Navigating Complexity and Transformation with Jordan Hall Part 2 (6rZRSGNlEmE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6rZRSGNlEmE

Welcome everyone to Another Voices with Verveki. This is part two of an ongoing series I’m having with my dear friend Jordan Hall. Jordan has converted to Christianity and that has been in some ways the pivot point, not the only topic of discussion, but it has been the pivot point of a lot of discussion. Last time he and I I think really came into what I think is properly dialogos. There was a reciprocal opening, there was a mutual vulnerability, there was a flexibility of discussion and openness to emerging intelligibility, and there was both continuity with our past selves and promise of new directions. And I was very, this is the inadequate verb, I want to say something like please, but that’s what makes it sound too egocentric. I was maybe joyful about what happened last time, not in the sense that I was running around the house kicking up my heel, but in the sense of that felt very deeply right, very deeply good, and I was in I think a virtuous sense proud to be part of it. And so I’m welcoming Jordan back, we’re going to pick it up. We have some leftover themes from last time that we’re going to start with. We wanted to move to the more macro, the meta level and talk about where Jordan stands with respect to his orientation and his identity towards the meta crisis. And then related to that is that Jordan brought up the notion of a fellowship of spirit that he’s been partaking in. And then around that, I wanted to bring up an issue that needs I think a deeper dialogical discussion, which is humility and what it is and how to properly understand it as a virtue. And I hope you get a little exploration around that. So first of all, I just want to welcome you my friend and thank you again for our last conversations, I think genuinely became Deo Logos. I think the Logos landed showed up and carried us both along. But it’s great to see you again. Very great to see you again. Yeah, yeah, I noticed that there’s a how’s it work. So Deo Logos has that feeling of a life performance. I mean, this in the musical sense, and unrehearsed, unrehearsed and unrehearsable live performance. But also where the invitation and the necessity is just like to bring your A game. And so it always has this beginning part of like, Whoa, we’re gonna be able to pull this off because you brought your A game. I was slacking, but you brought enough to carry us both. And now that’s not true. But okay. And of course, therefore, it’s therefore it’s intense, like, Whoa, okay. And then the ability to integrate that, to bring that into this category of Deo Logos. And for me, it’s always such a beautiful journey. And so I get the feeling we’re going to have a similar similar ride this time. Yeah, yeah, I’m looking forward to this a lot. And I really, I really, I really, I aspire to carry the mem the living momentum of the good faith we had last into this. So I want to talk, bring up the Meta Crisis, you have been talking about it in other places, I am having trouble keeping up with all of your conversations, I have the one that you had with Brandon down. And there was some provocative subtitles in there that I might to might refer to, I haven’t watched it. So I might be speaking out of ignorance. So I will to endeavor to speak from my concern. And maybe I’ll start there. And again, I don’t want to debate you, I want to do what we’ve done, what we’re doing and continue to do. So I’ll express a concern I have about addressing the Meta Crisis. And there’s areas I know where we already overlap. And I’m wondering if there’s areas of difference and if there’s a possible convergence from those differences. It goes along the following lines that I think the what is needed to address the meeting crisis is a profoundly metaphysical in the non pejorative sense of that term and that our way in which not not just how we think about our ontology, but how we live our ontology, has to undergo a fundamental restructuring. And some of those go around, you know, I know things we share pillars, I think profoundly brilliant critique of substance metaphysics, and then the the the my adjoining critique of what I call the monadic mind, and things like that. And I think that’s important. But my concern is and so I’m appealing to that as common ground, my concern is that part of the rehabilitation, I want to want a different word, I want to bring in life like almost revivification, or I don’t want to use resurrection, because that may sound sacrilegious, and I don’t mean it to be of a proper ontology, because you did talk about this deep reconciliation calling people to home. And part of the proposal, the metaphysics of the meeting crisis is we do not have a cosmic home, given our certain worldview. Now for me, part of that problematic, and I’m getting to my concern, part of my problematic is that our worldview is like it or not, and especially at the lived level of our engagement with technology and huge global forces is a scientific worldview, it is deeply enmeshed. And that the problem with that is, I take it that that scientific worldview is not disposable, we can’t get rid of it. But it also is inadequate for giving us a way of practicing the cultivation of wisdom and religion. That’s one of the core arguments. And I have generally rejected attempts to go sort of pre-scientific as a solution to that. Now, I’m speaking again from my perspective, the Christianity that I was exposed to and have been a lot exposed to, I think it is fair to say that it had that toxic nostalgia of wanting to get back to a pre-scientific worldview, which I think is, I think it just leads you into a life of continual performative contradiction, while almost verging because of sort of undercurrents of anxiety on being a hypocrite. And so that brings up the issue for me of what has passed under the label of naturalism, which of course was the provocative point. And again, I am ignorant of your conversation with Brendan. So just put, I’m asking for charity on your part. And as you know, I am because of the critique I just made myself and a mutual friend, Greg Enriquez, where we are very critical of what is known as standard naturalism. The idea that all that you can include in your ontology is what is derivable from your sciences. And we say that’s grotesquely inadequate. My good friend, Evan Thompson, has a new book out with a theoretical physicist and an astrophysicist called The Blind Spot about how the scientific worldview leaves out a lot. I am going to take a moment here of doing ruthless self-promotion. When he gets the chapter on the blind spot on cognition, he says the main blind spot is around this issue called relevance realization. And he cites one John Verbeke and things like that. So just a shout out, I’m going to be talking with Evan about this. So the point is there are many people, many people I think of excellent competence and provenance who think the current scientific worldview is in some sense radically inadequate. And in that sense, standard naturalism is a failure. And then Greg and I have proposed a two-step move. The first move is, well, what you’re talking about isn’t reduction. You’re talking about consistency with naturalism, because reductionism fails for a host of reasons. That consistency is not just consistency with what’s implied by the scientific worldview, but what is presupposed by it. And that, of course, gets you into a kind of neoplatonic reflection on things like intelligibility and whatnot. And then that extended naturalism can actually afford transcendent naturalism if you return to the idea of non-propositional kinds of knowing, knowing in which religio plays a proper role. We can enter into religio with these metaphors. The metaphor we use, it’s inadequate in some ways, with sort of higher levels of reality, deeper levels of reality. And that can be transformative for us. And therefore, the transcendence afforded is not merely psychological hygiene or well-being. It has real epistemological and ontological consequences of import and transcendent naturalism. And then part of that is the idea of trying to propose a way in which we respect the accomplishments science. I am a scientist, while also opening up a really important space that for significant revision of that framework so it can incorporate human spirituality and, dare I say it, religious life. So that is the proposal that I have done and that Greg has been a big help. And of course, and I’m not saddling you with anything to say this, I’m just giving credit, you helped significantly along the way. You had conversations with me and Greg about that. You showed up on transcendent naturalism for a couple of really important episodes. So I know you’re all aware of this and you’ve actually participated in it in a good faith way. So I think it’s fair and you understand I am not framing this as debate. I’m trying to get something going here between us. Where you would like to land on that or where you want to take off from it or where you want to push back on it. I’m ready to listen and to hear. Let’s see, where’s a place that we can get just like we get in? Okay, so we’re invoking the notion of dialogos and we’re invoking a sensibility whereby that notion is meaningful. It has an ontological reality to it. I hope so. There’s an implication to the concept of identity and relationality. We have something like maybe three qualities of relationality. So let’s start with the easiest one. You’ve several times said you don’t want to do. So debate. So in debate, we have this relationship where I have an identity, you have an identity, and our identities are effectively fortresses. We’re doing sort of flinging propositions back and forth between the identities and at its best, it fortifies our fortresses. We sort of like fencers. You get better at fencing, something like that. Yeah, we use that language. We take our positions and we defend them and you undermine mine or I might undermine yours. And it’s this language of siege warfare. