Latest / Thinking Class / #048 - Spencer Klavan - On Moral Relativism, Timeless Truths, And Science & Faith

Transcript

#048 - Spencer Klavan - On Moral Relativism, Timeless Truths, And Science & Faith · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillen and today I'm speaking with Spencer Claven.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Spencer is a scholar, writer, and podcaster, a graduate of Yale.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: He earned his doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Spencer is the author of the acclaimed book How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises, and his latest release is Light of the Mind, Light of the World, Illuminating Science Through Faith.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Spencer is also the editor of Gateway to the Stoics, the host of the Young Heretics Podcast, and associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he has written for many outlets, including The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, City Journal, Newsweek, The Federalist, The American Mind, and The Daily Wire.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Spencer and I explore the significance of classical literature and philosophy in contemporary society, the importance of reconnecting with the wisdom of the past.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: What is behind the resurgence of interest in Stoicism?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Why moral relativism is a miserable philosophy with miserable outcomes, why we need to rediscover timeless truths instead, the role of education in preserving cultural heritage, the need for a shared cultural language to navigate modern complexities, the transformative power of literature in understanding human nature and morality, the impoverished architectural landscape of modern cities, and Spencer's new book, where we talk about how science and faith can coexist and much, much more.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: You'll hear that Spencer is a deeply impressive man, and his erudition is out of this world.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Spencer's able to recall long passages of classic literature without preparation and in response to something that you said.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And in the opener, I unintentionally created a meme-like slogan for him which captures a sense of his mission.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Listen out for him.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: I won't spoil it, but I think you'll agree that once you listen to this podcast, that Spencer is doing more than most to re-enchant and re-enlighten the culture.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Before we dive in, he'd be really helping me out if you subscribe to the show.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So whatever platform you listen to it on or watch it on, subscribe, follow, share, because the more subscribers we have, the more guests we attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Spencer Claven, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: John, great to be here.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it feels like it's been a long time coming.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was delighted when you agreed to come on the show.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'd I I know you're a very busy man.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'd emailed you earlier in the summer, and then you came back to me and said, let's get it in the diary.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: And for whatever reason, life admin here and there, your book launch, your very busy media schedule has meant we've finally gotten a date in the diary, and it is my pleasure to have you here.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Spencer, I I I learned of you a few years ago writing in periodicals like First Things, and you have been uh inspirational insofar as for someone to be part of the same generation as me, but to be effectively making classics, biblical wisdom cool again and and deeply alluring to people of all generations, uh it it it gets me thinking what your motivations were for bringing those back into vogue.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we can start there.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Why did you why did you get into being a classicist and literary scholar and then deciding to bring it to the masses?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's the new tagline I'm gonna use for my bio.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you've described exactly what I hope to be doing, making classics cool again.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's because classics were always cool for me, honestly.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: I was really lucky to grow up in a house filled with books.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's something I didn't realize was a privilege.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't realize that was weird until I went out into the wider world and discovered that all the stuff I was really getting a kick out of was considered at best nerdy.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's the ideal case is oh, you you're reading Homer's Odyssey, like that's you're kind of a dork.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's best case.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Worst case scenario is you're somehow evil.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: There was this bizarre moral atmosphere attached to the classics in where I grew up in Southern California, that there was like a repressive or backward or superstitious element to this tradition.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: And none of that had ever even really occurred to me because I knew from growing growing up, surrounded by great literature, that to be among books is to be among friends.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I started as I progressed through grad school to get actually kind of sad about this, that we live in a whole generation of people who've been cut off from one of the greatest, one of humanity's greatest sources of companionship, that is companionship across time through literature.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And especially in the 21st century, as these kind of unfurling crises have started to envelop the West, it seemed to me really urgent that we reconnect to our sources of ancestral wisdom.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the motivation behind my podcast, Young Heretics.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's really the motivation behind everything I do.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not trying to build up credentials.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't, I'm not very, really impressed by the modern academy.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not interested in like ticking off boxes or getting publications in places, except insofar as I actually think this is a treasure.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: The the wisdom of Athens and Jerusalem has passed down through us through the literature of the West contains some of the most luminous insight into what it means to be human, what our purpose on this earth is, and how we ought to live that is available to mankind.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think it's the fact that I approach these authors as friends or at least companions, interlocutors, even if I don't love every author that I talk about.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm always trying to think of this as a conversation between me and them.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then I also think it's that uh I regard books as being aimed at life.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the greatest authors are not, again, trying to make publication.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Many of them, of course, will have their own ambitions, but a lot, you know, you read a lot of people like Boethius who's writing from prison, you read Machiavelli who's writing from exile, and they have hopes, of course, of getting out of that situation, but they're not writing for that purpose.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't depend on the prestige or whatever.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: It depends on this urgent message that that has to be communicated.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: And either that's a fantasy.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Either there is no such thing as human nature and there's no real kind of eternal truth that they were accessing and feeling urgent about, or there is.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: And if there is, then this stuff isn't actually old in the deepest sense of the world.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's eternal.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's something that still has meaning in the age of the internet and Cardi B and Kamala Harris and MEPs.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so if that's true, you know, I don't want to I never want to condescend to people or try to decorate stuff with flashy, you know, modernism for the sake of modernism, but I do want to treat the tradition as a living, breathing thing because that's what it is.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: The insights into human nature and ultimately how to live properly is what these classics, the biblical tradition on top of that, can bequeath to you.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I know from personal experience, having not been surrounded by that, I was a I was certainly a reader and highly literate as a child, and then I went totally off the rails in my teenage years and early school leave, uh, had to find my way in my early 20s, but was scrabbing around at things that were all wrong.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't grabbing onto anything of any substance.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: But when I discovered philosophy and initially Aristotle, that started to help me understand how it was that I could moderate my behavior, my conduct, the objectives that I might choose, why it is that I might engage with them.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then also for someone who was not particularly good at keeping a hold on my reaction to the world, which isn't to say that I lashed out, but I was unable to I was unable to operate without being constantly knocked off track.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And again, coming along the stoics, Marcus Aurelius reading meditations, all of a sudden I realized that actually all I can do is seek to persuade and control what I can control, but everything else just leave that to one side.