https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KOh0uDjSZ2E
So welcome everyone to another episode of Voices with Viveki. I’m very pleased to have as my guest Jules Evans. He’s a writer, a public intellectual, a teacher. I first met Jules in a really book, a really extraordinary book, and I highly recommend this book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, Ancient Philosophy for Modern Problems. For those of you who are in connection with some of the other work I’ve done, going through the Wisdom of Hypatia or reading Pierre Hadeau, this is an excellent book to add to the mix, excellent book to add to the mix. And it’s much more comprehensive in the various philosophies that are reviewed in the book. And Jules does more than review them. He shows you how there was an art associated with each philosophical way of life and how that might translate into practices, etc. And then Jules and I were both on a Rebel Wisdom documentary together about sort of the effect of COVID might be having on sort of the public psyche. And Jules and I both made predictions about how it was going to have sort of existential and mental health effects that weren’t properly being adequately discussed. Jules coined, I think, a wonderful term which I’ve been using since, conspirituality, to talk about this weird emergence of this weird integration of conspiracy theory and spirituality. And so I thank him just for that term. That’s a very useful term to have in our conceptual vocabulary. And then Jules had, I had the pleasure of interacting with Jules on Rebel Wisdom. He was running, I hope he does it again in the future. He was doing their Book of the Month Club and I was on talking about one of the books that had influenced me, Pierre Hedeau’s Ancient Philosophy, and I found it my great pleasure that Jules was also deeply influenced by that book and we really clicked. And so I wanted to invite Jules, I invited him at that time on here, because I wanted to talk to him about, you know, the connections between philosophy in sort of modern academic sense, philosophy as a way of life and spirituality, meaning making, the cultivation of wisdom, self-transcendence. So first of all, Jules, welcome. I’m very, very glad you’re here. Thanks for having me, John. I should say I’d love to take credit for that term, conspirituality. It was in a little red paper of 10 years ago. I resurrected it at the moment when conspirituality went massive in the last 12 months. So it was by two anthropologists, Charlotte Ward and David Vowas. They have the credit. Well, it’s decent of you to give them due credit, but nevertheless, you are due credit for bringing it into prominence at a very appropriate time. Yes, alas, you know, because of this just, this booming conspiracy thinking that’s happened in spiritual circles. Yeah. So Jules, I wanted to start by, and I’m hoping this will just, you know, evolve into what I call theologos, but you make it, you start the book, of course, with the figure of Socrates and you introduce this distinction, which I really liked and that you made a distinction between street philosophy, what Socrates is doing in the ancient agora, and academic philosophy, which is, by and large, I think what most people’s idea of philosophy, if they even have a conception of philosophy, but the conception they have of philosophy these days is something that is done academically. It’s a very technical kind of enterprise. It’s almost incestuous. The philosophers largely talk to themselves. And both you and I have degrees in academic philosophy. And so, you, but you weren’t trying to denigrate academic philosophy with the distinction. You made a very clear point that they have kind of a symbiotic relationship, namely that, and I liked your turn of phrase, you said that academic philosophy keeps street philosophy coherent and street philosophy keeps academic philosophy relevant. I wonder if you, I mean, you wrote that nine years ago, so I’m sure that your thinking has moved beyond there, but maybe starting from there, what would you like to say? What would you like to bring up? Well, yes, so I guess the idea of street philosophy was in that book, I found people from many different walks of life who used philosophy, who tried to follow ancient philosophies, like an ex-mafioso who came across Plutarch in a prison and he got inspired by this idea of imitating moral lives, or a cop in Chicago with an anger problem who read Seneca and it helped him to learn how to manage his temper. And I was really impressed by these people who were really trying these ideas and really seeing if they worked in very difficult situations and other ones like a major who taught a kind of Socrates cafe in Baghdad during the Iraq War. So they were really testing out these ideas in the crucible of human experience, of sometimes extreme experience, that’s why it’s called philosophy for life and other dangerous situations. So that’s the kind of street philosophy thing, they’re really trying to be true to it, see if these ideas work as a way of life. And we both love that Pierre Hadot, this French academic, and one of his books is called Philosophy as a Way of Life and he reminded us that these ancient philosophies like Stoicism were not just theories, as Epictetus said, you may be fluent in the lecture room, but go out into the street and you’re hopelessly shipwrecked. So in street philosophy, the true test is how do you cope with when you get hit by adversity, or by good fortune, by success, so this is the test of street philosophy. So that’s very important to me and I was very impressed by the people I interviewed in my book, but at the same time, without some kind of critical rigor and attempt to kind of try and work out, you don’t necessarily have to be 100% loyal to what the ancient Greek Stoics were teaching, or like the Roman Stoics, but it’s helpful if you try to get where they’re coming from, and try to understand what they mean, then you can totally riff off it and you know, but there’s something to be said for kind of that careful reading, you know, historical reading and so on, and that’s what academia broadly, you know, broadly described can give us, that kind of critical thinking, careful reading, a historical view, so it’s, you know, it’s trying to balance that, I think in a lot of my work I’m trying to, you know, in the next book I wrote, I was looking at ecstatic experiences, how to both surrender to them, but also retain one’s critical thinking, which is quite a complex manoeuvre, how to balance the Socratic and the Dionysiac, so maybe a bit like you, you know, I describe myself as semi-academic, so you know, I appreciate what academia does, I appreciate, you know, that academics aren’t always just hustling for likes, they’re not hype, you know, a good academic isn’t trying to hype their research, it’s like they’re doing careful archival work, textual criticism, however, and an academic would probably say, I’m not trying to be a good person, I’m not trying to teach my students how to be good people, I’m just trying to teach them how to understand a theory, and that’s really important, but you can see how that can miss out something as well, which is, you know, the practical, and what I see, what I saw in the university where I worked for eight years, was a huge demand among students for meaning, for practical advice, for ways to understand their minds, change their emotions, and to me, like, to talk about ancient philosophy without telling people about its practical use is like, you know, pouring over the manual for a Ferrari and never taking it for a drive, right, right, right, I bet you’re, you know, you probably, there’s some similarities between your kind of experience, very much, and