https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZMRn2cAaf6A
Welcome to Voices with Raveki. I’m joined again by my friend Brent Cooper. Brent is here to bring a very welcome perspective. I often say that Brent and I don’t agree on everything, but Brent shows up in authenticity and good faith, and I think he is deserving of the same, and I hope that he feels that I’m extending that back to him. So welcome, Brent, and could you please maybe give a very short reintroduction of yourself, and then I’ll introduce the topic we’re going to start with. Yeah, thanks for having me back. I’m a political sociologist, a rogue one at that, and very engaged in the literal and sociological sense, and kind of in limbo right now for various reasons, but all the more reason to engage on this particular subject, which is metanoia, as you’re going to give your introduction. So, Brent, I’m going to talk to you about how I have used the word in my work and how I understand it, and then that will hopefully give something as a foil for you to enter into discussion with. So the term for me has gone out of, for me, a Christian origin. It comes from the New Testament, the metanoia. It’s often translated as conversion. It’s a very poor translation, especially in 2020, in which the notion of conversion has gone through sort of American Protestantism and met this particular kind of emotional experience, and it’s been a very, you know, emotional experience, but if you go back to the original meaning of the word, and especially through its neoplatonic heritage, meta of course means beyond, to get to something to sort of the structuring principles of something, like metaphysics. You’re not talking about physics. You’re talking about the structuring principles of physics, and then noia is, of course, from the Greek noesis, and you’re probably aware of this. I’ve made arguments that noesis corresponds to what I call perspectival knowing, and so what’s being talked about is a kind of transformation in which the principles that structure your perspectival knowing, what you find salient and relevant, have been deeply and permanently, at least long-standingly, transformed, and that’s why the metaphor of turning, because what happens when I turn is I have this perspective in which these things are relevant and salient, and then I turn this way, and now I’m in another perspective when things are relevant and salient, and then the idea is, that’s a metaphor, something analogous that can happen to people when they’re undergoing a transformation, and these kinds of transformation have historically been called, have something to do with wisdom on one hand, or have something to do with, and this term is very contested and very vague, but spirituality in another, and so we sort of ended last time, and we were sort of bridging the topic of the spirituality of what you’ve been talking about, and then you proposed metanoia as a bridging point between, if you’ll allow me, this term, the sociological analysis and the spiritual practice, and so that’s how I’m seeing it, and that’s why now I’d like to hear what you want to say about that. Yeah, that’s a great set up. I just want to issue a quick correction if I’m right. I think the more true definition of the term is conversion, whereas it’s been translated in the Bible as repentance. Yeah, at times. Yeah, and so the research that I’ve aggregated basically says that the Bible mistranslated, translates it as repentance, which it’s not completely wrong. It’s repentance and guilt, and all that is very useful in this concept, but it describes metanoia more broadly as conversion, the ways you did describe it, and so that’s an important framing in the first place, like that it’s, that this, you know, that comes through the Christian tradition sort of manifests in repentance, but the deeper meaning is conversion, and that’s what the scholarship suggests, is that there’s a deeper meaning, and I’ve not found any sources for metanoia exactly outside of Greek and outside of the Bible. It all points back to that, but I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily exclusive to that either, you know. We’re trying to always, when we historicize too, and when we try to reinvent contemporary metaphysics, we’re trying to disambiguate and abstract the meaning from these historical meanings, but then also contextualize it in our current moment, our current unfolding of history, and so, you know, the nesting in Christianity is important, but I don’t want anyone to think that it’s exclusive to that, especially because Christianity has been so hegemonic, and the Christian religion, you know, it emerged, but it also was institutionalized by different powers that be over time, much of it after the fact, like much of this historical writing of the time of Jesus and of ancient Greece, even of Alexander the Great, much of the writing that survived was hundreds of years after the fact. There’s not real tangible history, but it’s taken as such typically until it’s deconstructed, and so, you know, I’ve gravitated towards this term for a long time, especially, you know, about eight years ago, 2012, my research in metamodernism was just really around this meta prefix and whatever fell into that bucket, right, and so metaphysics and metanoia especially was something that I thought was under explored and analyzed. Metamodernism, you mean? It was being under explored within? Just in general, just in general. I mean, even at that time, metamodernism hardly existed as a discourse, but so I went through my own kind of spiritual conversions and, you know, in the paper that I’ve been writing, you know, I cite on one hand, there’s some authors that say metanoia is very rare, it only happens once, twice, maybe three times in your life, and certainly in a grand sense, it would be that rare, but then there’s another example I give of a TED speaker who says, oh, you have, you know, tens of thousands, a hundred thousand metanoias in your life because they’re focusing on the other end of the spectrum, just little novel changes, and so, you know, we got to play with that spectrum, but I’m leaning towards the more