https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=j1r6m4S59pM
Welcome everyone to Another Voices with Reveke. I’m extremely pleased and excited to be here with Damian Walter. And we’re doing this as part two of his proposal about Star Trek as the appropriate mythos for our time. And so I’m just going to turn things over to Damian. He’ll take us through a bit of review. Last time we got, we did a lot of good work to get to a clear presentation of his thesis in full. And he’s going to just quickly take us to that and then we will unpack that thesis and explore it and constructively critique it and all the wonderful things we’re supposed to do. So welcome Damian. It’s great to have you here again. Thank you very much for having me back for part two of this, John, which I wasn’t expecting it to take me this long to prove that Star Trek is the story that we need for our times. And actually from the last conversation, I think it inspired a new video essay that I’m working on for my YouTube channel. Excellent. About the postmodern destruction of Star Trek. Because one of the things I’ve observed in, I spend a lot of time in kind of the YouTube critique sphere. And there are a lot of people who are very angry about Star Trek at the moment and the new seasons of it. And I feel like they’re making a kind of error because they’re identifying some of these real issues. And then they’re blaming it on that demon of wokeness. So I’m trying to actually make to show that it’s more the postmodern era than postmodern people who are the problem for us. And I think our conversation last time inspired some of that thinking in me because we straight into these areas of the culture wars. And maybe I can take us back to that point. Please. Just hit some of those key points. So I think we started with the thinking about and I went into some detail about my kind of history that built up to my first course, the rhetoric of story to think about story as a psycho technology. Yes. In your terminology there, so that we we found this way to kind of mirror the way the human mind, the psyche works in the presentation of whatever media they are. We thought about cave paintings initially. And I mean, we go through the great theatrical traditions and cinema and video games today. This psycho technology that allows us to be immersed into like a human experience. Right. And with that, we’re able to like take early humans and give ourselves the identity of the hunter. I’m sure you were hunting, but we are able to attach values to that activity. So we tell the story of the hunter and we make them heroic. And we attach, we emphasize their value to the tribe. And here we created this identity, this persona. And I think this is what we’re doing with the psycho technology of story where we’re creating our characters as people. Yes, yes, yes. Because I mean, it’s crazy, really. All the different things we’re capable of doing. And I feel this is all bound up with our storytelling. And we do this for thousands of years. And it’s this process of telling stories and then our new identities feeling back into the story that gives us what I’m using the term mythos. So I tried to make it clear that I am absolutely not a classic scholar by any means. So in many ways, I’m very ignorant of the usage of the word mythos in Greek society. But I think it’s useful for us today because we now have this hyper saturated culture of storytelling. So there’s stories absolutely surrounding us wherever we are day in, day out. We’re saturated in the media. It’s all storytelling. And we need a way of talking about this. And I think that is the mythos. It’s really useful for us today because of the powerful impact that the mythos is having on our lives, that we’re more immersed in it than ever before. And we have conflicts from from within the mythos, which I think is where we got to that cultural point, because we have, I think, a number of different stories competing for our our perception of what is real, which is one of the things the mythos subconsciously defines for us. So we have these kind of the ancient, the pre-modern stories, our great religious narratives. And those are still powerful for many, many people. But it’s questionable how far we can really believe in those in the way that a human being a thousand years ago might have been able to believe in the Christian mythos, for instance. So then we have the modern mythos, which has been a long time displacing the mythos of science and technology and Star Trek. And that’s still dominant in our society today, and it still has its old conflicts, even though it’s won most of them. So the atheist is still very angry about God, this this older part of the mythos. But the modern mythos is completely dominant, really, in the world. But now there is this challenger, the post-modern mythos, which I talked about as being more narrative aware. So the post-modern mythos is very active rewriting myths, myths like Star Trek, for instance. So I think we have this this this conflict within the mythos of our society between these three great stories, one old, one dominant, one emergent. And I think that we kind of started to get into the point of how Star Trek can bridge those three. Do you think I hit most of the point there? That was very good. So I want to bring up two points and then certain things. One is, you know, you talk about how within any mythos, there’s inevitably conflict between the narratives. And then, of course, what people used to do was advert, you know, they would defer to some kind of meta narrative, some like a nomological. This is the structure of reality, a nomological or a normative. This is how we get better as people. And then, of course, famously, Lyotard argued that postmodernism is defined by the claim that there are no meta narratives, which is, of course, a weird meta narrative claim. But we’ll just put that problem aside for a sec, what the status of that actual claim is. So I’m wondering if postmodernism is, you know, because of its challenging of a meta narrative, it’s