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So now I’m going to do a second one. D-logos is going to be the third. The second one is dialog. And I’m even playing with this similarity, which is of course part of the even part of the confusion that people have because you spell it like what’s the S doing at the end? How’s that changing it? But by dialog, I mean a trade relationship. So we’re no longer conquer relationship, kill or be killed, which is debate, but our trade relationship. So my still have my fortress. You have your fortress, but we’re trading things back and forth. There’s a little bit of front layer and there’s a value. Like I need to have the wall that we call the drawbridge has to be down. The portcullis has to be up so the wagons can go back and forth. Beautiful. But our identities are staying what they are. Yeah. In fact, in some sense, even more so because I’m riffing a bit here, but in a trade relationship, there’s the whole Ricardian thing. The more specialized I am, the more there’s value in what I have to trade. And this forms a particular kind of thing was forced land reaction called type two coherence. Or we could call it coordination, economic coordination. There’s a flat novel ontology, which is the synergy value. And I mean this in the economic sense of the trades that happen between, but the identity does not emerge to create a higher dimension. It doesn’t go vertical. It’s still happening in the X, Y plane. Then there’s dialogos. And in dialogos, the walls are down. The identities are now becoming fluid because there’s a third. We’re now in the realm of pure relationality. We identify ourselves as a relata and we recenter ourselves in the relationship, recognizing that the relationship is more fundamental. And we’re collaborating now in a space orienting towards that relationship and allowing that relationship to be what we are in service to, which is by the way, ontologically greater than us. We are elements and it is something that is a union or something that contains and holds those elements in a certain way, of course. So let me just say that was beautiful. That was beautiful. And you can count on my commitment to that. I may of course fall prey to human fallibility, but what I can say is with my utmost, that is my deepest aspiration of course, is to come into dialogos as and be a vehicle for it. I like that language as much as I possibly can. So I want you to count on me to be committed to that. And wherever that might take me, I am willing to follow it. That is how I’m a follower of Socrates. I will follow the logos where it goes. Wow. So that’s the scene in my mind as a kid watching the acrobats on the trapeze, you know, where she’s, she’s flung and she’s just like flying through the air. And as it turns out, the other guy was right there at the right time to get it. And I believe you, I don’t believe you, actually, there’s something deeper than that. Like, I know. So, all right. So in the conversation with Brendan, I don’t know exactly what, how he organized or categorized things, but there was a particular location, which may or may not have been the one that you were referring to, where what I was trying to do is I was trying to tease out a sense that I have that the scientific worldview, and I’m going to articulate what I mean by that in a moment because I have to make some room for breaking that up. It underlies the form of Christianity that you have stepped away from. It’s actually a double move. So what some something happened, I’m proposing, I’m arguing, both historically as well as epistemologically, whereby the scientific worldview ultimately was able to conquer the soul of everyone in the West. And then the minds of people who wanted to continue to be Christians recapitulated Christianity on top of the substrate of the scientific worldview. And those who didn’t want to be Christians just operated in the scientific materialist, humanistic environment. But both were sitting on the scientific worldview. I agree with that. I think that is correct. And the proposition then I would make is that this is the kind of Christianity that shows up in that way is just an error. It’s just a mistake because it’s cut its own legs out from underneath it. And I think that very close to the heart of that worldview, and yeah, I’m going to be for vakey and level of care here. Thank you for that compliment. Yeah. I want to situate that worldview. I want to honor that worldview. This is not a rebuke, honor that worldview. This is not a rebuke, except to the degree which is maybe overstepping its proper location. And so the question is, where does it belong? So the scientific worldview, where does it belong? And there’s a little bit of McGill Christian sensibility that’s going to come in. So the third person situation, which is an intrinsic, it’s a journalistic relationship with reality. You have to be by its very essence, the scientific worldview requires that you step away from the experiment. You observe the experiment as an objective fact, and then you coordinate with other potential subjects on an increasing precision of your ability to articulate facts about those objective facts, about what the objective reality happens to be. I think that’s well said. I mean, I’ve articulated something very similar at length, and it looks like the blind spot is articulating something very similar. What they claim that is lacking is of course the other perspectives, but especially in our attempts to get knowledge about reality. Great. So that’s it. So again, that’s important. That’s a very functional thing. It’s very critical. It’s nice. Like you and I can both, I say, Hey, I think there’s a fire over there. You look, you say, yeah, I think there’s a fire over there. So now we’ve been able to use multiple different perspectives to increase our mutual confidence that our perception is an accurate perception of objective reality, emphasis on O and R there, objective reality. And then we can make more effective decisions in our ability to navigate said objective reality. Of course, by contrast, if I say, Hey, I think a Tyrannosaurus is coming at us, and you look, you’re like, there’s no Tyrannosaurus, then one of us is going to survive. One of us is going to be doing something rather foolish or ideally I’ll go, Oh yeah, you’re right. That’s actually a tree and I’m just scared. Okay. So the question then is this other disposition, the first person disposition and what it means to be in a culture where the third person has been so pervasive in the way that we are in relationship with reality, that we have become obligate third person and in fact, so obligate that we simulate first person through the third person. And so you say a little bit more about that. Yeah. Yeah. I’m going to delve into that. Notice, of course, I’m making this all up in real time, but this is what I do. This is what we do. So we’re going to be there. We’re working together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I’m keep going. This is great. Yeah. So see, how do we do that? Well, could I say something that might So, I mean, one way I would respond to that is I think, I think the West actually careens between a first person and a third person perspective because Descartes actually gave us these two different notions of real. He gave us objective reality and subjective reality, where objective reality is the mathematically measurable and math is the determining way in which we understand knowledge and science. And that’s how it differs from Aristotelian science, for example. And but he also gave us the cogito, which is this moment of pure where consciousness purely touches itself is ultimately most real. And of course, our culture swings between those. We swing from an between an empiricism that says, I have to just read things objectively off the world and a romanticism that says, no, I must express myself onto the blank canvas of the world. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so I think the issue is that what we have is a is a structurally unstable grammar, cultural cognitive grammar of realness that messes up our phenomenology around it. That’s how I would put it. Yeah. So that was that helpful. Yeah. Yeah. Really nice. So what I’m going to say is that, yeah, let’s see if we can see if we can tease this apart, it’s going to be good. Or if I can tease it apart with you. If not, it’s going to be up to you. Let’s see. All right. So I think Descartes played a fast one. I don’t think he intended to, but he did. No. And this goes to that same notion of the layers of worldview. So both the romantic and the empirical are both simulations in the sense that I’m talking about. Ultimately import a subordination of a fully integrated, which is to say a true first person experience, a true first person experience does not have this separation. The separation happens in an analytical frame that is actually filtering first person experience through a mental simulation and then gives it back to itself. So this is the trouble the West is in is that we have a default analytic epistemology, or actually we have a default analytic onto epistemology, which then provides us with the simulation of an integrated self at the subjective level. This is the Buddhist thing goes here too, right? You go to the East, the East sees this same problem. The problem of actually going in, quieting the monkey mind is that the monkey mind interposes itself between self and reality and then presents itself as reality. It’s a simulation. It’s a seemingly. So let me see if I can concretize this and I won’t go off into theory. I just want to concretize this. So one of the most powerful experiences people can have that seems to be an enhancement of their agency and in some sense is embodied first person perspective is the flow state. But the flow state is exactly the state at which one feels radically at one and the flow state is