https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DXOlzvUG2zc
Harry Jaffa has this wonderful line that the West is saved or revitalized every time a human heart is saved from the dark night of nihilism and relativism. This is the premise also of my book. You’ve titled the book, How to Save the West, and of course, you feel a certain trepidation about people are going to look to you for some political program or some list of answers. But the point that I’m trying to make in the book, which Marcus, I think you get at really well, is actually the restitution, the restoration of every human heart is the project of the West. I think the first step to that, it cuts very close to everything we’ve been talking about, the first step to that has to be some recovery of the validity of symbols, of the fact that these are not arbitrary or accidental features of our biology, but are, I think you use the word primary, Jonathan, that they are in some sense a bedrock of reality. This is, I think, expressed very well in the Timaeus and carried forth by these Christian traditions we’ve been talking about. This is Jonathan Pagel. Welcome to the symbolic world. Welcome to More Christ. My name is Marcus. Today I’m joined once again by my friend, Jonathan Pagel. He’s been a great inspiration to me in this channel. Jonathan is a professional artist, writer and product speaker, giving workshops and conferences all around North America. He teaches carving, speaks and art, but mostly he explores symbolic structures that underlie our experience of the world. Through his YouTube channel and his podcast, the symbolic world, he furthers the conversational symbolism, meaning and patterns in everything from movies to icons to social trends. If I may go off a script here a bit and let you know about some exciting news. Jonathan and I are actually in the final stages of organizing an event with Paul Kingsmore, Dr. Martin Sean Dublin this June. So keep an eye out for that. You’ll be able to follow that on my YouTube channel and on event break and book tickets there. I’ll also be offering other events, one including Calvin Robinson, Rod Dreher and Fr. Ben Kiley. If you enjoy this conversation, you might enjoy that. That takes place in London on the 11th of March at Calvin’s church. I’m also joined today by one of my favorite podcasters, Dr. Spencer Claven. With a PhD in Classics, Spencer is the author of the new book, How to Save the West. He’s also an Assistant Editor of the Claremont Review of Books and American Mind at the Claremont Institute. Spencer’s literary expertise is aided by his knowledge of many languages, including ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew. He’s a scholar who enjoys exploring great works of literature. He provides valuable insights into today’s world. He’s also previously hosted Young Heretics and he’s been snapped up now by the Daily Wire. So I suppose first, if I might ask you both, what have you each found most insightful about the other’s work and what are some of the key areas that you’d like to explore today, I suppose, especially in line with Spencer’s new book? If I might start with you, Jonathan. Well, I haven’t, I mean, I mean, I haven’t read the new book, but one of the things that I found very interesting is that I met Spencer only once. I met him when I was at the Daily Wire and it was really interesting because it seemed like we were very much in line. He was quoting all my favorite passages from Dante at me. Like, what, what, like, what is this amazing? And so I feel like, I think like we’re, we’re like aligned on a kind of cosmic vision. And so I’m definitely looking forward to exploring that more with him and seeing, you know, how he brings that into his, his project. So. Yeah. I had that same experience, Jonathan. I think it’s the, I think it was Dante and Beatrice from the, from, from Paradiso that we were discussing. And it, it speaks to the place where I think we share the most. And that is this notion of, you know, you’re so eloquent about the symbolic and the way that we kind of experience, you know, I think that we currently have these two kind of toggle options in the public mind. One is there’s, there’s subjectivity and there’s objectivity, right? And objectivity is like the stuff that’s out there and it’s hard and you touch it. And then there’s the stuff that’s in here and it’s arbitrary and subjective. And I have really, you know, been insisting in my dogged way that there is a, a kind of middle space between those two modes of perception, which is properly called subjective in the sense that it involves a subject, right? There’s no such thing as beauty without a percipient, but it is not arbitrary. It doesn’t, you know, just come out of our pure will or what have you. Talk about a lot about that in the book. And you and I were, I think, sharing about your essay on the earth, right? Whether the earth revolves around the sun or the sun revolves around the earth. And that’s a kind of a classic example that actually the perceptive experience of how we experience the sun is not something that just gets to like vanish out of, out of thin air, simply because we kind of mathematically prove that it’s quote unquote objectively untrue. So that’s, I think the thing I love most about what Jonathan does. Thanks for sharing, gents. And so if we look at your book, even in broad strokes, then in How to Save the West, Spencer, you present five major crises threatening to end Western culture. Can you tell us what they are and then we can see how they align with some of the big challenges that Jonathan sees? Oh, sure. Well, I mean, the premise of the book is basically, you know, I think people wake up, the people that I talk to who listen to my podcast or what have you, I sense from them a real sense of despair and anxiety about just where the world is headed, about the news cycle, which seems to just constantly deliver, you know, crisis after crisis. And the way that people typically think about this is, you know, how can I fix things? And they think about it as if they