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden I started to find repose alongside how it is that I conduct myself and why I do things.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And having seen that build over time, then discover in biblical tradition and all of the Christian virtues that then bolted on to the cardinal virtues, I've seen my life transform.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I dare say, when I look around at folks who are within the world that you have uh uh alluded to, the the the meme world, the social media world, the the looking around at uh the um trendy ideas of the day, is that you see quite a lot of lost people.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: We've got mental health pandemics, we've got people who are uh dying earlier.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: There are many different metrics to say that the world in which we now live, if we have cut ourselves off from that inheritance, is not better than it was before.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that interesting that the Stoics are having such a moment?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: As you started talking about what you drew from Aristotle, I instantly thought, oh, John's gonna talk about the Stoics now, because Stoics are having this incredible online renaissance.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's fascinated me.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: I actually just wrote a review of a biography of Marcus Aurelius, and I think The Meditations is one of the most moving books from antiquity, weirdly, because people think of it as a handbook and a guidebook, which of course it is to some capacity, but it's also just uh this incredible privilege to be allowed into the intimate confidence of one of Rome's greatest emperors.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: And he's so vulnerable in it about his things, about his inadequacies, the things he constantly gets wrong, that his wisdom comes across with this wonderful character of humility, that these are not things you have to immediately embody in order to care about, things like composure and moderation.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: They're actually ideals under which you live and toward which you aspire.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you're absolutely right.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think one reason why the R slash Stoicism Reddit is so huge is because in this concatenation, this digital sandstorm of random clips of stuff, i mean, ideas about how you ought to live or not, or just total nihilism.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Sto the this sort of stoic teaching, the stoic path, as the Stoics sort of, I think, called it, represents such a clear and simple and really refined form of wisdom about how we ought to manage ourselves.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, tell me what you think about based on your experience before kind of finding the West and the classics, but I think that what really pains me about our modern condition is that so many people don't even know that those are questions, that how should I live or what should I do is a legitimate question to ask.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I I think we've been shamed out of it.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think that we grew up being told that it was in some way repressive or judgmental or just downright wrong to ask whether some ways of life are better than others.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: And this was understood as sort of tantamount to prejudice.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, in one sense, it is that, you know, if you think it's better to wake up early, pray, and feed your kids than it is to pitch yourself off a building after a late-night cocaine binge, then yeah, you have a prejudice against one form of action and even for another.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: But that's obviously not the same thing as irrational, unreasoned prejudices, like, for instance, racism, you know, all the things, all the nasties that we're always cautioned against.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so this excess of non-judgmentalism has created a situation where people are totally bereft, even of the idea that they they could have a guide to life and that it might come from inherited wisdom of the past.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And when you start talking about that, a lot of times they don't even know what you're on about.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you're speaking Swahili until you kind of grasp the nettle of this, and then you realize, oh, that that path goes, you know, way further and deeper than than I have let on.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I just read this book called Um All Things Are Too Small.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it was an essay by a, or a book of essays by a leftist in praise of excess and against this new minimalism trend.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought, I'm open to that actually.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: I get the idea.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Thomas Trahern, one of my favorite Christian mystics, talks about God and his abundance of desire that he wants us to want.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, you open this book and it's just all about how we should be having every kind of sex all the time.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Everything you want, just like, I mean, the cover in it's almost too perfect.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: The cover is from Ronamus Bosch's Island, a paradise of earthly delights, a garden of earthly delights, right?
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you're thinking, like, that was supposed to be hell.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like that, that's awful, right?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you realize as you read this book, which becomes just increasingly obsessed with the grotesque and the extravagant, that this is actually getting smaller and smaller, that the excess or the you know, the the bigness of our desires is actually a kind of monotony and ends up, it starts out looking like, oh yes, I'm gonna take away all the limits on my life, and I'm just gonna get this huge torrent of pleasure washing down on me.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: But in fact, it turns out what you really get is uh a day that looks the same as every other day and just an the kind of endless quest for more and more weird, grotesquery or perversion to like make yourself happy.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: And instead, like putting limits on your life is actually a route to joy, which is ever increasing.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the there's this wonderful passage in the screw tape letters where C.S.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis has the devil say, you know, that evil god whom we hate so much, he pretends to be an ascetic.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: He pretends that he doesn't want his followers to do all these things.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: But really, that's just foam around the shore of an ocean of pleasure.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, like the no's in the tradition are just signposts to deeper and and better yeses.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so, like, to be let free by tradition in that way is just this incredibly joyous experience.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think people are like incredibly hungry for it, even when they don't they don't know it.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I'd be curious to know whether that sort of aligns with your experience or or not.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, absolutely.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the the the moment in which so so effectively what had happened was I had had this inferiority complex having left school early.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was finding myself increasingly rubbing shoulders with the professional managerial class in financial services.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone in the United Kingdom, in my generation, had effectively been going to university.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so I felt I needed to, but also not for the sake of tick box, because I felt like there was some kind of an intellectual endeavor I wanted to embark on.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I I chose I chose a subject, and that subject had snippets of philosophy in there.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember the first time I came across a module which contained some, I then ended up with this unquenchable thirst to to know more.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: So then I just started reading all of it on the side outside of the the course content itself.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I felt, and and I I've explained this to a friend before, that it felt like I was looking through this portal thousands year into the in into the thousands of years into the past, in which I finally understood that Isaac Newton saying of if I have the ability to see further, it's because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then I realized that I was never going to figure it anything out on my own.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like, no wonder I'd struggled so much because I'd just been this atom thinking that I could I could figure it out.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if I just went with the culture of the time, which as you've described as largely leans towards hedonistic, you know, um highly liberative um thought processes, then of course I wasn't going to have my life in order.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what I thought.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And and you've talked about prejudice and discrimination.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: These words have a real negative slant on them these days, but rational meaning are ultimately about employing your rational faculties to be able to decide what is going to do you or the people around you good, what's going to do them harm, and to pre-judge things, right?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's like judgment judgment is a good thing.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: It helps you try to uh live in the right way and achieve the right outcomes or just do things for the right reasons.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you, as you've implied, go down the relativistic route and all bets are off.