challenging a space to which we can defer or from which we can draw authority in order to manage the conflict between our narratives, which would also be the space in which we would be having this discussion to some degree, because you’re making a proposal about how Star Trek can actually mediate between the traditional, the modern and the postmodern. And then the second is, you know, I mean, I’m in regular discussion with many people in many different groups, but they sort of are converging and perhaps there’s conciliance around a claim of meta modernism as anything distinct from postmodernism. And while I wouldn’t directly call myself a meta modernist, I find a lot of sympathy with the proposals that are being made there. So those are sort of two things I wanted to sort of bounce off you. One is, are we, are we, and I’m happy to challenge the postmodern claim that there can be no meta narratives. Is that being challenged here because it is, I mean, and again, there are no definitions but this is supposed to be a defining feature. There’s all kinds of self erasing language here in postmodernism, which makes it very difficult to wrestle with. So but are we doing that? Are we, are we, are we saying that there’s a space in which we can do that? Is that the space in which we can see how Star Trek can bridge between the three? And what about the meta modern? Is Star Trek also capable of appealing to this? Because, and this is the last thing I’ll say and then I’ll return things back to you. The meta modern claims to be doing exactly what you propose. It claims to find the through line between the traditional, the modern, and the postmodern and a way forward. So we’re not in the perpetual aporia of postmodernism. I know that was a bit of a ramble, but I hope that gives you like a couple of things to play with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m increasingly using the word meta modern to describe, to frame my thinking in story narrative and more broadly as well. But there’s, there’s at least two strands of meta modernism. One is the aesthetic, which I think is actually a kind of rebrand of postmodernism, that it is postmodern irony with a bit more sincerity attached. So there was a very big essay from Thomas Flight, who is a really big YouTube film reviewer, and he had obviously found this term meta modernism and interviewed Greg Denver, who is on the aesthetic side of meta modernism. And Thomas did this big essay and I did a response video to that and we’ve since done an interview about it. Because I’m very much over on this other side of meta modernism, which I think has come out of, and I’d be interested to know what you think of these areas, developmental psychology, developmental theory, stage theory, and the kind of the popular fronts of those spiral dynamics and integral theory, which are, to not go into detail about them, they are an argument for the need to integrate different stages of our psychological persona of our civilizational as well. And I have a feeling that these are very bound up with the stories that we tell that the problem for stagefries is where is this happening? Yes, yes. You know, we haven’t changed as beings, and there is a whole area of this that is around Daniel Goertz, Hansi Freinach, the meta modern philosopher, which is about cognitive development. Yes. The other side of meta modernism is, you know, I don’t deeply understand that side of meta modernism. I’ve only looked at it briefly, but I find that questionable that we’re actually questioning the cognitive levels, let’s say, of some people with traditional religious beliefs, for instance. That doesn’t seem at all to integrate. That seems to only exacerbate our cultural. So the cognitive developmental model of meta modernism, I think, is, you know, really just inflaming our cultural conflicts together. And it’s doing the opposite of integrating these different parts of our culture and civilization. I feel that what does evolve is our stories and our storytelling, is our mythos. And I think, I mean, I’m not, I’m never going to be the person to study this in detail. I’m a storyteller, so I just throw the ideas out there. You know, with what I know about stage development theory, you have these distinct stages emergent, because for the continued growth of a system or an organism, you have to abandon the previous stage and you have to make a distinct change from it. So we have to do this in our culture, for instance, moving into the scientific era, you have to let go of your religious myths. They can’t be allowed to continue to interfere in what you need to do to make that developmental leap. You still need them. They were still there. They’re in the same way. You still need your, well, you still need the learning that you had when you were six, when you get to 12. You still need your tongue to eat, even though you use it for speech. Of course. Yeah, and exaptation. Yes. And that I think is the key insight of these different areas of developmental theory, developmental psychology, that we have to make the transition, but we still have to value what was there before and integrate it. Yes. And this is the really difficult thing, I think, for people to grasp in our cultural situation. This is the fundamental error that we’re making. We can’t abandon our religious past. We still need it, but our modernist narrative wants to get rid of it. Our postmodernist narrative, you know, the elements that are key to our continued attack on, like, capitalist systems and the idea that we can simply abandon those in the past. So it’s this conflicted need to both move on from the past, but to still honor it and keep it as part of it. