https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SSwDLR5q1w0
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Raveki. This is a really fun one for me. My guest is Damian Walters. We have talked before in the past and it was so enjoyable. Damian does a lot of work on science fiction, speculative fiction, but not just sort of in-house. It’s in the broader cultural context, relationships to mythology, world view, world view attunement, connections to the meaning crisis. We just had a really, not sprawling, I was going to say sprawling, that sounds like LA, a really broad reaching there. That’s a better conversation last time. I’m going to ask him to introduce himself and then he’s got a really cool proposal for a conversation which I expect will get into the deal logo. So Damian, just really, it’s making me happy to see you again. I’m really wonderful to see you again. You too, John. I’m incredibly happy to be speaking with you again. You’re one of those people. I wanted to thank you at the beginning of this actually because in our crazy times at the moment you’ve been for the last two or three years for me a real source of wisdom, I think. So it’s great to be talking with you. Well, thank you. That’s a high compliment. Thank you. So you have a proposal for us, which I think is really intriguing and we’re going to try and, first of all, we’ll try and unpack it and then we’ll try and put it through some challenges. And I’m looking forward to it. So please make your proposal. Sure. So how did this come about? I was catching up with your material. So the After Socrates course and then your talks with Jordan Hall on governance. And Jordan said something about the need for kind of sovereign leaders in the talk. And what came up in my head was starship captains as sovereign leaders. And that’s what sparked it. And then in my mind, because one of the things I do around science fiction is thinking about my major course on science fiction is called Writing the 21st Century Myth. I’m thinking about modern myth makers and what a modern myth might be. And also the search for whether there might be a myth or is it more of a meta myth. So that from Jordan’s notice that kind of sparked in my mind. And I had one of those kind of frenzied 45 minutes of all the thoughts unpacked in my mind. And I instantly typed an email to you and sent it. And it was a really long email. And then I woke up about 5am in the morning, I think. And I was like, wow, did I send that email to John saying that Star Trek was the 21st century mythos? I did, I did send that email. And then it took you a couple of days to reply. And you sent me this great response about some other philosophers that might tie in. And that you’re a Star Trek fan. Deep. So I felt some relief then that there might actually be some overlap there. And I hadn’t announced a completely crazy idea. I had this tension quite a lot, actually thinking about science fiction that on the one hand, like today, I edited a one minute YouTube short for Bollywood Star Wars, which was extremely silly. And it was all AI generated. And on the other hand, I’m trying to think about the relationship with science fiction and philosophy. And most of its early history, science fiction really was like a product of philosophy. And it’s much later on that it became a mass entertainment. So now it kind of holds that tension in this really, really popular genre of storytelling, but it’s also about big ideas and philosophy and politics. I’ve always been oriented towards that side of science fiction, especially from third wave on, in which philosophical, spiritual, religious ideas were being explored. Above and beyond the sort of impact of technology, etc. I think we talked before about the work of Rogers Alasdney having a huge impact on me. But Star Trek was right there also at the beginning. It had a significant, it introduced me to a way of thinking and it ushered me into science fiction. And I was very grateful for that because you’re quite right. Science fiction is where I first encountered science fiction and speculative fiction in general is where I first encountered philosophical ideas, philosophical proposals in a way. I think my most, my initial confrontation with like the philosophical conception of nihilism was Stanislav Lem’s Solaris. That really, really got me really thinking about connectedness to reality, the possibility that we can’t render things intelligible, that existence could be absurd and that we don’t actually understand love. How is it that we meet individuals who have all of the properties of the individuals we deeply love, but instead of loving them, we’re horrified about them and then we get weirdly addicted to them. That was an opening. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And Star Trek, science fiction has this tendency to become more and more serious as you go from from west to east. Yes. Of course in the Soviet Union, it was, it managed to be a deeply subversive literature because even when it’s popular, very few people actually read science fiction. It’s written in a kind of code that people who aren’t conversant with that code can’t necessarily get into, so it often gets past censors. So people like Lem were able to talk about all kinds of issues that weren’t being conversed about across the society at the time, but it is a deeply nihilistic novel, Solaris. Yeah, that’s quite a thing to encounter when you’re a young reader. Yeah, well my mum told me on multiple occasions that I was born old, so it’s an odd thing to carry around. But well, let’s not get sidetracked into Solaris, let’s pick up here because there’s a lot we could talk about there, but let’s pick up, because of course Star Trek does this. I mean, and you know, especially some of the hallmark episodes in the original series like City on the Edge of Forever, but of course there’s, I think there’s a very important episode in The Next Generation where there’s a court trial about whether or not data can be owned, and so there’s a lot of reflection on selfhood, personhood, the soul. So it’s clear that Star Trek, at least at times, there were episodes that were just fun, like the trouble with tribbles and stuff like that, but there were episodes that had philosophical import. And then you want to, I think then within those, I think