https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RvZzK2ZT6T0
The other, after a fashion, and I would say this, I’ve written that modernity, that is the modern project, is inherently violent. It wants to manage, control, change. It doesn’t want to be. It doesn’t want to behold. It doesn’t want communion. It wants to make things be what we want them to be, and in doing so, create the better world. That’s a dangerous slogan. I think that that’s something that, I mean, I think some people are starting to see it. Some people are trying to try to separate the wheat from the chaff. They don’t want to see the relationship between, let’s say, the modern project and modern thinking or the Enlightenment thinking and the environmental crisis, or the manner in which we treat reality. As Heidegger talked about this idea of the standing reserve, that we treat the world as just this reserve of physical potential that we can just take and make whatever we want to make. But I think that it’s an essential relationship, and it’s very difficult because it’s hard to see a way out of that. At least socially, it’s hard to see how, because we’ve gone so far down that road, that it’s very difficult to imagine it in political terms. The only way that I can imagine it is, like you said, in particular terms, to say, I will myself try then to inhabit a different life as much as it’s possible. The first habit of modern thought is to see something that’s wrong and then think about fixing it, which is like we leap to the political. Because I’m going to make a better world. I’m like, no, no, no, that was the problem to start with. Be a better world. You know, that sort of in the Christian spiritual tradition, if anything, it wants to tell us to slow down, to pay attention to who you are, to where you are, to pay attention to the particular. And of course, when I start talking like that, modern listeners get extremely nervous because they’re afraid if they do that, somehow or another, no one will pay attention to the larger world. Excuse me. I have a dog. That was his greeting of the mill, man. There you go. They have a particular relationship. But when we stop and slow down and we’re not going to control the world, the truth is, I like to ask people when they go all political about stuff, I kind of want to say, how’s that working for you? When was the last time you thought it actually, you know, changed anything? It mostly just changes and makes you angry. Yeah. And makes you feel self-righteous as well. That’s what happens is we feel self-righteous because we can look at the world and see how bad it is and say, well, shouldn’t we change this? Shouldn’t we change that? We’re not looking at our own sins, at our own frailties, at our own broken relationships. Yeah. One of the benefits of older times of living in a monarchy is you actually knew who you could blame. That it is the king. And so sort of one of the illusions of democracy is those who actually have the power have us all convinced that we’re in charge. It’s like in the Soviet Union, everybody voted for the same guy because you only had one candidate, but they were called like the Democratic Republic of so-and-so. And so Sultr Nitsyn writes and says basically, refuse to participate in the lie. Don’t do things you don’t actually agree to or whatever. It’s sort of trying calling his fellow citizens back to the particular and not being allowed to be abstractions. As a Christian, I just don’t know anything about how we change the world. I don’t think that we’re given that as a commandment. We’re given commandments about how to live, how to actually live. And I suppose you could do the math and say, if we actually live like that, it would add up to a better world. But that’s not my problem. That’s in the hands of God. And when I start thinking like that, I’ve exchanged being someone who lives right to someone who wants to make everybody else live right. And there’s the violence again of the modern world. And so instead, you slow down, you take a look, you start seeing beauty, you start living truth, you try to do the good thing. And doing this in the face of the particularities made known to us as a Christian, made known to us in Christ. This is what it looks like to do that. Yeah. And we have examples in history where we see how it actually changes. It actually does change the world. The example of the Christian martyrs is the most glorious example where here are these people basically just saying, no, this is, you know, I’m going to stay true to what I believe, stay true to who I am. But I’m not going to fight the social system. I’m going to accept to die, you know, and not protest and then change, transform the Roman Empire, converted the Roman Empire. It’s crazy to think that that’s possible. But we’ve seen the Christian story do that. And St. Francis of Assisi is a great example of that where he just said, it’s just me. I just, I’m the smallest of all. I am the servant of all. I’m, you know, I’m the… And then he changed Christianity until today. He transformed the Catholic Church by not wanting to revolutionize anything, by just wanting to follow Christ and to do these humble things. You know, everything changed. You know, it may not always work out like that, but a couple of years ago here in the U.S. and maybe still going on big, big debates about guns and things like that. And I, you know, you get on social media and there’s just, you know, no guns, lots of guns, hate, hate, hate. And I posted and just basically said, my response to it is, is I promise I will not kill you. That as a Christian, this is my, this is my promise to the world is I am not going to kill you because I believe in God and because I believe that he’s in charge of history and its outcome. I can tell you that I don’t need to kill you and I won’t kill you. Someone immediately said, but what if you live in a dangerous neighborhood? And I said, well, then I’ll move. I mean, it’s, I mean, it’s kind of… The response to that isn’t, well, let me get enough guns so that I, I mean, you can’t outgun them. They’ll just, you know, it’s like, don’t live like that. Don’t live like that. And I, you know, people can argue, was that practical? I just, you know, we, all I can say is, you know, bless God, it’s not working out. But these things and the arguments are endless and people are never getting around to just living. And you know, I think this is a fundamental part of the Christian vision is that we should live. I mean, I think one of the great present tragedies in Christianity is the highly politicized that are going on that in which many Christians are absolutely convinced that there’s a culture war and that their greatest Christian duty is to be a culture warrior. And you can get that from both left and right. And in that frequently, they’re all engaging in generalities. I mean, the culture war is us versus them, and us and them are both generalities. And there’s no, there’s no, there can be no love in it. And there’s no transformation, you know, if either side won, you still wouldn’t want to live in their world. Yeah. And I think that that’s, I mean, but at the same time, it’s true that that’s the hardest thing is the hardest thing is to it’s so much easier to be, you know, I say that because I’m on social media, I’m on YouTube, I’m doing all this. And it’s a lot easier to do that, to comment on different posts than to pay attention to the people who are around you, the people, you know, to your family, to your neighbors, to the community that’s directly around you and engage with them, see them as people and be a, you know, be that particular who is manifesting Christ and is seeing Christ and others, you know, to the most that they can do. But it’s, yeah, we get pulled. I mean, I feel it. I feel getting pulled into political sphere. I try to avoid it. People on my YouTube channel know that sometimes I like I go a little bit in and then I like, no, I need to get back. Because it’s a temptation. It’s a great temptation.