substantive changes, but I’m prefacing that because I’ve also had lots of little changes in my life, right? So when I say conversion, it’s not that I converted to Christianity or from Christianity, right, for example, I grew up secular and, you know, interested in, you know, secular humanism as a kind of contemporary scientific civil religion, if you’re part of that tradition at least, and, you know, and so, you know, you talk about the religion without a religion and all that, but like all of this is preceded by a pluralism and a kind of study of world religions, and so there’s a revived interest in religion and mythology, but it’s all, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s all a dead end unless you’re trying to weave those threads together into, you know, trying to braid them into a metanarrative, and so the world religions are all part of a common tradition of humans discovering and creating religion, and so I have my own sort of metanoias within the Christian tradition, but then also beyond that, and political, social, political, economic, personal metanoias, and the research I did has taken me across all these fields such that the term has been by people like Peter Senge has been introduced into business, right, and so, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to, again, to weave those threads back together because they’re all inconclusive essentially. So there’s a couple things I want to pick up on, so there was three things you said. The first was, you know, that I think there’s a vacancy in point, I think that metanoia sits within a family, a family resemblance idea of related things, so whereas you may not have, you know, I mean, you may not have a term sort of like it etymologically or syntactically, I think Buddhist notions of enlightenment, I think enlightenment is also that kind of deeply transformed transformation of one’s respectable noticing and what one finds deeply salient and relevant, and so I think that’s, and I think if we, so I think if we broaden the scope to think of that, you know, the family resemblance class, awakening is another one, awakening is very much like you’re in this and you go to that, right, and so I agree with you. I think if we open up and look at, rather than trying to find a strict definition, if we collect this family resemblance together, then I think we can start to do what you’re talking about. I think we can both obduce what is perhaps general or universal, but also specify what is historically and culturally specific, and I think we can do both of those. So on the second point, the idea of the spectrum, I don’t know if you know this, the work I’m doing with Daniel Craig, I argue explicitly for that, and Andrew Newberg has done that as well in his book, So How Enlightenment Affects Your Brain. This is the idea of there being a continuum between the machinery of insight into things like the flow experience and mystical experiences, which I do experimental work on, and then full blown awakening experiences in which people not just have a mystical experience, but they feel called to transform themselves in response to that, and so I think there’s a continuum there, and I think remembering the continuum is very important because if we just talk about this and over here, enlightenment, and people will spat, but if you make them realize deeply the continuum, then its relevancy and currency to them is much more apparent. And then the third thing is more of maybe a question. So you’ve sort of brought up two aspects of something, and very often people put them in a relationship of debate. I’m aware of this within cognitive science and philosophy, and if you’ll allow me two terms, you won’t mention one already, pluralism, but the one that is often opposed to it is perennialism, the idea that they’re all saying that ultimately the same thing. Now I think you do too. I reject perennialism. I think there’s something right about pluralism, but there’s also the idea that that doesn’t mean there aren’t universal things, because I think one of the things that distinguishes pluralism from mere relativism, which gets incommensurability and all kinds of self-destructive patterns in, is that pluralism says that while there is considerable variation, like we’ve just discussed, there are nevertheless universal processes in terms of which we can understand and compare and bring these things into dialogue. Where do you stand on that perennialism? Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. That’s a good question. I don’t think I would reject perennialism. I think they can be compatible with pluralism, right? We can juxtapose them without canceling each other out. It’s a good word. I should have invoked it before, because there’s many ideas within perennialism, but just the, you know, it’s a deep subject, but just the idea itself, I like the kind of universal religion, because religions are so historically and materially, you know, predicated and constituted, and we often forget that, like all that survives is the myths, right? And we forget about the geography and all these essential things. And of course, as I alluded to in the beginning, like we can’t forget how much of history has been lost or destroyed, you know, like just ballpark 99% of documents of the ancient world is gone. But before going further, I wanted to give a plug to this book from, I think from 2018, by Bloomsbury. It’s called Metanoia, a speculative ontology of language, thinking, and the brain. And it’s referenced briefly in my draft that I sent you, but you know, it’s probably, I don’t actually draw on it a lot, but it’s probably the best book on the subject and the most, coincidentally, the closest to your research interests. And so there’s a ton of good stuff in there. So if we do converse on that more, we could use this, a book like this, as a jumping off point. But because I came across so many sources in my research, and many that this book didn’t reference, I thought I wanted to go broader, right? Because this book is a fantastic starting point. But it says nothing about what I’m talking about in terms of a paradigm shift, right? How do we achieve mass, you