years ago.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: So that's quite an interesting thing.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: But if you were to look at the four Ps in whatever country you're from and say,
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: well, how does this apply to me?
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is people.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that's your community.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's your group.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's your national group,
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: but it's more likely to be your sort of local group,
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: your families,
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: your local community, the sort of the group of people that you're part of.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: Then you have place and that's your roots in nature.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's also your roots in local culture, the history of that place.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then you have prayer, obviously, which is your connection to God.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have the past, which is your sense of where you come from.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what made you what you are.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think those four P's are what define a traditional culture,
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: what define a human culture in almost any country in the world.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: And as I say, we're uprooting them and replacing them with these four S's.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: So if we were looking at what a new story is like,
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: you know, a new story is almost always in some way going back to an old story.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the first thing I would say.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't mean that you are, quote, nostalgic, which is the criticism you always get.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the same thing as wanting to go and live in the past or romanticizing
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: a particular period that you think was better.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: Even if there were periods of the past that were better, you can't live in them anyway.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: So what you can do is go back to the principles that may have created a good society
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: then and may be able to create a good one now.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I think being rooted in those four Ps is probably the way that I would talk about
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: an alternative culture to the machine.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's difficult.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: We should just acknowledge that it's difficult.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: We're all living in a world of screens.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: We can't avoid that.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're all living in a world of electricity.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: We're living in modernity.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: It gives us some things that we like.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Even if we don't like it, we can't really escape it.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: I know people who live in off-grid cabins and don't have phones or cars,
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: but they still can't quite escape the machine.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: They still need a bank account and they need to get on a bus and we're all in it.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: So those...
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I would say would be the root of a real culture.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then the question you're asking yourself in your personal life is how you kind
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: of draw the line in your relationship with technology and with the world around you.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a tricky, challenging thing, especially if you're in a modern city.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: But you have to work out how to do it to some degree.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's easier to do it when there are other people who agree with you or
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: who share your sensibility so that you're not just on your own,
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: surrounded by people who think you're insane.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Which is certainly something that I felt sometimes.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you too.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: And feeling like a hypocrite as well because,
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm always giving lectures about like the dangers of digital media and then I'm on,
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know, go spend too long on the internet and I'm like, I know how this works.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: Why am I doing it?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's a constant battle to
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: get it in order.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: but I love what you're saying about the four Ps and the return because I almost look
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: at modernity as this like breaking from tradition, I suppose.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: I told you a bit about myself in terms of like I,
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: you know, I was raised as an atheist and then I was baptized as a Catholic lad.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so many people now are doing that, basically.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: They're like,
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: whatever tradition it is that you were kind of raised in,
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: there's this kind of mush of the modernity.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's like,
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: we're going to leave that and we'll kind of break that line and
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: then we'll spend time in the kind of, I don't know, the nun space or whatever it is.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think there's a necessity to reckon with those traditions to like go back or
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: to,
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: because I think the traditional way in that sense is,
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a path of transformation and it's something there, but I don't know.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: Is there,
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: is it possible to do it without kind of going back to one of those traditions or,
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: you know?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, I
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: suppose it is.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: we're probably going to find out because I think we're at sort of breaking point in
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: the modern story.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting how many people now seem to be exploring religion again in a way
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: that wasn't even happening five years ago.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, including me,
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: I would certainly never have imagined I would be sitting here talking to you as
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: a Christian.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you probably wouldn't either.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'd kick my own ass, to be honest, if I had known it was coming.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I know.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think God's got a sense of humor,
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: to be honest,
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: because if I thought that I was going to be the guy who wrote and talked
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: about Christianity all over the internet,
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'd have gone, what the hell are you talking about?
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: That would never have even occurred to me, certainly a decade ago or maybe less.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, as I say, I think God has an excellent sense of humor.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very dry sense of humor and he takes his time.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: He just turns us around and we have no choice.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it depends.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, say if you're a Christian, right, then you need to be in the church.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: So then you have to think about what church you mean.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're Catholic and I'm Orthodox, right?
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're two sort of severed halves of the same church.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: But then,
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: of course,
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: you can look at the past and you can say,
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: well, Church has got a lot of stuff to reckon with.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's got a lot of problems and a lot of, I mean, Ireland obviously knows that.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: So many people have turned away from Catholicism and not with,
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: you know, with plenty of good reason, to be honest.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it's a church.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's a human institution full of fallen people.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: So this is what you end up with.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, what is there outside it?