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I try to capture that with my phrase, neither nostalgia nor utopia. Yeah. So that’s exactly that. So do you think that the meta modern framework, and I agree with you, I think meta modernism makes sense at the level of the collective intelligence of distributed cognition, the level with mythos is evolving the relevance realization of collective intelligence, the way Brett Anderson is arguing in some of his recent essays based on my work and Jordan Peterson’s work. And so I think that’s right. I think mythos is how the we does, you know, grows its relevance realization capacities so that it can grock hyper objects and exercise a kind of hyper agency in the world. So, does, do you think that that means that, in a sense, we’re getting back the space meta narrative, it’s not the old kind of space, the space of day cards or universal logic space or something like that. But it sounds like there’s an attempt, both within meta modernism and in your work to find a space where we can do exactly that. Right. But the idea is we’re not somehow above and free from our historical time and space somehow we’re still imminent in it. And yet, we are trying to recover the, the past the tradition and inventio, the future. I’m sorry, I’m belaboring this because I find it a very interesting proposal I find that there’s this exploration to try and come up with the space that used to be filled with traditional meta narratives, but with a different kind of meta narrative, and that I find deeply, deeply intriguing. Well, I think there’s something that I argue is integral to to meta modernism, but others may disagree at this point, and it’s a fascinating discussion because met modernism is is at the point where we can shape it. And what it’s meaning. Yes, yes, yes. That’s right. And very useful. And that’s the reconstruction of narratives. So in my discussion with Thomas like, for instance, actually that something like Top Gun Maverick is is in its way a very meta modern movie, because it’s saying here’s this movie from 40 years ago. That’s, that’s when Top Gun was now, which you probably loved, and you probably watched it with your family, but then it became desperately uncool, and everything was postmodern, and we didn’t want to watch American fighter pilots blowing up the bad guys, you know, and the values of that are just icky. Yeah, but lots of people still really want that story. And the meta modern move is to say, okay, we’re going to totally honor that desire for this kind of story within our civilization. So the other big narrative of this kind, I think, is Lord of the Rings. Yes, you know, there’s this scathing attitude towards Lord of the Rings in in the more literary world, although even that is dying off, actually, at the moment, because I think more and more people are making this meta modern move of saying, well, there is a story about the return of the king, but maybe we need that story. Maybe that’s why it’s so powerful. Right, right, right, right. Absolutely abandon it. And this is much easier to do with our kind of mythopoic contemporary reinventions of myth than it is to do with our truly ancient religious myths, which are two, they’re two way down with their previous political uses, I guess. Well, I mean, well, I would, first of all, that’s a great proposal. I think that’s really good. Yeah, I think there’s the idea that, you know, that there’s there’s the idea that, well, we’ve lost some functionality when we threw out this story. And yeah, we can’t tell exactly the same story, but we have to recover the functionality that was in that story. And I think under the and I think your thesis that that’s one of the key moves in meta modern is meta modernism, I think is really powerful. I think also the idea that we can do that more in mythos before we can do it in religio or or the sacred, but I would hope that the first could educate us so that the second becomes more possible to us. Because I think we need a reinvent you of the sacred very deeply right now as well. And exactly this kind of way we’re talking about, we can’t simply return to it. And we can’t just sort of propose a utopia in which somehow when we get to the utopia, it will disclose itself. Instead, there has to be, you know, the reinvent you of it. Yeah, the thing that interests me, and I will I will let you get to your Star Trek thesis very quickly, but I think this is very powerful stuff because I think it’s interesting. Yeah, I think it’s really contextualizing what you’re doing is I’m very interested in the place. I’m using that as a metaphor, the place with from which that is happening. Like, where are we cognitively culturally, when we do this reinvent here, like we’re, we’re not in the mythos, we’re somehow out of it, but we’re not, you know, it’s like what Maximus says of God, right? He’s beyond everything, but not enclosed. He’s beyond everything, but not excluded. And like we’re in that weird place. I’m trying to get at like, it’s kind of like, you know, the way dreams are sort of about our real lives, but not our real lives and they’re in and out. I just find it a very liminal place in a very interesting way. And I’m wondering also part of your thesis is that let’s say that this liminal place is kind of like a pivot point. And, you know, and it’s almost like an aporetic aperture that we have to get to. Right. Could we not evaluate proposals like yours in terms of the exactly their functionality, being able to get us to that pivot point and move things from there? Right. So a really good reinventio, a really good modern mythos or postmodern or nonmodern. I don’t know what to say now. Right. Is, you know what this story does? It gathers the past. It opens up possibilities and then, but it does it in a way in which it’s neither nostalgic nor utopic. And it gives us a place at which we can really reconnect for us, make relevant to us again, the power of this in a way that’s needed now, here and now. Does that, do you understand what I’m proposing? Absolutely. I mean, there’s this desire, which I see as a non integrative desire to wake everybody up. Yes. Yeah. Which I think is probably not. I doubt that any of us are really entirely awake from the mythos we’re immersed in. And most of us, it’s simply the reason why we have this all embracing story is because this is what being human is. And we’re all sharing this story. And I mean, I