so, and let’s get into that, eventually, but, and maybe helping us move towards that is one of the things that comes to my mind that I’ve been trying to work out bridging between, you know, the academic world of theory and the street world of practice, if you’ll just allow me those broad categories, is getting clear about what this space is, so let me phrase it as a question for you, and I want to hear what you say first, and then because it sounds like you and I, and I’m happy that you’re including me, I do, I agree, we’re trying to find the space between theory and therapy, I mean, and to be fair, like, you talk about the connections between things like stoicism and therapy, CBP, there’s close connections, there’s close similarities, and, you know, and some of the thing that, you know, when I’m interacting with other people that are involved in these emerging communities of authentic discourse and relating, they try to say, well, we’re not doing theory, we’re not doing therapy, it’s like, you’re right, and so, what is that space, like, I think we don’t properly have a reference term for it, but nevertheless, maybe we could try and get a little bit, maybe we could elucidate it and clarify it, like, by contrasting it. What’s the space between theory and therapy? Well, I mean, I definitely had many colleagues who were interested in the space between subjective first-person forms of writing and objective academic third-person forms of writing. I worked at a place called the Center for the History of the Emotions, so, for example, there was a colleague there, Barbara Walters, and she was a historian of psychiatry and of, you know, psychiatric facilities, asylums, but she also wrote about her own experience about being sectioned, and so she would combine these two voices. So, that kind of blend, you know, is, you come across it in academia, where I think, you know, I sometimes felt a little bit out on a limb within my department, was I wasn’t interested not only in the kind of first-person voice, but also, I suppose, in, like, what helps people, that kind of transformative type of space. So, yes, therapy, but also, like, in the broader, an ancient sense of, like, care of the soul. Yes. So, I found sometimes my academic colleagues, you said we all study different emotions, the history of different emotions, 90% of it, of the work in the center was on negative emotions. Right, right. Game, fear, crying, you know, that kind of thing, and I would occasionally work on things like flourishing and well-being, or even ecstatic experience, and there was a discomfort with that in academia. But, I mean, let me, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you people I admire in that space, because, for example, I admire, like, the work of Jeffrey Kreipel. He’s a historian of, do you know his stuff? No, I’ve heard the name, though. Right. So, he’s a historian of religious studies at Rice University, and he does really good historical analysis of spirituality of the history of spirituality, and he also brings in his own experience. He had the courage to write about a kind of erotic encounter he had with the goddess Kali in Bombay. Right. You know, he also, you know, is not afraid of the marginal. He did a book with Whitley Strieber on UFOs, and he both teaches at Rice University, and he’s the director of research at Esalen, and so, as he describes it, he’s in that liminal space between academia and something else. What, I mean, maybe it’s kind of, you know, the whole personal transformation space, New Age spirituality space, human potential space. Esalen itself was a bit like that. Esalen, the kind of, what, it’s hard even to know what to call it. It was somewhere between a college and an ashram, maybe, but it wasn’t an ashram in that there was never any one guru, and that was quite important. So, it had this slogan, no one captures the flag. Right. You had different speakers and teachers coming there, often from academia, Joseph Campbell or Abraham Maslow, and they’d run courses and seminars, but you also had, you know, full-on stuff going on there. You had, you know, the hot tubs, you had naked massages, you had people tripping, all this. So, you know, it wasn’t just an academic seminar, though you’d have that kind of, that level of, hopefully, that level of intellectual sophistication, but it was open to not just the intellectual level, but other levels of knowing. It was inspired by Aldous Huxley, and he talked about integrated education, the intellectual, but also what he called the non-verbal humanities, the somatic, the ecstatic, the ecological. So, there, I mean, that’s some thoughts, yeah. So, let me see if I can respond on that. Something I’m getting from it, maybe, let me know if it’s representing at least a dimension of what you’re saying. It sounds like, you know, the space that we’re talking about is a space that has pursued intellectual rigor, like academic philosophy, but is also pursuing a kind of personal transformation, like what you have in therapy, but, like, where, but the academic philosophy leaves out the therapeutic sort of transformation, the therapeutic transformation often leaves out the intellectual training, and so we’re trying to find a space that says, no, there’s a space of practices in which those are actually integrated together, rather than being sort of secluded from each other. Does that land for you? Does that sound good? Yes, that does, though, I think another thing as well is, like, I wrote one book, Philosophy for Life, which was about, you know, the dialogue between ancient philosophies and modern therapies, and how these can help people today. So, it looked at kind of CBT, overcoming things like anxiety and so on, and also looked at like flourishing and positive psychology. That fitted relatively well into contemporary academia, more or less, though certainly I remember doing a talk at Durham University, and while I was waiting to give my talk, I saw an academic pick up the book, look at it, and he tossed it down and said, well, this is just self-help. So, you know, because it wasn’t afraid to kind of give people practical advice and tell people stories. But there’s another twist as well, is that I think maybe we’re also both interested in things like altered states of consciousness, things like virtuality, things like questions of the soul, ultimate questions like, is there a god, if so, how do we connect with it? Now, on that, then my academic colleagues were often like, has Jules gone off the reservation? Because it’s one thing to challenge the kind of the wall between the theoretical and the practical, but it’s another thing to start to challenge the materialist paradigm, which is the presumed background for modern academia. So, that’s excellent, but I think that brings in a third potential contrast, and the contrast between, we might call it the spiritual dimension between what we’re talking about and perhaps established religion. Again, there’s similarities and differences, and maybe we can bring that in. And I’m totally in agreement with what you’re talking about. Fortunately, because I’m in cognitive science, and the cognitive science was deeply influenced by Evan Thompson, and what that means is people are much, I mean, physicalism is still the dominant paradigm. I think outside of the cognitive science, which is looking very closely at the mind-body relationship, most people are still sort of physical reductionists, most neuroscientists are, for example. But within cognitive science, especially within 4-E cognitive science, non-reductive ontologies are becoming much more prevalent, and I think for a very good reason. I don’t think that’s just happenstance or a fad or something. I think there’s good arguments and good