the state in which the nattering monkey mind narrative kind of ego thing has dropped away and you realize that it has been lying to you when it tells you that it is identical with the locus of your agency. Is that a whole? Totally, totally. Exactly. And notice the distinction between when the monkey mind makes these chattering noises around authenticity and when you’re in fact actually in a flow state where that’s not even a thing that you’re considering because that’s not your relationship with reality. Rest, okay. So what I’m focusing on is actually the simulator that we’re running and the simulator imposes itself between us and reality and the simulator is an imposed intrinsic third person but provides us with a first person simulation which of course is at the mini crisis level is why we have existential angst because it’s not really us and the more we are obligate routed through that or the more we bullshit ourselves at more finer and finer grain levels the more angst we feel because we can’t actually this is Greg Henriquez, we want to be seen for who we are. We can’t even see ourselves for who we are and we’re increasingly simulating ourselves to other people and this is the adolescent problem, adopt a persona and so we’re getting further and further away from our ability to be seen for who we are. Now this is obviously not a western problem, this is a human problem but the superennial problem. The west has kind of doubled down on the superpower of what happens when you exercise that functionality and has built a whole bunch of mechanisms like those notions of dialogue. We can form trade relations, we can kind of solve our existential angst by being able to benefit from the boys a lot of stuff, metacrisis stuff dropping in here pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I feel anxious so what do I do? I’ll make more money. Well how do I make more money? Well, I actually optimize my persona to play in the systems of justification which is to say the socio-economic regime so I can make better trade relations and become more regarding in my particular persona. So now I’m the executive vice president of marketing which is not who I am vaguely but it’s a version of me that makes a lot more money so I can buy fancier cars and slightly feel better about the trade off that I’ve made for some amount of time before it catastrophically collapses and I go sit with either you or Jordan Peterson in a clinical setting or Greg, all three of you. How funny is that? That’s interesting, that makes sense. Okay, so that’s the diagnosis. It’s not even a critique, it’s a diagnosis and attached to that, go ahead. Well I wanted to add one thing which we also inherited from Descartes and I think it exacerbates this and this goes of course to a lot of my work and especially there’s ongoing discussions I have with Rafe Kelly who is also making his way towards Christianity as you know. He told me I’m the gateway drug, I think I mentioned that too. So but this is the idea, this is from Arlo Ponti that right, the body is what gives us this, the chiasm, that which is subjective and objective because but is actually neither, the lived body because right there’s the sort of, I’m using these very scare quoted, there’s the inside of my body which is not, I’m not talking about the physicality I’m talking about right but my body is also there in the objective world as an object among objects and therefore it weaves and it is deeper than I’ve coined the term transjective and when Descartes moved us into Cartesian dualism and makes the mind something that is intrinsically disembodied by its very nature, this exacerbates I think the machine you’re talking about, this simulator and the way it’s interposing itself. Yes, exactly. Because I mean what happens in Descartes of course is that minds become incapable and I mean philosophically, ontologically incapable of contact with bodies or with other minds and everything is just the mind somehow trying to simulate to itself what the body and the world is and then of course like you said recursively simulating to itself what it must be such that it is engaged in these simulations and you can get into understanding a lot of epistemology that way. Does that land well for you as a proposal? Yeah, exactly and so the diagnosis then is that to properly resituate ourselves so that this full intrinsically whole self, not a analytically synthetically reintegrated intrinsically whole self is in the McHillgristian sense, that’s hard to say, is put back on the throne and the emissary is given his proper place as the emissary. These things are not novel, this world has been talking about this kind of stuff a lot. That is just sort of rearticulating in those frames the argument that I’m making in relationship to Christianity specifically, religion more broadly and the scientific enterprise. So far I find this very helpful. I like this notion of the whole self, this was sort of Tillich’s notion of what the spirit is. The spirit is when, to use a phrase I’ve been trying to do, when we involve the whole of the self without becoming self-involved because we’re involving the whole of the self in a way that understands it to be primarily relational in nature rather than substantial in nature. That’s why spirit is something that is more properly between people. I’ve been told that the verse in the gospel is that the kingdom, it’s not that the kingdom God is within you, but the kingdom of God is among us or between us or within us collectively, not within us sort of individually, although it could also mean both. I’m not an expert of of biblical Greek, so I’ll just leave that option. I mean it’s definitely in the gospel of Thomas where he said the kingdom of heaven is spread amongst you, but you do not yet see it. So I think all of this is very well placed and this idea of the whole of the self thereby having a capacity to come more properly into a relationship towards the whole of reality. It can’t grasp the whole of reality. Now I take it that what something I just introduced a few minutes ago, this notion of the self ultimately being relational in nature is also part and parcel because if we agree as we seem to that reality is ultimately at base, ultimately pure relationality, then if we are going to participate with the whole of ourself, ourself has to be some kind of relation in its intrinsic nature. Kierkegaard’s the self is a relation that relates to itself and that kind of thing. Is that a fair proposal? Yes, very much so. Yeah and I think it’s we’ve kind of we brought this up a little bit last time and it’s worth emphasizing because it’s in many ways a tough pill to swallow if you’ve taken a default substance ontology approach to things. It’s a little bit mind-bending and I think as I even mentioned a call with you a little while back it’s fundamental. One, if you get it once you get it everything else begins to pivot around that and two, if we don’t get it and then begin to use that as our way of re-crafting relationships in general or relations with the world we can’t solve the meta-crisis. I’ve been beginning to make an argument especially for sort of a Zen, the Zen current of Buddhism, then this is what an Ottoman means. It doesn’t mean that you’re selfless and there is no referent for the word self but the self is not a substantial entity but an inherently relational entity which fits very well with you know the idea of codependent arising. Thich Nhat Hanh’s notion of interbeing and things like that. That’s super hard to work on. That feels really sharp. Even that notion of like so much of the Zen work is precisely about dealing with this object, this simulator. When you say selfless what you mean is that thing, that thing goes away which doesn’t mean that you don’t go away but you were never a substance. That wasn’t who you are. Yes, that’s very nice. That’s really nice. It’s actually then it brings the intrinsic wholeness into the foreground by getting out of the way of the simulator that’s been running. Nice. So you can see the possibilities for a sort of like I’ve been talking about a Zen neo-Platonism where these two things are talking very deeply to each other in a dialogical, dialogos fashion. So that brings up something interesting. So there’s a sense in which there are dimensions of reality that will be disclosed in this whole self towards whole of reality that cannot properly be grasped by the scientific worldview but are ultimately must be presupposed by it because I would put it to you that the relationality to disclose but by the whole self to the whole of reality is precisely that you know the ground of intelligibility itself. And the very possibility of connectedness, the very possibility of there being something other than a random scattering of nothingness or something. I don’t know what to say. Even particles will have some sort of logos to them. Right. But you know what I’m trying to get at. And now the thing for me is I still find this deeply consistent with what you might call the boundaries of the scientific worldview. I think if you deep when you dig down into the quantum you hit pure relationality any of you if you sort of build up to the relativistic you hit pure relationality as what is being emphasized as the grounding of reality. And so this comes this is where there might be a difference between us but I’d like to explore it. I understand the supernatural as the proposal that that which is disclosed beyond the scientific worldview is in important ways inconsistent with it. Is other than it works according to different principle than it. Whereas there is a notion of the supra natural which is found in things like I think versions of neoplatonism very much in Zen where it’s no no no this more it has a profound identity relationship to the truths that are found within the scientific worldview but it is not reducible to them. It is more real than them. It is presupposed by the scientific worldview and that’s what we’re trying to get at with extended