were like Ron DeSantis, you know, they sort of imagine like, what law am I going to write tomorrow? What system am I going to build across the nation that will quote unquote, you know, fix the world or save the West? And I think that’s what causes that despair. I think when people think that way, they start to paralysis starts to set in because most of us aren’t Ron DeSantis. And most of us have been trained to think in these sweeping political terms, when what we really need is some agency over our own immediate surroundings and personal, you might even say subjective lives. And so the project of the book overall is to take some of these things that are kind of flitting past the news cycle and, you know, invite people into speculation about what deeper questions might be underlying them that are answerable in human terms at an individual human level. And so the first one I call the crisis of reality, and that’s related to what we were just talking about. It’s this, you know, is anything out there real? And if so, what? And do I want it to be? Is it convenient to me for there to be objective reality or even subjective reality? Or would I rather kind of dissolve the boundaries of true and false in some sort of digital space? And then, you know, from closely related to this is the crisis of the body, I think, is this uncomfortable relationship that we’ve had basically for as long as we’ve been around on the planet with our fleshly selves. What does the soul have to do with flesh? Why do we need this kind of appendage or meat sack that just decays and dies? And wouldn’t it be better if we could, you know, either manipulate it, rearrange it at will, or maybe just escape it altogether in some sort of, you know, code space. And so I kind of present as an antidote to that crisis, the arguments of Aquinas and, you know, drawing also on Aristotle for a hylomorphic world, for a world that is comprised of the fusion of form and matter threaded through, you know, at every point with order that is more than simply meat. And this is kind of what leads into the second half of the book, with the crisis of meaning and the crisis of religion. And that’s where you start to get into, you know, whether or not we can believe in the wake of the scientific revolution and the discovery of evolution, you know, whether we can be confident in the things that we perceive in this world that have no place on a brain scan, and yet we feel very powerfully to be true. Then finally, at last, having addressed some of those, what I consider deeper philosophical issues, I turn to the crisis of the regime, which is the, you know, the political issues facing America and kind of drawing on some of the history of political philosophy to, you know, describe how regimes have been understood to rise and fall so that we can understand kind of what the threats, what the particularly acute threats are to ours in America and where we might be headed. Wonderful. Thanks, Spencer. Would you like to go with any of those in particular to start off with, Jonathan? I mean, I think there’s many, there are many things there that are interesting to me. For sure, the question of how we can believe or, you know, how or why we should believe in the kind of scientific or post-scientific world, that is definitely one of the main projects that I’m trying to attend to. And so I’m definitely interested in the notion that cognitive science has afforded us a new space to talk about these things. That is the inevitability of patterning and the inevitability of, you know, framing in terms of how we see reality and how if you take that seriously, then in some ways it can recapture our, the phenomenological world. It can kind of recapture it as primary. It has to do with what you said in terms of the sun coming up in the morning, right? It’s like if you can realize that like the inevitability of this experience, right? Of this conscious experience and how it’s related to meaning in general and how we make meaning, then it seems like almost all of the categories that you find in ancient world, like in scripture or in the medieval world, can be recaptured. You know, I often give the example of going up a mountain. It’s like going up a mountain is an objective thing. It’s a subjective thing, but like in the way that you said subjective, but it has a stable pattern to it and you can recognize it and you can understand why Moses goes up a mountain to encounter God. It’s not, it’s something that you can actually comprehend and have a little experience of yourself. Yeah, you know, this is related to something I’d love for us to get into that you were actually touching on before we started recording. And that is the kind of fractaline nature of this stuff, the way in which reality, human experience seems to kind of consist in larger patterns that can be infinitely sort of nested within themselves one after the other. And I think this is something I sort of address in the book. I think this is one of the kind of dominant patterns of ancient Greek philosophical thought, which is, has been lost to us and needs recovering. You see it maybe most clearly in Plato’s Republic, this notion that the city is a kind of soul mapped over many, many people. And therefore the soul is a kind of city nested within a single individually. And in both cases, order is the kind of spirit shared among these two things. Man as the microcosm is the kind of classic tagline for talking about this. And I wonder, you’re mentioning cognitive science. I wonder if that concept in particular, this idea that, you know, the log-os, which is either threaded through creation or expressed in creation, however you want to put it, finds a kind of little mini reiteration in the human mind. Oh, I think so. I think that the fractal, to me, the fractal structure, that’s the solution, at least to help people see what’s going on. And one of the things I think we have access to right now that in some ways, it’s hard to know to what extent the ancients had access to it. I think they did, but they would, you know, the idea of