know, class consciousness and tipping points and all the sorts of fantastical ideas of metamodernism. But they definitely dovetail, you know, there’s sort of alignment with, you know, speculative realism and object-oriented ontology and all that. So there’s so much in here, just in, you know, they talk about Poesis and, you know, Aletheia, and at some point, there’s some quotes there about like, Metanoia is kind of a fundamental concept to philosophers, right? I think that I thank you for recommending that. I’m surprised I have not come across that. That’s awesome. Yeah. I will definitely order that book once we’re done talking. Okay, so I want to give you space, and like, you’ll probably say things that I might not initially agree with. But before I do that, before we move to, like, because I want, like, you’ve made a criticism of me, and I take, and I try to take it to heart. And you said, you know, because I talk a lot about, and you don’t dismiss this, you recognize it, I talk a lot about bridging between science and spirituality. But you say, you know, I think appropriately, yeah, but what about science and political? I have some criticisms of that. But I think you have a more Aristotelian sense of politics than the current meaning of that term. Maybe that’s part of the, we could work out the semantics. But the discussions with Lehmann and Zach have sort of opened me up to at least what Zach and Lehmann have been calling the Metapolitical. And so maybe you and I can initially, I mean, we at least, maybe the two Metas are some common ground, the Metanoia and the Metapolitical. But I will give you space for what you want to say. But before I do that, I wanted to ask you about the perennialism, because there’s sort of a thing going on in perennialism. There’s sort of, there’s two versions of it. There’s like sort of a Ken Wilber version, right? And then there’s a Jorge Ferrer version. And Ferrer’s version is that the perennialism is not one that everybody says has the same thing, but that instead it’s much more what I would even call sort of procedural perennialism. The idea is that there is a kind of knowing, what I call participatory knowing, that all of the religions are crafting procedures to try and get us to remember the perspectival and the participatory. And that kind of perennialism, I think, is viable in concert with something like pluralism. Whereas I find the perennialism of Huxley, for example, I find that very hard, because his seems, well, to use one of your terms, it seems very hegemonic. It seems like that all of these are basically, you know, this particular sort of Christianized view of Hinduism that he had. And so I’m very sort of wary of that. Would you say that you’re more on that side of perennialism, the Ferrer side, than the Huxley side? Just so I understand where you’re coming from. Did you swap out Wilbur for Huxley? Well, I see Wilbur as a modern version of Huxley. Okay, okay. Yeah, I mean, you’re talking about all this Huxley. Yeah, yes. I mean, I love all this Huxley. So that’s a good place to start. But however, I think I’d lean more the other way, as you’re saying, and what you’re describing, you know, evokes in me the sociology of religion. So within that subject, right, that merging of fields, they understand all of that stuff from a functional point of view, like what is religion actually doing as a form of social organization? And so I guess, on the other hand, you’re saying that the Wilbur Huxley version is kind of a bit more abstracting it into a Western context and a bit wishy washy new age or prone for misinterpretation. I don’t think, I mean, so for me, I can’t find it as easily alignable with sort of the best cognitive science that I know. Okay. The way culture and cognition, what I call culture cognitive grammar works. Like, so while I think, you know, and Evan Thompson has made a very similar argument in his recent book, you know, Why I’m Not a Buddhist, you know, he argues that Western Buddhism has basically sort of cracked itself to look like it’s very scientific and then claim that all of Buddhism has always been more scientific. And I think you so he rightly criticizes what he calls Buddhist exceptionalism, the idea that somehow Buddhism, you know, and I’m a friend of Buddhism, you know that, right? This is not a hostile skeptic from the outside, the same thing with Evan, right? I know Evan personally. And so that kind of exceptionalism, what I’m saying is there is a version, I’m not saying all versions, saying there’s a version or a branch, and maybe I’m doing something similar, like what you did with the Meta modernism stuff, but there’s a branch of perennialism that sort of allies itself with various kinds of exceptionalism. And that strikes me as, I don’t know if you can make any kind of good justification for that move. That’s what I’m criticizing. I think I understand. Sorry, I got distracted because I was trying to look up a world religions tree. And this is something I came across a long time ago, but it came out of a research project and a foundation that I think dovetails with what we’re talking about, in trying to, first of all, map everything. But then from that sort of macro perspective, you can trace the origins. And so in the tree, all the world religions do go back to not a single source, but a kind of weave, a kind of trunk, a thread of sources. And it’s the same with languages. And I’m fascinated with that idea too, because again, we’re talking about pre-history, before written history, kind of culture existed. And it was just extant. It didn’t exist in the abstract. It just was. I’m sure people had thoughts and stuff, but they didn’t have writing. They didn’t have institutions yet. They had language. And so that’s mind blowing in itself. And so with metamodernism, we’re trying to trace this long arc of history. And not throwing the baby out with the bath water, because all of these traditions still have something to teach. I got it. Your language example, though, is really pertinent. So what I’m proposing is something not like that there is one best language. Let’s use the Chomskyian framework. I’ve criticized some