evidence that’s been building over the last three decades for that, largely the inadequacy of a sort of purely formal systems computational theory of cognition, etc. So I have a little bit more of a welcoming home than you might have perhaps had. And also what’s been happening in conjunction with that, not, again, not haphazardly, but I think for deeply plausible reasons, is the exploration of meaning, altered states of consciousness, mystical experiences, psychedelic experiences, and pretty explicitly so, transformative experience, spirituality, these are now all considered legitimate topics. So as theoretical topics, that’s a thing. More and more, we have see that we have researcher practitioners, people who, while studying mindfulness, also have been practicing it for a long time, or while studying altered states of consciousness, have been practicing it. People, of course, aren’t as, they’re very reticent about talking about whether or not they’ve been experiencing and experimenting with psychedelics, but nevertheless, there’s a general understanding that these people are not just talking about psychedelics in the brain, they’re also experiencing personal transformation via, and so there’s also been a growing acceptance that we have to do both an inside and an outside reflection on these phenomena, both the appreciation of the phenomena, and that we have to do both an inside and an outside reflection. Mm-hmm. So it’s, I firmly agree that you’re exactly painting the picture of the dominant view, but I also, I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’ve been a little bit more lucky in seeing that there’s a lot that’s pushing it back against that, and it’s not just, you know, new age spirituality, or like there’s a lot that you can properly call bona fide scientific work, and bona fide philosophical work that’s pushing it back against that in a major way, and the reason I bring that up, and then to turn things back over to you, is that I have a thesis that you’re familiar with, that I think that that rise within academia, the rise of work like what you’re doing, and I don’t mean to just make you a symptom of anything, but you know the revival of stoicism, you know, the attempt, and it’s going, I have a lot of criticisms of importing Buddhism and Taoism, right, all of this is, like I say, these are, you might call them positive symptoms of the meaning crisis, and there’s a lot of negative symptoms which were exacerbated by COVID, and I won’t go into those in great detail, but so, right, right, it, like, let me give you a historical analogy for my question, like many people have said, you know, you see things, you see people like Pythagoras and Socrates and Plato arising, because there was a vacuum sort of emerging in the established religion. The religion didn’t go away in ancient Athens, it was still there, but it was something, it wasn’t, it either stopped performing a function, or it was incapable of performing a new and emergent function that was needed, and then philosophy emerged to try and fill this gap, and so is there a sense, and I want to ask this question very respectfully of the established religions, and I do respect them, right, is there a sense in which though, because the demographics seem to indicate that people are finding them inadequate for these questions, right, these questions of deep understanding, deep transformation, deep connection, and then they’re turning to something else. Does that land with you, does that, does that, does that make sense, does that help to explain why we’re getting this, because like I said, I’m privileged, I’m seeing a bit more of a change than you are within academia. Well, yes, I think there’s a, you know, definitely you can see that religious affiliation in the United States, and I’m not sure, you tell me about the situation in Canada, plunged in the last 20 years, so it went down, also in Canada, the United States, oh okay, so in the US, you know, US was always like the weird exception compared to Europe, to the secularization thesis, because yes, the 60s kind of, you know, transformed it, but still religious affiliation stayed unusually high, whilst in Europe it went down after the 60s, below 50%, so you know, in the UK, the UK is an incredibly secular country, and comfortably so, really doesn’t give, it’s not spiritual, but not religious, it’s neither spiritual nor religious, like it’s, it’s like, it doesn’t even notice the absence of God anymore, as long as it’s got Strictly Come Dancing, the Great British Bake Off, and the bit of football on TV, no problem, right, but in the US, you know, 19, so, 2000, there was 70% of people religious affiliated, and it went down below 50% for the first time in American history last year, and the particular steep drop off among millennials, so you get this rise of the nuns, you know, as in not literally the nuns, but no religious affiliation, and because, as I said to a friend today, Americans are so religious, even when they’re post-religious, they’re very post-religious, you know, they’re still more religious than Europeans, so yes, you get this, a lot of interest in spirituality, or in kind of, the synthesis between psychology and spirituality and religion that you see in people like, say, Sam Harris, or Jordan Peterson, or in your own work, so I suppose, I mean, that’s one way of making sense of it, and of course, there are all kinds of other things going on at the same time, like the climate crisis, like the decline in living standards, like the stagnation of the economy, and of innovation, and also, and I think, you know, new technology as well, I think, is kind of feeding that appetite for autodidactisism, for people want to feed their heads, I mean, and so, you know, who’d have guessed that, you know, like a whole lecture series on meaning would hit such a chord, right, like, I mean, but the people sit through, you know, they’ve really got an appetite for content that demands something of them, and, you know, you look at the rise of conspiracy theory culture, and of course, it’s extremely negative for our societies, but the one kind of bit of light I see in it is, people are devoting hours to trying to educate themselves, and trying to do their research, and unfortunately, they’re going down the wrong rabbit holes, and, you know, they’re getting hooked into some, you know, simplistic maps, but, you know, what a desire for autodidactisism, if that could be directed in a healthier direction. Yeah, and perhaps also, if the autodidactisism, I mean, so there’s, I agree with you, that that is, like, that’s an important thing. As a cognitive psychologist, I’m worried about autodidactism, because of the way in which it, you know, this is the sort of, part of the antipathy that your colleague directed towards self-help is precisely the way in which it tends to often just reinforce self-deceptive bias, all right, and then social media can exacerbate that, and it can lead to spirituality, and so I’m interested in, I’m interested in, like you said, the clear hunger for self-transcendence and self-improvement, but I think the conspiracy reality also points to a hunger to connect to other people, and to some kind of community that can act, whether or not really, or only in an Earth-sat-faction, as some kind of, like what the ancient philosophical schools did, bringing some rigor and some challenge, some way, I mean, we basically get our ability to reflect on ourselves through other people, and so I see that hunger, and so I get what you said about the UK being, you know, sort of happily secular, but, you know, the UK also is suffering from, by its own reports, a loneliness epidemic, right? Yeah, no, it’s true, the UK’s got all kinds of problems, and it tries to deal with it by this kind of new religion of wellness. Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted you, yes, great. Let’s just, you know, we used to be, you speak, think about English people, you think about the stiff upper lip, yeah, like my god, Harry, now Prince Harry, god bless him, he’s doing a mental health show with Oprah, he’s doing a mental health podcast, he’s just announced a new memoir, like English people, all we do now is talk about our feelings, and like we can’t understand, the more we worship the cult of wellness, the more miserable we are, and we can’t figure it out. So that’s the issue again, it seems like, again, that we’re like trying to find this space between, no, this is therapy, this is theory, this is religion, I mean, I think just what’s seeming to sort of emerge for me in this conversation is, it’s both a needed space, but it’s a space that’s hard to get, hard to make sale in, hard to get people to look at that space without them being very easily distracted into these more culturally recognized and established spaces. What do you think about that as a proposal? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it’s, I don’t know, I don’t feel it’s necessarily as culturally confident a moment as say, the Greek renaissance, you know, the Greek enlightenment, which was these strong new ideas, and I feel our time is a bit more like, you know, the late antiquity, where you have all kinds of ideas and cults swilling around, you know, syncretistic, and stoicism was very popular, then you had like neoplatonic magic, you had new cults coming in from the east and Egypt, you had pharaohs trying to live forever, you know, like, so I suppose I mean, I sometimes, I don’t know, maybe I’m more pessimistic than you, John, like, I worry about our era, and I, spirituality is my culture, but I’m, I worry about spirituality at the moment, you know, like, the lack of integrity sometimes, the hucksterism, and the kind of hucksterism gets so kind of turbocharged by the internet, you know, and so, you know, so trying to balance kind of critical thinking with hopefulness, and with self experimentation, what I think we’ve seen in the last 12 months is a real rise of critical thinking and spirituality, but that can end up in the hermeneutics of suspicion, where you’re just always calling out, yes, of course, like, 90% of gurus are full of crap, and, you know, but you also, you can’t just offer criticism. No, no, there needs to be hopefulness, you need to offer people hope and consolation in this most difficult of times. Yeah, I would, I would reinforce that by saying, if the criticism is just dismissive criticism, I think it’s halfway criticism. I mean, I think more of, like, Kantian critique rather than criticism, where you’re trying to understand the functionality, right, you know, so Kant’s not just saying do away with this, he’s saying, but what’s the underlying functionality, and let’s properly understand it, and that’s where I think, you know, the cognitive psychology, the cognitive science can be a big help. But that leads me then to, like, your, you know, your second book, and I haven’t had the pleasure to read that, so I apologize if I ask things out of ignorance, but you did bring up this, you know, you know, the tension, Socrates and Dionysus, sort of the, you know, and there’s some allusions to Nietzsche there you might want to explore, but maybe you do in your book, but how that’s the thing that is, that’s what I’m trying to also point to in this space, is that I want to be able to offer people practices of self-transcendence, ecstasy, fundamental self-redirection, self-transformation, while still nevertheless keeping them connected to critical reflection, to self-examination, to existential self-doubt in important ways, and it sounds to me like you were wrestling with something like that in the second book, so where’s your thinking about that issue, because that issue, I mean, that issue concerns me both professionally and personally. Yeah, it’s a very interesting one, can you have a model of education, of pedagogy, which includes the mystical, and includes ecstasy, and altered states of consciousness, because those kinds of states involve the, hopefully temporary turning off sometimes of critical thinking, or at least going beyond just the analytical and the critical, maybe not the turning off, maybe hopefully the kind of yes and, rather than turn off your mind, but when one goes into those altered states one can very easily fall prey to cultishness, to black and white thinking, to manipulation, then in-crowd, out-crowd, to guru worship, so I remember in our last conversation I talked about Abraham Maslow talking about what leads to peak experiences, and he was like sometimes the lecture can lead to peak experiences, you know, maybe, but if you are giving people peak experiences in your pedagogy, you can become a guru, and you know, various people have talked about, you know, a guru is a certain thing, but it’s something a bit different from, I don’t know, certainly an academic or a teacher, but then maybe was Plato kind of a guru, I mean, so there’s different ways one can think about it. Okay, here’s some thoughts off the top of my head. Ken Wilbur, who kind of fell prey to the guru thing, but he talks about the difference between a guru and a pandit. A pandit kind of describes a certain body of knowledge and might share some of their experiences, but it’s different from the guru who’s actually kind of taking responsibility for your soul and trying to lead you to a certain state of mind, so that’s one thought, maybe there’s a difference between the guru and the pandit. I’m certainly much more comfortable with the pandit role than the guru role. Another thing to think about is models of educational institutions, precedents, which have tried to teach both knowledge and theory and also be a space for the exploration of, you know, the non-rational, the trans-rational, so I’ve thought about that a lot, historical precedents for that kind of thing that I’m interested in, and so I’ve thought about places like Esalen, places like Naropa Institute, which Chogram Rinpoche set up in Boulder, places like Schumacher College in Devon and Dartington right next to it, and you can see that they sometimes go wrong. They go wrong because they, like say something like Naropa or the Mind and Life Institute, they became somewhat kind of cultic in their thinking, or at least, you know, they were so into what they were doing that they suffered from confirmation bias. Yeah, they became apologetic too. It became an apology. Mind and Life I’m familiar with, and I was there with Evan Thompson, who was, you know, Lorella’s protege, and Evan was getting upset, and you know, about that it was turning into a Buddhist apologetic program, and so sorry I interrupted you. Yeah, you know more about that situation than me, and I think definitely I imagine something similar happened at the Maharishi University, so it’s tricky. You see kind of the normal model of academia, and you think, oh that’s kind of arid and desiccated, and you know, I had the pleasure to kind of meet and interview the former president of Harvard, Derek Bok, and he’s brilliant. He says, yes, we should have a place for teaching mindfulness. Yes, we should have a place for trying to teach kind of happiness and things like that, but it’s always about, you know, creating a space where the student can disagree with you and say, yeah, you know, and take it in a new direction, and so that’s, it is hard. It is really hard because something Aldous Huxley said to the founders of Esalen right when they were setting it up is, you know, things might get messy because you’re talking about altered states of consciousness, and