don’t know why it’s very difficult for people to awake from the story to put aside your personal identity. I mean, this is part of the meditation experience. But it’s something that writers and storytellers need to do. Right. Okay. I think. Right. Because the big challenge, I spent many years teaching creative writing, the big challenge for people who want to write is that really what they want to do is have perpetual immersion into a story they love and have some control over. Right. Storytelling is very confused with the immersion into the story. But what you actually need to do, for instance, to become an effective novelist, which I think is one of the highest level clients of storytelling or screenplay writer, is to be able to maintain these states together. Right. You need to have some immersion into your imagination and a really well practiced writing practice, for instance. So I tweeted once that, you know, as I was getting better as a writer, I found it more and more difficult to enjoy stories. And did anybody else share that experience? One of the people I’m friends with is Neil Gaiman, who’s a very famous fantasy writer. And he tweeted and just said, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, your ability to just truly immerse is probably going to be broken by developing this skill. But I think it’s those people who then become the people who shape the mythos. And I wanted to put a question to you. Because to lead into based on the topic of how we can deliberately engineer the mythos. Because again, I’m very inexpert in this area, but there’s an academic I’ve been listening to called Michael Sugru. I think that’s the pronunciation. I don’t know the pronunciation. But yes. Good. So these are kind of like some bits I put together of Plato’s life from from various sources. So please forgive me if it’s completely incorrect. No, no worries. So initially, he wants to be a playwright. And, you know, he’s that’s how he’s going to demonstrate his skill, his intellect in the world. And he stopped from doing this. I picture him crossing the Agora, he’s going to hand his plan. And so yeah, Socrates stops him, you know, and basically says, you know, you, you could be more than a player, you could be a philosopher. But Plato always has this fascination with the story with the mythos of his society. His way of expressing philosophy is the dialogues, the means of the playwright, really. Yep. Yep. The, the allegory of the cave is, for me, my interpretation of that is this is the mythos that the people of Athens are immersed in is, is the, the images on the cave wall because they’re being projected by the poets, who are the creator, a kind of lower level of creators. And I think Plato has this deep frustration about how can I make the Athenian people better? How can I improve Athens? This is the project of the Republic. And this is Michael Sugru’s insight into it. He knows, you know, he can’t have the philosophy of kings, he can’t have the model of the Republic, he can’t make any of this real or happen. So Plato’s ultimate idea is he’s going to, the Athenians have this god, this mad, crazy god, Zeus. Yes, yeah. And it’s going to rewrite that god as, as Deus, as the god, and take him from a character, the mythos, and give him the values of the logos instead. So he’s doing like this immense act of mythos engineering by kind of inventing god. But the important thing is that god, Zeus now has the values of the logos of reason, rationality, and is the creator of the universe. So I don’t have to have any, any belief in, in god to find that idea fascinating that an individual, super intelligent, individual made this intervention into the mythos of their society, has this tremendous historic outcome for thousands of years to come following it. First of all, I mean, on the specific thesis, I think Plato is trying to, well, to use my phrase, trying to steal the culture in the way that’s being proposed. And I think he is introducing a kind of non theism into a polytheistic world. And I think he’s carrying the axial revolution into the mythos. The gods before the actual revolution are just powerful or glorious in the hands of Socrates. You can see it already in Socrates, Socrates and Plato, and you can’t really pull the two of them apart anyways. But in those two, you can see that the gods become sages, they become moral exemplars. And so I agree that that thesis is going on. I agree with the thesis that that that what Plato is doing is exactly that. The way he’s doing it, I’m not, see, I’m not quite sure I understand why we’re using engineering. Engineering carries with it a sense of a repeatable method that can be applied without much consideration for variation. And that’s not what’s going on in the Platonic corpus at all. Right? Right? There is this endless exploration of, so Plato, at least this is what third way Platonic scholarship argues. And I agree with it, you know, people like Gonzalez and Highland and others, Rucznik, that, you know, what Plato does is he’ll constantly, Socrates will, somebody will claim a certain virtue of wisdom and Socrates will propose techne, right? That procedural technical ability as the paradigm, right? And then people will, oh, yes, I want that. And I want wisdom to be a techne. And then he’ll draw them out of their opinion by offering them this. And then he’ll sabotage it and show how, but it can’t be a techne, right? It can’t be something that can be merely engineered. And, you know, by the time of the seventh letter, which I do think is authentic, Plato is basically saying, look, you got to live with somebody for a long time and this spark has to catch. So I agree with the thesis. But I would say to you that, and this is what I’ve been trying to explore in depth with this whole notion of dialectic and didiologos, right? The way you, you know, and he’s, and of course he’s drawn on Heraclitus and Parmenides, Parmenides’ notion of the one, Heraclitus’ notion of the logos, he’s bringing them together. But I think his point, the point is, it’s not the