https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sWdBXHiYwAk
I can’t help but think that when God is asked what his name is, the burning bush, Moses asks God, who are you? He says, I am who I am. I am being himself, right? And when we find our identity in I am who I am, things make sense. When we reject I am who I am, when we reject being himself, we’re left with this question, which is, who am I? And we’ve got this identity crisis, and right now, specifically that identity crisis, is manifesting in gender. This transgender moment where more than one in five Zoomers are identifying as LGBT, and where you’ve got a huge spike in even childhood transvestitism and gender dysphoria, who am I, who am I, who am I? I can’t help but notice that symbol is at the very heart of that question. The body is a symbol of our soul, for instance. No, you’re absolutely right, and it’s something which, the way that you framed it is perfect, because it does have to do with the problem of being. And so, you can think about it fractally, about anything. It doesn’t have to be just God, let’s say. There is a way in which you recognize the being of something. So let’s say, like a chair. You have a way to recognize it, and you have multiplicity. There’s variation, right? There’s variation of chairs, there’s all kinds of different chairs, but the further you get away, let’s say, from what you recognize as a chair, you’re gonna start to see things get weird, where you’re gonna start to see, let’s say, or it’s kinda like a chair, kinda like a stool, it’s kind of in between, it’s like a hybrid between a chair and a bench. And so you start to see exceptions and strangeness, and those are, in some ways, they’re actually okay, if we’re all oriented towards the being in the first place. And so, this is what we’re seeing happening everywhere, which is that we’re moving into exception, hybridity. So that’s the difference, that’s the opposite of being, is that if you move away from being, you move into confusion, into things that have different identities. So if you think about, so I like to help people understand, let’s say you think about a traditional church. A traditional church is built exactly like this. Like a Gothic church, for example, is a good way to say it. So at the center, we have the altar, it’s the highest place. It’s the place where the heaven and earth meet, where the priest lifts up the chalice, and he shows you, heaven and earth is meeting right here. This is the spot where being is manifesting itself in its fullness. And then we have the people that are there, and there’s multiplicity, and there’s all this stuff. Then in the corners and in the edges and on the outside, that’s where we have gargoyles. And gargoyles are fine, right, in their proper place. And that’s what they are, they’re ambiguous, they’re humorous, they’re confused, they’re a strange mixture of different identities. They usually have a kind of irreverent nature to them. Sometimes they’re even kind of off-key, like a little salty, let’s say. And they have their place in the structure, but only if they’re in their proper place. If you take a gargoyle and you put it on the altar, like you’re in trouble, and I think that this is what’s going on, is that exceptions will always exist. So there’s a sense in which the argument of the, of let’s say the LGBT argument, to say that there’s some fluidity is true, but the fluidity is on the edges. It’s always in the exceptions and on the edges and in strangeness. But you can’t make strangeness the thing that you worship, because then everything falls apart. So if you have like a whole month where you’re celebrating idiosyncrasy and strangeness and ambiguity, and it actually becomes the only thing you’re allowed to celebrate. Like if you want to know where a culture is, look at what you’re allowed to celebrate. And so as there’s a war on, let’s say, the 4th of July for Americans, war on the idea of saying the holidays instead of saying Christmas, like all this kind of little, this little fight in language and what it is that we are, that we should and are allowed to celebrate, at the same time that there’s rising up of entire swaths of our liturgical year, we could say, to worship ambiguity and idiosyncrasy and strangeness, that’s a sign. It’s related to being itself. It’s related to the manner in which being reaches its edge. And yeah, so. And you’re getting contradictory protestations coming out of the left, I’ve noticed, specifically on this question. The left will try to change all of our language and force us to call men her and women he. And they will force us to say happy holidays instead of Christmas. What holiday are we talking about, folks? There’s one big holiday here that we’re all talking about. We’re not allowed to say it. They’ll say this is so important, change the language, change the language, change the language. And also, what do you conservatives care about? Come on, it’s just words, it’s just symbols, who cares? You care, you’re the one who is making me change all of the language. And yeah, and also, I mean, the language becomes, the idiosyncratic language is so precise. The whole pronoun thing is you have to use this pronoun, you have to use this, and then there’s all these multiple terms, like exploding multiple terms of how to define someone. And if you don’t use that, you’re actually making them not exist, you’re refusing their actual