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: so I don't think it's a question of sort of unquestioningly turning back
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: to something and Trying to sort of recreate a sort of trad version of
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: the Middle Ages or something like that.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's just kind of, that's sort of larping and role-playing and things.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all, you know, dressing up as a medieval knight or whatever.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Meming about that.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the point.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: The point is that if the church is real and if Christ is real,
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: then it's going to be a timeless thing that has to be alive in the world today.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not just something that you're trying to turn back to because you're,
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: you can't turn, say, to Christ or to God because you don't like the modern world.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you might not like the modern world.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't particularly like it myself, obviously.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know,
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: you have to want to move towards something positively rather than wanting
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: to move negatively away from something.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if you think,
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: if you believe or if you have experienced what you said earlier on,
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: that there is a shape to reality,
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: and if you think that shape is the Christian shape,
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: then you have to conform yourself to that shape because that's what makes sense.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way it works.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are not in that shape or attempting to conform yourself to it and
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: to align yourself with it,
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to be unhappy and the world's going to be broken.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, say,
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: the story of modern Ireland or modern Britain is a giant experiment in this, right?
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: We say, right, well,
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: we're throwing away our spiritual heritage of a thousand years and we're going
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: to free ourselves.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to be individuals.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: So we're not controlled by this church anymore.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: We can make our own way, decide our own things.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that's very attractive in a lot of ways.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I used to want to do.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: But you can't invent your own theology or your own reality.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: You have to conform yourself to what you think reality is.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: And in the end,
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: personally,
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: I never thought,
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was never able to think that the sort of Dawkins-esque story was correct,
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: that everything is just a meaningless mass of atoms.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's true.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: So if it's not true, what is true?
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I ended up, much to my own surprise, And believing that the answer was the Christian story.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you have a different answer.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my wife is a Sikh, for example.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: So she has a different understanding of God, although not that different, funnily enough.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: But still,
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: it comes down to aligning yourself with what God wants from you
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: and what you're supposed to do in the world and how you're supposed to live.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we are,
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: as I say,
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: undergoing this giant cultural experiment of saying,
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: OK, we're chucking all that out.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't think it's working.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: If it was working, we'd be happier than any people who'd ever existed.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're very rich compared to even my grandparents,
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: you know, even my parents when they grew up.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: We've got so much more money and wealth and technology than we've ever had before.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: We've got this brilliant freedom.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: All our freedoms are protected by law.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: No one can control us, at least in theory.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: Are we really very happy and content societies?
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't look like it to me.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't feel like the world I'm living in at the moment.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: So something is working out.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: Got a youth mental health crisis.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's a huge thing, this global human flourishing study.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: And in Western countries,
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: 16 to 24 year olds had the worst levels of human flourishing,
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: however they measured it.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: So like the young people that are healthy,
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: that have all the technology,
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: all the rights, all the freedoms are the most miserable people.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: How does that make any sense?
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: So what's
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: going wrong?
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, something's...
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've got, we've got something wrong for sure.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder like, yeah, go ahead.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: Even just, yeah.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: Cause again,
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: like within the traditions,
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: like modernity is this other thing,
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: the atheistic materialist thing,
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: but within the other traditions, they're all realist traditions.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they all have a kind of sense of natural law.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Although they differ on us,
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: but even just that you have this kind of in-house thing,
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: that there is a reality and that there is certain ways we have to kind of conform
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: to us.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you could have differences on that,
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: but at least even if you could agree on something is real and it has some sort of,
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: claim over us,
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: we'd be in better shape for kind of orienting ourselves as a,
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: well, individually, I mean, you have to recognize something's above you.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: You serve some master,
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: you know, and I,
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: Is it going to be the machine or hedonism or is it going to be,
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know, the true, the good and the beautiful?
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: Could you have like a minimum viable philosophy or something of like, you know, realism?