logos unless it takes shape of its own accord. You know, this is why Socrates says you follow the logos, like he follows the logos the way you follow the wind and the illusions there, right, to spirituality, I think are intended. So I think Plato’s doing that, but I think what I’m, I’m maybe I’m belaboring it, but what I’m trying to say is the how of that transformation is just as much important as the what of the transformation. Yes, he’s not only saying, here’s a new God. He’s saying here’s a new way to relate to the sacred in a fundamental transformative way. And, and he’s binding reason, not logic, but reason as logos into the sacred and into the, and as you said, the dialogues are this wonderful combination of drama and argument and they take on a life of their own and they’re often inconclusive because the point is not to come to a conclusion, etc. So I think that Plato is actually pointing to that point we’ve been talking about and saying, yes, you won’t be able to live in your old myths, but that point gives you a new kind of access to the sacred that can empower many other kinds of myths to be told mythos to be told. And of course, it shows up in the allegory of the game. That’s my best explanation for why Plato demonstrates this profound ambivalence towards mythos. Like he censors it in the Republic. And yet he in the very same book, he engages in it profoundly. And it’s like, because I think he he I think he’s making this proposal. Yeah. He’s engaging in an act of mythmaking. Yes, and he’s in, but he’s also saying, this is a new way to make myth. He’s not only saying new myths. He’s saying, here’s a new way to make myths. And I think that is really, and the two I think belong together, I think trying to separate them as a mistake or prioritize one over the other. They’re both like that the myth of the cave, we’re only will grab you as a myth. If you are living the love of wisdom. When I using the term engineering, I’m trying to indicate, hey, there’s a purpose of intent. Yes, yes, yes. Right. The the mythos evolves, like, like fire. Well, that’s why I tend to use the verb, verb cultivate, because you cultivate a fire, you cultivate a plant, you, you have this relationship of tending and attending and affording, but it is directed towards something that you want and encouraged to have a life of its own. What I’m getting to is that, you know, like the gods that had emerged for the Greek pantheon, there wasn’t a purpose of intent behind them. I think it was they were simply characters of stories that grew and grew and became more important. And I compare them to like our popular storytelling. Today, the purpose is, is, is to entertain and distract. And, you know, Luke Skywalker wasn’t invented to play some larger role in society. But for the myth maker, there is some larger role to this storytelling and they cultivate an awareness of the mythos and they start feeding back into it. You’re right, not in an engineering sense, in something much more organic in cultivating the mythos and growing the mythos more like a gardener. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tolkien is a myth maker of this kind, kind of steeped in all of the myths of European culture. He’s been kind of brewing them internally and they’re fusing with his life experiences as well. And then there’s also the Inklings, a kind of a philosophy crew of the modern era. And they also engage in their purpose in myth making as well. And I think that’s what Plato is doing. He’s fine with that. I’m fine with that comparison. I think that comparison is very good. I think that’s very apt, especially the open endedness in some of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So given all of that, now another myth maker of that kind is Gene Rodenberry. Oh, excellent setup. Oh, wow. That’s beautiful. Sorry, I just, I just like the aesthetics of that move. That was a beautiful movie. Great segue. Thank you. Thank you. Because Rodenberry in the story Bible for Star Trek, he repeats over and over again that this is science fiction. And he has a specific meaning to that at the time. He’s using John W. Campbell’s definition of science fiction. That is the telling of a story which extrapolates science into our, you know, into our future. And Rodenberry also has some interesting insights into actually the areas of psychology as well and politics and sociology and he is wrapping all of these together. And Star Trek is also wagon train. So there’s, there’s like a history of stories that he’s drawing on. And I think in this kind of gardener sense, he, he, he grows something very interesting in the early series of, of Star Trek. So last time we talked about the Silk Road metaphor. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, very much. Because, and that kind of grows out the fact that it’s episodic and it is wagon train in space. So they’re going to encounter a new world. And then what’s grown from that is the idea that each of these worlds is a kind of a political or a social metaphor, and they’re informing the audience and giving us again like a psycho technology to, to think beyond our one world experience. We only have our own world to look at. In the 60s, it’s already becoming globalized. So now we have many other worlds that we can have, you know, metaphors for kind of social justice and racial issues and everything else you can think of. Why civilizations end? That’s something Star Trek plays with a lot. And I think that ties into the value of Star Trek. As does this fusing together of the different competing narratives within our mythos today. So maybe I can… Yeah, please open that up. Yeah. So William Shatner on a planet fighting a rubber lizard man. It’s ridiculous. It’s the California countryside, but it’s a moment of, you know, tribal heroism. So Captain Kirk can go from the bridge of the ship and he can be down on a planet fighting for his life in that situation. So that’s a whole kind of value system. One of our earliest stories. Long Moria who’s going to go and fight for his people in this