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's a particularly good way to live both individually and for society because and I can't remember how you described it in your book, How to Save the West, but effectively you you railed over a few pages against relativism, saying this just leads to misery and disintegration.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think we should have a prejudice in favor of joy flourishing and human excellence.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we should have a prejudice against the opposite of those things, or just evil, evil moments.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's like if I'm not canceled already several times over, I think I'll never be invited to my alma mater ever again.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, this is the first chapter of my my first sort of major book, How to Save the West, which is about the crisis of reality.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it really, I think on one level, this kind of begins with modernity and it begins, you could say, you could argue with the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, but certainly sets in with Nietzsche and then with the postmodernists that we have no way of knowing truths, and therefore there is no truth, and there is no objective good, at least in the realm of the abstract or the non-physical.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: So we're pretty comfortable, actually, and this is the top major theme of my next book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, is that we're pretty comfortable associating truth with material facts.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you might even say that we have a functional definition of truth, even if we don't know it, that uh restricts it to the material realm, that uh really limits truth to what can be known by way of numbers and quantification and and and the senses.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: And before even getting into the various philosophical problems with this, it just doesn't square with our experience of the world.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in order to do science, you have to believe that the human senses contain or convey valid data about the outside world.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: In order to live as a human being on this earth, in order to get up in this this morning and go to work or do this podcast, we had to believe a number of other things about other ways we have of perceiving.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I see no reason really why our senses aren't somehow inherently more trustworthy, especially given their notorious capacity to deceive throughout all of time.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: We all know that your senses can be mistaken.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: But we also have decided that our moral intuitions, because they are, again, subject to questioning and critique, because they can be mistaken because people can disagree, therefore, they refer to nothing real outside of us.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it's even perhaps hateful to suggest that our moral intuitions refer outside of us to objective standards of right and wrong, good and evil, true and false.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: And nobody lives this way, which is the most damning indictment of the attitude that I can give, even above and beyond the incoherence of acting as if or talking as if nothing is true.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Chuck Pierce, one of the great, kind of underappreciated American philosophers, C.S.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Pierce says that we shouldn't pretend in philosophy seminars to believe what we don't really in life.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the height of that mistake is relativism, is to say, uh I don't really think anything is good or bad.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: So why why are you here and not over there?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just existing as a human in the world contains an implicit set of values.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't pay attention to that set of values, it's going to be crap because it's Going to be random.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to be whatever happens to occur to you at any given moment.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: And none of us really wants to live that way.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Most of us give some thought to how we ought to live, how we want to live.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so why not give rigorous thought to this, the most important subject, which is your route to joy?
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's like saying, you know, if you get to Poughkeepsie, if you want to get to Poughkeepsie, you have to take the following highway routes.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: And somebody says, well, don't restrict my driving freedoms.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: I have to drive on every highway I want.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer to that is yes, of course.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: You are more than welcome to drive on any road you may come across, but this is the one that goes to Poughkeepsie.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the the ethical tradition is kind of like that.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's, you know, you can do whatever, like in modern America, nobody's stopping you from like doing most of the things you want.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like take whatever drug you want, I guess.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like go on an ayahuasca trip for all I care.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not the road to your best life.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: You're actually going to be happier with virtue, which is almost the definition of virtue.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we think of it now as this like scolding, oh, you know, I'm you're telling me not to do things.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: But in fact, you know, arete, the Greek word, just means excellence.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: And excellence is just a good thing.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And ethics is just the school of loving what is good so that you can be happy.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like uh I don't understand why why you wouldn't want that.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: The theme that's coming up from this is something that I've meditated meditated on quite a lot about the state of not just how individuals, the common person, live, but also our governors.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and and the world seems to be in the throes of being unable to distinguish between right, wrong, the right path, the prudent path, the the um the the just path.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you trying to bring classics back into vogue feels extremely extremely necessary given that as far as I can tell, they hone the ability to be able to see clearly, as you've said.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we were once a very highly literate society in the West, which we did, even in the city closest to where I'm from, Newcastle upon Tyne, which is now known for boozy nights out, stagdoos, handus, and and it was a former mining um town and uh shipyard, is it was also one of the most literate places in the country.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: It had four weekly periodicals, despite having most people down the coal mines and building ships.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: And now it's not a very it's it's not a very highly literate place.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what struck struck strikes me about reading some philosophers from those periods, the the Enlightenment period, I was reading Edmund Burke's uh inquiry um into um the sublime and the beautiful.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And what struck me about reading him, and it struck me through the editor and the the footnotes that the editor was including, which was this citation was slightly off, which there were so many citations of biblical strip scripture of every range of Greek and Roman philosophy you can imagine, and it struck me that he was probably pulling it from memory, and he was 23 years old when he wrote this.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's it's striking how much our whole intellectual tradition, people didn't look at something like history by itself, or philosophy by itself, or art by itself, or religion by itself, they were all interconnected, and people could get those references.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, coming to it much later on, you know, I I loved Dante's Inferno, but I had to read it a couple of times, and in between that, I had to read a whole bunch of philosophy to even get a lot of what's going on and who he's referring to.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: And besides that, it also got me thinking about the inability to distinguish between right and wrong, and how here in the United Kingdom we have schools giving up the likes of Shakespeare and Milton because they're no longer relevant.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: And within this Burke book, and I had to prepare a passage from Milton's Parasite Paradise Loss for this, Spencer.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: Within this Burke book.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: You really know how to you know how to uh get on my good side.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very this is great.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is like I've just sit back and listen you read Milton.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's well, I hope I can do it in some kind of rhythmic fashion, but but Burke Burke decided to bring the passage where Milton is describing the figure of Satan, and I'll explain why I think that's important based on what we've been talking about so far.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: He above the rest, in shape and gesture proudly eminent, stood like a tower.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: His form has not yet lost all her original brightness, nor appeared, less than archangel ruined and the excess of glory obscured, as when the new sun risen looks through the horizontal misty air, shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon in dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds on half the nations, and with fear of change plexes.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And what's he trying to say here?
