https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=auQDpfLVViI
A common theme of your sort of criticism of modernity and also of recent artistic development is a sort of disregard for meaning and for pattern, right? No, well there’s both. There’s actually like a hyper pattern you could say, a pattern that is so abstract that almost no one cares about it. Because a lot of the modern, yeah, and then there’s the opposite, then there is also like anything goes, whatever you can do. So both these seem to happen at the same time. Okay, so what I was thinking was sometimes when let’s say a person whose outlook of the world, maybe a Christian, that sees meaning and pattern in the world as something objective that exists and that reveals a truth that is there independent of me, a conversation between this person and a person who is a complete relativist for example and doesn’t believe in any meaning or any pattern, usually what I find when I have those conversations is the person that doesn’t believe in any sort of pattern feels very much restrained when they are sort of pushed to believe in a pattern. But if they don’t, they have to disregard for example human nature because human nature is a form of a pattern, right? Yeah, no they’re stuck, you know. I totally agree, I agree with your sentiment. That is that you can see it like in the modern world, this desire to free ourselves from the pattern has led to things that are so abhorrent and absurd that, you know, for a good example would be, you know, let’s say deconstructive architecture in the 1980s and 90s. And so, you know, architects would create buildings with like just a massive hole in the living room. It’s like, okay, there actually are patterns. You cannot live in a house that has like a 10-foot hole in the living room because it’s just not going to happen, right? So it actually, it’s like it’s as if some of the modern, I think some of the experimental music in some ways, it actually reveals the pattern. And so it’s like you can make an effort and listen to like, it’s a minimalistic acoustic music and listen to, you know, someone like grading the side of a counter for an hour. Like you can do it, it’s not impossible to do it, but it’s like it actually reveals just how difficult it is to get there. And so we have, for example, like for someone who doesn’t think we have patterns, like we have a certain frequency of sound that we’re able to hear. It’s very simple. We have a certain level of decibel of volume that we’re able or that we can sustain hearing, that we’re able to hear and that we can sustain hearing. Those are patterns you just cannot, you cannot avoid these patterns. Like you could destroy someone’s hearing if you don’t pay attention to these patterns. And so, and then there is a certain level of variation which people find pleasant. And those are probably, they’re probably derived from the human voice. They’re probably derived from our thousands and thousands, millions of years of hearing human intonation and hearing the space that exists in our intonation. And so their derivations, and probably concentrations and derivations of the possible tonalities in the human voice. And so I don’t think, I don’t think, I don’t see how even the most secular person could think that that’s absurd. It’s like these are just, these are just kind of like natural, you know, and you could say something like, you could say something like, you know, there are certain birds that make certain sounds and if the male bird makes certain sounds to attract the female and if they’re off, they won’t get, they won’t reproduce themselves. And I think that that’s true about music. Like I think that there are certain, there’s a certain, like, you know, I mean, I don’t mean, I mean, yeah, of course there’s a musician getting laid or whatever, but that’s not what I mean. But I mean is that there’s also, like, what I mean is that just that if certain sounds don’t continue, let’s say there’s a certain perseverance of sonority and distance between sounds, then those will become one-off experiments and then they’ll go away. Whereas some things will just continue. The things that continue is because we like them, we care about them, and we want to, we want to kind of perpetuate them. So I think that even like from almost like a Darwinian perspective, you can argue for patterns. So, as a fellow, so, so basically what I think what I get from that is that we all live, whether we believe in patterns and meaning or not, we all live as if they exist. We just can’t escape, escape it. They exist and we live according to them. But in this sort of conversation that I was talking about, the person that doesn’t believe in them, or rather the person lives as if they exist, but feels restricted when they have to accept the truth that comes with those, with those meanings and those patterns. So I wonder if you could talk about the relationship between, or the necessity, the necessary relationship between truth and objectivity and these patterns and these meanings. Well, it’s pride. And I think it’s like, if you want to understand all the, like the source of sin, you could say, right in the world, that’s what it is. It’s saying, I don’t, there, like, I, there are patterns that have authority over me. And I don’t care, like, either you just can’t get away from it, right? You can’t eat rocks, you can’t, there are a bunch of things that you cannot do. There are some patterns that have authority over you and you exist within that, that, that’s the scope of those patterns. So that exists both objectively even in the natural world, but it also exists in the human world. Like we have, we necessarily have people that are authorities. We have our parents that were, that had to guide us. We have different structures of authority. And so I think that, I think that there’s just a, it’s just pride. It’s like, it’s the, that’s why we see that as the root of sin. It’s like the idea of self-causation is the idea that I can cause myself, right? I can completely contain myself. I can be free from any type of constraint. And, you know, there was a moment, I think, like there was a moment maybe in the late 19th and early 20th century, whereas people could credibly believe that. I really don’t see how anybody can believe that anymore because one of the things that happens too, which is hilarious because like in the early 20th century, really, I mean, I can have sympathy for them. Like I have sympathy for the, for the artists in the early 20th century. They’re like, we’ve got this, we’re going to do this. But then whatever happened between like, let’s say 1900 and, and, and maybe 1925, maybe, I don’t know in music, but in art and visual art, it’s like, then that set up a new way of doing that nobody has changed. It’s like experimental music or experimental art is no different now than it was in like 1920. It’s like the Dada artists did everything anybody can do now. It’s like not explicitly everything, but every idea that any, any contemporary artist has, you know, installations or whatever, or, or breaking these rules or whatever art that, that doesn’t last long, that, that, that, you know, that it’s like all of this was this, all this happened in 1920. And so what happened is like even the counterculture, like even the people that wanted to like break all the patterns, which rule over us created a, like a kind of weird anti-pattern that now people just follow. It’s like ridiculous. And so, you know, it’s like, who’s more conforming someone who goes to church or a punk rocker? I’m not sure which one is more conforming. Like they both have uniforms. They both, they both, you can recognize them. You can, you know, it’s just that one is like a kind of anti-pattern, but it’s still a pattern. And so I think that’s what happens. It’s like, that’s what happens with a lot of the, with a lot of the contemporary, or the idea of not wanting a pattern is that what you end up is you create an anti-pattern, which is still a pattern and you can recognize it. Right. You can tell it’s like, yeah, yeah, you’re just doing it upside down, dude. That’s all you’re doing. Cause you turn something upside down. Does it mean that it’s, I can’t still recognize it and still recognize it.