people are going to bring up subconscious stuff, and I think Esalen, which is going to celebrate its 60th anniversary next year, and that is in a way the almost the only good precedent that in the sense that it survived for a long time, so it has that kind of longevity, which is so lacking in spirituality. It never, it never kind of, no one ever captured the flag. It was, you know, it wore its dogmas lightly. It was open to criticism. It never became culty in an era where everything else became culty, you know, like the 70s human potential movement, OSHO, EST, but somehow Esalen didn’t, so of course it’s flawed, but I think that’s quite a, that’s an interesting precedent, and the last thing I would say is, oh go on, yeah, I’ve said enough. Well, I wanted to give you a couple of, another precedent to consider, and this is one that Thomas Jorgman has brought out with the Nordic Sea Trip. I forget his co-author, the the Bildu movement in the Scandinavian countries, which I mean, so you see the Scandinavian countries at this one point in history, they’re agrarian, they’re authoritarian, and what you, the Bildung movement, who’s from Germany, and they set up basically, and there’s no other way to describe these, these secular monasteries where people go in and they’re basically doing self-cultivation, Bildung, right, and self-transformation, and they’re doing this project, and it’s spiritual, and it’s philosophical, and it transforms the Scandinavian countries into the countries they are now, radically different than they were before, and it didn’t evolve into, as far as I can tell, anything sort of cultish or a new religion, and you know, Thomas points to that, I think quite rightly as, you know, as existence proof, no, no, it is possible to find that space that you and I keep trying to circle in, and it can be cultivated in a way, and it can be cultivated such that it can transform, and not just the country, a whole region, in a profound way, in a profound way. That’s, yeah, that’s very interesting. You know, it also reminds me of a book called The Diamond Age by Neil Stevenson, which is, I’m not a big sci-fi fan, but this is one of my favourite kind of sci-fi books, and it’s about a kind of artificial intelligence, Enchiridion, a handbook, which someone designs to develop good characters in, and it’s a huge amount of money invested, and then it gets stolen, so a street urchin gets this incredibly intelligent handbook, which gives her like, like 21st century ancient wisdom, and she becomes this kind of great character, but in it, there’s, it’s set in the future, and there’s this, there’s this, one of the fundamental questions it asks is how do you create an educational system that both reinforces traditional values, like ancient wisdom, because that’s in some ways, you know, but also creates a space for like new thinking, for subversive thinking. Now, what we’ve got at the moment is sometimes we get like people on the right, and they’re all about traditional values, whether that’s Confucian, Aristotelian, Stoic, whatever, or you get people on the left, and it’s all about subversion, and there’s no centre there, it’s all about the kind of, what’s the opposite of, you know, there’s the kind of centripetal and something else, right, so it’s not about the centre, it’s all about, you know, undermining the centre, or subverting the centre, so how does one bring that together, like have a kind of an educational system which gives people the kind of training and ethical habits, but with the space to kind of, yeah, to subvert and to improvise? That’s exactly it, I mean, and so the metaphor people are frequently using, I’ve used it myself, is the jazz metaphor, like if you can’t play formal music and you try to jam, you’ll just, it’s horrible, right, this is a mess, but in jazz, of course, you’re doing, you break the rules in a way that feeds back into the rules, like it’s, you know, it’s James Carr’s idea of an infinite game as opposed to a finite game, and learning how to play that, and Zach Stein, one of my collaborators, you know, education at time between two worlds, he’s exactly exploring that, he’s exploring how do we reorient education so we can both reach into the past and foresee the future, if you’ll allow me a visual metaphor, at least a perceptual metaphor, and so what’s interesting, like, you see the brain actually organized to do this, I mean, this is the work I do on relevance realization, insight problem solving, how the brain is constantly oscillating between, you know, strategies of assimilation and strategies of accommodation, and that when we’re measuring intelligence, we’re often measuring the flexibility of that system, what we actually want is to promote the flexibility, and so Zach is trying to ask that, but he’s asking that in connection with what he claims is a fundamental reorientation, so I want to suggest to you that part of trying to find that education that finds that center point in balance is also a reorientation of education, and so one of Zach’s main criticisms is that we have lost the function of education as intergenerational enculturation, we used to think, so you look at cross culturally or you look cross historically, education is viewed as primarily an intergenerational relationship of responsibility, and it’s a responsibility of enculturation, so we humans have the capacity for cultural ratcheting, you and I don’t have to start from scratch, that other organisms do, we don’t have to start from scratch, we have this, but the point is we’re supposed to ratchet, so we’re supposed to start from this, but go beyond, and so his point is we’ve largely taken education out of that, and then we have reoriented it towards preparing people for the market, and that has failed for various reasons, and some of those reasons are being exacerbated, so as the rate of technological change increases, trying to prepare people for the market is largely a fool’s errand, and so I was told this, and this was a while ago, as I was going into university, it’s like you’re not going to have a career, it turned out they were wrong, I managed to get one, but they’re saying most people are not going to have a career, they’re going to have five, six careers, and so trying to make education about preparing them for their career is, like I’m not saying we shouldn’t prepare people economically, but trying to make that the defining essence of education is largely a failing, it’s a failing project, and so it fails in its own manifest goal, but also fails for a latent reason, which is we’ve abandoned the cultural project, you know, the project that, no, the point of education is to create a stable relationship between generations of impulsoration, and so I think part of the problem, sorry, this is long-winded, but part of the problem is that, if you’ll allow me a dimensionality, it’s not only that we’re trying to recover, and I don’t mean the political center by any means, and you didn’t, I didn’t think you meant that either, we’re trying to recover this center where we get both ecstasis and rigor, if you’ll allow me that, but I think that can’t be separated from, we have to, and this is why I’m a little bit worried about it becoming therapeutic, because therapeutic is me now self- focused, we have to recover this other kind of focus, right, that what education is doing is, it’s, right, I’m grateful for a gift and I’m responsible for giving, if I can put it that way, and so I, my concern is that some of these, like a lot of these things you’re talking about didn’t have that intergenerational focus, and that helped explain their failure, and now I’m getting back to the point, whereas the building movement in Scandinavia had exactly that intergenerational mindset, and