existence. So no, I mean, it really is, it was never about it doesn’t matter, it really is about what matters. Humans can’t live without things that are important in a hierarchy of values. And so it was never, although people will say, oh, we just have to flatten everything, we have to make everything kind of like this, it’s never true, that’s always a lie. It always ends up with a kind of hierarchy of values. And in a way, the way to, right now what we’re seeing is something like an upside down hierarchy is the best way to understand it. And so it’s like where the exception is the rule, and we used to say the exception proves the rule. It’s like there’s exceptions, so you can see the rule, and so now, no, no, no, it’s like the exception, not only the exception invalidate the rule, it becomes the new rule, and everything is kind of directed towards the exception. They’ll say this with hermaphrodites, they will say, well, because there are like four hermaphrodites in the entire world, this proves that men and women are not discrete categories that really exist. And I think first of all, even hermaphrodites can be classified as man or woman in virtually all cases, but ligers exist, there’s such a thing as a liger. It is a hybrid of a lion and a tiger. The existence of probably a similar number of ligers that there are hermaphrodites, it does not negate the existence of lions and tigers. Yeah, well, it’s because people can’t think in hierarchies anymore in a way, well, they do secretly, but they say publicly they don’t really think in hierarchies, they do think in these weird radical opposites. And so it’s a trick, like the postmodern trick has been to take everything ambiguous, everything that’s kind of in the margin, and use it as a tool to devour, it’s like a parasite. And I say that, people go, oh, Jonathan’s saying it’s a parasite, no, the postmoderns were very much aware. Jacques Derrida has a famous interview where he said that his whole work is about parasitology, it’s about virology, and that it’s about introducing a parasite that slowly devours the host, and the exception devours the rule, right? The thing that’s writing the world is slowly kind of deconstructing the main body, let’s say. So it’s not, this is something that is weaponized, it’s deliberate. When we’re talking about these exceptions then, I have to wonder if conservatives are, if we’re taking the wrong tack here, if we’re taking the wrong strategy. Totally, I think they are. Because you know, especially when it comes to gender, we deny gender expression, we say gender expression is this totally bogus thing, I’ve said this myself, it’s this bogus thing, it’s ridiculous, I mean there’s just sex, there’s boys and girls, XX and XY chromosomes, and that’s that. But it’s actually a very ancient way of thinking that gender and sex are not exactly the same. I mean, they’re finding in like the Byzantine Empire, they had this notion that they weren’t exactly the same. Well, and it only makes sense because symbols and the symbolized are not exactly the same. I am of the opinion that symbols should precisely and accurately reflect that which is symbolized. And the further a symbol gets from what it is symbolizing, the more trouble you’re going to have. But they are different things. You know, if gender expression is the symbol, that which is symbolized is biological sex. Just as if my body is the symbol, my soul is that which is being symbolized. The idea that the soul is the form of the body. And actually, it keeps coming back to religion. I mean, this has been a real point of great significance between the Catholics and the Protestants, and the Orthodox too, I suppose, which is that in the Eucharist, you have the total unity of the symbol and the symbolized. The bread is the symbol, Jesus Christ’s body and blood is the symbolized, and the Catholics and the Orthodox believe, there they are, both together. And some Protestants believe, there they are, both together. And after the Protestant Revolution, you see different Christian groups move further and further away from this, and you say, no, it’s merely a symbol, and you’re rending these two things apart. No, I totally agree. There’s definitely something about the breakdown of Eucharistic theology. I mean, this is going very far in the past, but it’s definitely part of why our vision of the world has broken down and why these weird separations, radical separations between exactly that, between, let’s say, the referent and that which is reference has come together. But in terms of, let’s say, in terms of the difficult situation with gender and desire that we’re dealing with now, we have to understand that modernism is a funny thing, that modernism is extreme, it tends towards extremes. So what we’re going through now for all the difficulty that it’s bringing is a reaction to something that happened at the beginning of the early 20th century, which is that we pathologized everything. And so men were being castrated in the 1950s. We have to remember that. And that a lot of the things that are going on now are like a reaction to that, where we had a black and white, crazy black and white world after World War II. It was like this, this, this, this. Everything was completely hermetic and black and white. The world doesn’t work that way. There is, fluidity does exist. It only exists on the edges. And if we try to eliminate fluidity, if we try to eliminate