of Chomsky’s language, but let’s put it aside. The idea of universal grammar, that all languages make use of universal grammar, but that doesn’t mean that all languages have the same actual grammar. They work very differently because they fit their historical context. And you shouldn’t use the notion of universal grammar to try and say, somehow, German is a better language than Spanish, or something like that. And I hear people do that all the time. They make exceptionalism arguments, like blah blah is a way more complex language than blah blah. And one of my criticisms of Heidegger, by the way, is the way he has that kind of exceptionalism towards German as the best language in which one does philosophy, or something like that. And that, for me, is very problematic. So that’s what I’m criticizing. I think there’s a universal, allow me the metaphor, don’t push me too hard on it. I think there’s a universal grammar for religion, but I think there are many different religious languages. And the universal grammar does not give the basis for privileging any one of these languages over the other. That’s what I’m saying. Yeah, exactly. And so with that said, I want to go in two directions, either simultaneously or one at a time. But one is we keep going in this broad, abstract direction. But the other is I wanted to touch on Christian metanoia, because we can talk about that within the bubble of Christianity. And so then it’s contextualized in that greater context. Okay, so if I go there first, the point I wanted to make, though, is I’ve always been a dabbler in the different religions and fields. And I’m not just co-opting to mash up something. Each one has its own complexity and depth. But I do think that at the end of the day, they’re kind of dead ends, like, or cul-de-sacs, rather. You got to return to the source. And so within Christianity, there’s many traditions. And I’ve gravitated towards certain traditions more, like Gnostic Christianity. And my takeaway from that is that God is kind of within. And I don’t mean in a crude sense that you have direct Gnostic access, but in a cognitive sense, you study and you enter the flow state. Maybe you take some substances and you have a Gnostic experience, right? Which is your mind is lit up and it’s integrating and synthesizing all this information. So this is contemporary language. But my understanding of the Jesus metanoia itself in that time, and before I say this, I want to preface, Jesus may not have existed historically. There’s serious scholarly arguments that deconstruct that notion. And so I want to give kind of just an honest take because somebody like Jordan Peterson, for example, waffles on this topic and thinks maybe even Jesus came back from the dead. And so I want to draw a clear line, right? And so I’m not disrespecting Christianity. I’m taking it to a higher level than someone like Jordan Peterson. You need to historicize it. Not, that’s my cat. So Jesus may have existed. I wrote a paper once that I found there was many people named Jesus at that time. And many, you know, crucifixion was a common practice. So since there’s nothing that’s still available written about Jesus at the time, nothing gives us any real context, eyewitness accounts. What is that worth? I’m just, I want to start off on a clear speculative ground here, right? And I’m also going to preface and say, I’m not going to say Jesus was a socialist or whatever because these are anachronistic terms in that sense. However, that is kind of what I’m saying is like Jesus was a rebel, a political rebel of his time. And he was basically persecuted and crucified for not just political crimes, but spiritual blasphemy saying I’m God and all this, right? So the punchline that I’m getting to is that the metanoia of Jesus and of all of Christianity is to realize the divine spark within everybody. And so you’re taking away that monotheistic authority from the state and bringing it into yourself, right? So Jesus as a Jew under Roman rule is saying, no, excuse me, I’m God. You can’t tell me otherwise. And so I really respect that notion, right? I mean, Christianity is about anything fundamentally it hangs on that. And so this is why I don’t want to fetishize the character of Jesus at all. This we’re talking about 2000 years ago. It’s got nothing to do with the internet and modernity. So we have to, again, not throw out the baby with the bath water, but recontextualize all these things, relearn all these and be it, be it. Stop talking about religion, stop talking about this or that figurehead, but embody it. And so my own realizations have been along those lines is not that I’m the Messiah, right? There is no Messiah, but then I’m going to try to live up to those principles and not the principles as distilled by this or that church, which can very easily be co-opted into a political agenda or whatever, or just as a mechanism of social control. But as this, so to bring back to this term perennial, as this perennial realization that divinity is within us all and that we have to nurture that and practice it, practice it through spirituality. And if we’re going to have religion and if we’re going to institutionalize it, then it needs to be far, far more ethical than what we’ve seen historically. It needs to be totally nonviolent, totally humanist. And this is what people like Martin Luther King and Gandhi embodied and pursued with the same vigor as a kind of Christ figure. Yeah, that’s wonderful. So just you recommended a book to me. Have you read April the Connors book, the Gnostic New Age? No. She’s one of the people there. So the Gnostics have undergone, you’re probably aware of this, they’ve undergone a sort of a significant revival and revisioning within scholastic work. I mean, so, I mean, not that it’s not a good book, Hans Jonas book is I think a very important book, but since then, there’s been a reinterpretation. Some people are even questioning whether there was ever something like the Gnostics. People argue that Gnosticism was, and I think there’s good evidence mounting towards it, Gnosticism is much more a style of any religion you’re practicing. The comparisons that’s