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: And what am I trying to say here?
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, to most people who aren't used to poetry written in that style, or all of the things we've been talking about, it's probably not that accessible.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: But effectively, what he's trying to say is that in line with the Greek word uh diabolos, which is where devil comes from, it means the scatterer.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: And Burke is effectively saying in this passage that Milton is showing that by being pulled in by Satan, all becomes in this it all becomes indistinct, things become confused, and that over time societies, even long-running institutions like monarchies, are brought to their knees.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's and this indistinct form, yet so terrible and so real, yet unreal, it reminds me a little bit about how Tolkien ended up envisaging Sauron and having Sauron once being in full form and then suddenly not and in the tower, but always looking to get control and get people to bow down to him.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems to me that if we had things like Milton being taught within the school system in a way that people actually um could teach, because I don't I don't think teachers are really capable of it anymore.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: We might have people have better judgment and less relativism because they would see that within this whole concept, this scattering, confusing concept, that there are so many ways that you can go wrong, but here are the ways that you go right.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what you make of any or all of that.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: You ever really want to get depressed, you know, bring yourself down for an evening, read either Milton's curriculum for when he was a school teacher, the sorts of things he was putting his students through, or just read a life of Milton about his education.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, granted, he was a prodigy, but I think he was something like 14 years old when he started translating the Psalms into Greek verse, ancient Greek compositions.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, that's what education used to do for people.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: I love that passage he read.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: It reminds me of something from arcane diabolical literature, which I had to kind of look into for light of the mind because it's about the history of science, and science is very closely connected to alchemy and the so-called dark arts and so forth.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: And and somewhere in there, I forget where, the the there's a uh slogan, uh emblem, emblematic uh kind of tag for Bafflemet, one of the one of the demons, and it's dissolve et coagula.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's melt it down and then clump it back up together again.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: So this fundamental diabolical activity of first taking things apart, deconstruction, and then importantly, like shaping something else unnatural out of it.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Once you've broken things down into these disassociated atomistic parts, then you can start to impose your will upon raw matter in this really grotesque way, which is like, you know, if you if this doesn't ring a lot of bells, I don't I think you're kind of not paying attention.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like this this is sort of a Tower of Babel-esque project that we see all over the place in the effort, for instance, to open up borders and then like reconfigure nations out of just whatever persons happening to be there, but according to the scheme of benefits dreamed up in Devos or or wherever, rather than according to the traditional constitutional mandates of the relevant country.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: And this is something we see kind of like all over the place.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, in education too, which is what leaves people so adrift, so unmoored.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: And here you have to kind of stop and say, like, okay, so you you don't have to be John Milton, right?
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to be a a prodigy who's read everything ever.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it was probably nice when school kids started with Latin at age five, but uh it might be that we're not there, that there are other disciplines that we also need to learn.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: So okay.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: But here's what I say to my students, actually, when I teach Greek literature when you read a book like uh Homer's Odyssey, for instance, you may or may not love this particular book.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: But you do have to understand that you're not actually just reading one book, you're gaining access to this enormous vault.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: And now, when you walk into a museum, you know, if you ever had that experience of going into a museum and you come to the Renaissance paintings and they all look basically the same to you, um, because they're all nymphs and satyrs and naked people and wandering around.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, just from reading this one book, when you walk into that room and that gallery, those paintings won't all look the same anymore.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because this time, maybe you'll recognize the figure of Proteus or Chiron or some allegory or myth that you recall, and you'll start to understand that this is a language.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: This is an entire social civilizational language that exists to bring people together.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, all this stuff that we're always looking for, the Brotherhood of Man, whatever, like this this is it.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: We already have the Brotherhood of Man at home.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's the communion that comes from soul to soul in literature.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: And when we build up an architecture of that, you don't have to read every great book that's ever been written.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, people are always asking me for like the hundred grays books or whatever.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we say, like, don't worry about that.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, don't like set yourself some homework assignment because then when you get done with it, you're gonna be like, well, now I've read things and I don't have to do that anymore.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: But it's it's not that.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like brushing your teeth.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like this daily practice.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: And gradually the grooves of history and of your patrimony will start to work, etch their way into your mind.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, this is the true, the only known human technology really for transcending like differences of race and birth and background is the con is to live in the context of a community.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: And why wouldn't you live in a community that extends across centuries and includes the living and the dead, and even as Burke, of course, said, those those yet to be born.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I think, you know, yeah, some people are going to be specialists, some people are gonna have the particular interest in this or that period, or get really steeped in some aspect of history.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: But I my concern, and I think it's it's actually a this is actually a possible concern.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: You tell me whether you think the UK situation may be different than America, I don't know.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: In America, although our academy, our the academy proper, that is the sort of historical universities, have kind of screwed the pooch and uh just thrown away their patrimony to the wind, um, there is also a real appetite and urgency behind re-establishing something like a common stock of cultural inheritance and building universities like the University of Texas at Austin, you know, New College, Florida, where I teach, I think has a lot, you know, is sort of moving in this direction, where at least we can talk to each other because at least we have a shared store of ideas and and traditions.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of my, you know, dream vision is that we get back to a place where, yeah, not everybody's a literature professor, but the guy down the street has maybe read a couple plays by Shakespeare and now suddenly you have something in in common.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: Dear classmate John here.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you're enjoying the show, then show your support by liking, subscribing, and sharing on whichever device or platform you are watching or listening to Thinking Class on.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: You can find me in the show on YouTube at Thinking Class.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: You can also subscribe to me on Substack, searching for the at thinking class handle, or by entering thinkingclass.substack.com in your browser, and you can receive reflections, blog series, and recommended reading to your inbox.