https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wUMIR7X51gA
I’ve been more and more attracted to Rene Girard in the past year, I would say, you know, just because of everything that’s happened. And I’ve been seeing that his analysis of the situation is, is really one of the wisest in terms of the way that he interpret what’s happening and intersectionality. I mean, he passed away, I think, around 2010 or maybe a bit later. Um, you know, he talked about, I, I saw a quote of his in 2007 where he talked about the machine of Antichrist, which is ramping up. And he saw exactly what we’re seeing. He said, it’ll be infinite victimhood looking for infinite scapegoat. And so it’s like this perpetual wheel of victimhood, which is looking perpetually for more and more scapegoats at like, almost like a self devouring machine. And so we’re seeing it. The solution is like, I hate to, I know you dislike when I push it too far, but the solution is the, the image of the scapegoat being the murderer and this, and the victim at the same time, right? Identifying with Christ and identifying with those that killed him, identifying with the capacity to exclude and the reality of also being excluded to a certain extent, like those two things, together, if you can kind of, you can integrate them properly and not in a weird disorderly manner can help you have compassion for those who are excluded, but can help you also understand that you are one of those who do that all the time. You’re always doing it. But this is what I meant. I think there’s power in drug argument. I’ve only read the one book and I’m not completely at the one I saw on Satan fall like lightning. But the idea that you can explode the, if you’ll allow me to use some of my terms, you can explode the cultural cognitive grammar of scapegoating and that the Christian mythos does that. I thought that was one of the most powerful arguments. And it’s a new argument as far as I know, one of the most powerful apologetic arguments for Christianity that I had heard in quite some time. So I think that is a good point that you brought up. But it does, I think it’s situated within this larger past again, which we keep coming back to, of trying to get to a place where we can simultaneously accept faith and virtue. Because one of the ways in which you can, right? One of the ways in which you can address people’s thoughts and feelings is by inspiring them to aspire to virtue, rather than trying to eradicate. You can try to inspire the aspiration to virtue. And this has been to my mind, you know, a very, very successful strategy where I’ve been talking a lot recently in a cure of the dawn did the meeting wave about it, about stealing the culture. And I actually use Christianity as a primary example of that. That Christianity doesn’t try and overthrow the political structure. What it does is it steals the culture. It creates an entirely different culture from the bottom up. And then because the problem to my mind, what the French revolution shows is you can radically transform the state, but if you don’t transform the underlying cultural cognitive grammar and normativity, nothing is fundamentally going to change. Yeah. You just change the, you just change the ones who are holding the reins and you circulate, you circulate the elites. Right. Right. And so whereas what Christianity does is, and is, is it, it builds a new civilization. Buddhism does the same thing, right? It builds a new civilization. Islam does the same thing. It builds a new civilization. And, and so that brings us, and we don’t have much time, I suppose, but so that brings me towards the third point is you said, you, you, you know, you sort of despair of knowing what to do. And I’m wondering if you, I’m sorry, I realized I might be daring the pro-hostress thing of proposing some sort of a Christian thing to a Christian, which is a ridiculous thing. But I gave you all of those examples. And to my mind of the idea of, well, isn’t the response to do as much as we can to engage in building the next culture. And that sounds preposterous, but a commitment to that kind of thing seems to me to be the most responsible response to the depth of the situation we are in right now. Yeah. No, I think so. I think, I mean, I would say on a personal level, it’s, it’s just, I mean, love God, love your neighbor is a pretty, pretty good thing to live by. And in the immediate reality and not abstract categories to deal, you know, to, to love the people that you, that you encounter with to see in them the face of God is something that will transform at least your life. It’s harder in terms of like a social responsibility for sure myself, the way that I, the way that I frame it, that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. What you said is that I’m trying to help people see the, the grammar of culture or see the pattern. And of course, one of the things I’ve been emphasizing the most is the importance of the margin and talking about the margin in a balanced way so that you neither have the desire to, cause both sides want to eliminate the margin. Everybody wants to eliminate it. They want to eliminate the margin either by making it the same as the center, by integrating all the marginal aspects and making them equal to everything else or by eradication or by cutting it off. And that’s, those are, that’s the real problem with the, like the, it’s the question we had during the first wave of violence of the 20th century. You had two sides. You had one side which wanted to create an equal utopia and one which wanted to create a hierarchical utopia that cut off the margin, that burned it off. And so, and we’re facing the same, it’s like we didn’t deal with it. We’re facing the same problem now. And we’re seeing the one side now. We’re seeing the, we’re seeing the side that wants everything to be equal. But I always tell people that when the Nazis came to Germany, they were on the verge of a communist revolution. It’s not, the pendulum doesn’t