naturalism and transcendent naturalism. And I have as you know I have an ongoing critique of supernaturalism and because I think it just hits tremendous burden of proof arguments. I won’t give the whole argument but the main gist of it is which is kind of a riff from David Hume who I will only take all upon cautiously but right but the idea like the burden of proof is to show you show me why all of the arguments and evidence and all of the powerful record of self-correction that has gone into scientific claims can be put aside in terms of something that is inconsistent with all of that. And I find that I find that problematic and I and I don’t mean just epistemological. I find it disrespectful. I just find it disrespectful to the people who have sunk time and talent and often their lives and frequently sacrifice themselves to make this possible for us and I think it is a disservice and a kind of profound disloyalty to say well you know what nah and I I’m very very hesitant to do that. So I wonder if that lands for you or if not or if you want to push back and I’m here to listen if you want to. There’s going to be a little bit of what I was noting is like reconciliation. It’s going to be reconciliation. Good good good good. I do I do want to open you up to the possibility of challenging what I’m saying of course. Well I will be challenging it but I’ll challenge it in a way that is actually I think orienting it towards the thing that is the higher version of it. Why else would I do anything? Well I mean I mean when DLocus is working best it’s like how love works. What we’re doing is we’re trying to call each other to our best and not only me calling you to your best and you calling me to our but us calling our us to our best together. Yeah exactly. I agree. So let me lay down let’s see I think three things. What’s the reason I’m bringing this up is both very personal for me and it has and there’s three and it has to do with the meeting crisis but the other is I think there’s a way in which if you could address this with you know with the care that you’re and the well this goes without saying with the authenticity that you’re bringing to it. I think this would alleviate some of the concerns that people are directing towards you if they could get a good answer to this. I hope you take this as an act of friendship. I’m trying to help you in that way and I don’t mean it in a condescending way. I mean it genuinely. Right so all right I think I think I’m gonna try it in one order. I think it’s okay. I just need to remember not to lose the last because the last one’s a little bit more well you’ll get it. So the first one in terms of super supra what I want to do is I want to lay out something like an order. It’s going to have a kinship with your order of uh participatory up to propositional. Sure. So love, hope, faith, understanding, communication. So there’s a my point of view it’s a layer cake and in this case it’s a layer cake with a like a layer cake. The bottom layer is bigger than the than the layers. Okay yeah we share that. Then we share that model. Okay um and the category of faith. Did we talk about that last time like the version? We talked a lot about it. Okay great. I’ve been talking a lot about it in general because I’m spending a lot of time chewing on it because I think that’s a key pivot point that really helps resolve a lot of issues and so the way that I would say it is so for example I’m not going to carry the burden of proof you propose because I don’t believe that so I’m going to tell you what I think is right and maybe maybe it works out maybe it resolves nicely. For the most part the totality of the scientific enterprise you know lives in this layer between faith, understanding, and communication and that there are elements of reality that are not none of this is controversial which is why it’s so weird there’s a conflict about it. There are elements of reality that are outside of the scope of the kinds of things that are subject to the techniques of scientific investigation. Yep totally with you on that. Those elements are important. They might be the kinds of things that are not subject to sensory measurement or they might not be subject to repeatable sensory measurement or they may be more fundamental like you said intelligibility. It’s actually at a category at a deeper level. Intelligibility lives at the level of faith which is the substrate for understanding where it allows understanding to be available at all and therefore is not subject to the techniques of understanding and so we’re partitioning reality into its elements. Okay so that’s what I think. That’s how I think it works. Sounds like it’s how you think it works. So now we have to sort of tease apart why did the siblings get into a scuffle and I think I understand. Okay let me yeah you do use and then I’ll see what you have to say and then I have an answer to that question but I want to hear yours first and then we’ll put them into a relationship with each other. Yeah so a while back I wrote an essay obviously you know this is probably true for you as well. Most of the time when I’m writing an essay I’m trying to make things clear to myself so I try to clarify the distinctions between science, technology, religion, spirituality and there are others but those are the ones that were in there and one of the things that I proposed is that each of these is particular. Each has a proper domain of application and then the right way to live is to bring them into a relationship in their proper domain of application but that different cultures will oftentimes find themselves over indexing on one or others and then we’ll have the cardinal error which I invoked the canonical work of the Ghostbusters by talking about is crossing the streams. In the medieval period religion ended up trying to do too much science so it tried to it overstepped its bounds and it ended up creating when religion tries to use religion to do science it oftentimes produces superstition or myth that’s one of the things that happens and then in the modern era in an adjustment space for economic and political and military like lots of reasons science and its sort of partner actually kind of its boss technology was able to take advantage of that overstepping at the level of the how do you call it the egregore or the identity of the west in particular and took that territory back but in the act of taking territory back it ended up casting religion and very specifically the religious institutions as an adversary and so what ended up happening is that then it overstepped its boundaries and it ended up to do religion using science and by the way also trying to do spirituality as science and so that also crosses the streams and so we’ve now been locked in this conflict where both parties I mean it’s just like what’s going on in politics like why is it that we end up with Trump and Biden as the candidates like the version of religion and the version of science that we end up seeing out there in the world are like the equivalent of Trump and Biden there’s a polarization that has to happen when the primary locus is the conflict between the two competing for hearts and minds in a field of debate and a field of conflict not a field of dialogos and so and so we find ourselves in that circumstance we find ourselves in a circumstance where religion at the heart of religion feels deeply disrespected deeply abused and reasonably so by science and scientists and the new atheists and sort of and going all the way back like the Scopes Monkey Trial think about the way that the religious were characterizing what was actually a political conflict a socio-political conflict for resting control over the zeitgeist of a moment and therefore the resources and whatnot I think about that as a cultural war thing yeah that’s probably the right way to put it because we live so deeply immersed in culture war right now my diagnosis is culture war that’s what happened and we’re living we’re near the end of it we’re sort of living post that but the version of science that we see from the point of view of religion is seen as claiming much more certainty than it could have all the time and we can point to like the nutrition pyramid you know all these circumstances where significant political forces are imposed on people on the basis of science that follow the science and people are abused by that over enough generations that they’re like fuck you that’s where it gets sticky right when the energy goes to fuck you then they’re fired back I mean you see this happening in social media across the political boundaries people aren’t civil anymore that lack of civility goes well and of course the scientists feel lack of civility has felt like lack of civility right so they feel impeached from the other direction and I think both of us it’s interesting actually because both of us straddle those worlds and I and I have spent a really good amount of my life in relationship with some of the most brilliant scientists in the world and I appreciate them right I appreciate the curiosity I appreciate the rigor I appreciate what they’ve brought into the world I use it routinely like a lot in fact I even thought of myself as moving in the direction of being a scientist or at least an amateur scientist and I think I still kind of do to be honest so therefore at a heart level I don’t feel a sense of hurt I feel almost like a sense of how do we reconcile the family members these are family members and the family is in brother versus brother or divorce even worse like divorce style conflict it’s gotten ugly out there so that’s my diagnosis thank you for watching this youtube and podcast series is by the verveki foundation which in addition to supporting my work also offers courses practices workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis if you would like to support this work please consider joining our patreon you can find the link in the show notes I don’t have any disagreement with that I do I think