mano a mano situation. That’s the humorous level there. But then I think if you look at Star Trek, especially next generation, and actually I think it’s in next generation Star Trek really takes its full form. You have a tremendous sense of order aboard the enterprise. In fact, it’s when they make fun of this in some episodes like below deck, you know, the order is actually really oppressive. The people who just stand all day and stare into a scanner. You know, but it’s really comforting for lots of people to watch this tremendously well ordered world. Everyone has a place and unless they go into the merry universe, they’re not ambitiously competing for each other’s roles. So it’s a truly idealized kind of social order. And it’s the military. Well, it’s Plato’s Republic is what it is. Yeah, you could definitely say that about Picard is the philosopher can write and then you have the guardians, and then you have all the worker and everybody loves their job and everybody loves their place. It’s Plato’s Republican space, basically. So I think this is tremendously useful for our conservative part of our society, you know, who want this reflected and ordered world. And that they can return to whenever they want. But crucially in Star Trek, that conservative social order serves science. Yes, and military serve science and the exploration of the unknown. And I don’t know how deliberate this was from Roddenberry or kind of Rick Berman later on in the next generation. But I think this is a really brilliant kind of inversion of where we currently are today with like the military industrial complex. Yeah, that too often science is is serving the military. But you even see that. Yeah, you even see that. Like, if you actually look at our military today, the officer corps are all highly educated people and mostly are scientists as well at some. So I think that you can kind of see that change happening. But Star Trek is almost a starting point for that because it starts to to shape our ideas of what the military might actually be for. You know, you have NASA at the same time. Right, right, right, right. That’s right. Very good. So I think that that’s the first level of integration there. You have this strong social order, the conservative dream that you write Plato’s Republic, but in the service of science, knowledge, exploration. And then what do the crew of the enterprise always prioritize above everything else? The prime directive, noninterference with other people’s causes of social justice, essentially. So the values this is oriented to are the postmodern values of a kind of activist. Yes. So you have the sandwich with the free value levels in Star Trek, which I think is why it’s so successful when it’s done well, why there’s such a broad audience of people who can watch it. OK, first of all, this is a brilliant thesis. I really like this thesis. So, yeah, you’ve got you got Plato’s Republic that’s conservative, but it’s but it actually sort of fulfills Plato’s greatest longing, which has always been the problem, which is the philosopher kings are ultimately about philosophy and knowledge. They’re not about control and power. And so there’s that which, of course, as you say, that’s the modern that’s the that’s the that’s the mythos of the Enlightenment, right? Exploration and gathering knowledge for its own sake. And yet that’s in service of noninterference, a kind of a kind of multiculturalism pluralism, social justice framing that’s at the core of postmodernism. So I’m just repeating it because I just I’m savoring it and I’m making sure I’m getting it. Does it sound like I’m understanding it correctly? Yeah, sure. Well, I think I think it’s so clear in the show. If you look at it in a kind of this developmental model, it seems to be. And then this sandwich of the different stories within our house go and encounter other often less less developed civilizations. And what’s the key thing that the enterprise does? Well, it turns up and saves planets. Yeah, yeah. It couldn’t be more clear in a way, really, that once you have this operational sandwich of of our civilization and they’re all working together, you then have the the. The people, the structure who can turn around and where are we now as a planet in need of saving? We need the Starship Enterprise to come along and turn up and sort out climate change and our geopolitical struggles. That’s very good. OK, can I ask you something then about here’s one of my critique. I like the next generation. I mean, I liked all the Star Trek’s up until Star Trek Discovery, which to me, I thought lost the vision of what Star Trek was. We had enough dark shows. We didn’t need to make Star Trek dark. But my one of my critiques of the next generation is the old series for all of its flaws had moments of astonishing awe. And you got a sense of bumping up against the numinous. Think of the city on the edge of forever in which time and the profound mystery of time and how human lives are tragic in the face of time like that. Like there was that or, you know, there’s episodes that might not be as as, you know, as as good as the city on the edge of forever. But there’s that episode where they find an individual Flint and he and it turns out he’s immortal and he’s been all of these great people. And so there’s this sort of silly story about a love triangle going and then this opens up and you get this tremendous sense like of the numinous again. And one of the or even like and their profound ambivalence. One of my favorite scenes is with the enterprises battling Apollo, because that’s just like the quintess in Who Will Mourn for Adonis. That’s just like, my gosh, this is the enterprise is like such a character in that show. Right. It’s actually the enterprise, not Kirk, not Spock. It’s the enterprise that can take on a God, which I thought was like a really, really interesting and powerful metaphor. But but even then, they’re ambivalent about right there, because there’s a sense again of awe and depth. And I did I like I like the next generation. I didn’t I