microcosm, macrocosm, for example, you find that, of course, like you said, in the Greek thinkers in Plato, and then it winds itself into Christianity and finds its place in St. Maximus and in the more cosmic looking Christian thinkers. But there’s a sense in which that microcosm, macrocosm is actually indefinite in number. So it’s not that there’s like one microcosm and then the macrocosm, it’s that there’s levels. And if you read St. Maximus, you kind of see it. It’s like the individual is the church, is the cosmos. And so it’s like the individual is the city, is the cosmos. There are these different ways you can frame it, but you can go individual church cosmos, you can go individual family, church nation, like you can, there are all these ways in which these nested relationships work. And then you can go down from the individual actually into the manner in which your parts fit into you, right? And that there’s a kind of an indefinite way in which anything that has multiplicity joins into unity. And so this is like a stable pattern. And it’s like the one of the many, basically is nothing new, we’re not making anything up. But that understanding that it nest itself all the way through is really, I think it’s a solution to so many of the problems that we have, because even in terms of politics, I always see modernity as a splitting of heaven and earth. That’s the way that I understand it. It accounts for more of modernity than some people sometimes, because people see in modernity, the Leviathan, right? And then you also see the kind of noble savage idea, but those are the two things happening simultaneously. So it’s like one is calling the other. So the idea that heaven and earth are separating, and that that is reducing the fractal relationships. So you end up with something like, you know, whatever globalist, world government, whatever, like, obviously, this is a little caricatured, and then idiosyncratic, you know, I make up my own identity, whatever that is, like, I can be a cat man or whatever at the bottom, right? So it’s like these two extremes happening. And the fractal is the way to connect them together. Fascinating. It’s intriguing, actually, to think that, you know, in the scientific revolution, you have notionally, you have this connection between the sublunary and the superlunary spheres that there was supposed to be this division, you know, at the orbit of the moon. But in point of fact, what you’re saying is that in some ways, the whole of physical creation, physical existence was kind of brought down to the level of the sublunary and split off, cut off from its heavenly sort of vertical dimension, which is really cool, a cool way of thinking about it. I also think that this, you know, is a mode of scriptural interpretation that can be very fertile and fruitful when you’re trying to think about these questions like, can we believe, how can we believe, how should we relate to these texts, which have been so kind of maligned and dismissed as like Stone Age superstition or what have you. But the other night I was having a conversation about, you know, is the, when God says to the nation of Israel, you know, I know the plans I have for you, plans of good and not of evil, plans to prosper you. Is he just saying it to the nation of Israel about the exile in Babylon? And is the effort to kind of extract this verse, as people often do out of context, is that effort just fundamentally misguided and kind of feature of American Christian happy talk. And one of the things that I was drawing on in that conversation is this notion, which I think I got from Aquinas, although I’m not totally sure if I’m right about that, but you know, this notion that it’s somewhere in between those two things, right? This is not just a kind of floating set of words that you can apply to any situation anywhere, but neither is it limited in its time at space context or else none of scripture would really have any meaning for us at all. There’s got to be some kind of analogical link that you can draw between the historical experiences of the Jewish nation in relationship to God and whatever it is that’s going on around us at a cosmic level. And I think this is this kind of infinite nesting that you’re suggesting is, is the link. It’s really important what you say that like there’s no, there’s no ceiling to this. It’s not like macrocosm and macrocosm absolutely, or like there’s just two options, but rather this is a kind of infinite chain. And so you could say, well, Israel in its kind of nationhood represents or stands in for, but that’s even not quite right. In some ways embodies a cosmic man, just as Adam also can be conceived of as cosmic man and Christ, of course, as well. And once you kind of get into this, there’s a million different ways that you can legitimately and meaningfully kind of draw significance out of these historical events without just kind of reducing them to like platitudes or. Yeah. You’re so right. I mean, it’s so right. And I think it’s that is bound in the script, the scripture itself, you know, it’s bound in the way the scripture relates these together. So if you think about what you said in terms of the nation of Israel, the covenant that God makes with the nation of Israel, and you think of that already in the covenant itself, there’s a fractal relationship that gets set up, which is increasing. So God makes this deal with Moses and then Moses says, like, I can’t do it alone, whatever. And God sets up mediations between Moses and the people. So you have God, then you have Moses, then you have these mediations. And then it says Israel will be a priestly nation. What does that mean? Like priests for the west of the world. That’s what it means. And so the role that Moses is playing to Israel is the role that Israel is supposed to play to the world. And that is that is set up in the text itself. And if you see then from Exodus and you kind of move on into the story of the Bible, you come to a point where this seems to be increasing and increasing to the point where God’s saying, you know, I