so what I want to say then I think is more amplification I think that part of this is also we see even before the emergence of science we see the emergence of a drift towards propositional tyranny within the religious framework and I’ve made that argument extensively and there’s ways in which the sordor scriptura of Protestantism which has other reasons for it I’m not saying this is but one of the I think non-deniable effects is it it ramped up the propositional tyranny in powerful ways so I think that is going on before and I think what happens is is attendant to that maybe entailed by that is the idea that everything is captured by belief where belief doesn’t mean to give your heart like we talked about last time it means to assert the truth of particular propositions and the logical relations between them relations between them and then I think both of those misrepresent each side I think understanding faith as belief is inadequate in many of the ways we articulated last time I think trying to understand what science does as just the propositional manipulation of belief is wrong for all kinds of reasons and you you know you were talking about there’s paradigmatic reasons from Kuhn and there’s all the way down to the important role that procedural and perspectival and participatory knowing are playing essential science and a lot of the history and philosophy of science which I have a tremendous amount of respect for has been putting this out and also just radically undermining the Cartesian reduction of logos to logic and I think a lot of the people who talk think they talk they’re talking on behalf of science are actually not that well versed in this history and philosophy of science and what they actually do is they engage in a profound performative contradiction in which they speak about scientifically which is kind of an irony to behold and but not a welcome irony not a Kierkegaardian irony and so I think this I think this straight jacket has straight jacketed both of them into a stance in which they have both reduced themselves to belief systems and each one claiming it has the right way in which we get our belief systems and therefore they are inherently competing in a zero-sum game that’s how I would amplify what you said amen I completely agree and so we know now we actually get to be a little bit hmm that’s interesting so there’s a bunch of stuff that’s going on as to how that came to be well I wanted to do one thing in the amplification then and which is when I talk about being consistent I don’t just mean propositional consistency I mean not falling into what’s called performative contradiction I mean right I mean I mean a much more profound notion of integrity between the kinds of knowing right I don’t just mean I’m not excluding but you know I know you know that we know both enough about algorithms and combinatorial explosion and you can’t you can’t try and build all of your integrity off of logical consistency or coherency because you’re going to hit combinatorial explosion Godelian problems bias variance trade-offs blah blah blah blah blah blah blah so what what we have to do is we have to look for well we also care about other kinds of contradictions and I’ve mentioned it and I just brought one up we get into performative contradiction matters so when I’m talking about being consistent I’m not I I want people not just to hear logical consistency I’m talking about this full person integrity kind of consistency so that all of the kinds of knowing are aligned in the best possible mutual correction of each other that’s what I would be and for me if you accept still at Felix proposal that that’s what we’re talking about we’re talking about spiritual right that it’s the whole person aligned to the whole of reality then that project is properly a spiritual project that kind of integrity is a spiritual integrity yes yeah yeah absolutely man I’m sorry what I’m noticing is I understand and agree and if I feel like if there was a way to make the understanding and agreement sort of be broadly perceived it would be really good yeah yeah well I mean we are both endeavoring on our own ways to make it more broadly received so let me let me let me talk about me throw some more things out there um please please so now another essay you remember the one about thinking and simulated thinking yes I do and why so what we’re I think one of our first one of our first discussions I think our first one was about that and this is where I asked you simulated thinking was what I was talking about when I was talking about bullshit self-bullshitting and we got into that that was I think Jordan I think that was our first conversation together actually our first public conversation providential um okay so it’s when I was when I was writing that and thinking about that one of the elements that came up was why why does that why does that happen right because when we simulated thinking was a double whammy the idea is that there’s there’s sort of habits of mind compact paradigms right paradigms that are functional useful we can use them they go we can run quickly we can you iterate through the algorithms using those kinds of things and then there’s other things thinking which is in relationship with the wholeness of reality and has creativity and nuance and subtlety and insight built into it and then what happens is is that when we find ourselves in a circumstance this is back to that simulator where the habits of mind begin to present themselves as being the whole story and then get locked into a loop because you can’t have access to the insight then you’re in simulated thinking so that’s the idea and and the the explanation that I got to was basically culture war at the end of the day right when you find yourself in a milieu like debate um thinking is going to lose more often than win because the advantages of the quick quip or the clever turn of phrase um the rhetorical flourish think you know socrates the rhetoricians rhetoric exists for a reason and it resists for the reason of winning culture war battles at the very low level and it acts mostly on the habits of mind of the audience to produce effects that are limbic in nature and and it’s a weapon right okay the same thing happens at the level of of at larger levels of society and so if i’m endeavoring to politically control a large population and maybe use them against other populations in various phrases of culture yeah yeah i need to do that i need to i need to have access to that same set of techniques and think about this now we’re going to i’m going to fast forward to liberalism um liberalism is uniquely risky in dropping into simulated thinking because by its nature this hegelian sensibility of constantly sort of refining the paradigm into finer and finer grain elements it has the ability of producing a habits of mind or constructs and paradigms that are very close fit to the larger reality but are actually ultimately at the end of the day habits of mind or paradigms and over here we have to be very mindful of the fact that it’s intrinsically connected to a socio-political economic context liberalism is successful in the world more because it produces more fancy cars and cheap electronics and more food than it is a really effective epistemological method right i’m pointing that out at a political level like at the end of the day 98 of the population doesn’t care about what’s going on in the academic discourse they care about the fact that they have you know more more fried chicken or faster cars um and so liberalism combines those two right it actually allows us to engage in rapid technological development it allows us to engage in economic specialization and simplifies trade because it breaks down wars between people on the basis of property we’re thinking about how it emerges on the substrate of the propositional bias and therefore the ideological conflicts as a pseudo solution to that and so and i’m putting that in there historically because it’s a very important part of the historical moment as we already accepted agreed that the the falling into propositional mania propositional bias was a historical moment that almost sort of foredoomed us to a series of next stages once you pass a critical point there you’re going to go down a bad slide liberalism emerges as a solution to that but doesn’t solve the problem it just finds it literally does the thing that it does it finds a way to create more room and it continues to ameliorate the the catastrophe at the meaning crisis level and at the meta crisis level by expanding more and more of its competence but thereby more and more likely and more and more increasingly trapping us in this simulator yeah it spreads the problem throughout the world which is one of the by growing trying to grow its way out of the problem which is how politics has often been if we could just grow the gdp by trying to grow itself out of the problem of course also in some ways spreads the the the the i’m going to use it this in a kunian sense it spreads the anomalies globally the anomalies that are at the heart of the right the meaning crisis and the meta crisis right and globally in this sense both sort of at one level i.e. every country and vertically every facet from this local yes basic interior of the biome through the individual psychology and through all relationships all the way out right so exactly exactly and this is a fundamental diagnosis of the meta crisis meaning crisis overlay yeah yeah yeah and and therefore by the way now we can actually situate the previous religion science conversation say oh okay well this is actually part of a much larger phenomenon that’s been going on wow we’re about to move pretty quick um and it’s not surprising that it ended up being the way that it ended up because socioeconomically people are are deeply deeply incentivized to become simulated thinkers so that they can have some degree of legibility and even just local success in the education arc right we all know i don’t know