that’s at least a plausible hypothesis of why it succeeded in the way it did where these other things failed, sorry, that was a bit of a long-winded argument, but I wanted to make that argument. Yeah, well, you know, I would love to see examples of that today, whether that can work, I’m all for like, you know, as many experiments as possible, and the experiments of institutions and see, you know, can, how do they work, can they last longer than two years, three years, can they deal with the money issue, can they deal with the power issue, can they avoid from just getting lost in kind of, you know, paralysis where it’s so much kind of challenging the centre that there’s no actual kind of, you know, agreed ethics there. I can tell you that trying to change within British academia was, well, just within my university, for eight years, I tried to get them to develop a kind of more coherent wellbeing policy, which would involve things like, you know, courses and workshops and classes in practical philosophy, and, you know, the progress was so slow, and there was so much weariness, suspicion, maybe, you know, just complete indifference from senior academics. If one of them maybe then showed interest, then they would leave after a year. So it was, I have to say, I got nowhere, and I heard something similar from the president of Harvard. He said, you know, he did his best to introduce things like courses in happiness, like, you know, both psychological and ancient wisdom, but then the person who taught the course, like Harvard’s most popular course was this course in happiness, but then the person teaching would leave, and the university would not feel this is essential to get someone to replace it. It was always just, you know, someone’s initiative, exactly what happened at my university. I was into it, but as soon as I left, no one felt it was essential. Universities are massive, massive corporations, and they are mainly looking at expanding, particularly internationally, so attracting as many foreign students as possible, who may often barely even speak English, but they’ll spend, you know, 30,000 a year. These are huge money-making machines, so it is hard to bring in any kind of culture of wisdom there, even if you were the provest, even if you were the head of that university, let alone a semi-academic like me. So I guess I’ve become more interested in smaller institutions, where you can try to have a genuine kind of shared ethos, a shared spirit, and I’m also just interested in, like, adult education, where you put out maybe a book or an online course or something, and, you know, the people who really want it, they will find it, and what you get is, like, you know, like, to me, the most incredible technology of education is still the book. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. You put a book out there and someone spends, you know, 10 hours giving their deep attention to you, and it can change their life, so that kind of thing, like, what do you think? Am I being too pessimistic or…? Well, I’ll tell you, Jules, I mean, no, my friends actually, it’s not an accusation because they love me, they’re my friends, but they attribute to me that I wear a cloak of melancholy and that I tend towards seeing things darkly, and I hope I did not convey, I share with you a sense of deep urgency around what Thomas Bjorkman calls the meta-crisis, because those crises you mentioned, they’re not independent. The wealth disparity, the environmental degradation, the political, like, frustration, auspication, corruption, our political institutions, those things are not independent. They’re interacting and exacerbating each other. I happen to think that the meaning crisis also puts people into a kind of scarcity mentality, and scarcity mentality makes people much more short-term thinking, much more rigid, so I think it also exacerbates things in a profound way. So I often, I mean, I went for a walk with a good friend and he was saying, like, he was considering having a child and he’s thinking not, and he’s really wrestling with, you know, issues around despair, and I think it’s a race. That’s how I feel it. I feel it’s a race between the kind of work you and I are doing and many other people, you know, and all these other forces, and the other forces have tremendous advantage. They also have tremendous, Whitehead once said, the one thing, one of our great sources of hope is that evil is very self-destructive in nature in the long run, right, and so these huge machines also are incredibly, they’re incredibly powerful, but they’re also incredibly self-destructive. They’re suffering from general system collapse, to use some technical language, so I mean, and that’s what’s good and bad. So I don’t think there’s any theology that is guaranteeing anything, and I do seriously consider the fact that, I’ll just, I don’t mean to sound grandiose about it, that we might fail, you know, that all the people that are trying to wake us up to wisdom and meaning, right, that we might fail. I totally get that, and so I guess I console myself this way. I console myself with that, well, it’s certainly not going to make any, it’s not going to help things if I don’t try, so I’m going to try my best, and I have kids, so that especially motivates me, I’m going to try my best for them, and also for my students, and for my friends, and then I talk about stealing the culture, like, we’re not going to do this by a political revolution or something like that, but I also mean the possibility that maybe we’re like Augustine, maybe what we’re doing is we’re not saving the Roman Empire, it’s too late, what we’re doing is gathering together the candles that we can, and storing them in a way that’s going to survive so that something else could potentially be built from it, and that’s how I try to console myself, and I know that sounds rather grandiose, but that is how I try to deal with this tsunami of pessimism that could wash over me. That’s how I introduce myself, maybe I’m Augustine. No, but I hear you, and it’s funny, I was thinking about that, I guess a couple of days ago, thinking like, you know, obviously the news is, there’s tough news every day now, and particularly around the climate, but other things as well, and I was thinking, if this is, you know, a kind of end of an order kind of time, that is also a very fruitful time, because something like, you know, Saint Augustine and his new view can be hugely influential in that kind of time after, that you can’t quite predict who that person’s going to be, or what that idea is going to be, so I think you’re right there. I don’t believe in a kind of set goal, but I do believe, you know, that some new order will emerge, like I believe in some kind of, you know, tendency to complexity, tendency to order, and we’re just in a time of turbulence for, you know, for better or for worse, that’s I think what it’s going to be like this decade, next decade, so what’s the kind of useful work? Definitely can think about what happens after the turbulence, what would you like to see after the turbulence, what would be the good, you know, it doesn’t have to be the perfect, what would be the good, and the more we keep reminding of ourselves that maybe we make it more likely to happen, and then there’s work to be done in consoling people through suffering, and there’ll be lots of suffering in the next 20 years, won’t be the first time in human history, but there’ll be a good portion of it, good helping of it, I guess, so there’s lots of the traditions that we work with, that’s their forte is kind of consolation, and I think, and I definitely, like part of that consolation is kind of hope and cosmic hope, and you know, the old wisdom traditions give us that as well, the