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: You can also follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I would I would like to say that's happening in the United Kingdom.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: I can neither confirm or deny.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: I I I'm not really getting the impression outside of our really august institutions like Cambridge, Oxford, St Andrews and and the like.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think for the most part, a lot of our universities are effectively just going down the progressive route.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if you go on, in fact, I was going on a couple of university websites the other day because I was interested in some of the universities I saw that were in the periphery of my London office.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't live in London, I actually live up in Edinburgh in Scotland.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: When I go down to London, I noticed some of these universities, and I thought, well, I've never really heard of these before.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: And there are so many like that.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: And when you go on the website, it's the usual page all about diversity, Black History Month, those kind of things.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: And there seems to be not a lot of majoring on those courses of substance, as it were.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: But this language you were talking about, this cultural language, which you say you can understand when you start to read the classics, you'll start to see it within art and literature.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: I also to draw an analogy from my time in London, you see you see where the story breaks off in our architectural uh stock, as it were.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I was I see it all the time, but and I always look out for it now.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I I am in one of those very new modern buildings in central London, near Liverpool Street, so the City of London.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: And when you look out of that window, down at a much lower level, but probably high for the time, you have all of these beautiful buildings in a vernacular architecture style, whether neo-gothic or Edwardian, and they still have that language you're talking about.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: Either you can see a figure of Apollo or Atlas, or on some corners you can see the Virgin Mary holding holding the Christ child.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um but flanking them are these huge featureless uh monoliths of glass and steel occasionally jutting out, and it seems to me like you know, in the men in Men in Black when they will do the they'll do the memory erasure, and then it's like nothing ever happened before.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like there was an architectural period, you know, probably the 50s, the 60s, the 60s, I would have thought, where that happened, and everything that's built afterwards, there is nothing, there's no common language.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and the thing is, is I used to walk around and notice the detail, but not know what it was, couldn't didn't pay attention to it, wondered why it was there.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until I started to access this rich tradition that I started to understand and then realized that it was um bequeathed by a certain person who also had links to this person over here, and then they were deep believers in the Christian story or or otherwise.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it the architectural landscape of our major cities, the America's the same, they are so impoverished now, and they're quite dispiriting places to be, and you could be anywhere when you're walking through them.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: There just doesn't there are large parts of London you can walk through, and you're not and you're no longer in the capital of England.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh that Men in Black metaphor is very haunting.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's I think that's right.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's a quote that I love to return to by the paleontologist G.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: G.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: Simpson that basically everything before Darwin, he says, was uh worthless and and would be best if we forgot it and started again, especially on the subjects of mankind, what what we are, where we came from, where we're going, because we have a new story about that.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the attitude that motivates a lot of what we've been talking about today, I think.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's that there is that that we need liberation from something, and that something is usually something baked into the structure of reality itself.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it's liberation from the past, it's liberation from oppressive beauty standards, it's liberation from right and wrong, it's liberation from true and false.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Milton's great theme in Paradise Lost, actually, is that liberation at that scale, liberation from all strictures, including those that are definitional, that simply are by virtue of the structure of existence, is hell.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: Is is to you have no choice but to constantly remake the universe and yourself in the image of deeper and deeper misery.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think that's like, you know, that's a lot to lay at the feet of a couple ugly skyscrapers, but the impulse is on display everywhere.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I spent some time last year, I think it was in Budapest, which is really noteworthy for this very phenomenon, for the architectural kind of periods that are visible in the landscape of the city.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: One reason for which is that if you can think of a conquering power in world history, the Hungarians have been conquered by that power.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: There is almost no oppressive autocratic regime that has not rolled through and over the Magyars.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: And they remain now still the Hungarians, and they have this incredibly embattled and beleaguered country.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, this includes having gone through a period of Soviet rule.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: And Soviet rule really was the ultimate expression of this impulse to start again at year zero.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: You see it elsewhere, you see it in the French Revolution with the attempt to restart time and rebuild the calendar, but it's in Soviet ideology that this becomes explicit and becomes a philosophy unto itself.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just a consequence of some other set of ideas, it is the idea of Soviet ideology that we are making the new man and making the new world along with him.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yes, you see it.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: You see it just like totally axed and raised to the ground.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it's very easy when you start talking about this stuff to get into a sort of this is what they took from us antiquarian mentality, and to want to say that therefore every building should be built with fluted columns and have sculptures of the classical gods.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I might enjoy that, but I actually think it would be a mistake, and it's something that it's an aesthetic mistake that conservatives are prone to.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: That the answer to this problem, I think, is not.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, certainly it is to recover and preserve our heritage, but not to attempt to recreate the material particulars of our heritage.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's actually a form of idolatry, it's actually a form of confusing the ways in which these uh attitudes and ideas have been expressed in the past with the ways in which we in the nuclear age and the digital age ought to be expressing them.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: And there are better ways, I think, of doing this.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: In Budapest, one of my favorite phenomena is the uh it's called the ruin bar.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it's when uh young people and artists have taken these destroyed industrial wasteland landscapes of the Soviet period and turned them into these kind of riotous Mardi Gras dive bars.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you wouldn't think of that exactly as a classicizing impulse.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you wouldn't call it that, I don't think.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's not right to say that's conservative or anything of that nature, but it is restorative.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: That is, it brings, it takes the reality of the city as it is, including its.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Scars from periods of conquest and says, How can the spirit of life, which ultimately is the spirit that motivates the classical virtues and so forth, re-colonize this area and this location?