about you but i certainly had i i booted myself from school somewhere between second and third grade but if i wanted to perform well in school i would have to give up on thinking and optimize for simulated thinking and then the same thing happens when you move into the working environment you can think about how our global society is constructed as sort of maximum cope of how do we produce a type two coherence how do we create dialogue not dialogs relationality that produces something that can kind of cope but ultimately is fundamentally unstable ultimately once it reaches its limits of cope and now moving this psychological language but you can see how it cascades across all the different modalities it will then go through a crisis here hence a meta crisis yeah that’s that’s very well okay so there’s two things i want there’s two things that were sparked by that um one is the idea that one of the things that happens you know dirkheim has these two notions of how you bring about uh social cohesion one is what he calls mechanical solidarity where you try to get all the units as much like each other as you possibly can and that way they fit together mechanically and then he has the other one which he calls the division of labor which is you you pursue a strategy of sort of living complexification um in order to you make people as interdependent as opposed to as homogeneous as possible um and you can see how one it pushes you towards a substance ontology one same thing or pushes you to a relationality uh kind of idea um and so i want to add a third okay which is yeah so we used to try that we did in the beginning so the first is like the coherence of a laser sameness the second is relationality on a flat plane so i’ll just call that coordination or type two coherence which is very esoteric i’m describing it we’re proposing a third which is like the spiritual it’s actually yes yes that’s where we’re moving a multiplicity that actually integrates in communion into a novel identity that does not subsume the multiplicity into a new sameness and maintains and even enhances their multiplicity but it literally increases the world by adding a new dimensionality to it exactly so you ran with that really well and then that one that maps me into carries me into conveys me into the now there’s a question i i there’s this issue and i’ve been my good friend and shabby and i were going really deeply right now we’re doing going through hagel but we’re we’re writing a book on uh the being of rationality and the rationality of being what does rationality look from the being mode and how is what what what must being be like such that that rationality can conform to it or come to know it um and along the way we keep bumping into this this interpenetration of indeterminacy and intelligibility it’s in filler’s work for example right um and then phenomenologically i’ve been talking about we seem to have these two different senses of realness and i have a suspicion that the day cart thing might have sort of pivoted on them but also simulated them rather than living in them so one is our sense of realness as well you know the gathering together the logos the confirming the coming together things fitting together working together belonging together notions of coherence and correspondence and consistency and so you know what i’m point but we also have this notion no but reality is that which takes us by surprise when the experiment shows us that our hypothesis was false and there’s the notion of and of course that’s indeterminate because it precisely falls outside of your projected and what you have is you have these two senses of realness right which is the confirmation and surprise and you know part of what we’re trying to do is try to understand ratio as the project of realizing them in a an opponent processing that gives you a kind of optimal sorry fundamental optimal grip on reality can you actually and then let me and i’m going to get into one of our topics here which is and the way that’s enacted is by playdo’s proposal that our fundamental project is to hold in tonas our finitude and our transcendence and the finitude is this the determinant the grounded the coming together and the transcendent is that which about reality which continually surprises us and of course if we identify with one we become hubristic monsters and if we identify with the other we become servile humiliated despairers and then this of course is my way of proposing that and also bringing up the topic of humility as a virtue because i think virtue the virtue of humility is exactly that virtue if we if we build reverence into what we mean by virtue of holding on not not holding on wrong word participating in finitude by appreciating the confirmation sense of realness and participating in the transcendent by appreciating the transcendent aspect of realness holding those together and remembering that i am properly a human being when i i’m always mutually recognizing and inhabiting the tonas between finitude and transcendence and that is humility i want to that that’s what that virtue is doing there okay good we can move on yeah so i mean what i’m about to say is obvious but i just felt like it might be nice to put in there is just to say look this notion of the relationship and the relata we’re saying that reality is the relationship and the uh the determinant and the surprising of the relata and the reality is is the relationship versus more it’s a more fundamental thing that holds these two our life needs to be in that thing we are relationality our life at the tonos is is what the quality how do we how do we how do we live in that way and how do we live that’s the question that’s the inquiry and how do we and how do we live both uh how do we say this right um yeah with this notion of the vertical be increasing the dimensionality so how do we live more in that way dialogos how does how does jordan as a as a as a relational identity cultivate a tonos a harmonic tonos with john as a relational identity so as to give rise to a new relational identity that has even a richer and more potent and subtle and therefore more beautiful capacity for being navigating this totos right that’s like that set of three yeah that’s what’s up yeah yeah yeah i totally i totally agree with that i totally agree with that and for me humiliation when we make it as something distinct from humility is to fall into the attractor well of just the pole of finitude and despair where and hubris is to fall or be sucked into i don’t know which is the right word here i’m thinking of skill and corruptus here right it’s to get sucked into uh um the opposite pole of of inflation and and then i put it to you that this maps on to the thing two things in our culture which of course are nihilism which is the finitude attractor and narcissism which is the hubristic attractor another way of understanding the meaning crisis is that those are prevalent precisely because the polarity of our humanity has been lost yeah yeah so let me do the same polarity in one that you’re quite familiar with but i’m increasingly familiar with which and i think it maps which is over on this side we have the salvation of of works and here i mean at the fair saic level right we follow a very large number of rules super well and you guys are shitty therefore we’re safe at that one that which is of course is narcissism and then over here we have the um the the notion of the perception of unearned grace that grounds itself in a self kind of self-flagellating self-debasing right i am so unbelievably terrible that the notion that i could deserve grace is like impossible the self-mortification self-mortification yeah nice and so the and you know the the tonos that lives in the middle that i was literally talking about with a friend today just before this call oh you’re proposing christianity is the middle path between these yeah yeah very much yes right and let’s do it we can do it in two steps it’s actually very easy so the first because you and i are both parents in fact we’re both fathers and so and we both love our children which is yes a convenient convenient thing for a father to have um sadly not a universal thing um so as a as a parent or as a loving parent you you have this thing you know that you see your child you see them and you love them because you see them and what they do isn’t relevant and that’s the key right they can’t do things to earn your love not because you don’t enjoy the things they do but it’s because it’s not how it works it’s it’s yeah that’s right that’s right you just like i see them yeah and so therefore what you do delights me i am delighted and when you do things that are a fulfillment of who you are it delights me greatly and when you do things that are destructive to who you are it pains pains me greatly right and not because i’m angry at you or because they make me mad but rather because i love you because i see you and i and i feel out of that love for you i feel deeply called to find a way to support you in walking the path towards who you are because it’s so beautiful it’s so glorious to perceive them right and all you do is flip that just flip that one step say okay that is the proposition of what christianity says is god’s relationship with us that is that exact relationship so let me this is a whiteheading question within that framework and i like it uh but i’m going to use the analogy i see my children but i see them in a way that affords them surprising me yeah because if i were to see them in a way and see and part of the one of the conceptions of god is god is i’m like i’m not trying to get into an argument about doctrine i’m trying to get into phenomenology you can and nicho gave voice to this you can conceive of god as an overwhelming viewer that sees you to such an extent that you are robbed of any capacity or being who you are um that kind of and you can see at least uh some of luther’s early writings seem to have that uh right that god’s looking at me is crushing