move in one direction. The pendulum swings and it’s a scary thing to watch. But this is part of the way in which, again, the way in which this lack of, the lack of a dynamical nuance in thinking. So, you know, Leo Ferraro and I talked about this idea that you in, in, in living systems and right, you, you see opponent processing. And I’ve argued, right. And that what an opponent processing means, this is the way you deal with trade-offs. And we’ve been talking about trade-offs all the way through, right? You have a point of processing like your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. Like the sympathetic nervous system is biased. It tries to interpret everything as a threat or an opportunity that arouses you. And the parasympathetic system is biased. And it tries to interpret everything as a signal that you should relax and calm down. And they’re working, their biases work in opposite direction, but they’re functionally integrated together because that’s how you get the most self-corrective system. And what we were supposed to have, you can see this in Dewey, right? Because we’re supposed to have a point processing, but what it’s devolved into is adversarial processing. Yeah. Like, and this is the eradication idea. The ad, it says zero. Now it’s a zero sum game. I’ve given up the idea of self-correction. I’ve given up the idea of commitment to a process that you and I, even though we disagree, we can, we can commit to like you and I do in dialogue, we have disagreements, but we see the potential that we can correct each other in valuable ways that we mutually appreciate. Right. There was that commitment and that commitment to that process has been lost. Like the fact that most Americans are more distrusting of the opposite party than they are a foreign threat. Like, what the heck does that mean? Right. What, like, what does that mean to you? Like, like, and so the adversarial eradicate the other, destroy the other zero sum game mentality, I think has made the process, I think is broken. I think the process is broken. And so I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t see how, I mean, and Laman Pascal and others, they disagree with me on this. I don’t know how to work within that in a way. And so that’s what I mean by steal the culture that I don’t know if working within that machinery is a viable strategy. I think strategy has to be, you know, Jonathan, I was at a conference two weeks ago called the movement summit. And there’s all these communities of practice springing up everywhere, trying to integrate mindfulness and movement practices and discourse practices. And so many of them, and you know, and these people and they all want to talk to each other and they want to network. And it felt very different. This is, it felt very good. It was neither, you know, the revolution of the, of the left or the law and order of the right. It’s, it was orthogonal to that. It was these people trying to seriously time and talent and money and energy and commitment to the cultivation of wisdom and a deeply alternative way of being. And to my mind, that’s where, and I know you think it should be given a particular Christian slant, but I also think you’re charitable enough to include other people of good faith who are willing to work with you. I think that’s where the answer to the more difficult problem lies. I think there is stuff actually happening right here, right now, culturally, symbolically, existentially. That is where the diff the difference that is needed is starting to be generated. Oh, but I, I, I for sure agree. I think that the seeds of the, like a way to see it is like that, this is horrible because it has bad implications, but like the seeds of the next world will appear in the current one, right? It’s like they, they’re just hard to see, you know, the little sprouts are hard to see because everything else is burning in the forest. Right? So it’s, it’s difficult to see that the seeds as this is kind of breaking apart. And, and I mean, I’m curious to see how all of this will be integrated. I do, I do again, like, you know, we, we, we’ve talked about this before and so we’re not going to come to a conclusion, but I do, I do think that there is a need for a narrative cohesion. And, and I, and I do think that until, until something happens in the West, it’s still, it’s still the Christian narrative. So I don’t, I don’t see a way out of it for at least, you know, I don’t see a way out of it. So, but I, I appreciate, I do think that the questions that people are asking and that the desire for wisdom and the desire for transformation is one which will bear fruit. It won’t, it has to, if it’s done with sincerity and done, you know, in a desire for transformation, it will bear fruit. Yeah. And the point I’m trying to make is thank you for saying that. And, and, and, and, you know, from my part, I don’t, I don’t ever claim to have a foreclosure argument against Christianity. I, I always say that I do not have such a fit. But what I was trying to emphasize is there’s not only sincerity, there’s depth in like what’s going on here. It has the appreciation for humanity and complexity. That’s what I’m seeing in these people in this movement. Of course we’re all flawed human beings. I’m not, I’m not painting some utopic vision, but I’m talking about, you know, a real, a real possibility. And the acknowledgement that I think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s in existence. I like your metaphor for all the ways it’s fraught, but I do like your metaphor of the seeds. I do like putting the two together that the burning of the forest actually fertilizes the seeds in the way they need to be fertilized. And perhaps you were alluding to that and your wry smile. Yeah, but it’s not, it’s not a fun, it’s not fun. Like it’s not pleasurable. No, there’s, and it means, it means death and suffering. Yep. And I have kids and I, and I don’t want this, but I want, and what needs to happen are not always the same thing.