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: And whenever I see, you know, a digital aesthetic that kind of speaks to me in that way, I make a little like bookmark or note of it just because I think, you know, we are struggling with this right now, what it what it looks like to embody all of these virtues and ideals in the in the present.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that is kind of our our task, I think, is like we're gonna have to retain our patrimony and our uh inheritance while also uh like undoing some of our um some of our historical mistakes without traveling backward into the past.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: We're looking, I think, now for a way forward that is traditional but also you know hyper, hypermodern.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it is possible, you know, like the uh I have a friend, Emmett Penny, who is fascinated and really knowledgeable about nuclear power, and he designs nuclear power plant cathedrals just because he thinks like what would it be like, you know, to kind of take the exigencies of modern technology and like feed them into the true, the good, and the beautiful.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't even think in that in those terms.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: We have this like automatic kind of utilitarian impulse that just, you know, executes whatever task we have without any sort of imperative for beauty.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: Beauty is not kind of a like of good in itself that needs incorporating into our projects in our mindset.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that's I think maybe the thing that really needs to change.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: Switching gears whilst remaining on that topic of timeless truths, the true, the good, the beautiful.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: We we've spoken quite a bit today, Spencer, about living in a UDU YOLO culture, relativistic, one that arguably negates the gods of the copybook headings that Rudyard Kipling has written about, uh, which is to say there are these timeless truths of human experience individually, societally, which the next social engineers of the age, of which there have been all through the ages, throw away and then predictably it all goes awry.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: And you argued in How to Save the West, that timeless truths have a tendency to reassert themselves over liberation narratives.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that?
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it speaks to this very satanic problem that we've touched on now a number of times, this idea that you know this idea that you can escape a a truth may be accurate if the truth is a contingent one.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: So as you know, in philosophy we make a distinction between contingent and necessary truths, and even we make that distinction when it comes to the identity of certain things.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: So uh you would say, for instance, that skin color is a contingent truth of humanity.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: Every human has skin, and every human's skin is a certain color, but uh it's possible to make a definition of the essence of mankind without reference to skin or color.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: You can say, for instance, that mankind is the two-legged rational animal.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: And once you have arrived at that core, you have some things without which the thing itself wouldn't exist.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: So if you say, I'm gonna create a man, but with without even the potential capacity for reason, not that he's gonna be in a coma or he's gonna be hampered by some sort of disability, but that like in his essence, he won't be able to think or to make rational conclusions.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: You've then stated a contradiction in terms.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's no such thing as a man with no capacity for reason, and just like there's no such thing as a round triangle or a square with five corners.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a it's a contradiction in terms.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same reason why it's meaningless to ask whether God can make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that there's a limitation on God's power, but that you're you've said a sentence with no real referent in the world.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: This starts to feel like kind of seminar room philosophy, abstruse ideas, except that when you then turn to the question of like transcending or or rejecting a truth or an idea, you have to ask whether that truth is contingent or not.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: So some certain truths have turned out to be contingent.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: For example, when birth control came along, certain facts about the relationship between men and women changed.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we all kind of readjusted.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: You can argue that we readjusted badly or well, you can argue that, but but we were readjusting because something had actually changed about the structure of the consequences of sexual interactions.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: When we said that men can become women and women can become men, we had then denied a truth that had not changed, that is baked into the structure of reality and that shows no signs of going away.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: When we said that there is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so, nothing had changed or revealed itself as contingent to alter the reality of the moral universe.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: We'd simply declared that it was within our power merely by asserting it to upend necessary truths, inherent truths in the world.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: And when you do that, you have set yourself against the grain of existence.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: You have effectively declared war upon the basic laws of cause and effect that run reality, which is a losing war in the end.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, of course, you may win for a while.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: You can mankind has the ability to impose his will on reality.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: But there's this same, this line from Horace that when you chase nature out the back door, she comes in the window.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of what I'm talking about when I say that the copybook headings, the gods of copybook headings will have their vengeance.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the tragic fact is they may never have their vengeance in terms of like, you know, you're the guy that you hate getting his comeuppance.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like it just happens that the Soviet Union collapsed into rubble.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: But it's possible to imagine an evil dictator that goes happy to his grave, that escapes any sort of earthly judgment.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, the minute you ask yourself, do I want to be that guy?
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: you start to realize the answer is not only no, but no with a kind of horror at the thought.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the play that most dramatizes this is Shakespeare's Macbeth, right?
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because Macbeth, for a long time, kind of gets away with abandoning the moral universe and declaring his own, usurping his father figure and usurping, you know, the laws of um friendship and loyalty and and all of these kind of larger moral truths, and then becomes haunted and ends up believing that the world means nothing, right?
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in his petty pace from day to day and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to be that guy, even if he's the king?
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: Even if he's the king of the world?
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like, no, you do that's that's hell.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: That man is in hell.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so in the long run, I think those realities assert themselves even at the historical level.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: That is, ultimately, even regimes that are founded on anti-nature, anti-truth, anti-reality do collapse.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's no reason to expect they'll collapse within our lifetime or to be quietist about what happens in politics.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: But it is a key in the outward world, on the grand stage of history, to what's going on within every human soul when it undertakes to unmake reality.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: You are on the path to a kind of inward collapse the minute you do that.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, again, I think we should have a prejudice against despair, self-destruction, and and human disaster.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of my my pitch for believing true things that are true.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I think what's remarkable about this world which we've painted today, which I think listeners, regardless of whether they're inclined to the the the worldview that you'd typically attach to the people who would be uh sympathetic to what we're saying, is I think most people will recognise when they look around cities which are uh seeing a rise in antisocial behavior and the cities themselves looking a bit more tired and a little bit less well kept and uh perhaps a little bit less um um of a community feel because everyone's just desire seeking and that's what they're trying to do, and they don't care about anyone else's, they'll be able to recognize that we live in this world.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I think what's remarkable, we also live in a world which supposedly really values science, and science is based on reason and and um a disciplined inquiry and trying to uh open your methods to challenge to be able to reach toward the truth.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: And and those people who don't want to necessarily buy into what the ancient traditions have to say, what religion has to say, they perhaps don't see that there's a a total uh um what's the right word?