there’s some exploration, like you’re saying, of this notion of sovereign leadership around the captain. So put those two together, you got the sovereign leadership, you got the proposal of the mythos. How would you argue for that? How would you argue for that? Yeah, that was certainly one of the issues. Like I think one specific thing that Star Trek has done, and this is kind of the obvious way of thinking about it as an influential story, is that if you talk about an issue like universal basic income today, the way that people will understand that is it would be like living in the Federation in the 21st century. That’s how you actually explain that idea to people. And Star Trek has been doing that for 30 years now. It’s been introducing all of these ideas in these little studies of civilizations that we encounter somewhere out there. But I was wondering if we might kind of work our way towards Star Trek to kind of put some underpinnings in about story and mythos, really, for how we get to that point. Because one of my, before I was working on the science fiction course, I had been, well, this was quite a long time before. My early employment was in the city of Leicester in the United Kingdom. And I’d gone to university and I had this grand ambition of being a writer. And one of the things I did to fulfill that was I started teaching workshops in libraries and other places around the city where I was studying. And that actually turned into a job for me. And I ended up staying in Leicester for the next eight years after I graduated, basically doing community work with arts and storytelling and literature. And the thing that I began to observe, I guess what I was doing was a bit like your colleague Jordan Peterson’s self-offering course. I was getting into people’s stories with them. And I began to observe that when people were happy, they had a sense that they had a story and it was unfolding for them. And when people were unhappy or broken, they had a sense that they had a story and it wasn’t happening. And even if people’s circumstances were bad, if they felt the story was happening, they still felt they had some direction. But without that story, even if people were really wealthy, things weren’t working for them. So I ended up going back to college to study story further. I did that for about 10 years whilst teaching creative writing. And I was reading all the material on storytelling that I could find at the time. I probably read about 300 sources on storytelling, everything from Aristotle to Stephen King. And all kinds of material in between, like the whole area of narratology and playwrights. I started to see that there was a kind of absent area. There were so many different subjects and disciplines that spoke about story that you couldn’t go to university and study story. You can study creative writing or script writing or psychology or all of these different areas. But it was like an absent discipline from the heart of things. So this had made story very central for me. And then I was also going on a meditation journey at the same time, which started a bit later. And cutting the story a bit short, I had left the UK and I was living in Asia, mostly to study meditation. And at the same time I was writing, continuing to develop my storytelling skills. And I had a kind of a revelatory moment. I was actually in Penang in Malaysia at the time. And I had gone on a really long run through Georgetown in Penang. And I realized kind of at the end of this 10 kilometer run, I was kind of exhausted and inspired at the same time. That what I was doing with the storytelling and the meditation were the same thing, but in a different direction. When I was storytelling, I was building the motivations of characters and the narratives around them. And when I was meditating, I was taking these things apart. Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like frame making and frame breaking. They’re in relation to each other. Yes. I was hoping for your, what psycho technologies this overlap with actually. And that was when I kind of began to formulate what became my course, the rhetoric of story. So over the next about two or three years, that all came together, really around the idea. I don’t actually love it as a line, but it’s the simplest way to express it, that story is the operating system of the human mind. Yeah. Yeah. So the way that we shape and tell stories is how we think as well. And that course has been very successful. It’s kind of over in the area of popular writing teaching, but it’s most of the people who find it, haven’t had any experience of narratology or other areas. So many of the ideas are really, really new to them as well. And that for me was like a really essential process. There was so much that I didn’t know at the beginning of that. I would have just afforded stories as entertainment. Right. And that’s, I think then informing for me as well of myth and mythos, because we have this long history of storytelling going all the way back to ancient cave paintings, I guess are the oldest stories that we can identify. And for me, they’re probably like the set and setting of stories and rituals storytelling. Yeah. We have evidence that they’re singing, probably dancing. Yeah. So yeah, I think the proposal that the caves are ritual centers, I think, of course, there are people who still reject that, but I think it’s a very respectable proposal now in the interpretation of the cave paintings. So please continue. Yeah. And what we were doing in those stories is they’re like imprints of the way we think of our cognitive processes. So it’s like an early psycho technology, maybe one of the earliest stories that we’re able to shape information. It could be shadows on a cave wall. It could be paintings. It could be telling each other stories in language. And because they mirror the way that we think, we get this sense of immersion from them. And that immersion can be very powerful in the way that it can influence how we think. I find that there’s this very interesting phenomenon with stories that I can watch Star Wars and I won’t remember that I’ve been Luke Skywalker. I’ll know that that was a story that I experienced. But the emotion that Luke Skywalker experiences and I feel through him of blowing up the Death Star or discovering that Darth