https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XYju045Z1hU
I’ll ask you next then about our dominant scientism, if I may call it that. And how may people maybe on the margins come to see and see through that as a crude story, say with the likes of Pinker’s naiveté, which I think you pointed out nicely in your critique. Well, it’s very it’s very it’s really the science of consciousness, which is helping people understand this or the science of perception. And I think as an artist, I come to it so intuitively because when you’re an artist and you make an image, you realize that you are actually you have to synthesize what you’re looking at because there’s too much of what you’re looking at. And then you once you realize that you have to do that for an image, you actually realize realizing that you’re doing it in your mind all the time. So the idea is that the world has too much stuff in it. That’s pretty much it. The world is indefinite in in in detail. You know, it scales all the way up and scales all the way down to, you know, to quantum possibility. And so because of that, in order in order for you to even notice anything, there has to be a reason for you to to to notice something that categories are bound up in reason that there’s a meaning for them and that. That if I consider things and I put them in hierarchies of importance and I have to or else I would bump my knee into the table if I didn’t have a hierarchy of importance, like I would, you know, I would eat dirt. I would like we all have this like irony. We have a natural hierarchy of importance. And that hierarchy of importance is what precedes the scientific world. It precedes scientific perception. That is, you need a reason to look at something for it to then become a category that you can analyze. So science doesn’t give you the categories. And it doesn’t give you any category, actually. It can only analyze preexisting categories. Can only give you and it does it very well. It can describe it. It can quantify, can predict. It can make even help you reproduce an identity. But it doesn’t give you the identity ever. Identities are already given. And those and the place from which that comes is the very deep structure of being that we participate in for meaning. It’s the revenge of Aristotle. It’s the revenge of Plato. It’s like all of a sudden you realize that when Aristotle talked about potentiality and the connection between the actual and the potential, it’s like that’s actually how the world exists. Like it really does exist. Because the in front of you is a field of it’s like an indefinite field of potentiality. And you have to constrain constrain it in order to engage with it. Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks, Jonathan. And is there also the problem that baked into a lot of those conceptions? You have this myth of progress that is taken as an axiom, as it were, which I think you see in liberal types like Pinker, like Sam Harris and so on. And that progress, initial progress doesn’t make any sense to me. Well, because it’s like it’s hilarious. The progress is the funniest thing in the modern world. It’s one of the it’s one of the biggest, most hilarious thing for a scientific materialist, because progress. It takes for granted atelos, there’s no way around that for you to progress. You have to be progressing towards something. But if you tell me that there is no telos in the world, then I don’t understand even what you’re talking about. And what happens with these people, with Sam Harris and Pinker and Weinstein, is that. They have a moral structure. And it’s actually it’s given to them exactly in the way that I’m saying, it’s given to them, it precedes their perception. But they’re there, they don’t have the capacity. To notice that. And the thing is that most people don’t and it’s fine, like most people don’t like, you know, the regular people you find on the street, they can’t perceive their given moral pattern. They can’t perceive it. And it’s actually probably better that they can’t, you know, it’s like most people shouldn’t be able to do that. But if you’re the guy attacking moral precepts, if you’re the guy attacking spiritual reality, if you’re the guy who’s mocking ritual and who’s mocking the idea that there are these deep pockets. And you’re not the only one who’s acting with a set of patterns in the world, yet you’re acting with a given invisible to you set of moral patterns, then I have no patience. Like I get really impatient with that stuff. Yeah. I think from and from my experience, this kind of liberal and seems to think that the enlightenment ideas are all still fine. And because it’s failed and doesn’t mean that it can’t succeed. It’s like the kind of that wasn’t really socialism myth. And I don’t think that things align with what Tom Holland, for example, talks about things like human rights make sense. Ultimately, if they’re just going to steal a part of the Judeo-Christian story, the difference, I think, between Stephen Toppenhugh in his book and say, Yvonne Illich, who’s really powerful and deconstructing some of this stuff as David Keighley describes in his article too. Would you like to speak a bit to that and the mistakes involved in that kind of dominant ideological faith that they have? Yeah, Tom Holland really Tom Holland’s dominion book is amazing. It’s really astounding because there’s also like there’s also like there’s there’s some parts of that book that there is some mischief in it. Like you can see Tom Holland is being very mischievous because one of the figures that appears right at the outset of the enlightenment is the Marky the sad. And and oh my goodness, like Stephen Pinker wouldn’t like to talk about that guy. And what happens is it’s interesting because Pinker and these people what they’ve done. It’s really a wonderful trick is that the enlightenment happens. And then, as soon as the enlightenment manifests itself, all the dark, dark aspects of what that implies come to the fore, right, sasser mazak said market sad right away. And then there they are like right the worst of everything torture, you know, like all the worst sexual things, you know, this idea of power over others and and all of this like just comes right out. And what Stephen Pinker and them do is they just say, oh, that’s the counter enlightenment. And like they have a weird strategy, which is to somehow connect the counter enlightenment with the dark ages that they are opposing. So somehow it doesn’t make any sense. But somehow they don’t see like the rise of rationality has nothing to do with the Middle Ages. The point is like read Thomas Aquinas like read read. They were the most rational people that have ever existed. Right. It’s just that they understood that reason came from first principle, they understood that the system of reason had axioms that could be seen as culminating up into something infinite, but they were extremely reasonable. Anyway, so that’s their strategy, but it’s a it’s a it’s a really annoying. It’s very annoying and very silly. It’s like, what is it that book? What is it that that book against postmodernism? I forget the name of it, understanding postmodernism, you know, and that book, he basically places postmodernism into Kant. He has to put it all the way back in the enlightenment in order to say to kind of justify his position. But these two opposites are part of each other. You know, I pointed to the I pointed to the Goya’s famous engraving there, but he’s probably seen, which is you see a man sleeping and you see all these kind of monsters coming out. And it says, it’s written on it, the sleep of reason produces monsters. And I trying to point to that and say, there is a normal human cycle of being, which is awake and sleep. What Steven Pinker is telling us is, if you just stay awake all the time, then you won’t have any problems. And then if you fall asleep, then I can get angry at you and say, hey, I told you to just stay awake. Like, if you just stay awake, then you’ll have none of these problems like the monsters come when you fall asleep. So don’t fall asleep. But this is absurd. That’s not how human beings work. This is a this is a complete misunderstanding of reality. And so. And so to me, it just it anyways, we’ll see. We’ll see how it plays out. But for sure, right now we can see the the reappearance of the monsters have been kind of bubbling up since World War Two was like a reprieve because it was a massive shock. It was almost like a massive shock, massive human sacrifice. And then all of a sudden, there was this reprieve which lasted a generation. But now here we are. We’re at the end of that reprieve. And now we’re seeing the monsters come out of the closet again. And you can scream reason all day long. That’s just not how the world works. You