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's a there's a total um break between what it is that they say they're for and the world that has become based on that detachment from those traditions we've been talking about.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a good segue into your new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the Worlds, Illuminating Science Through Faith's faith.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: And and you you tell us in that spencer that this this divergence that has taken place between science and faith, particularly the Christian faith, is a false dichotomy.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: And and you argue that it need not lead to a godless world, the pursuit of science and scientific truths, and in fact may lead us back to him, him being God.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe describe that for us.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'd be happy to.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, I will grab that I now have physical copies of this book, which is always such an exciting moment.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're watching, you can see this book, which it comes out a week from when we're talking.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: It may already be out when this is released.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, but uh Amazon is the place to get it, light of the mind, light of the world.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, this is a story that means a lot to me.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's a this is a history of science in in a few short and hopefully exciting chapters.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it tells that story because I think we need to understand that story in order to realize how it stood how it was that the world started to look like a dead machine, how it seemed plausible for a time that everything we need to know, everything that can be known, is contained in natural science and material truth.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: And what's interesting is that that conviction arose at first out of a religious project.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: The scientific enterprise was a religious project.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: It contained religious, explicit religious presuppositions, like, for instance, that the universe is rationally ordered according to a plan that also exists in miniature within the human mind.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's there's no reason to think that.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: No reason to think that the universe will answer our questions about it if you just think that our brains were evolved haphazardly to deal with our immediate surroundings.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're perfectly well capable to face a lion or a rainstorm.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the things that we evolved to deal with.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: But we also think that we are somehow equipped to deal with space travel and asteroid showers and life on Mars.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_01: Why do we think that?
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: Or why, for instance, do we think that we will ultimately figure out how quantum gravity works, how how special relativity and quantum gravity interact with one another?
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because somewhere in our distant ancestral memory, guys like Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler and even Galileo believed that we were made in the image of God, so that our brains are not simply reactive tools for dealing with the kinds of situations we happen to find ourselves in, but blueprints or microcosms of the world at large.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: And basically, I argue in this book that that idea became a sort of victim of its own success, that once Newton blew open the door to mechanical explanations of planetary motion and apples falling from trees and all the stuff we we know about, it became very tempting to conclude, although Newton himself did not conclude this, but some of his interpreters did conclude that everything can be explained like a machine.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: And if everything can be explained like a machine, there's really no place for mind or consciousness or God.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and in fact, Pierre Simon Laplace, of course, it was the French that did this.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: Pierre Simon Laplace, one of Newton's greatest ever inheritors, said that if you knew the position and velocity of every particle at any given instant, you would be able to see past, present, and future all linked together in this perfect determinist chain.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the idea of the world that they came up with eventually over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, and it worked its way into the public psyche, all the while science was proving Laplace wrong.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the kind of trick ending at the end of this story, the surprise ending, is that that idea of the world as a machine, which we've got kind of baked into our public mythos now, um, has been totally surpassed by things like quantum physics and relativity, which actually reveal a fundamental ingredient of the universe to be mind.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so the book explores the consequences of that.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you end up with a picture of the world that looks a lot like the one in Genesis, that you have raw potential, that is quantum superposition or something like it, some, you know, reality, some material reality that is outside of its contact with mind, meeting with mind when the spirit of God broods over the waters and bursting forth into these like shapes and forms that then find their answer in the human mind, which is made in the image of God.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the the argument of the book, told as a story of the history of science.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we are on the cusp really of a revival here, or at least we we need a revival and that it is possible.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I've been reading lately in the book of uh Chronicles the story of King Hezekiah, who comes just before the Babylonian exile, and he revives the worship of I don't I, the one God, when it has fallen into terrible disrepair.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: As you mentioned, as you were talking about the effects of nihilism on cities, which I saw too in Los Angeles, I was thinking about Hezekiah because he too comes with age, comes to power in a city that has fallen into disrepair.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's it bears all of the marks, this kind of sort of rampant poverty, unaddressed or poorly addressed.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the the execution of infants, which it's my belief we we also perpetrate en masse in the in the modern West, but also apostasy, also all this stuff.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: And he comes back to power, and one of the most interesting things that first happens is that he celebrates Passover late.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_01: And the text makes a really uh sort of a big deal out of this.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the reason it's doing that is it's trying to convey, you know, these dates for high festivals are are very serious commandments of law in the in the Torah when you celebrate Passover, all the different, you know, obligations, religious obligations that we incur.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: But the picture of revival that we get in in Chronicles kind of says, yeah, but you start from where you're at, right?