Vader is his father, that’s actually indistinguishable from whether I’ve experienced that emotion for myself or whether that’s something that came from the story. And that means that these stories are kind of feeding back very powerfully into who we are and who we’re becoming as people. And that’s like the beginning of myth for us. Whenever the stories step over into reshaping who we are, that’s what they are as a myth or a myth. I like this proposal. I like that proposal that you could think of a story as just this sharing, but if we end to the participatory relationship, we’re shaping it as it’s shaping us as we’re shaping it and you get that cognitive niche construction happening. Yeah, that’s a good proposal of when we’re moving from the genus of story that could include things that are just entertaining or the story that goes into a joke or something like that to mythos proper where what we’re trying to do is, like I’ve been deeply influenced by Hutto and Keith Oatley, the narrative practice hypothesis, the idea that narrative is how we practice being a temporally extended moral agent, that narrative is the primary way we become persons, we become selves with moral and cognitive agency. And so I like this idea, though, about pointing to where that is actually the central sort of function of the story is exactly that I’m going to turn you into a person, right? And I’m going to do that by getting you to extend your moral agency and the possibility into the future, into the past. So I like that. I’m sorry, I’m just playing around and letting it sort of rumble around. Because it would help to explain some of the sacredness of mythos as opposed to stories that aren’t encountered as sacred, precisely because in mythos, the story is serving this really primordial function of person making in a really, really deep way. I like that. I think that’s good, because one of the difficulties, of course, I mean, of course, it’s a continuum, and there’ll be stories that are in the gray area and all that stuff that always happens when we talk about any phenomena other than math. But I like this idea. Yeah, so please continue. I’m just sorry. I’m not saying anything like critical, positive or negative. I’m just sort of amplifying it and tasting it and see. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, no, I think that’s good. I think that’s good. I like that. And then I know that you work with this word as well, mythos. Yes. And I saw you say in an interview, actually, that you prefer it to myth. Yes. Because of the connotations that come with myth. There’s so many people in the conversation who might be triggered. I experienced this in my science fiction community, that about 70% of that community, when I talk about myth, are very turned off from it. Because they have this whole baggage, a kind of modernist association of what a myth is. Yeah, it’s a fake story about the past. Right, of course. Which just explains some mechanical process, like why the sun rose, which is probably a completely artificial idea of myth, actually. Yes. But this term mythos, I think, is really powerful and useful. And even though it has ancient roots, I think the reason we need it is because of where we are now. Yes. And the scope of storytelling now. Because we might step back to the beginning of mythos, but if we think about where we are now with storytelling, from those cave paintings, where maybe people had two or three exposures to a story ever in their life, to the medieval cathedral experience, which actually we spoke about in our last meeting, where you might go on a Sunday, maybe once a month, perhaps, and see the stained glass windows and have that narrative experience. And now we’re immersed, for some people, maybe the majority of their day in narrative experiences, and movies, television. And these are the old forms now, going back to the novel and the mass media forms. And now we’re putting the mythos into massive virtual worlds that we’re inhabiting as well. And this means that the dynamics of the mythos, this shared mythic landscape that we’re in, have the potential to be more powerful than ever in our lives. And that there are emergent qualities in our mythic storytelling. We don’t know where the characters, the archetypal characters, like these pantheon of gods that we have from our ancient myths, and they’re the same wherever they crop up, or they’re very closely related. I’ve seen, like, Joske Bach describe that as, I think it might have been in a talk with you, as like the 12 optimal personality types that arise at a particular stage of civilization. And no one has written them. They’re not an authorial creation of any particular individual. They’re emerging from these shared stories, and the stories have a kind of evolutionary process which is unfolding over time. And that gives us these very archetypal characters, or they might be demonic characters as well. I guess thinking about the egregore discussions going on among some people at the moment as well. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of discussions with Jonathan Pagio, and I’ve done work with Dan Chiapi about collective intelligence, distributed cognition. So I just want to make sure I’m getting this. So we’ve got this idea of mythos, right, which has this more sort of sacred function. And then we have the idea of mass media mythos, which is wonderful alliteration, so that’s got at least that going for it, that can really tap into the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And it’s that collective we agents that is sort of writing these characters. I mean, obviously individual people are doing individual, but what you’re saying is there’s these archetypal things that emerge, and no one person is the author of those. It’s coming out of the geist, the spirit of the collective culture as it’s being educated by the mass mythos. Am I understanding it correctly? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. With this kind of vast sea of mythos that we’re immersed in now, the potential for emergence from it is kind of unparalleled. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. Yes, yes. I recently did a video essay on Interstellar, the science fiction movie with Matthew McConaghy, where he looks amazing through the whole film. And I didn’t realize it until I went to really look at that film to talk about it about two years ago, that there’s like a very clear Christian symbolism throughout the story. So for the video, it’s really profane. Actually, I’m not sure I should have done it, but I called it Interstellar Space Jesus. That’s Matthew McConaghy’s character there. And for that, I was reading back into some of Carl Jung’s idea about where the Christ archetype had come from. And this is one of potentially one of these emergent characters from our mythos. Oh, you know what? I mean, that addresses a criticism I have of that movie. So I was disappointed in that movie when I saw it the first time. Because when I was watching the movie the first time, I thought, oh, this is interesting. It was the opposite of 2001, that sort of space theology. It was the opposite. It’s like, no, no, human beings are not meant for the cosmic dimension. It’s too vast. It’s too overwhelming. Like when they’re on the planet near the black hole, and I’m going, oh, wow, like this is saying that human beings, I think of Moby Dick by Melville when the pastor before they go to sea says, what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God? And I was like, oh, wow, this is a great theme to explore. And it’s kind of the antithesis of 2001. But then it turns around and then the human beings become gods. And it was like, ah. But you’re right. If you put the Christ mythos as the incarnation that bridges between the finite and the transcendent, then that’s actually the response to the fact that human beings on their own are incapable of this cosmic dimension. But if they have the Christ figure, which is, of course, is the classic Christian claim that God is inaccessible, I hadn’t put that except through Christ. I hadn’t put that in. But now that you say it, it just drops like a penny into place. That’s brilliant. Because I liked it the second time I watched it, because I went in with a different framing. Because at first I thought, oh, no, what they’re doing is they’re really getting human humility. And then they’re falling prey to hubris. But if you put it into the Christ mythos, then that changes it totally. It’s not hubris. It’s incarnation. So thank you for that. That’s very good. I think that really responds to a criticism I’ve had of that movie for quite some time. Well, there’s two things in there. One is that at that moment, Matthew McConaughey is in the Tesseract. Yeah. And he’s speaking back to his earlier self. So that is your Holy Trinity. Yes. The Holy Ghost communicating between them and the sun. And that’s like super clear. But then it’s Jonathan Nolan, who tends to add these things into the Nolan brothers movies. And I don’t want to insult him. I doubt he’d hear this anyway. But I have the feeling that there’s no real deep intended meaning. It’s just a way of writing. But yes, we’ll do this with some Christian symbols. Yes. So then the meanings of them become quite mixed up because for them, it’s just a way to compose a story. This happens a lot in Hollywood. Yeah. I mean, it happens in ET, right? Why do you mean it’s about Jesus? Yeah, it’s clearly about Jesus. Right. And it’s obviously in the first Matrix movie and in the third one. No, but I get what you’re saying. I mean, in a Jungian sense, it’s actually being driven in a very unconscious way. Here’s a mythic, in the mythic sense, problem. Humans are so finite and small and the reality is so vast and overwhelming. And then the mythic response is, well, you need the incarnation figure, right? The figure that bridges the two. But that’s happening like largely, perhaps unconsciously. And all that’s coming up here, I think you’re saying is, no, no, this is just writing and I just do this writing and I throw this similar, right? But they’re not right, right. And then there’s a degree to which that’s kind of inevitable because people are always going to be overtaken by unconscious, especially more archetypal things. But there’s a degree to which that’s unfortunate because somebody who is more aware of it could bring nuance and exploration into it. I mean, that’s Jung’s point about how the ego is supposed to relate to the self. The ego is supposed to bring consciousness to the unconscious processes. So I don’t want to fault people because they’re being driven by unconscious archetypal things using Jungian language. But I also want to say, but oh, what a lost opportunity because if consciousness could be brought to that, then you could explore it, you could play with it, you could open things up in an interesting way. So I distracted you, but these distractions seem to these digressions seem to be very fruitful. So we’re talking about your essay, so keep going. Yeah. Well, the unconscious of it is very central because it’s an audience thing. As well, like I would guess that less than 10% of the audience of Interstellar think about what its symbolic meaning is at all. And in fact, there’s a much bigger focus on its literal meaning. It’s quite a lot to present physics to the audience. And this is a realistic depiction of interstellar travel, although interstellar travel is probably impossible, but this is some kind of semi realistic depiction of it. Because in our relationship with the mythos, I don’t know if it’s for evolutionary reasons, or whatever the ultimate cause is, but it’s very difficult for us to be conscious of the mythos that we’re immersed in, especially when it crosses over from storytelling into how it’s affecting our lives, and then the stories that we’re all living in as well. But this would have it fall into a lot of implicit learning. And there’s lots of evidence about how human beings can implicitly pick up on very complex patterns without being deliberately aware of them. This is how we acquire most of our intuitions. So what I now hear you saying is, you know, this is a lot of this. It’s not just going into empty head though. You’re not saying that it’s going into the unconscious. There’s implicit learning going on. People are developing intuitions. They know not where and how, which is of course a hallmark of intuition. But here’s my concern then. The very thing that makes intuition powerful makes it perilous, because intuition, the implicit learning picks up on real patterns, but it also picks up on all kinds of illusionary correlational