often made with the Gnostics often made is like Gnosticism is a term like, it’s not the same term. I’m talking about what kind of term it is. It’s the same kind of term as fundamentalism. You can be a fundamentalist Christian, fundamentalist Muslim, et cetera. And Gnosticism is much more like that. I don’t know if you know, there’s an episode in my series that I did on Gnosticism and Gnosticism, and I’ve done some talk on this. But anyways, one of the things that the chronic brought out, and this is the way I argued it. I want to know what you think about this, because I argue that the Gnostics, and there’s problems with the Gnostics. They also have a dark history. They go into the European underground and get associated with all kinds of conspiracy theory crap, and there’s been danger there in their history. But going back to what you said, the perennial quest, I argued that there’s a sense in which the Gnostics are trying to complete the Axial Revolution, because what the chronic argues is that the Axial Revolution had already done a significant change. What she says is that the transgressive nature of Gnosticism was that it was calling into question something that had been held over from the pre-Axial period into the Axial period, which was that the basic relationship between human beings and the God was one modeled on enslavement and servitude, and that the Gnostics were trying to finish the Axial Revolution by removing that and therefore seeing all the existing gods as representing that fold over. And this comes out in places where people might not expect. So here’s, you know, he’s of course considered, you know, radical in some sense, but he’s nevertheless considered a mainline and important theologian. Paul Tillich, when Paul Tillich talks about the God beyond the God of theism, he’s basically making that same argument. He’s making the argument that we haven’t completed the Axial Revolution, if that’s something we want to do, but nevertheless, right, because we’re still bound to this grammar of sacredness and slavery being bound together. And of course, I think that does have all kinds of meta-political consequences in it. And so, and you’re right, Jesus is crucified, and crucifixion is the punishment for, you know, political threats to the Roman establishment. Let’s not forget that. I agree with you, he’s also crucified for religious reasons, having to do, again, here’s a Gnostic thing. He seems to be overthrowing purity codes, and this was also part of the Gnostic thing, that the purity codes that we live by are often ways in which we are bound into things. You know, you get this in Jesus saying things like, you know, the Sabbath was made for mankind, not mankind for the Sabbath. He’s trying to invert the relationship in a very fundamental way. And so, I think, sorry, this is long, I’m sort of getting you, though, I’m sort of getting why that, and this is honest, you know, it’s respectful, and getting why you would be attracted to sort of the Gnostic thread within Christianity. Yeah, and let me, yeah, there’s a lot I want to pick up off there and keep going. So, yeah, I agree with you. I’m not going to refute anything about the history of Gnosticism, like there’s many rabbit holes there. And what I’m attracted to is the knowledge part, right? The knowing. And so, as a, you know, a sociology person, this is where it gets tangible and interesting, is like, you know, religion and not just religion, but you know, social organization in general, but religion in particular, tries to control knowledge and power, right? That relationship. It’s always been that way. And so, to this day, we have an epistemic crisis, where we can’t disentangle knowledge and power. And so, you know, so it undermines scholarship itself, because so much of scholarship and scholasticism was created under these conditions of power. And so, history is the unfolding of that. And I do believe in some abstract sense of a kind of, well, let’s say, completing the Axial Age, but also, fulfilling Hegel and Marx’s vision. So, there’s an eschatology here, and not necessarily like nihilistic one, right? Like this is, it’s relative, we can strive for relative utopia. But, you know, so I reject the kind of biblical eschatology, but it’s fascinating because there was a great flood in ancient history, right? Before writing, again, and this was passed down through tradition and all that. I agree. I think there’s good scholarship around that. I agree. Yeah, but we couldn’t confirm it until later science, right? And then we, you know, and it’s not like we’re finding Noah’s Ark or whatever, like, whatever, but there was a great flood and sea levels rose like 400 feet, whatever it was. And, you know, and so it was for, you know, humanity or whatever collective consciousness existed in its primitive forms, there was culture and there was a kind of social imaginary, and that was destroyed. And of course, in a smaller scale, there’s been many, many end times, right? This is a ubiquitous recurrent concept. But what is different today, right? And again, putting aside like mind calendar prophecies and stuff like that, putting, you know, we are in the kind of end times. And so I like this theme, because it’s ubiquitous in culture and with climate change, with the end of capitalism, these things are kind of kicking the door down. And you know, these things are like confronting us and we have to confront it. So my broader point, though, is that everything you said, and what I’m trying to say dovetails into this political conversation is inescapable, because it defines the terms of knowledge and power and how they relate. So, you know, the 20th century saw a lot of brutality, but it also saw the expansion of these progressive humanist institutions, but they’re still not universal. We’re still debating things like systemic racism, like the extent of it, and there’s people who deny it. And, you know, white supremacy is a latent, invisible thing that acts through people, sometimes unconsciously through and through institutions. And so this kind of stuff, this kind of lower level stuff, actually prevents us from solving the greater