um it causes despair and so whitehead was was proposing god more as he called it the fellow traveler or the poet of the universe the way a poet writes a poem this proposal it’s a whiteheadian it was actually picked up by one of his followers uh faber who’s doing a lot of who’s written maybe the book on whitehead right now the mind of whitehead which is like this vast it’s whiteheadian right you can’t write anything about whitehead it isn’t 700 pages well there are some small books but yeah i get the point um uh then and he’s also got um a book something uh along the titles of depths depths yet unspoken where he’s trying to get in the mystical dimensions that are often not properly foregrounded when people are talking about whitehead anyways he proposes and he picks up on one of whitehead’s metaphor and tries to craft a theology out of it when i think well reasonably well which is this notion of god as the poet of reality as opposed to the you know the carpenter of reality that the poet is seeing things very clearly in fact that is what makes a great poet a great poet the poet is seeing things but that doesn’t mean the poet is writing the poem and not also listening to the surprising emergence that’s coming out of the poem as they’re making the poem right and i i for me that of course is a feature of the logos when i when i’m writing and that is taking place or when i’m writing poetry and that takes place uh that’s very much when you the moust and the musicality show up and so does that transfer back to the analogy from the because i think a good parent is a poet of their child not a carpenter of their child right yeah i i can’t help but agree right so i feel that same reality and you know as i’ve been sort of delving into scripture and working backwards from there frankly i keep seeing this show up right we see plenty of examples where god’s heart is broken by the choices that people make and it doesn’t seem to be performative like he’s not pretending it really is real and so that implies that one it could have been otherwise and two in some sense he was surprised and in fact in this case disappointed in my mind i’ve been able to craft a wave that you’re going to laugh at this in a second but for me it’s the dungeon master version of the yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah in fact i’ll do it you know if you don’t mind i’ll lay it out right so but in my mind as i’ve gone through and checked scripture against this model it doesn’t throw any errors like it’s it fits the story all the various characteristics it works like this so over here i have let’s just go with like harry potter as written by jk ravelin so in this category harry potter hermione they are people like say david or peter and jk raveling is playing the world of god the creator she creates the world now in that world it’s not really realistic to think that jk raveling is going to be truly deeply surprised by harry potter or hermione because they are ultimately entirely figments of her imagination now interestingly at the level of being a creator i haven’t done this kind of thing before in the past i have been surprised by what emerges and that’s interesting so i’m going to hold that to the side but certainly at the level of what is written down it’s in the book if i’m reading it we can say this every single there’s no notion that harry potter is an agent that has choice in what’s going on he’s just a figment of jk raveling’s imagination she is the author had choice but he didn’t that’s the book if i move over over here to like the film version i notice a little tiny scope of agency not big but a little bit because the way the actor who is a human portrays like the tone of voice that he uses the facial that he uses has a little bit of play and that’s part of the film environment like sometimes things are put into the film that were entirely spontaneous on the part of the actor this is even more so if i move into the realm of theater because now it’s every day it’s a different version there’s a little more play okay so in each case what’s happening is i’m moving from a an on what i call it a cosmology that is entirely determined by this by the author and and that the the agents or the beings the people in it are entirely fictional to one that has increasing agency sitting in the in the agent or the person but of course in all those cases like the big arc like how the story ends the author wrote that down like the actors are determining how the story ends there are the actors are termed are just sort of have a small amount of agency inside if i move all the way from me in my story i’m just going to put here on the left dnd and dnd is is i think beautiful because it starts to put it on a cross which is a good a good symbolic geometry the player characters are real humans and they have and they have wide latitude in what they do the dm is the world creator and holds the dm side the ability to come and do fiat at will if necessary and the big picture view of what’s going on in the world that the the player characters don’t perceive right so you’re seeing things through your character’s eyes you’re playing dnd is this landing or do i need to give you an example i played i played dnd and powers and perils both of them okay i’ve also played god like which is a version set somewhat like like that in world war ii which is was it i think of all three that one i enjoyed the most playing wow interesting i’ve never heard of that which is rare i’ve heard a lot of this so you get the idea right so what happens is is that the dm has the big picture the major set pieces the large arc can at any point determine any aspect that he wants but the whole point is to make the game delightful to make the playing of the game wonderful for everyone right for the whole point is to make it so everybody continues to play and invest more and more like they play more and more deeply to invite committed to the meta game exactly committed to the meta game or to the infinite game as uh yeah yeah as cars would say yeah and so that that is the kind of the i did it in the frame of dnd just precisely to make it impossible to elevate to being a serious theology or i’m going to be a serious theologian because i’m not but that fits for me because again this notion of love requires something like that you can’t really love something that doesn’t hold the possibility of delight and you can’t be delighted in something that you already are perfectly certain every aspect of it in every possible way well and beauty is surprise that can be integrated right so yes if you want beautiful that’s also the case and i you know and this is part of the whiteheadian view too that god is works through persuasion but in the sense of dia logos rather than uh dictation it’s this idea that we come close to understanding how this poesis works when we’re in deep dia logos in which we are fully participating but we’re not commanding or carp or being carpenters and the logos is guiding but it’s not dictating and you get that sense and for me that’s the metaphor i use to try and understand what is being proposed uh here well i think it was both i mean both are true there’s there’s there’s aspects of the world that we’re in over which i have i take is purely out there there are aspects of the transcendent subjective and aspects of the objective that are guiding like their carpentry is just out there and i don’t have any particular influence of the law of gravities it is what it is um oh i didn’t i didn’t mean that but i mean is if we say god is both then okay that seems to make sense like god is creating an arena for us to play in and then he’s playing with us in that arena and the playing part has this characteristic of dia logos yes yes yes uh yeah that’s um yeah whitehead uh his notion of ultimate reality is sort of broken not broken that’s the right word wrong word sorry um it there’s what he calls the extensive continuum which is um i’ll use spinoza terms that’s sort of nature as natured and then there’s god which is nature as nature in um and the two are bound together um he’s whitehead said says something along the lines that god transcends the world to the same degree that the world transcends god which is a variation on ecarts the eye by which i see god is the same eye by which he sees me uh kind of idea um um because there’s you you need to have a well i would argue you need to have a model of reality that properly deeply humbly respects and appreciates its inexhaustibility it is not a thing like your table or right or even your table is inexhaustible at one level but you know what i’m trying to do with this there’s an inexhaustibleness to the world so to speak right that has to be properly situated with our ontology and i think that responsibleness sorry that that inexhaustibleness is at one with the inexhaustibleness of god as the one in a neoplatonic sense and that one that the one between those two inexhaustibilities is not a logical one by any means i’m not saying that right no i get it and this is this is right and it’s so we’re in some sense rewinding back to this notion of the tonos where humility sits in this location where you are neither um knocked to a point of despair nor um stepping into hubris in relationship or rather actually entering to a relationship of ultimately open this thing it’s it’s quite it’s open to all the all the things that we like through humility comes things like delight through humility comes things like surprise through humility and beauty and beauty yes all those things right so this these are all sort of bound in a particular location and then that helps us situate we can kind of get a better sense of okay well if it’s ugly it’s not humility that’s just it’s an fyi well i mean i put it to you that this is helpful i think a distinguishing difference between pornography and beauty is that beauty calls humility from us and pornography denies a role for humility right but like that i think is a fundamental difference and then that’s