https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8CaeWSIm3eU
We have seen an increase in political polarization and identity politics slash tribalism in modern political culture. My question is what do you believe is causing this and how can we go back from this? There is a move in history which is that when certain civilizations become actually quite wealthy and quite content they tend to fragment because they have everything they need. We saw that in the late Roman Empire and it’s as if they lose the capacity for their own cohesion and when that happens those who are tribal can come in and ram through that kind of weakened civilization and just like and sort of bust through it. So to me I get the sense that the increased polarization in our society is that it’s not just polarization I think there’s also just a basic fragmentation and that fragmentation is almost physically real. It’s physical even in the manner in which we develop our the layout of houses and the layout of like of suburban neighborhoods where we don’t like I’ve been in my neighborhood for 15 years and I barely know my neighbors and I think most people in North America have that same experience. It’s like so we are like the tissue, the mesh that created whatever it is that we are like whatever civilization whatever is fragmenting and so I think that that’s one of the things that is causing the the chaos at least and those and the problem is that those some people who see that fragmenting they’re afraid and they then they want to pull back and say okay we need to get something really straight something really hard and then they they tend to go towards tribalism you know it’s like it’s beyond like the the economic I mean I think that the economic the economic thing can can kind of unleash it but if you look at Weimar Germany and you look at where we are now the the social tendencies and like the the kind of underlying feeling that things are falling apart were there too and then a so then an economic disaster created that crazy kind of so I think there’s a there’s a there’s a quite a quite a few level of things happening at the same time. Do you believe we are experiencing a Christian Renaissance? I have no idea I mean all I can I can all I can account to is my own experience in this in this field I know that for the past year I’ve been taking on this crazy journey that I didn’t expect at all and by now I’m getting emails every day and the emails are basically the there’s a pattern the emails are the same and it’s I have a vague religious upbringing and became an atheist Sam Harris style in college discovered Jordan Peterson realized religion isn’t stupid discovered your videos and thought wow okay and now like I want to go to church and it’s like I don’t know I have no idea like I don’t know what numbers those represent like I don’t know how many people write me and how many people who are going through that don’t write me but for sure as a person I believe that to dive back I mean that by stake my entire life on this being an icon carver and talking about the things that I’ve talked about tonight are completely related together I believe that the underlying grammar that was developed in Christianity especially in the first 1,000 years the underlying relationships of symbols is like an algebra and it and it’s it’s like a mesh through which we can look at the world and I think that to recover that to the extent that it’s possible is one of the solutions out of our morass and so I’ve staked my own yeah my life on that so in the breakdown of categories things that usually would not meet can in fact meet and I believe it’s not for nothing that Christianity increased in the twilight of the Roman Empire where the the stretched multi-ethnic multicultural vastness was oscillating between fragmentation civil war the iron fist of a diocletian figure right now as we are watching the Western world being propped up as competing identities of race and gender you know and ethnicity and age and you name it any identity you can imagine and while simultaneously there’s this paradoxal insistence that all identities and distinction distinctions have to be dissolved there are those who are not even in the church not in any church who are getting an inkling that maybe Christianity considered even at its minimum as a set of presuppositions maybe it was the only glue that ever held the West together that ever kept the balance since the conversion of Rome even as precarious and volatile as that unity sometimes was people are so hungry for meaning for the past year or so I’ve been on an adventure on a crazy adventure that took me completely by surprise I was asked to do some interview with some professor in Toronto on some random subject and because of that I’m not going to go into the details but but all of a sudden I was being flooded with letters and letters of atheists atheists who are looking around and are seeing the fragmentation as well they’re looking around and they’re seeing the hemorrhaging of our culture and they’re trying to ask what can we do to stop the bleeding I mean there are its ways but there’s some peers where I get a letter I get a long email every day of some recovering atheist who’s moving away from their criticism you know the 13 year old’s version of Christianity and is discovering the cosmic vision of Christ and he’s discovering the cosmic vision of his mother whose womb is faster than the heavens there’s so much to say to those people I mean we hold in our hearts the tradition of Christ which connects through a beautiful braid of analogies the personal the social the cosmic and the transcendent realms and I am NOT I have not tried to convince anybody I have no desire to convince anybody the only thing that I ever did was to show people the the beautiful patterns that are in our tradition the beautiful connections between scripture and the icons and the liturgy and the hymns and people are so hungry for meaning that they just it’s like breathing it’s like it’s like they all of a sudden they’ve been drowning and they can they can take a breath I’m not saying that all these people are going to become Orthodox I mean I don’t think so but it’s a crazy thing I got a letter from a man a man from two three days ago I got a letter from a man in Pakistan a man who was a Muslim and who in university like so many people became an atheist and now he writes me and he says I think I’m a Christian I don’t know and I don’t know what to do because I’m in Pakistan of all the Christians we do not see the stories of the Bible the stories of salvation is just this arbitrary set of facts that we must believe in to be saved of all Christians we know the organic process of salvation the transformation of man into God through participation in the life of God is the very manner by which the world exists it’s the very thing that links this outward phenomena to consciousness to news to logos and unites all things towards the infinite I mean how awesome is that and in the background we’ve also kept and we hold not only the keys to Christianity but we also hold the heritage of the ancients I mean we’re not Platonists but we have carried Plato we are not Aristotelian but we have carried Aristotle Alexander Homer Virgil and we could add to that you know all the useful stories of all people who enter in communion with Christ we keep them alive in the narthex of the church so that they can participate in the manner to which it is possible that they participate in the divine life you’ll recognize these are images of the Greek sages from an Arthex Adam in a monastery in Greece they don’t have halos it’s okay we hold the golden thread that reaches back into the mists of time the same golden thread that is under increasing threat of being cut so I think the chaos we face is a test like the waters of baptism it will wash off all that is superficial all that which we have not integrated encountering outer darkness being challenged by the outer darkness is an urgent test for Christians to know to the extent that it is possible to know in our hearts and our minds what exactly is this thing about what is the incarnation how does it the world and of course there is mystery but we can tell people why mystery matters why some things cannot be described or contained and why that mystery is the fount of existence