problem, right? And we have to solve all the problems. In an integrated fashion, is that what you’re saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, coming back to this idea of gnosis, like, I think, for myself, and probably a lot of people who study and practice these things, you eventually have to take responsibility for it yourself and figure it out yourself, right? So, I guess for me, it’s been a quest of extracting knowledge from a given context, like, trying to learn things firsthand, as impossible as that is. You know, like when it comes to politics, you need to decode a lot of nonsense. And so, and you have to be kind of spiritually grounded at the same time, so you can, I guess, differentiate different qualities of information. Can I pick up on that in one concrete example from my own work? Because when you were invoking the eschaton and the apocalypse, I mean, so Chris and Philip and I wrote in the book, you know, about the zombie apocalypse. And the problem about the zombie apocalypse is, right, it’s a perversion of apocalypse, right? Apocalypse originally meant revelation. It meant something like a worldwide insight, a metanoia at a civilization level, so that the world and the agent arena relationship, to use my language or our language, I mean, my co-authors, is radically transformed and a viable long-term future is now made possible in a way it wasn’t before. The myth is you have decadence and it can, right, and the only future is a decadent one, and then you get this metanoia that’s systemic across the civilization, and then a viable future becomes available. But the point about the zombie apocalypse is it articulate, it expresses, without articulation, sorry, I misspoke, it expresses without articulation the meaning crisis and how it’s infecting our notion and basically shutting it down. Because what the zombie apocalypse is, is it’s the perversion. The zombie is a perversion of the resurrection. The zombie apocalypse is not a viable future. It’s a future that is continually decaying. Everything is being, and so what I’m saying to you is, like, you mentioned that decoding, and maybe this won’t be how you would use your word, this word, but I would use this word here, and what I’m learning from Zach and Raymond, I think there’s a meta-political project of decoding that perversion of the myth and showing people that, you know, that it’s, it’s, there’s a kind of, it’s very attractive, that’s supposed to be the question, but it’s attractive in a way that’s attractive in a way that’s entrapping and it’s preventing, right, it’s preventing the kind of transformation we need in order to try and bring about a viable future. Now, is that an example of the kind of thing you’re talking about where, like, we’re, like, I was trying to get it, go, give, for people, we were trying to get people to see this myth because, oh, I don’t believe in mythology. Yes, you believe in this, you believe in this, and you enact it, and you will do these huge social rituals going on zombie walks and dressing up like zombies, watching movies, right, but you’re not, you’ll allow me your verb again, you’re not decoding this, you’re not seeing what’s being articulated in here, and you’re not, and worse, you’re not seeing what’s being perpetuated in this mythos and how it’s hamstringing you in a very, very powerful way. So, I have this ambivalent attitude towards the zombie apocalypse. I mean, I think it’s important as a phenomena, but I think people need to decode it and understand what it’s doing. Is that a fair example? I’m trying to connect with my own work. It’s a great example because I’ve thought about the zombie apocalypse a fair bit. I haven’t written about it yet, but we’ll see, let me see if I can just explain my thoughts because, yeah, zombie culture is big, you know, I’m not a big horror buff. There’s lots out there, but I like meta-humour. So, for example, you take the movie Shaun of the Dead, it’s a very popular kind of play on zombie films, right, and so I love that kind of stuff, but so for me, you know, so the cultural depiction of zombies is like the living dead and they eat brains and all this, and it’s ironic because what I see is zombie culture, and I have no doubt there’s a lot written on this, but zombie culture is like consumerism, so you’re kind of mindless, just droning around and, you know, and the idea of eating brains is ironic too because it’s like this longing for knowledge, but you don’t want to take the shortcut and just nourish yourself cannibalizing somebody else, right, so a lot of these sort of myths, wherever they originate from, they do kind of layer and complicate some simpler truth, like in the case of zombies, it’s like, you know, it’s maybe a death denial mechanism and it serves functions and sublimates all these things and entertains us, but if we’re to decode it, I would say the zombie apocalypse would be, you know, just people who are sort of uncritically drifting through the world, even if they’re very smart, you know, if they’re just mindless consumers, that the zombie apocalypse is awakening from that, right, and breaking the mold that you’re in and eschewing those habits, right, and eschewing the literalism of the myth, always looking at the deeper level, and it seems like, you know, coming back to mass metanoia, it seems like we’re not getting any closer, you know, like there’s things like the zeitgeist movement and other things like that which are trying to build mass consciousness and a kind of political cultural metanarrative, which in large part is perennial, it’s like the interesting thing about the zeitgeist movement is that it was, you know, consciously kind of theatrical and vaudevillian and it merged all these religions and said, look, well, the myths of Jesus is just like Horace or whatever, and you know, so it was kind of meta-historical, but ultimately, like, I wanted, you know, I strive for these things to dovetail more, like I don’t think the zeitgeist movement in itself has any kind of conclusion, it’s all a prelude to some institutional change, like we’re all, and this is why I believe in convergence, it needs to dovetail more, not more