patterns. And so this is what I mean. I get it. You can’t replace the implicit with the explicit, but you can pay attention to the explicit framing of the context in which you’re learning the implicit intuition. And you can structure it so that that intuition formation process is more likely to find real patterns as opposed to illusory patterns. And so I get what you’re saying. And so I’m not naysaying it, but I’m replying to it and saying, yes, you can’t. Most of this has to happen implicitly. I get that. But there’s a sapiential dimension of which, yeah, but you can pay attention to, well, you do it. I mean, that’s what you’re doing in your science fiction course. You’re trying to set explicit context around it so that people are relating to the material in a more perspicacious manner. Is that not a fair thing to say? Yeah, maybe actually that interstellar example is a good example. So I have a big science fiction community on Facebook. There’s 26,000 members in the community. And we talk, we argue a lot. Science fiction people like to argue. And the split of the course of the composition of that community is about 70-30, with the 70 being people who are absolutely passionate about the idea of interstellar travel and watching stories about interstellar travel, watching the realization of this idea. So that could be Star Trek, that could be interstellar. You had 150 year history of the representation of this. And then about 30% who are more the kind of Stanley Kubrick 2001 psychedelic experiments. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m more in this community. But for that 70%, so there’s a really good, I was involved in an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, who’s a very famous science fiction author on Clubhouse. And he said in this interview, and we talked for a long time about this, that he believed interstellar travel to be a religious fantasy. Yes. There were two parts to that. It’s a fantasy because it’s an impossibility. There’s lots of levels to that, you know, on Einsteinian relativity and the impossibility of reaching anything like light speed. And then it’s just disastrous. Exactly. Near the speed of light, you hit even like an atom. But then the technologies that could take you past that, like warp drives, hyperdrives, they break reality. Yes. If you have a hyperdrive, like you’re not going to be going to planets. They tell you that your ontology is a leveled ontology. It’s like smuggling in a new platonic framework. You know, hyperspace, above space, and all this warp. Reality is not a flat ontology, it’s a leveled ontology. So it’s interesting because I think that, I’ve been arguing recently, I think that’s fundamentally correct. But you’re representing it through something that’s actually like, you know, literally impossible. But nevertheless, I think you’re pointing to a deep ontological truth with that, which of course is how religion typically works. It tries to get you into a different way of sensing your ontology. I hope that’s resonating with what you’re saying. Yeah, well then that puts it perfectly because there’s, we have this particular ontology that makes interstellar travel look possible to us. And the stories support that. That’s the religious part of their use. They fulfill that aspect for us. And the reason, I mean, it’s a fascinating argument itself, but the reason why I make it is that if I talk about this with that part of my community, who I love and respect, then they won’t hear it. And the response is- Really? But don’t they want to know why they love it so much? Or they don’t want to question why they love it so much? I don’t think we do when it is our mythos. Oh, oh, this is an interesting proposal. Yeah. Okay, when it is the story that we have internalized as representative of reality, and is answering deep, deep questions for us. So we want it transparent. We don’t want to step back and look at it and become aware because we might- Yes. But how does that work then for where you get a reflective, so I’m thinking of neoplatonism where you have tremendous mythos and ritual, but it’s interwoven with this profound reflective project where you’re constantly taking off your glasses and looking at the framing and then seeing if you can improve it. So like, how do you see what I’m saying? Yeah. There’s a tension here. There seems to be clear instances where people, I mean, think of the whole theological tradition in Christianity. People are trying to do this, right? But they’re doing it. But there’s something also what you’re saying. They’re doing it. They’re taking off their glasses, but only always with the intent of putting them back on and seeing better through them. They’re never taking them off with the intent of rejecting them or letting them go. Because I’m trying to get with what- Do you see the point I’m trying to make that? But we do have traditions where people want to deeply reflect on why they love their mythos, why they find it so true, good and beautiful. Well, I think when mythos is at its most power, powerful, it’s inconceivable to us that it isn’t simply real. But again, I’m going to keep pushing back on you because this is really- Yeah. I mean, you have even in early, I mean, like fourth century on, you’ve got the introduction of, you don’t read the Bible just literally, you read it also morally, you read it allegorically, and finally, you read it spiritually. And those other readings are much more important than the literal reading. See? And so even that is from the very beginning. So go ahead. But which part of the Bible is actually the mythos? Is it the- You can read Genesis and Adam and Eve allegorically, but what about your conception of how long history is? Or what is beyond or what the heavens are? Right. Right. Right. These are things that once you have to have a concept of them to operate, but once it’s set, it’s very difficult for you to question it. Okay. So now I’m hearing you. So when the mythos is at its most powerful, it is the fundamental affordance of how we participate in our most basic presuppositions. Is it something like that? Oh, I see. So the fundamental presupposition that there’s a God, that he created the world, that he incarnated in Jesus, that is not called into question. You can call a lot of other stuff that’s downstream from that into