don’t I don’t remember being ever having that sense in the next generation. I think that’s deliberate. I think I need to speak to that, please. What the next generation is is doing, because what we’re really talking about there. So there’s an issue with the Starship Enterprise that if you have war pendulums and transporters and holodecks, you have actually sublimed beyond the material plane of reality. There’s no reason to be zooming around in chunks of metal, even with force fields. You’re far, far beyond this. But the as an intervention into the mythos, there’s there’s a vast chunk of our civilization who aren’t ready for that. So we discussed this in the last. Yes, yes, yes. That there’s the whole dream of interstellar travel, and it’s all about harnessing the machines. And it’s really about the continuation of what we are now into the future without any changes. And that audience love Star Trek because it is limited into this scope, unlike something like 2001, which is a transcendent myth. Yes, yes. Star Trek, the original Star Trek is more in that line is more psychedelic. Right. 2001 psychedelic. Yeah, it has that feel at times. Yes. But Star Trek, the next generation really limits that. And that’s part of its of its strong appeal to people who love the space program, people of an engineering mindset. And that modernist myth has to be kind of embodied in that way. And in next generation, it is it’s almost like the the bridge is like a corporate boardroom. Yeah. And you have the captain’s boardroom there. So it’s all reflecting like the dominant kind of power structure of the age turning up for work at the of the at the corporation. Very, very different from from Star Trek. So I think that’s a deliberate act in the storytelling is that limitation. But I think I’m proposing here that the real value of Star Trek would be in the way that Plato did with. Yes. With the with the Greek gods is to add something to it is to twist the values. We have this pre-existing story that has this incredibly wide reach and we could add something to it like a different alignment. So so. OK, great. I mean, there’s a thousand things I want to ask. But let’s just pick up on that. So you’ve got you made this great argument. Very good about, you know, Star Trek is so appropriate because of the if its grasp of the traditional, the modern and the postmodern. But you also said it now, but it’s at a place that liminal pivot point where it can do something with it. It has a capacity to reinvent you. So say more about that specifically. Like what what do you see? Do you see that? Do you see that only largely in potential in the existing shows? Or do you see that there’s moments where they realize that power and act and actualized it towards some end? How would what’s your what’s your sense there? Yeah, I think that there there are moments like that. Maybe a way into this is to think about like the symbol of the starship. Right. Because it’s fascinating symbol. It’s it’s Lenny and Falcon. It’s the Starship Enterprise. So many other occurrences. And we will probably never have a starship. Although to many people, it seems like a reality. So it is a it’s a very religious symbol because it it represents in some ways ultimate power. It’s the pinnacle of our technological achievements. But it also takes us beyond. Yes. Where we are. It’s a chariot gods in a sense. Yeah, yeah, very much, very much. And, you know, the the thing we remember is the starship from all these things. It it lingers as a character, and we even bring it to life with a eye with its voice and ability to to commune with us. So I think. In fact, I’m going to. Uh, I’ll name check Ian Embanks, who I doubt you’re very aware of. I’ve got one of his books, but I haven’t read it yet. So, so Ian Embanks is very influenced by the way that he’s been. He’s very influenced by this history of space opera Star Trek amongst it foundation as well as a Mars Foundation, and he takes it a step further into like the very far future and a far future civilization called the culture. And the culture are completely utopian because they have artificial intelligences called minds who organize the whole civilization and human beings just live for pleasure and fun. And it’s a complete post scarcity society, which Star Trek also nods to. So the fun, the culture, citizens and the minds intervene in less developed civilizations. Sometimes that goes well, sometimes it goes really badly. So it’s kind of a very neoliberal metaphor that there’s less developed peoples and you can go and intervene with them. But Ian Embanks carries it all the way through because he starts talking about the potential for sublimation to going beyond reality. And I think this is where we’re kind of taking our, our thoughts right now. Star Trek always has this potential for. So that could that would, that would bring back the numinous that I’m missing in the next generation. Oh, so please continue. That’s really powerful. Well, there’s two things I think through the symbol of the Starship. Yeah, we do return to the to the numinous and science fiction is always torn. We had the traditional Golden Age science fiction and then there was the New Age of like Ursula Gwynn, Samuel Delaney, and they always went more into the numinous actually. I’m also interested in in that kind of Silk Road metaphor. Yeah, yeah. We’re on the edge of a planet of the aliens and in Star Trek, we use science, we drill a hole in the Earth’s crust. But that’s not really the complexity of what we’re dealing with. We’re not really dealing with geological problems. We’re this tremendously complex eight billion people on a planet. And as you say, what we need is wisdom. The thing we we add to the Star Trek mythos is is stories of wisdom to bring people into thinking about what what is wise. Yeah, that’s that’s great. And this is where I think we go metamodern past the postmodern. What is really the wise thing to do about trying to pick one which isn’t too inflammatory, actually, but transgender issues. What’s what is actually the