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's interfaith, intersecular.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's funny.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I have a lot,
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I have a lot more in common with people of other religions than I would
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: with somebody in my own culture who's very materialistic,
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: very atheistic, very rationalist.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: Not because I necessarily obviously agree with them about everything by any means.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: But people who,
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: as you say,
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: basically people who believe in God,
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: people who believe there is a divinity,
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: there is a great intelligence,
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: there is a creator,
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: there's something we're supposed to be doing here,
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: there's a shape we're supposed to be,
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: there's a direction we're supposed to be going in,
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: there's a meaning to it all that's bigger than us, we don't create it.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: Those people might be Sikh or Muslim or Jewish or Christian or whatever.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: But they all believe that.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there's plenty of scope for disagreement.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that we're suddenly all sort of syncretist and we can say
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: that all religions are the same.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: They're not the same.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: But they have more in common than modern atheist materialism does,
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: because it basically says all that is just superstitious rubbish
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: that we only believed until we had science.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: And now we have science.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: We don't need it anymore.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all junk.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that worldview,
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: which seemed very dominant when I was young, doesn't seem so dominant anymore.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not least because if you look at it in global terms,
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: the great majority of people in the world are religious.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: And actually this sort of very materialistic worldview is confined to kind
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: of Western Europe and a bit of America and things.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: But it just doesn't seem real, doesn't seem true.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: And we've had a long time experimenting with it and trying to create the utopia.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is the thing that created, say, the Soviet experiment.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: The whole experiment with communism, which was a specifically materialistic, atheistic system.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Which very openly said, you know, God is dead.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is all rubbish.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to create an egalitarian paradise here on Earth and ended up with 100 million dead.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: The whole of the 20th century is like this, far right or far left.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: They're all experimenting with materialist utopias.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it doesn't follow from that that,
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: you know, the church has always been wonderful or anything.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: But either there is a shape to reality or there isn't.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if there is, you need to find out what it is and align yourself with it.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I feel that It's almost like the division between people who are religious
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: and people who are not is bigger than,
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: in some ways,
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: the division between different faiths,
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: even though those are...
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: it's a metaphysical difference, I think, fundamentally, about the nature of reality.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_01: There is a reality or there isn't.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you can't even solve problems, I think.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: If there is no reality, if you're nominalist, anti-realist, you can't have morality or anything.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: Why would any morality have any hold on me?
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: If there's no...
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm not beholden to something that's actually going to have real consequences
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: in reality or that disconnects me from it,
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: it kind of just shoots the whole thing in the foot at the start.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: That always seems to be the question that the atheist can never really satisfactorily answer.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: Why should anything be considered to be good or bad?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: Why should I not just pursue my ends?
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's no actual answer to it unless you think there's some sort
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: of objective reality and morality going on.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think we're running into that in real time.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: Something I write in my thesis a lot is that we don't have the luxury of relativism anymore.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: We've had this kind of relativism that we've gotten away with it
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: because there's bread on the table and milk in the fridge or whatever.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: But with the internet,
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: we've now built a global culture that's shaping people,
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: in my argument anyway,
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: towards vice, moral degradation, human downgrading, as Tristan Harris calls it.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's orienting people's attention towards...
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Sins, basically, for profit.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: And
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: so we have this massive adversarial environment now that's having real consequences
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: for people, and we have to morally evaluate it as a collective.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like,
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: in order to do that, we have to have some kind of shared morality that we agree on.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: There has to be something.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: My generation, I'm in my 50s now, so I grew up with moral relativism as the norm.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: In Britain when I was young.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: But you could get away with that when Britain was still running on the fumes
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: of Christianity,
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: because basically everybody shared more or less the same morality,
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: which was basically Christian, even if they weren't Christian.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you could get away with saying, oh, yeah, everything's fine.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: We can all just choose our desires.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: But as you say,
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: that's now accelerated to such a point where what we're doing in Western cultures,
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: if you take the list of, say,
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: the Catholic list of the seven deadly sins and you look at what they are,
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: you can see that every single one of them is being monetized.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: And promoted, right?
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: So this is like we used to live in a society which at least attempted to tell people
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: to avoid these things.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: Strive to avoid them, even though sometimes you're going to fall into them.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: What we do now is we go, yeah, pride, great.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, lust, fantastic.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: We'll monetize that.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's all over the posters.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's in every film.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, gluttony.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's money in that.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: Everything.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's a very interesting exercise to look at all those sins and say,
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: are there any of these that are not currently being promoted for profit
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: in our culture?