people start more spin-off projects, and so, and none of it is perfect, right, we have to take the best of each thing, and so yeah, that was my riff on the zombie idea, so. That’s great, that’s great. We’re sort of coming to the end of the hour, so I don’t know if I want to start another big topic, but I’d like to invite you to come back and we continue. Yeah, we got started a little late, so I don’t think we’ve been talking that long. It’s up to you, of course, in your availability, but we can keep going. Well, I’m not saying we should stop right now, but I have about five more minutes, and you know, starting late was my fault, and I apologize for that. No problem. But like, so, but I think there’s momentum what we’re talking about, and so like I’m extending the invitation, so I’m not trying to close this off. Okay. I want to keep going, I want to keep going. I just like what, it feels like also there’s a bit of a, we’ve come, like this topic has been, come to sort of like a point of coherence for me in my mind, understanding where you’re coming from a lot more clearly now than I did in a previous discussion, so I’m just also worried about sort of the logical thing. If we start something and it’s about five minutes and it’s a dangler, I’m inviting you to come back and we can talk more, but what I would like to do then is give you the last five minutes to you, to whatever last word you want to say about this, so that you don’t feel like I’ve just foreclosed on what’s happened between us. I thought today was really good. I mean, I really like what happened here. I thought it was some really good unpacking here. I felt that in terms, I mean, in terms of the manner, I thought this was much, much better than our previous recording. I think it was much more flowy and dialogical and so I thought, and it felt much more organic to me. Yeah, great, thanks. I don’t know if you experienced it that way, but that’s how I experienced it. Yeah, yeah, it felt good and I don’t know what my closing thoughts would be. What else have I not touched on? There’s lots more to go on Metanoia, of course. Yeah, there is. Yeah, there’s, you know, I mean, just so we didn’t really define all aspects of it at the outset, so I’ll return to that because one of the key of the key sort of basic parts of the definition is that it’s a transformation, not just of the self, but of the world as well. Totally. And of your future and your past perception. Yeah. And so, you know, it’s so potentially so hard to define in a way that everyone’s going to relate to. You know, in my draft, I kind of touch on a lot of examples, like it could be, you know, you realize a conflict of interest or, you know, you realize you did something wrong or you atone for your past sins and, you know, I try to draw on some concrete examples, like Christian Piccolini, for example, is he was an ex neo-nazi, you know, and like American history, ex, right, like this is a guy who went in head first and no pun intended. And so he came out on the other side, an anti-white supremacist speaker, right? So it’s, you know, an anti-Odromio, like it’s a complete inversion of who he was in the best possible sense, right? Because you go from being a Nazi to an anti-Nazi. And, you know, and so, you know, we’re all nested in systems of control in one way or another, right? And we’re all through scarcity, whether it’s real scarcity or artificial scarcity, we’re compelled to do things that aren’t good fundamentally. And I don’t just mean like killing or stealing, like part of my moral system, where I think some people aren’t there yet, quite frankly, and it’s not an elitist thing, it’s just that I think more sociologically, more systemically. And so I think of ethics and agency as nested in these systems. And so the only way to be moral is to completely extricate yourself. And in a sense, that’s impossible. But at least intellectually, you need to, and so like I’m an anti-war kind of advocate, right? And so you can’t take a more extreme position and a more alienating and ostracizing position because people just want to argue with you. Sorry? They want to argue with you about war. Yeah, yeah, they want to equivocate and get lost in the details. It just baffles me. And, you know, it’s not that I’m a pacifist. Like if you go deep down that rabbit hole, there’s some pushback there too, because there’s always this argument at the end of the day, like, well, you got to defend yourself. And if you’re being invaded, blah, blah, blah. And so something we touched on in our last conversation, I think, is social paradox. Yeah, yeah. And so I always come back to that idea too, because it traps people, right? And if you’re going to get into an argument with me or with whoever about war, it’s paradoxical, right? So there’s always arguments you can scrape together for war, for militarization, for conflict, for police brutality, whatever. And so I try to be radical in the most radical sense of Christianity that’s truly emancipatory and truly nonviolent, right? And so I’m trying to institutionalize love, which is something that Zach talks about. But we need, you can’t, you know, it’s a difficult thing. We can’t just practice it as individuals. You need to put your money where your mouth is. You need to advocate for the policies that fulfill the highest ideals of religion and philosophy and whatnot. You mentioned Gandhi and Martin Luther King earlier. Are they examples of what you’re talking about right now? This kind of, you know, not just individual, but also collective, and, you know, at least culturally revolutionary, right? Kind of nonviolence, but it’s not a passive nonviolence, right? It’s an active, you know, it’s confrontational. It’s trying to provoke transformation and change. Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about? Because you invoked them earlier as modern. Yeah, it is, and it is and it isn’t, because they embedded themselves in modern religion, right? I see. Religious traditions to affect these changes. And I would say in the case of Gandhi, not so much King, but in Gandhi, it’s like there’s no fault of Gandhi’s, but there’s debate over the ultimate effect, right? So this is a topic for another day, but like by by India achieving independence, that led into different periods of decline within India. And I traveled there, I read some books on India, and so it’s not a clear topic. Like they revere him and also criticize him. So the metamodern difference with these things is in part that we have to do it a little different, but also like invest less in the figureheads and, I mean, choose the right people to follow. But there’s such a responsibility at the individual level, like we have to have to have a much more distributed cognition, as you would say, but one that is at a sort of high level that we don’t equivocate. We don’t fall for ruses. We don’t, you know, play into these fallacies and traps, because we’re all, this is what politics does, because it’s a power game. It ends up co-opting people. And that’s why highly intelligent people like yourself want to step away from it or want to do meta politics, right? But I would close with the point to challenge you and as well as Zach and Laman to, you know, to do the harder thing, which is to join me in the ongoing literacy of leftist and progressive and socialist politics. You actually know what’s going on, because you can’t trust virtually anybody in the media ecosystems except the people who are consistent and advocating for the universalist policies, right? So a common expression in defense of leftism is that, you know, that we’re in fact just advocating for what are now mainstream policies. So the left should be the new center, not whatever is happening in the current center with Biden and Kamala Harris and, you know, quote unquote, unity projects. And it’s really, you know, getting back to basics, universal health care, universal education, you know, with a kind of a buffet of policy instruments like UBI and modern monetary theory that enable this paradigm shift. But as we get closer, Laman did bring up UBI and other things. Yeah, right. He was talking about that. And so just to defend him a little bit. Yeah, there’s lots of puzzle pieces floating out there. And, you know, Andrew Yang is for you, and I like him insofar as he’s for that. But, and he likes Bernie, you know, but what happened over the last five years politically is just a mess. And I blame a lot of people who refused to participate in that discourse and that movement, right? And in one sense, it’s never too late, you know, but we keep missing these windows. And so we need to converge, right? We need all these different discourses and communities and political movements to actually consolidate. And it has to consolidate under the authentic progressive leadership, which is somebody like Bernie Sanders, right? Even though he’s not running for president anymore, he’s still active, and he’s still an important politician and leader. And so the way these things fall apart and get fragmented so easily is not for lack of trying, right? It’s because of the way power operates and through and capital through media institutions and think tanks and, you know, all of these people hanging on to their power. And I guess maybe a way to bring it back to religion and to close it out is like, you know, these are, you know, kind of death denial mechanisms again, and we have to recognize how, you know, our own mortality, our own collective mortality, and there’s literally nothing to cling to except these universal values. You know, that is what moves the needle. And that is what goodness fundamentally is. If we want to get really deep into the core of religion, you know, we’ve got to throw at the hypocrites, and we got to take responsibility without becoming those powerful people that become hypocrites again. Like, you know, we need to maintain that spiritual integrity in the face of death. And so, you know, I see lots of people taking, you know, different long not shortcuts, but like the long way around because they don’t want to cut, they don’t want to do the right thing. And the right thing intellectually and morally is to converge on the best universal kind of policies and to work through the differences, you know, just if we’re going to worship anything and practice anything, it can dovetail with this bigger picture. The more time we waste kind of like competitive, you know, doing competitive commentary or philosophy, the more people die. You know, a thought that keeps coming into my head is like, how many Palestinians have to die until we take the right course of action? Because this is a very transparently kind of black and white issue for me and for the international community and for the left. But the discourse gets mangled and co-opted continually by people like Benjamin Netanyahu, right? They just, they’re neo-fascists. And so I said this word literacy, like we need to come back and have an honest, deep literacy about politics, history, economics, the way all these things interconnect because what is undermining that is the continued potency of the narratives coming from people like Trump, people like Biden, you know, and all across the spectrum with the exception of the emergent left, right, who’s just trying to advocate for health care, you know, things that are human rights. So again, this idea of fulfillment of history, whether it’s the new Axial Age or whatever, I think the truth in these notions fundamentally converges rather than endlessly proliferates in different directions. Well, thank you. Thank you for your challenge. I do think I’m trying to do good in the world in the ways you’re talking about, but nevertheless, I do appreciate your passion and your perspective. And I do think there’s something deeply right about the project of convergence that we’re talking about. And so that does seem to be a good place then to bring things to a close because of the metaphor convergence. So I do think we should talk again, and I think that would be great. But I think we should end it for today. And I want to thank you for coming in. And like I said, I thought you made your position really deep for me, which I really appreciate it. So thank you very much for that. Thank you, John. And thank you, the audience, whoever’s out there. Okay.