https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uUVRB2lqWzc
The way to understand that there’s an old world and there’s a new world is to the extent to which people look at the old world or look at medieval art or medieval stories or medieval world and can’t make heads or tails of it. Have no idea what they’re looking at. You know, they think they’re just looking at a bunch of crazy people that must have been insane because how could they produce such images, such stories, such legends? And so because of that, you know, you get the arrogance of the Enlightenment and the arrogance of the new atheist types who look at everything before them as this kind of stupid superstition. The entire world before me were just a bunch of idiots because I look at what they’re saying and I look at what they’re doing and I can’t understand it. And so I think that that is a testimony to the fact that there definitely is something that happened, a break, a shift. Whereas when you go overseas or you go to more traditional societies and you encounter people, you realize that they have something in common. There’s something in common about the capacity to view the spiritual world as being embodied in reality and seeing how these things and they have their different ways of talking about it or describing it. But for them, it’s a completely natural moment. And I had a funny moment one time when I was in Haiti, actually. I was in Haiti and I was talking to a bunch of carvers and I was helping them out because I work with artisans overseas. And they were kind of talking and talking and then all of a sudden I said that I was Orthodox and they looked at each other and then they started talking and they were saying things amongst themselves. And then I kind of hinted at the fact that I could understand what they were saying. They looked at each other and they said, oh, the Orthodox, they have a bit of the mystical vision. And you can realize that what they were saying to each other was usually when I’m with a white person, we don’t talk about this stuff because they don’t understand it. They have no sense of what we’re discussing. But all of a sudden they had this weird hint that maybe this guy has a little bit of a glimpse into the notion that there’s this connection between the spiritual world and the embodied world. I took my family, three daughters at the time. We were Orthodox Christian missionaries in Haiti. And I know it’s super reality what you’re saying. And you know where it was manifest in their understanding of icon. So the Protestant missionaries there had struggled with our icons in our house. So we’re foreigners and they come walking into our house and they’re very taken aback by the fact that we had icons. And they kept saying, why did you adopt the pagan traditions? It’s hilarious. Whoa, because we had done the Serbian tradition of, I think more, but for sure the Serbs do this where they take a candle and burn a cross just over the door, over all the entrance ways, just as a blessing. And they saw that and boo! We had it. But you’re right, we could meet on a different level. It can be a scary world though, because… So talk to us about what the new world in your mind or in your work, what did it do to the mind the way we think or perhaps even better to art? What happened as you see it in terms of the mind and then culture? Well, the way that I understand, let’s say this new world or the development of this new world or the development of the modern world is I see it as a form of de-incarnation, as a form of… It’s kind of like a breakdown of Christianity. And I think it’s part of the story. I think it has to happen. It’s part of the scandal that Christ talked about. And so I don’t… I’m annoyed with it because I’m in it and I have to deal with the consequences of it. But I also think that it’s part of the story. And the way that I see it is that it’s as if the two… If in Christ the invisible and the visible were joined. And if in Christ that became explicit, like the notion of the invisible and the visible joined together in one person perfectly with all the ways that we tried to describe it in the councils, then it also… It seems to have opened up a possibility that now that we know about these… Now that we have clear formulations about two natures and about all this stuff, then it’s at some point in the late middle ages, in the early modern period, it started to split apart. And then what you ended up seeing is you ended up seeing descriptions of God which became more and more removed from reality, leading up to deism, where this idea is that God is basically so outside the world that he’s actually arbitrary. It’s completely arbitrary. There’s no connection between God and the way that the world lays itself out. Or a more kind of a stranger version, which is the idea that God is basically just like a super being with a lot of powers. And so it’s like he’s basically like the Marvel Comics version of God. He’s like a super being with a lot of really, really powerful. And that’s usually the God that the new Atheist types like to attack because some people do really believe in a God like that. It’s like, how can God listen to all the prayers of all the world? Because what kind of brain would he have to process all the prayers of the entire cosmos? It’s like, that’s not possible. It’s not scientifically possible. That kind of nonsense. And so those are the two extremes. One of them gave form to idealisms and kind of abstraction. And the other gave form to brute materialism. And so it afforded us some power. It afforded us real power, which is the development of extremely subtle theories of mathematics, extremely subtle theories of the notion of algorithms, all these patterns that people are, that the scientists are able to perceive, and also a force in the world to create technologies, to create medicine, to create all of this. So it afforded us a power, but because of the de-incarnation, then it also leads us astray and leads to fragmentation. It leads to the breakdown, the social breakdowns that we see. And then the clampdowns, which are the reaction. So you have a breakdown, things start to break down. People notice that there’s nothing, there’s things aren’t holding us together. And now what we want to do is you want to overcompensate by creating systems of control. So you have totalitarian states coming together at the same time as you have this kind of crazy excesses of passions and excessive. So you have the roaring twenties, and then you have the Nazi Germans, right? It’s like you have these excesses which start to manifest themselves. Is that what you see when you see, you’re in Canada, but you see in our country that there’s people marching into the, I don’t see blue and red there or right and left. I see people trying to put together, put back together a world that they know is coming apart in their bellies. They know it in their gut. Do you see it? Is that? I think that’s exactly the right way to understand it. Is that as we’ve moved away from the thing that unites us, as we, you know, as we’ve, and you can see like the idea that it’s like one nation under God is actually a very late statement, you know, in the story of America. But you notice that the reason why it was put there was almost like to say, we’re noticing that we’re not a nation under God anymore. So we have to say it, like we have to say it so that it stays true for a while, at least. And then that leads to the other opposite, which is, it’s like, no, we know we can’t be, we can’t put religion into the state. And so all of this, it’s always like a move between a breakdown and an overcompensation. And so that’s what we’re seeing right now is that you have two sides, one side, which wants to affirm nation identity, you know, and this closed borders, all of this type of talk. And then you have another side, which is basically saying identity is evil. You know, any form of identity is evil. It’s all about multiplicity. It’s all about the outside is better than the inside. The stranger is better than the national. So it’s like these two, it really is these two extremes. And so they can’t, there’s no way for them to come together. And then both of them can’t see the other. They can’t see, they can only see the sins of the other person. They can’t see the, the, the, the, the value in the discourse of the other. And so when the left is violent, it doesn’t see it. And when the right is violent, it’s, it’s, so they only see the violence of the right and the right tends to see the violence of the left. And so it’s like, it’s, it’s, so you can have, you can have an autonomous zone in Seattle for months, but when the right attacks a federal building, it’s like, oh my God, it’s the end of the world. It’s like, this has been happening since March. This whole, this has been going on for months and months, but it’s like, so there’s this weird, weird in capability of seeing, and seeing the other side. That’s a dangerous place.