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's so funny.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's like the, you know, the Israelites worship a golden calf.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: We've actually turned that into like a whole,
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: it's like we're literally monetizing and amplifying the worst possible truth.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it is fundamentally an anti-Christian culture in that sense,
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: even though it might not,
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: you know, specifically and officially be, say, anti-Christian.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: It is absolutely opposed to everything that Christ ever taught and what
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: the church has taught at its best.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: And as I say, other religions too.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: I can talk to my wife who's Sikh about this and she'll say exactly the same thing.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's like her religion teaches pretty much exactly the same in terms of
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: the way humans are supposed to live and the values they're supposed to have.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: And they're the opposite of the values of everything that we say is currently good.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: And as you say, now we've got a youth mental health crisis.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's the kids.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've got teenage children and they're living in this world.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: Of all of this stuff being promoted at them.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hideous, actually.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's really, really grim.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they don't like it.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: And if they liked it,
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: we wouldn't have this mental health crisis and AI chatbots telling them
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: to commit suicide and all this other stuff
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: that you couldn't have made up 50 years ago and believed it.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like we're almost in this weird,
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: like, Post-Christian, but Old Testament kind of thing going on.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, you know, humanity, sins, strays from God, God's wrath comes.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think, I feel like we're heading for just a huge humbling man with all this stuff.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: The AI thing is just going to be a, and then a hundred percent.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: I like, I don't see any other way,
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: but like then the it's repent and,
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: turn away,
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: turn away from this,
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know, And in the Christian story, the new covenant is always the Eucharist.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's the new and everlasting covenant.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so I remember like in the Old Testament, they make a new covenant with God.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: But in the since Christ, it's always going to be the Eucharist.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: So in some sense, we have to return then to the Eucharist.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: And in order to take the Eucharist, you have to be, you know, you can't be filled with sins.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be, you know, repenting.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to be proper in communion.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so I don't know,
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: like that's kind of the meta narrative I'm working with at the moment
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: that it's going to look like that.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, you were talking about new stories earlier.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if you were to talk about, again, the Eucharist, you're going back to the old story.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're going back to the original story,
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: which is,
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_00: there is Christ and you can experience him every week and walk towards him all
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: the time.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I tend to feel more and more that I only feel Sane when I'm in church,
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: which is again something I would never have imagined saying 10 years ago.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_00: But now I just feel like this is the still point of the turning world and
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: the turning world is going madder all the time.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, look, I mean, the word repent is very interesting too.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's also the key to things.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: What's the story we ought to be following?
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's the story of repentance.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: And again, the word repentance comes from the Greek metanoia and metanoia means turn around.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: Change yourself, change your mind, change your way of thinking.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: So what does that mean?
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: In Christian terms, it means go to the Eucharist, go to church, follow Christ.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: In cultural terms, it means remember what it means to be human.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: Turn around, turn away from the machine as much as you can, because we're all in it.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: But don't let it consume you.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: Don't let its values consume you.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to have to use the internet, but that doesn't mean you have to be eaten by it.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: You have to have a world, a life, I think, that's built on those four Ps.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: People place prayer in the past and prayer is the key one
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: because that's what puts you back in touch with God.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's, in a way, it's a simple answer.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, with Christianity, it's simple in theory and difficult in practice.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: Actually living the very, very simple radical teachings of the gospel are very difficult, but.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: But that's okay because you can keep repenting.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: You keep turning around.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: You keep falling down.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: You keep going back.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you can do that all the time.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: And hopefully you fall down less and you keep walking towards the right thing.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: But I really do feel personally,
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'd probably be going quite mad at this point if I didn't have the Eucharist,
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: if I didn't have the Christianity, if I didn't have the church.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's the thing that makes sense of everything to me.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the world is going so insane.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: That it's very difficult to find any kind of still point within it,
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: actually,
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: unless you have a story that seems true to you,
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: that you can follow and be transformed by.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the way Christ always urges us, like, do not be afraid or stand up and don't.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: He's just always saying, don't be afraid.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: And you're like, whoa.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of scary stuff happening.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: He just keeps it.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: You're like, all right.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: Do not be afraid.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: My favorite quote from the whole Bible is when he says,
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: don't be afraid for I've overcome the world.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I sort of hold on to that.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, yep, I think that's true.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: You can't always hold on to it every day because you're in the world,
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: as you say,
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: and you're looking around you and saying,
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: Could we have the second coming now, please?
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, neat.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: You think, oh, could you please come back?
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then you think, oh, no,
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: hang on,
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: because when you come back,
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: you're going to judge me, and I'm pretty sure I'm not ready for that yet.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe it's good.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: You'll be judging the living and the dead.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: I need a bit more work, man.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe if I need a bit more time, I might need a bit more time here.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, but it's...