following on hans work right whenever whenever we come to something in it and we do not feel we should enter into we should be exercising the the virtue of humility then we’re getting into a pornographic relationship to it and whereas if we come to something even for me a naked woman that doesn’t have to be pornographic if i can come into it um and i’m not talking about coming into an object which is i’m talking about coming into a relationship with a person right that is um you know that that is can be experienced that same reality can be experienced as beauty because i come to it with humility rather than with um a a bullshitting in which i try to pretend that humility is not relevant in this situation yeah yeah so there’s a uh what’s that what is that there so in this case humility certain characteristics of humility are associated with um well the part and parcel of the notion of repentance but i’m specifically focusing on the orient there we go yeah orienting the the way that we are making our governing our relationality there we go for org in the way that we’re governing our rationale like where where are we sourcing where are we sourcing the basis by which we are going to ultimately choose what relates qualities of relationship are we going to be entering into right and and and pornography is humiliating rather than something done with humility because it is the attempt to make the other completely accessible and consumable to me and put them forever beyond the capacity for surprising me they become what han calls the smooth and the reason i want to do this is because i’m trying to use something and i’m i’m picking something that’s provocative and i’m trying to be i hopefully helpfully provocative i think the naked body can be beautiful or or pornographic and the reason why i want to say this is because there were there have been errors within neoplatonism and christianity to my mind of identity identifying the body per se as something ugly or something that should be right uh suspected um and i think and one of the things that drove the renaissance was an attempt way before the reformation or the scientific revolution the renaissance was trying to get back the notion uh though the natural and especially the human body can be beautiful it’s not the body that is the issue and you know why i’m going on of this because we’re talking about embodiment and we have to be able to find the body beautiful in order for embodiment to really take right talk all you want about the body and if you don’t think if you can’t really understand the body as beautiful then you’re not going to be embodied right and so i’m trying to challenge this history and i admit the neoplatonism and there are versions of buddhism there’s versions of hindu that we have this tendency to turn on the body and because it can be a salient object or pornography we forget that it is also a place in which beauty can disclose itself the beauty of embodiment yeah i mean if we sort of orient to a simplicity of the bad beatitudes we have the solen caribdis you know if the if the mandate is if you look with the eye of lust pluck your eye out then you’re like well i kind of can’t skip i can’t get away from the lust part so i’m going to go with the let’s not you better be fully clothed right that’s the only we’re going to solve this problem so it’s like a capitulation to lack of trust and frankly lack of repentance like lack of actual discipleship is to say well i’m going to take the safe safe path here i’m going to keep my eyes by just making it so i don’t even have the possibility of being tempted but one might imagine and i would be surprised if it wasn’t in there somewhere that christ could look at a naked female body and not be tempted by lust and that’s the thing we’re called towards is to be able to perceive that the perceive the actual beauty and to build in ourselves the capacity to actually be deeper and deeper into relationship with beauty and the possibility of beauty which is which is on us right it’s on us we don’t control our world and separate ourselves from beauty so that we avoid one kind of error thereby guaranteeing another kind of error like this this this middle way is is a tricky business yeah very i think that i think that was beautifully well said i think for me the way we do that the way we properly canal canalized lust is you know in in in the deep full person spiritual commitment to another person um and so that um that desire is transfigured i’ll use some christian language here into delight into mutually shared delight rather than into one-sided asymmetrical consumption you know these things that we see we see all the time i think the parenting metaphor just continues to bear fruit um you know a child is doing something that is bad for the child do you and you can’t quite find your way to an adequate skillfulness of really supporting them into under the proper path well so what do you do you either are permissive and let them take the risk or you’re controlling and you take their sovereignty okay yes yes there you go and we see this doing that if you look at the vices the places where religion has made an error well it’s made that exact same error if conservatism conservative religions tend to bias towards controlling and liberal religions tend to bias towards permissiveness and neither one is good parenting that’s a that’s very much so you’re you’re you’re without being condescending you’re casting that religion should aspire to take on a parental role rather than a controlling or i don’t know what an enabling role or something like that yeah that’s a very interesting proposal um i i think when i think of religion like the the one ring in in one sense not in all senses in the lord of the rings because it just tends to magnify whoever’s wearing it and what i think religion um can be something that magnifies people’s worst defects i think if you’re defective and you’re wielding the power of religion um on behalf of your deficits or your excesses um the religion makes it much worse but i think if you have virtues the religion magnifies those virtues and makes them much more powerful um that’s how i i so that’s how i would yeah so if you view if you view religion from the point of view of let’s see ideology slash substance ontology as opposed to relationality and the the various things that are associated with how relationality properly works and that’s the key there there are ways to be able to support and participate hey d logos right d logos is something that says hey this is of the toolkit of relationality this is not of the toolkit of control so that right religion can be coming this way which is the you know it’s grasping it’s a shortcut it’s ultimately subject to the simulation or propositional domination it doesn’t come from the organic aliveness of family right of of spirit meaning whole real wholeness actual wholeness it is the you can see this in so many different examples like the situation we’ve kind of got like the the the family at the family gathering that is a family that’s not really in loving wholeness but the desire to present that and so like the the need to kind of control it right so there’s these two modes that we can use but we try to create a simulation of lived wholeness through a variety of different techniques all of which are wrong and the appropriate approach is okay how do we re-enter back into this deal logos how do we re-enter back into love hope faith understanding in the right order and maybe have to go through some real work to rebuild that humility also is the thing that brings us back down the stack it brings us back into love all the way down to the bottom of love like we talked about with grief as well and grief brings us all shreds all the other stuff until you get back down in the very bottom of grief you actually perceive the the infinity of love from which you can now be reclothed back up that stack and able to thereby be more fully able to engage in the proper way right to to be in proper communion right to be in to be a proper liturgy i’m using these particular words now so yeah yeah the liturgy is that there’s the fabric the tool of relationality how do we work together to form a proper communion like how do you form an identity that is this emergent thing that is greater than us and and also but doesn’t dominate us right and so we have anti-literature it calls us it calls it calls us up even more right it nurtures us it supports us it makes us more beautiful and that like those two like that that very simple thing is a lot of the whole story yeah i i agree with that i think that’s really wonderful um i’m gonna again we’re gonna pause where uh there’s gonna be more um jordan knows that i um in in the process of inviting somebody uh he knows and who has he’s had also amazing con via logos with and who’s a beloved friend of mine which is christopher christopher master petro i think having chris come in uh for the third one of these uh would be a really beautiful in all the ways we’ve been talking about it uh addition to this uh because um chris has an interesting he’s gone through his own interesting return to christianity in a certain way um and um and i am deeply uh respectful of it and so i want to uh just give you as i always do with my guests first of all my gratitude this caught fire this this the the logos showed up and we were sailing man we were sailing and that was great and i want to thank you for um your good faith i hope you found that i reciprocated it i aspired to respond in good faith and maintain the fire of the deal logos cultivate it and tend to it together and attend to it together uh so all of my gratitude for that and um but now just give you the the final word in our paws my final words pretty easy which is um i just want to thank you for your friendship and it is really the case that one we’re friends yes and two you’ve been you’ve done a really wonderful job of keeping that in the foreground and i really appreciate that thank you for that