wisdom of this situation that our traditional stories are modern or postmodern. They all have a very conflicted position on this. Yes. So what’s the integral metamodern wise synthesis of this? That would be a brilliant two hour Star Trek. Yeah, yeah. I like this proposal a lot. I think this is a really good proposal. Do you do you like I say, do you see, do you see, do you have any inkling that this is on the horizon or possible? I mean, there’s the new show, The Strange New World, which is harkening back to the old series in some way. Do you think that they do you think there’s an opportunity there or do you think this is something that the writers haven’t heard yet? I would predict and this maybe this could be a testable prediction. But if we get to a Star Trek that people really love again, it will be doing this. Ah, call it two things, the numinous and wisdom. Yes, yes, yes. It will be pushing the narrative into both those spaces. Because what the last 10 years have done, like the J.J. Abrams reboots and then particularly discovery, is they are very postmodern. As I said in the last talk, they’re a very aggressive postmodern rewrite of Star Trek. And that was never the right thing to do. No, really make it work. Strange New World is really. Is too retro. Yeah, I think it’s too nostalgic. So if Star Trek comes alive again or if a new version of this myth is given to us, that’s probably more likely it will be this kind of psychedelic journey into the numinous and the expansion of people’s understanding of what the wise solution to our to our problems is. That’s the excellence. I want you to start. Yeah, yeah, I think you’ve made you’ve made a very good argument for its fundamental principle and its real potential. And then you’ve made a prediction about whoever can actualize that potential will make Star Trek beloved again. I think that’s I think that’s very good. I think that’s a very sharp, very sharp. I like this day and a lot. We’re almost out of time, but this was, you know, we came to a nice closure, but I want to give you an opportunity for you know any afterthoughts or postscripts or culminating things you might want to say about this. I was really happy that we’re able to think a bit about these kind of developmental theories. They think that they’re, I think they’re very imperfect. But I feel they’re almost like a needed addition to our public discussion, even if they’re just an improvement on the kind of really broken left right political model. In public terms, we could think about, you know, the need to integrate differences and metamodernism. And but I guess also in our little corner, as Paul calls it, which I’m really happy to be part of. I think we’ve been having this discussion about story. Yes, yes, yes, very much, very much. What role it plays. I guess. I picked Star Trek to do it with, but I think this is this is my way of putting forward the argument for the need for traditional and more stories as as part of the picture. I think that’s right. I don’t know if you caught the video, I think was released two weeks ago that I did with Sean Coyne and his ideas about narrative as well. Yes. Yeah, yeah, I think. Yeah. And he and I were going to do one about his take on the matrix, which I, which is of course just laden with platonic and neoplatonic symbolism and imagery. And so I’m just looking forward to that. Yeah. And, you know, and Jonathan and and and I, you know, we did it with with Jordan, Jordan Peterson as well. And also Jonathan and I and Paul, lots of discussion about this, because of course this has to be done with wisdom, because as you said earlier, we’re drenched in narrative. And that’s clearly not just having more narrative isn’t the answer. And of course, there’s, there’s all there’s, you know, a whatever makes you adaptive also makes you prone to self deception. The narrative bias is one of the most powerful biases to which human beings are subject. And so the wielding narrative comes with a tremendous responsibility to cultivate wisdom about it. And Plato is a great example of somebody who’s wrestling with that. So, but I like the way this this was put forward the way you argued it very, very carefully, very discerning. And then I guess there’s a bit of a I don’t know if there was a bit of irony, even dramatic irony in what we’re doing, because if if if we if we know this, does that make it impossible for us to enter into the news that the coming Star Trek? Because we’re we’ve seen the man behind the curtain the way the way you know, you said that as you became a good story writer, you lose the ability to become immersed. I think there’s an extra level of enjoyment in I talk about this to my podcast audience and why I put so much time and effort into criticism. Yeah. And I think that’s a critical thinking about culture, basically, because when you can, you can bring the story up from the mythos, but into conscious for and play with it and then let it sink down again, your enjoyment of the story is is much higher as well from doing that. And I would put to you that that’s exactly the parable of the cave, you rise up to the see the sun, but you return back to the depths. Exactly. Exactly. I just say, go ahead, john, honoring me with with two sessions for this I’m really happy that you did the honor was mine. This was, I mean, both of these, I think are just the overarching argument I think is powerful, and it’s beautiful. And of course, you know, you knew from the beginning that you had a hook into me because I’m a Star Trek devotee so but thank you so much. I hope. I think it’s maybe that you and I, and Sean, could at some point have a discussion like this about more philosophical broad about narrative per se builds on, you know the videos I’ve done with you the videos I did with him. If you’re open for that I’d very much like to set that up at some point in the future. Okay. This has been fantastic it’s been it’s been so good to just be with you again I love the taste of your mind. I really like it a lot. Well, thank you so much. It’s been great.