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think the world is unmooring itself very,
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: very fast from fundamental human values in a way that it probably hasn't done quite
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: before.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: There have been lots of terrible things that have happened in history.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: But the speed of the technological change is unrivaled.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: The creation of machines that talk to you, all of this stuff is all very, very novel.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: We've never had it before.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't have a map other than the Eucharist, which is the ultimate map.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that, I mean,
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: what you're saying about metanoia as well of like change your heart,
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: even in some sense,
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: as more people recognize like these,
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: the goods of the world are going crazy and like it's going to get worse.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's like to try and turn away from that,
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: to focus on like formation, virtue,
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: like love in your,
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: where you are, your relationships, your community, like your locality.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's really the rebellion.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: I say that to people a lot.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: Being a Christian who's productive with a family is the new counterculture rebellion.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly that.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: Living what would have been considered 100 years ago or even 50 years ago to be
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: a very normal life.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: Create a family.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: Be in a place.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: Have some sense of community.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: Follow your faith.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: Is increasingly countercultural now.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely it is.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what I'm talking about in the book when I talk about creating
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: a new counterculture.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we had the sort of counterculture of the 60s.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: And there was something to it.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: There was a rebellion against the machine in that.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_00: But it was radically individualistic.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was very much sex and drugs and rock and roll.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, it all dissolved away.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because it wasn't connected to anything that was actually more rooted and eternal than that.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: So all the things that, again,
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up being told were old and conservative and boring and terribly reactionary.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_00: They're actually the stuff of life, I think.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's interesting to me how many young people sort of long for this life
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: that I was always told to escape from.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't it be nice if you could have a little house and a family and a bit of land
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: and you did something meaningful and you had a prayer life?
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't that be nice?
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's a simple thing, but it's harder and harder to get hold of.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we were told that that was a prison.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's what you need to escape from in the matrix.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: And where did we end up?
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: We ended up enslaved by the machine working for operations for 10 hours a day
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: and not being able to afford a home.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, we want, yeah, we want some wholesomeness back and some, some, yeah, some actual life.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: And do you think, I mean, how do you see it, that counterculture taking shape?
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you talk about in the book about hedge schools and I love,
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: I love how Irish frequently you're talking about Ireland in the book.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like even the monasteries and the hedge schools.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I agree.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's something,
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: there's something there,
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: uh, of we need, we need those kinds of new in-between institutions.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, Ireland's been very influential to me.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: I've been here 12 years now.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, I come from England, but I consider myself a little bit Irish now.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I leave it up to the Irish to judge how much...
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: You've got my vote anyway.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: If I can sway, I'll let you in any time.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's nice to be a bit Irish,
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: but you know,
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know a great deal about Irish spirituality at all when I moved here.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I certainly wasn't a Christian,
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: but I've been very influenced by the landscape here,
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: the holy wells and the monastic ruins and the fact that there are so many saints
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: in this country.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of saints,
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: all from pre-schism Ireland, so they're Catholic and Orthodox.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it was so hugely influential as a kind of spiritual beacon.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been Catholic until recent times.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that was,
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: recent Catholic history has been very much more history of the kind
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: of modern 19th century church.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: But if you go back before that,
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_00: you have a church which is profoundly important for people,
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_00: plays a role in kind of resisting the empire as well.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's what the head schools are about.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: When your faith is banned, you go out to the mass rock.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: And you go and you teach your kids in the head schools and you say, no,
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: we're not going to be told by you that we can't have a cultural language or a faith.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to do it anyway.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: And there's something to that,
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: and it's almost like I'm not going to say you're in the same position again,
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: but there's a sense that if you want to resist the machine.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you just get together and do it.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need permission and you don't need a kind of global movement.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: you do it with your neighbours and you do it with people who share
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: the same positions.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: You have some meetings, get together, teach your faith, homeschool your kids, whatever it is.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is going to be more incumbent on younger generations than it is
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: on mine, whether it's in Ireland or anywhere else.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, I feel like there's Always a great deal you can learn from your past.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think it's so much that you need to be revolutionary or rebellious even.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: You just need to be going back to your roots and say, okay, look,
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_00: we're not going to let the machine and its culture form our children or ourselves.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: We're not going to do that.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to teach them the right thing and we're going to live in the right way
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: as much as we can within the limits that we can have in our lives.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to cleave to these real values because they are the real values.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't care whether people call us reactionaries or Luddites
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: or whatever else they want to call us.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: If this is true,
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: if there is a shape to the universe and if it's a Christian shape
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: and you teach your children that you live in that way,
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_00: then that ultimately is going to be what works out.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because,
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_00: I do think that this can be very depressing talking about the machine and all this,
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: but I think ultimately...