reflection to enrich it, but the most fundamental aspect, that’s good. So when those things get challenged in the scientific revolution first with Copernicus and then with Darwin, that’s a different thing. Then the mythos reels in a very powerful way. Yeah. Okay. I get it. I get it. I get what you’re saying now. Okay. Good. That’s why it’s violent as well because it’s- I’m interested in these conversations with people who are very anti-religion and have nothing good to say about religion. Which is a religious stance, by the way, because they usually have very- they have these very comprehensive, often not evidence-based or rationally-based assessments of religion. Like I’ll say, did you do science to come up with that statement about religion? No. Well, then aren’t you just like- so I see- there’s some degree exemplifying what you’re talking about because the lack of self-reflective criticism is just as apparent in them as in the people they’re often criticizing. So please go ahead. Yeah. And they’re looking at the end of this mythic stage. Let’s say it’s kind of 1500 years of the Christian mythos in the Western world. And for a lot of that stage, it’s much better than what has come before. It has kind of tamed the heroic kings of history. It’s building nations. But at the end of that period, when it’s- the mythos is challenged by a new emergent, the mythos of science essentially, that becomes extremely violent because a huge number of people are challenged in their basic presuppositions of what existence is, which they’ve received from this kind of sea of mythos that we’re all swimming in. But hasn’t the advent and recession of modernity, as you know, the Enlightenment project, also disclosed that people can’t really be a mythic, that that is not something that they can actually live or think. So there’s been also that, I think, has been seriously disclosed. At least, I mean, that helps explain why the hunger for things like science fiction. Well, that’s what I think we’re doing in science fiction. So the history of science fiction is like about 300 years. Yeah. Some people trace it all the way back to like Gilgamesh. And my answer to that is that all science fiction is myth, but not all myth is science fiction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a point where we’re composing new myths for the age of science. Yes. And we have these massive factual revelations about the nature of our universe, but then we have to put them back into the stories, which allow us to actually conceive of what this means. Yes, yep, yep. You have like two major threads. You have the conception of what space is. So you have like Voltaire’s micro-megas, which is the journey of a giant being across the galaxy at the time. And it’s one of the first presentations of gravity in a work of fiction. And what would that mean if everything is being governed by gravitational forces? And that basically takes you through to Star Trek. Like Star Trek is an endpoint of that presentation of what space is for people so we can conceptualize it. And the other major thread is what is a human? Yes. And that starts with Mary Shelley. Yeah, yeah. And Frankenstein. Yeah. A human is something you can take apart and put back together like a machine. Yeah. And that runs you through like the Terminator and Matrix and all kinds. We are in some way machines in our body and then our consciousness is machine-like as well. And I think these are all very internalized ideas now via science fiction for people. So let’s put that together then. I think that’s brilliant. I think those two mean because that’s the worldview attunement thing. Like what’s your account of the world and what’s your account of how human beings can know the world and fit into it? So that makes perfect sense. Like what’s your account of the agent? What’s your account of the arena? And how do the two fit together? Right? So to create the deepest kinds of affordances. And we’re doing it at the level that the deepest level, the level that has to remain transparent because it’s our most fundamental framing. I think this is all. Well, it’s converging with a lot of stuff I’ve been talking about. But then you’ve got, like you said, the idea of interstellar travel is religious phenomena because it opens up the idea that our ontology is layered in ways that we don’t normally think about. And of course Einstein and the quantum opened us up to that. They open that doorway anyways, but the science fiction does, fits us into it. We can journey through that that extended ontology. So, I mean, you’ve got this exploration and then you’ve got this mythologization in order to refit those two, the agent and the arena back together again. And that actually fits very well with our discussion of interstellar because first you get, well, human beings don’t belong in this arena, but then you get the mythological response, but this is how human beings can fit into that arena. And it’s an ancient answer, but of course people still gobble it up because it taps deeply into sort of the grammar of our cognition. I think we’ve now got the framing. So Star Trek proper now, Star Trek proper. All of this. So what is it about? I mean, so this is how science fiction in general is doing what we’re talking about. What’s the specificity in Star Trek that you think is particularly salient and worthy of discussion? I think there were two and then maybe the third, which is the Starship Captains. I think the Starship Captains is the most tenuous of the three points. So, okay. Oh, that’s the reverse order of how you presented things to me, but that’s okay. Go ahead. I think the first is that we have this, well, it’s the good way into it. So we have this kind of civilizational point where we have lots of traditional mythic civilizations on the planet, let’s say a few thousand years ago. And when they encounter each other, they fight each other to the death because they have a different language. They don’t even see each other as human fundamentally. But the only people who start to see outside this are merchants. Yes. People who are moving. The Silk Road. The Silk Road, yes. And they’re like, oh, all these guys have the same gods. And these guys have this head thing and these guys have this. And that’s the beginning of trying to bridge that gap. But we can’t do