exceptions and strangeness, then it’ll come back with a vengeance. So in the Bible, you have this image, for example, of the field, and the Israelites were supposed to till their field, but leave the corners untilled. So you’re supposed to leave the corners untilled for the stranger and the poor and the stranger. So the sense in which the world can’t be completely, can’t be completely filled. You have to leave a remainder on the edge. And the idea of having a fringe on your vestment, for example, is a good example. So it’s like you have, the hem of your vestment stops. Then you leave a little bit of wild on the edge. That’s something that has always existed in all societies. So I’m not trying to justify morally this or that behavior, but there’s a man in which traditional societies would always recognize that exceptions happen, and that we just have to kind of deal with it privately and not deal with it publicly in a way that is related to law, but deal with it privately in the world of exceptions and strangers and in the places where our own symbols don’t totally fit with that which is symbolized. And now the fringes are at the center of society. People who frequently, I hate to be offensive, they frequently look like gargoyles, are at the center of society. And I also can’t help but notice that the people who mutilate themselves in these ways and who, it’s not merely that a man is dressing up like Donna Reed, okay? It’s usually a man mutilating himself in ways that often seem to have very little to do with sex or that are extraordinary caricatures of what a woman is, or very frequently that involve occult symbolism. I mean overtly occult symbolism here. And if you put that sort of ugliness, if you make yourself uglier than you otherwise would be and you put that ugliness at the center of a society, my question that I struggle with is, why don’t we all just reject it out of hand and say, yuck, between a beautiful artistic environment and this cult of ugliness, give me the beauty. Why are we still being drawn into this? I think it’s actually, this is more something like a sign of the times. So think about, okay, so a normal society will always have some of that. It’s there in every traditional society. So think about carnival. So traditional societies had a carnival. And that carnival would be the place where all the idiosyncrasy, upside down behavior, strangeness, a little bit of lewdness, a little bit of that, a little bit of drunkenness. It’s like, okay, we kind of open the valve a little bit, let some of that out, then we close it down and we go back into normal world. And so this is something we see in the Jewish tradition, the apurim, we have things like Mardi Gras, and we still have, let’s say, Halloween as an example of that moment where we kind of embody monstrosity and strangeness and exception. So this is something that has always been part of every single traditional society in the history of the world. Now, think about as if this was a really, really big version of that cycle, and now the whole world is just a giant carnival. It’s all Mardi Gras. Right, it’s all Mardi Gras all the time, right? So I think that that’s the best way to understand it. So there is a manner in which, just like in a normal Mardi Gras, we would leave a little bit of space for that, and there’s something about understanding the reality of idiosyncrasy, which is necessary. That’s why there are gargoyles, that’s why, like on the edge of manuscripts, there’d be all these funny figures doing weird things, because that is actually part of reality. If we deny it, like if we deny it, we’re denying a part of reality, and the world is gonna fix and crystallize, and it’s gonna shatter. And so that’s it, that’s where we are. We’re basically in the massive carnival. Now the problem is that living in a carnival is not, for a very long time, is not good for your soul, and making carnival your identity. I mean, think of a carnival, for example. We have an image of the carnies, and those images are not just cliches, like people who live in the carnival all the time, they tend to degenerate and fall into their own passions and have very dangerous lifestyles, I’d say, and so it’s like, think about it, now a whole society that is worshiping the carnie, this is, it’s not a good moment, it’s not a good spot, but the solution, I honestly think that the solution is not to just bring the knife down and say, chop. The solution is really to say we need to find a way to understand the inevitability of strangeness and find ways to integrate it, so having proper Mardi Gras, like having proper celebrations, but then also then saying, okay, well, we’re done, now let’s move into normality. So I think that’s, I think that conservatives have to, I know it’s difficult because conservatives have a very large disgust mechanism, like they tend to get disgusted, which I understand, but we can’t just rely on that. We need to, if we want to find a better world, we need to be able to understand the inevitability of strangeness. This is gonna be part of your world no matter what, you can’t get away from it. But you have to put it in its proper place. That’s right, it has to be in its proper place, which is on the fringe, that’s what, all the language, it’s already that, like the fringe, the margin, the exception, like the water on the edge of the world, right, the fluidity that exists on the edge of reality.