sense that like, hey, you know, you can’t lose, at some level you can’t lose, yes you can, some level, yes, you know, try to mitigate suffering, but at a certain level, you know, it’s not on you, it’s not on a few people, you know, thank God, it’s not on a few people on YouTube to try and like save the world, like there’s something within us that can’t, this is my opinion, that can’t die, that can’t be defeated, that can’t be kind of broken, and it’s always there, and we can sometimes be lucky enough to get reminders about it, and sometimes we can remind others about it, but, and that’s, and you know, that doesn’t mean you don’t want to just rest in that and go, oh well, you know, oh so some people died in floods, oh so, you know, there’s some wildfires, no, you do your best, but that saves me from despair, and gives me a certain amount of detachment which helps me to kind of keep going, and I think, you know, when I think about spirituality, and I have felt somewhat dispirited in the last year about our culture, because of things like conspirituality and hucksterism, or anti-science, making the pandemic worse, but I think, and part of that’s kind of historical, is we focused so much on self-actualisation, and follow your bliss, and be a super being, and it was so kind of Nietzschean, and it was rejecting compassion and charity as phony or Victorian bunk, which is what Nietzsche did, he hated anything that was to do with compassion or philanthropy, he thought that just smelt bad, and was basically, you know, we’re not into that, so, you know, so I feel it’s just, it’s a glaring lack in spirituality, it’s lack of kindness, and charity, and compassion, and active work, you know, there’s a big, really good emphasis on work on the self, but there’s a real glaring lack on kind of organised attempts to help others, which, you know, the old Christianity with all its flaws, and Julius and so on, was good at, so, you know, what are your thoughts on that, how, what can we do to help our culture, do you think, do you agree, and if so, what could we do about it? I do, and so, I mean, so, part of what I’m doing as a researcher thinker, but also personally, I mean, I’m entering into really good faith, and I mean it in both senses of the word, good faith discussion, with representatives of, you know, Christianity and Judaism, and one of the criticisms, they often make of my work, and I respond to it, I take it to heart, is, yeah, but the stuff you’re talking about, the religion, that’s not a religion, like, how are you going to scale that, how are you going to do exactly what you’re talking about, right, and so, I have tried to move from just talking about this, and talking about ecologies of practice, and like, I’m not abandoning that, I think that’s still central, ecologies of practices, but really emphasising how much the ecologies of practices have to be set within a homing community, and a community that does that, and so, a lot of the work that I’m doing now on is around, so, taking a notion from 40 Cognitive Science and distributed cognition, and the power of collective intelligence, and then the idea, the very strong analogy, so I, as a psychologist, one of the areas I do work on is, how do we use our intelligence to become rational, because intelligence is only weakly predictive of rationality, you have to use your intelligence and train it in a specific way, become rational, be able to, you know, systemically and systematically overcome self-deception, well, part of what I saw the ancient, especially the neoplatonic tradition of dialectic, doing was giving people an individual practice of self-transcendence, dialectic in this dimension, but also putting it into this, which is, how do we access and activate the collective intelligence of distributed cognition, and transform it into collective rationality, and dare I say it, collective wisdom, that gives us something that helps to curate and correct our own individual wisdom project, and so, I’m engaging in this project of trying to understand this process, called DIA Logos, and I’m teaching a course with Guy Sendstock on this on the weekend, how do people do this, so, how do, a kind of practice, and also doing that series on the connection between DIA Logos and mystical realization, how do we, how can we get, well, let’s use some of the language, how can we get something like a collective ecstatic, that is also a collective rationality between people, because you can, because I’ve participated in it, and I’ve seen it happen, and what’s interesting is how spontaneously people from whatever background, religious and secular, start to describe this experience in spiritual language, and how much they’re drawn into this, and how can we organize that, because right now it seems to be so that it doesn’t focus, because it doesn’t focus on the person, it focuses on the we space, that’s even the term that’s used, and so, trying to understand, see I’m getting too passionate about this, I gotta calm down, trying to understand, right, like, and you can understand it from a rigorously cognitive scientific perspective, collective flow state, collective intelligence, distributed cognition, but you can also understand it as, right, you know, as, I don’t know how, I don’t want to, I don’t want to sound disrespectful, people, I don’t think it’s inappropriate or misplaced for people to, that they gravitate towards spiritual and religious language to talk about this experience, because what they, what they do is they discover kinds of intimacy that have been lost to our culture, they discover non-sexual, non-romantic intimacy first with each other and themselves, and those are happening in tandem, then they get an intimacy with this, this dynamical system, and then they start to get a new sense of intimacy towards reality and being through it, and what’s happening is you get communities building up, so during COVID, I started an online meditation, contemplation and cultivation of wisdom, and a sangha grew up around it, I didn’t try and do that, it just happened, right, and then a discord server, and it’s all come out, so, sorry, this is very long wind, I’m getting very excited, but both as a scientist and as a participant observer and as a participant, right, experimenter, I’m trying to understand very deeply the processes by which we, by which individuals build new, I don’t know what to call them, something like new cultural homes, new ways of being with each other, being themselves and being in the world, and trying to really understand that in a deep way, precisely because I think the point you put your finger on is the crucial point, my friend and colleague Jordan Hall says the next Buddha is the Sangha, and I think that that’s, there’s a deep- Well, he took that from Thich Nhat Hanh, so I hope he credits him. I didn’t know that, I didn’t know that. Well, there you go. Well, anyways, he brought that to, I mean, I’ve read Thich Nhat Hanh, I didn’t come across that, but anyways- Well, you know, because I read it just yesterday, like, and I never come across that thing before, so it is one of these strange coincidences that you talk about. Yeah, so we might not know where it actually began, so, but whoever said it, there’s truth to it, and I’m trying to understand, I’m trying to understand a narrative, a different kind of cultural narrative, I have concerns about the hero, the resurrection of the hero narrative. Yeah, so do I, I mean, the hero’s journey, that’s been overly flogged, because, you know, the hero is just going round and round and round, and after a while, like, you know, I think there’s such a thing as a post-hero, where you’re mature enough, you don’t have to see yourself as like Luke Skywalker anymore, you don’t have to wear your Luke Skywalker pajamas. I’m thinking of the way, you know, the way Plato eventually has Socrates disappear from the dialogues. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s true, but, you know, you know, that map of the hero’s journey, they’re pretty much always on their own, have you noticed that, it’s always just one man. That’s what I said, I said, you know, I’m interested in, I’m not so much interested in heroes, because they don’t really build networks. I’m interested in the kind of processes, right, these distributive, dynamical distributive processes to build networks. Well, yeah, so I hear you, and, you know, I think, I bet that you are doing, in your field, is doing interesting research on kind of the connection between rationality and, you know, wisdom and emotion as well. And what happens in that kind of those group dialogues, and it made me think of both, you know, in the 20th century, things like the encounter group, and more recently, things like authentic relating groups. And I love those authentic relating exercises. But then it makes me think even older about things like the Pentecost. And, you know, the Pentecost was a kind of collective fire. That people were connected with this kind of spiritual intelligence, and they could speak different languages. And so, and I think that the challenge as well is how to always broaden those dialogues to include the other. And, but I don’t mean in a kind of just a woke way. And I’m using woke in the kind of, you know, not in the true sense of the word, but in the kind of hackneyed, journalist sense of the word. But I mean, so I guess, because I what I’m also having in mind is, in terms of this next 20 years, I’m thinking of like, increased emergencies, increased natural emergencies. So I suppose what I also have in mind, what I would is, hmm, this will sound silly, but like, something a bit like, you know, the Franciscans, you know, like, or something so that you’re, you’re, you know, I think all like Tich Nhat Hanh’s contemplative activism movement, where they were during the Vietnam War, helping people to build churches, you know, helping the villages, so making themselves useful in a time of crisis. So I suppose that a good church would do that in a time of crisis, you’d hope that if the city was flooded, they would be there trying to help people who’d lost their homes. And I just, you know, how can our culture be, how can we be of help? Because it seemed to me like, you know, we weren’t the only ones, like, churches were often just as riddled with conspiracy thinking, unfortunately, during the pandemic, but we, we weren’t at help, we actually made it worse. So just in this, in this time of, you know, there’ll be increased natural disasters. What can, what can we be of, how can we be of service? That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s what I wonder. And, and I, and I, and I, I can tell you, I do, you know, pretty much zero service. So, so I’m, you know, I’m asking myself that, but I, you know, you tell me if you see that happening and where, where I do. Yeah. I mean, and, and I’m not putting one upmanship or anything like that. That’s why, that’s why I did that stuff during the COVID. Yes, you do. You’re giving, you’re giving your stuff, your stuff away for free. Right. So that’s true. Yeah. The coursework and then also trying to help build communities where like, yeah, or like working with people like Ray Kelly, you know, building a community, helping to build the networks between the communities. Yeah. I’m trying to do that. Sorry, I don’t want this to get off on self-promotional. What I mean is I think the point you’re putting here is exactly right. And that, that’s, you know, that’s back to Epicurus, call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others, right? That point that, and, and, you know, and I think that’s, that’s also part of when Jonathan Pagio and Paul Enderclay sort of, you know, criticized me is like, but in the end, is your philosophical community going to help when things fall apart? Or is it just, is it going to be, is it going to withdraw like the Epicurean community? Or is it going to try and go out into the empire like the Stoics did, right? And so I think, I think making that question prominent, putting it at the forefront of any proposals for, for like how we’re going to make institutional educational collective and individual change. I think that’s important. I think, I think I totally agree with that. I don’t, I think in fact, if we don’t do that, we’re, we’re going to suffer the fate of the Epicureans. They lost the competition first to the Stoics and then to the Christians. And justifiably so to my mind, not because they didn’t have good ideas. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the fact that they made themselves like improperly useless. I mean, there’s a, there’s a, right, there’s a proper way of being useless, that they were improperly useless. And that goes back to how we started this. I mean, if, if we’re doing this, if, like the advantage of street philosophy is its claim on relevancy. And so we’re not doing that. We shouldn’t be doing anything. We should just be doing academic philosophy to my mind. So that’s how I would include. Yes, I agree. And I, I, there was a Vice article recently on the revival of Stoicism. And, and I said in it, why has no one set up a Stoic charity? Like at the very least you could have an initiative to get a copy of meditations and a copy of Epictetus’s discourse in every prison library in the West. That would cost about a hundred dollars. And like you got, you got people like Jack Dorsey calling themselves a Stoic who got billions. Well, you know, and I could afford it as well. So actually let me put that away. Why don’t I, you know, but so, so this is a good challenge, I think, for this broad culture that we’re a part of. I agree. What I, what I want to encourage you is that any of the people that I’ve mentioned that I’m talking to, they actually make that the priority. So the, the, what, if we expand the term to include much of what we’ve been talking about, the philosophy is important, but it’s important insofar as it supports that, that ability to intervene effectively and helpfully in other people’s lives. So that, that is also what helps me at least for moments take off my cloak off melancholy. Seeing that meeting, meeting one of the great gifts of the series, Awakening from the Meeting Crisis was getting to meet the people like that. And I continue to meet that. Yeah, and I, and I, and I appreciate that. I appreciate the kind of generosity of, of, of, of online education as well. And people like Donald Robertson in the Stoic movement, give so much of his content away for free. And there’s, there’s, there’s just, there is a real generosity there. And I think the intention with which work is done often helps it to carry, you know? Yeah. So Jules, I promise not to keep you, I’ve kept you longer than I promised. And I always like, I’ve really enjoyed this. I think this has been very good. I hope we can do this again. I would like to do this again. So I would like to, I’d like to give people that come on to voice in the break the sort of the chance to offer any last words or last reflections. Well, I, when you were talking about improvisation in jazz, it reminded me of a quote that I quoted in The Art of Losing Control, where I was talking about the value of religious traditions, even if you don’t adhere to them 100%. As quote by Charlie Mingus, he said, you can’t improvise from nothing, you got to improvise from something. Yeah. Yeah, so there we go. That’s a nice quote to end from. That’s a great way to end things. Thank you very much, Jules. Okay, John, nice to see you.