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_00: Machine society is a limited thing.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's limited by resources.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, for example,
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know if it's going to be ecologically possible to create the vast AIs
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: that they want with all the server farms,
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_00: the amount of water it's going to use, the climate change it's going to induce.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think culturally it's possible either.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_00: They're not going to get their machine dream of uploading our minds into files
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: because you can't do that.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't possible.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it is going to be another Tower of Babel experience.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to build all this nonsense up and it's going to get knocked down again,
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: whether it gets knocked down by an act of God or whether it's war or
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_00: whether it's climate change or whether it's just general cultural collapse.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can't build a culture on sand, which is what we're doing, on false values.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot to be said for just going back to something that's eternal.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: And because it's eternal, it's not.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: Just, as I say, a nostalgic exercise.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: We go back to a time period and try and live in it.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's going back to the central stream of reality,
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_00: which is God, which you could experience as a Christian through the Eucharist.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_00: And saying, well, this is truth.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I base my life around this and I see what comes from it.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then, I mean,
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_00: when I manage to do that,
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: which I don't every day because I lose track of it,
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_00: but then I can come back to it,
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: which is why I like to go to church because it Drags me back to the centre
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_00: of things.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like, oh yeah, I get an enormous sense of peace from this.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and it's not a sense of peace that comes from me.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sense of peace that comes from elsewhere.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: You can take the bread and the wine in church and you feel yourself changed
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: and calmed and centred by that.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_00: And even if you then have to go out into the world again for a week,
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: you know that that is there.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know,
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_00: in a way the solution is simple, but as ever, actually living it is another matter.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: Is difficult, yeah.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: Difficult, but not impossible.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not impossible.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: And becoming more necessary as well.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: Becoming more necessary.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, personally, as I say, I find it difficult to imagine.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_00: I can't really remember what I was like before I was a Christian,
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: even though I've only been a Christian for five years and I'm 53.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: It really is.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is a new form of...
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in one sense, I'm the same person.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: In another sense,
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_00: there's kind of no going back from it because it just changes the way that you see
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: the universe and the way that you experience it.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that there's, I mean, that it's so good as well.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm always trying to convince people, I suppose, to be like, just give it a try.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: don't let the biases or don't let your kind of preconceived notions get in the way
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: of actually going and experiencing that piece and trying it.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, actually...
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: Run the experiment.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: Try and participate.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: If you haven't been away for a long time, try and go to confession.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: See what that does for you because I guarantee you it'll tick some boxes
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: that people aren't aware of.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's just the fear or the procrastination,
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what it is, but the enemy probably stands in the way of it.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, completely.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is particularly the case in Ireland, but the shame of it, the
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's not cool anymore.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's definitely not cool.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: But again, that's countercultural.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you're going to be countercultural,
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: you have to do the thing that everybody is saying isn't cool.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's how it works.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then later on,
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: they'll all be saying it's cool whenever it becomes fashionable again,
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_00: but not for now.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Although I did, I met this young guy actually who's like 17 and he's not baptised.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I was saying like, so you're interested, like, are you going to get baptized?
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: And he was saying, yeah, but all my friends are getting baptized.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't want to just like jump on the bandwagon.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like everybody else.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, there's a bandwagon?
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: Baptism bandwagon.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: Very, very unusual, but okay.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: Very interesting.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: I keep hearing these stories all over the place from young people,
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: especially in the Orthodox Church.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think in the Catholic Church
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: as well.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: Lots and lots of young people coming into the church.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, who would have thought of it?
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: Armies of 17 year olds who want to be baptized.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: You couldn't have imagined that even a decade ago.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: So again, it's that.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: I do think that, yeah,
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: as society becomes openly more sort of demonic,
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: really, then you think, okay, hang on.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there was something to these guidelines and these rules and these things that
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: the church was teaching us after all,
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: because I don't like the things that I'm told are now the norm.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and the writing's on the wall.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's going that way.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: So there's cause to be hopeful, I think, in all this.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I do think so.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think if eternal values are eternal, then they're eternal.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you can try and build your Tower of Babel and it will fall down.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have to turn back to God again and say, oh, yeah, whoops, we've done it again.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I've done that personally, and he's quite forgiving.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, haven't we all?
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's the essence of the Christian story.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's the beauty of it.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: God is not a tyrant.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_00: God wants you to come home.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_00: He's the father of the prodigal son, and he's just waiting.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: And you can always go home, and I think that applies to societies as well as people, I hope.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where the hope is.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Paul.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_01: This has been a real pleasure and I encourage people to pick up the book,
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: check out the Abbey of Misrule.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure everybody's already on there, but definitely do.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you so much, Paul.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's been great.