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe we hope that one day, like everybody will be reciting the Apostles' Creed and worshiping Jesus and you know, but right now we're in the sort of postmodernist wasteland and wreckage.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it's gonna take time and compromise to move from there to meet people where they're at and build back to to a sort of revival.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one route in, there's the political route in, which people like Ion Hersey R.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: Lee are taking, saying, you know, our social structures need Christianity, but there's also the scientific route in, which says, look, science itself needs religion to make sense as it needs first principles, and is trending toward a vision of the world that looks like religion.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to give up your your your rationality or your um just basic good sense, your belief in reality in order to be a religious person.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, just the opposite.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: You might need religion now to make sense of the truth.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think I think you're right about that revival, and it seems to be coming from two ways that I've seen it anyway.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_00: In Britain, we're very lucky to have the most wonderful scholar, um, Dr.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: Ian McGillchrist, who has written The Master and His Emissary about what the divided brain is and uh the implications of becoming too left hemispheric or and and not right hemispheric enough, and how they're meant to talk to each other.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I I won't butcher that in a summary, but also the matter with things, which he wrote 1400 pages, effectively railing against what your you you're you you've outlined, which is we are not machines, and here are all the ways that we are not, and this is He's in this book.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: McGillchrist gets a gets a quote in this book.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's wonderful.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_01: The matter of things is wonderful and and magisterial work.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it really is.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: And and for for someone to bring together uh philosophy, literature, neurology, and physics, and as well as countless cultural traditions that span the globe to show that there is much more to the world and our participation in it than it just being a material thing, uh, I think really has had a huge impact, particularly when he ends up on podcasts like Russell Brand's and Chris Williamson's and you know, millions of people listening to it.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we're seeing it, at least in the the the Zoomer generation, not all of them.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: I know that in it it's typical to see Generation Z or Z as being uh woke and woke alone, but at least in Britain, we're seeing a bit of a a group, or we're seeing a group of Zoomers who are actually really pushing the same kind of um philosophical investigation and uh the expansion of the Christian faith that you just would not have expected, and you certainly don't expect to see within the millennial generation.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I think I think you're right.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_00: I know some people who would disagree would say, no, this is just this is cope, we're done with all of that.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there might be enough to suggest that we might be on our way back uh with regards to the bigger questions, what it means to be human and trying to order our our lives and our societies in a way that conforms to the good and avoids the bad.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_00: And and you're you're part of that as well, Spencer, right?
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: You people like Louise Perry are also part of it.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: People who in the past, like I, probably dismissed all of this stuff, and then you discover it and then your life becomes transformed by it.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I think people are clutching around for things, and I'm I'm personally very glad you're you're putting you're putting this stuff out there because it's it's you know, as much as the word accessible can do a lot of uh far too many yards in this this uh life, and sometimes it means it's it's dumbed down uh to the point of you know you know a futile endeavour.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: You actually do make things accessible in the way that uh opens that portal that I was talking about earlier to people to go and discover for themselves.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: So you keep fighting the good fight, Spencer.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: And and and before I let you go, I I would I I like to ask each of my guests a question about what they've changed their mind on in the course of their lives.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_00: So was there anything that you once held to be uh uh this unshakable truth about the world, which is since no longer part of your psyche?
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: And what was it that made you change your mind?
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, thank you very much for that kind of ration.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't know that I can go on after that.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: I just need to sort of retire to my fainting couch.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's been thank you.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_01: That is very, very, very kind of you.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that it means a lot because that is you've described what I hope what I hope to be doing and what I hope to be offering to a larger social movement, as you s as you say.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's bigger than any any one of us.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um I am a late convert to Christianity, late in the sense of non infant, non I I was baptized when I was 18.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's difficult for me to say that I change I mean, I certainly changed my mind, for instance.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: About certain doctrinal elements of the faith, like the divinity of Christ, you know, that I now believe in and did not before.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um but that would be doing a disservice to the nature of the transformation.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot about St.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_01: Paul talking about the renewal of your mind that comes along with conversion.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think my experience of that renewal um has been entirely defined by joy.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_01: And nothing in my life has gone materially.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's not true.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_01: Some things in my life have gone materially better since becoming becoming religious.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the mark, the hallmark to me of of true religion is actually not that you get a million dollars or that suddenly everything starts going well for you.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that rather the whole experience of life becomes suffused with joy.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_01: Joy not in the sense of dancing around and smiling and clapping, joy not in the sense of like, you know, do you mind if I tell you about Jesus?
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, whatever.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_01: But but simply the peace which passes all understanding.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_01: This suddenly God, which is to say the highest, highest good, right?
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_01: The embodiment of everything we've been talking about, aspiring toward, um becomes really present in your every waking moment.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think that's just changed my attitude about the point and purpose of everything.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it it has really upended what used to be, I think, kind of the defining goal of my life, which was ambition.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm a like very ambitious Ivy League kid, went on a path kind of like you were describing for yourself, also like had a trajectory, and then just had that completely arrested.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's not as if I'm not ambitious, it's not that I don't do things.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, I have a career, obviously I work.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_01: But the reorientation of every moment toward the good of that moment for its own sake, like this conversation, not because it's gonna increase either of our profiles or whatever, other things it may do.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_01: There may be good things that come out of it.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe sell a couple copies of the book, who knows?
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_01: But to be able to like forget all of that and leave it kind of in the hands of a power which is gonna take care of God's gonna take care of, or rather, decide about what happens in the future anyway.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then to be able to sort of abandon that in peace and just like invest yourself entirely in in what's the like what's good in our heart, like what's the best and most interesting thing that we can talk about and turn over and discuss.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: And to take that attitude into like every room, every moment that you go into um is is an incalculable gift.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess the if I had to say like what I changed my mind about, it was like the purpose of doing things is for the good of the things themselves and not for whatever you hope to get out of them.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I couldn't I couldn't agree more.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: I I I heard uh he was he he's an English slash Irishman, but now naturalized American citizen who is a poet called David White, and he wrote a book about the the the cons uh called consolations, the the meanings of everyday words.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think his idea was we use lots of words with without knowing their meaning, and one of them was ambition.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um he talked about how ambition, the very ease of ambition, is that it can be explained, and that is the very disease of ambition in that it can be explained because then it become you can end up oriented toward this already stale, um, too narrowly confined objective which utterly destroys your ability to actually realize the potential within your life and others because you're too focused on that.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_00: And he he effectively is trying to make the same point as you, which is there's a right way of approaching things and approaching life in the right spirit, and that's when you get the most out of it without saying I want to achieve this role title or this amount of money or this number of book sales.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, Spencer, I I think I think it's safe to say that you bring joy into a world that is has suffered its fair share of despair.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I I you've certainly brought joy to me.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm delighted you came on the show, and I do hope we get to talk again.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I wish you all the best with the book launch.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it'll do excellently.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, thanks, John.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's good to know.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe Mary Marie Kondo won't throw me into the dumpster just at if I spark joy.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_01: It was a pleasure.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_01: This is really a delight.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me on.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks again, Spencer.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_00: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are run making it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.