that. We’re just now pretty much a global civilization heading towards that. And we have no external examples to encounter. So one of the things Star Trek does for us is it gives us a civilizational example. Science fiction has been doing this, but Star Trek does it on a much more coherent level. So you have a kind of run of development into Star Trek, which I would argue really begins with Isaac Asimov and his foundation novels. Asimov is hired by John W. Campbell. And at the time, American science fiction is very pulpy. Campbell wants to make it more serious. And Asimov has been reading before he goes and pitches the idea for foundation. He’s been reading Edward Gibbon. Ah, fall of the Roman Empire, right? Fall of the Roman Empire, which sets a lot of our kind of liberal ideas about civilizational development. He’s a hallmark figure of the Enlightenment. Yes, yes. Yeah. So what Asimov does in foundation as he writes it, there’s three initial novels over four or five years, and then he revisits it later. He basically recasts this on a galactic scale. So this gives you the idea that the galaxy is a backdrop for geopolitics, basically, and for civilizational development. So the foundation is kind of roughly the American colonies, escaping the decaying empire of Europe, Britain. Yeah. And then the struggles of the foundation against less developed civilizations and then later encounters more developed civilizations, yes. Which is a really important idea for us because here we are on the planet with a kind of spectrum of civilizational development all in play, assuming you accept those liberal assumptions about development, which I tend to. Asimov is very popular in science fiction, but that idea influences June Frank Herbert, who takes kind of keeps the world medieval, influences Star Wars as well, but Star Wars never really takes the political ideas seriously. But Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek is very influenced by Asimov, and he builds out this model, really. So the federation is the foundation, but with a slightly different emphasis. But it is the USS Enterprise, just so we know what’s going on, right? Yeah. And it is encountering, in every episode you encounter a different political or social scenario that the crew of the Star Trek deal with by using science, essentially. And over, I can’t remember how many episodes, is someone in our community told me actually how many episodes of Star Trek there have been so far across all the seasons. Across all the series? 700. Oh wow. I think maybe 700, 700 hours, which many people have watched entirely. At one point, because of Star Trek, William Shatner was being played somewhere in the world permanently. There was never a moment where he would love to know that given his personality. I’m sure he knew that. But it has the scope to influence us, and it’s fulfilling this role. It’s not so much the individual scenarios, as in, I think it’s raising our consciousness up into the realm of considering our civilizational development. Yes. Which isn’t necessarily something we have done as a civilization ever in a meaningful way, up until very recently. So you see it doing this in a positive fashion. I mean, there’s one way in which our civilizational development is being called into question, the postmodernism and the attempt to deconstruct the Enlightenment framing. But you see this as questioning that’s not ultimately rejection, but in some sense, an attempt to educate, develop this in some positive manner. Am I getting that correct? Yeah, but it’s doing it through the mythos. Of course. It’s not doing it identically. I get that. It’s doing it through participation in mythos. And so I find this interesting, because I hadn’t thought about this. There’s a way in which it’s kind of like they’re finding the Silk Road in space. That’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re finding the Silk Road in space, and that’s in their mandate and all that sort of stuff. Seek out new civilizations and all that sort of thing. That’s very cool. So you’ve got a mythos there. What about Discovery? I couldn’t even watch Discovery. I watched one season and I stopped, because it seemed to be undermining the mythos. I would ask people why they watched it, and they would say, it’s so dark. And I’d say, so what? Everything’s dark. That’s not a great aesthetic move anymore. You have to have dark for a reason. It’s just dark to be dark. But I’m prejudiced. I only watched the one season. I didn’t like the taste of it, to tell you. Discovery is a postmodern re-write of Star Trek. Yes, exactly. Star Trek is essentially a modernist mythos. And Discovery, it’s a very aggressive re-write as well. It’s as though you went back a few thousand years and took the Bible and rewrote it and took all of the supernatural stuff out of it. And they said, here, have your Bible back. Well, that’s what Nietzsche tried to do with also Sproxer and Thustra. That was his explicit… He wanted a book to replace the Bible. He wanted to somehow do the mythos without all of the mythology, if I could put it that way. So I like this proposal. That’s the first. So you have two more points. Yeah, well, what they’re doing with Discovery there is really a mistake. It’s a mistake for Star Trek as a commercial franchise. Yeah. It also misses… So the second thing with Star Trek… So we have a situation from my perspective, and you brought the postmodernism in, which is really good, where we have a situation where we have the modern kind of dominating the world, capitalist democracy, nation states, large armed forces, enlightenment dream, but still a very influential rump of the pre-modern as well in our religious structures. It’s kind of arguable in a country like America or in decay. Canada, to what extent people can really embody those pre-modern values in the way you might be able to in some of the still more traditional societies, but it’s very there and very strong. And then we have this emergent postmodern as well. And I think about these as, from a story perspective, as kind of narrative embedded, the pre-modern people who are embedded in a narrative, and that defines their mythic structure of reality. And then the modern is the narrative blind because it’s trying to structure reality in a way that says, well, we no longer need a mythic reality, but that means it’s very bad at processing the mythic. It’s very literal. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes. It gets into a contradiction. Yeah, of course. And then the postmodern, which is the narrative engineers. They’re people who have developed an understanding of the narrative structures and start working with them. And they reject the leotard, right? They explicitly reject the proposal of a meta-narrative or a grand narrative, right? Which is part of what is really interesting because then they verge on a performative contradiction the other way. They’re trying to free themselves of narrative and the meta-narrative, and yet they keep bumping into the fact that they seem to be standing in the very place they are denying exists, right? Because they want to propose justice and liberation. But where’s that coming from? And so what do you… Go ahead, go ahead. Well, I think really the postmodern isn’t really rooted in those postmodern academics. Now it’s a kind of constantly mutating online force. The postmodern really emerges in the online world. And that’s where it really has its influence. Now with people kind of roughly my age and younger. So I was at the the tip of this, I think. Like I was exposed to a lot of postmodern ideology when I went to university. So I went to university to study media and found that I was reading all of these postmodern philosophers. But that was probably just at the beginning of that tip. But now these ideas are kind of emergent online. And people who are exposed to them a lot are just very good with narrative. And they’re very good at picking up narratives and running with them and using them to get what they want, basically. So I mean, has it become… I don’t know. I’m getting a tone here, but maybe it’s incorrect. It’s almost sound in Machiavellian though, that they’re knowing how to the way Machiavelli knows how to manipulate the narrative of politics. And he recommends the prince stand there and do that. And it’s unclear if it’s a satire or if it’s an actual promotion of a particular stance. But to what end are they doing the engineering? Are they like the sophists of ancient Greece who have to pick up on the engineering of salience as something that can be independently manipulated from the truth? And then they just run it for their own… To what end? What is the end? Well, the explicit end is social justice. Of course, that’s the term at the heart of it. Because social injustice is always a construct of identity, which is a construct of narrative and the mythos. But the normative standard to which they’re holding themselves is not such a construct, presumably, because how could they advocate for orienting towards it as something independently capable of guiding our social construction? I mean, that’s what I mean. If they get into it, there’s a weird place. I think you and I, let’s say, I assume we would agree that trying to get people to adopt justice is to trying to get them to become temporally extended moral agents. And all the research shows the way you do that is through narrative. And so they’re actually binding themselves to some underlying realities, it sounds like to me. Yeah, there’s massive contradictions. But the explicit reason people pick up these tools of narrative is initially from an individual drive to escape your own identity. Especially if that identity is perceived as being like disadvantageous for you, if it is an identity. So that’s a religious function. I mean, a new one. Yes, yes. But identity transformation through narrative participation, that’s a hallmark of Buddhism or Christianity, right? Like, oh, participate in this, and we promise you a different and better identity. So it’s, I mean, it’s still serving a profound, it goes towards your point of there’s this ultimate mythos level that’s transparent, that is serving a religious function in this way. We do this, participate in this, and you will go through the narrative of significant identity change. Yeah. And I guess you could point to like, if the modern stage has interstellar travel, as it’s kind of mythic heaven, the postmodern stage has a better society. So that could be left hand of darkness or something like by Le Guin. Yeah. Like if you look amongst, far outside the science fiction community, but Ursula Le Guin is a sainted figure. Yes. Now for like people under 30 who are progressive Americans, because all of those novels are deeply embedded. Samuel Delaney, similar figure, J.G. Ballard would be, but all of these new wave writers, Rogers Lasny as well, probably. Yeah. Well, Rogers Lasny played with identity a lot in Lord of Light in really powerful and interesting ways, you know, because he had people’s Ottmans, you know, somebody who was biologically originally a woman, she transfers into a male physique and all, like, so he was playing with that stuff a long time ago too. Yeah. Yeah. So we have three mythic stages in the kind of the evolving sea of mythos, all unable to see beyond our own stage and kind of in a culture war. This for me is what the culture war is, is all of these three primary mythic narratives that we have in operation at the same time. And what Star Trek does that I don’t think any other mythic narrative of any scope does, is it bridges all three. Wow. That’s a powerful point. That’s a good argument. So I want to propose something to you. We’re at sort of our limit, but let’s set up time soon. Because now I think we’ve got to the proper statement and explication of this, right? And then you built a very powerful defense. And I hope I helped unpack things along the way. And then we could come back and pick up how does Star Trek do that bridging? Those three. Yeah, that’d be a great place to pick it up. So we could have a part one and part two around this. Cool. So, Damien, this has been fantastic. I hope that you’re, I mean, you’re touching the boy in me. You’re doing it properly and well. Sorry, that sounded like a horrible sentence. But so I get overly enthusiastic and I might have interjected a little too much, but I hope, I hope. No, no, it’s cool. I thought that was good. Okay, great. So you’re definitely going to come back. So reach out to Madeline and we will set something up right away. And thank you so much for this. I’m looking forward to part two. Okay, cool.