will, I will fill the entire earth with my spirit. Right. It’s like we will as if, you know, when he when the promise was made to to Abraham to make the descendants as numerous as the stars, you get a sense even in the Old Testament that this is going to be more than than just the strict nation of Israel. And we’re moving towards a time where God’s spirit will pour out into all flesh. So if you see that as this fractal nesting, where it’s like these these increasing circles, it’s like I think it’s right there in the text. And so it’s not I don’t think we’re I don’t think we’re just trying to interpret something that that that that we want to be there. I think it’s there in the order of revelation itself. It’s remarkable. I mean, of course, the prophets maybe wrestle with this most fruitfully in the lead up to the exile and then in the restoration, this in this, you know, the sort of building of the second temple. I sort of discern it’s not so much a disagreement is just a kind of mystery or a kind of waiting about that very question. Like when the nations come to Zion, like what will that look like? How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? And and how is it possible for other cultures with distinctive kind of practices and this whole separate symbolic language, perhaps mutually unintelligible to the you know, to the Jewish nation, right? You know, the tire and bastion and just all these other, I mean, nations that haven’t even been known or named yet will come to Zion. And you have this image, I suppose, you know, in Isaiah 60, for instance, of like Zion as this kind of ineffable core, right, this kind of meaning beyond language, beyond symbolic expression, that joins together all of these nations, which, you know, horizontally amongst themselves have nothing in common and are mutually unintelligible or even adversarial in the case of Babylon, Syria. And this, you know, this kind of symbolic or analogical relationship that they’re able to develop is kind of I think the glimpse of that in the prophetic visions. Let me ask you a question that may well be above our pay grade as human beings and therefore unanswerable just to make it as easy on you. Yeah, why not? Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, since here we are. And that is, it seems to me that this kind of nested structure, this representative symbolic structure is inherent in the Trinity itself. In other words, it’s not simply something that has to do with the way that God must express in itself to man and among humanity because of our distance from him or because of our, you know, embodiment in matter. But that actually it comes along even in a prelapsarian way, bound up with our nature as images of God, that we are three in one already kind of within an individual. There’s symbolic language going on even in our thought, private thoughts to ourselves. Aristotle says, you know, no thought is an image, but no thought takes place without images, without pictures, fantasia either. And I wonder whether Trinitarian theology, I mean, you would know a lot more about the patristic literature on this than I would, you know, whether it’s a kind of an article of Trinitarian faith that something about this symbolic gesture is inherent in God’s nature of itself. I mean, obviously, I don’t want to misstep. I always hate talking about Trinitarian theology, less than when someone calls me a heretic, you know, and I don’t even know why. But I think that definitely the one I think the moon of the mysteries of the revelation of the Trinity is the the notion that multiplicity is in the Godhead, right? That in God is both perfect unity and perfect multiplicity. And in some ways, it has to be represented as an aporia, because obviously, we can’t make sense of it. But it’s not an aporia that is just arbitrary or illogical, because we can see in that aporia of proposing perfect unity and perfect multiplicity, that we see that happen at lower and more imperfect levels in the world. So in the world, we notice the coexistence of unity and multiplicity. And we can see when that is balanced, like when there’s we could say, when there’s love, and love is holding multiplicity in unity, and we can see that. So I think that I think that we are meant to live as an image of the Trinity, for sure. And I think that and I thought that’s why I really do believe that the truth I mean, I’m preaching for my for my own parish or whatever. But I do believe that the Trinitarian revelation in some ways is met even metaphysically, it’s like the deepest. It’s the deepest way to talk about the infinite that that I can think of, because the problem with with a kind of monadic vision, right of the one and that that type of language. And I mean, I don’t want to reduce the new Platonist, but you know, it’s it can be dangerous, because it tends to diminish, it tends to diminish multiplicity as being derivative and as being, you know, almost fallen in itself, like a kind of Gnostic move that we saw at the in the beginning of Christianity. But Trinitarianism really puts multiplicity as being in the very infinite itself. That’s astounding to me, like it’s a it’s a beautiful image. It’s a return to Dante, you know, I think of his beatific vision when he finally makes it. And as you say, it’s it’s aporetic in some sense, he loses his power of speech as he frequently does in the presence of the divine. And yet it’s quite a definite and really quite strange image. I mean, I’ve always thought that, you know, his his image of the Godhead is one that you could you could never dream up sort of on your own, you know, it feels very right. And yet he comes out with it. And you’re sort of like, that’s quite surprising. And, you know, it’s significant, it seems that, you know, as we’ve been talking about symbolism, about the sort of fractal nesting and all of that, we almost can’t escape some form of hierarchic language, right. And, you know, we make all these caveats, we say, you know, and yet you always get the kind of bigger within the smaller or the and the thing that binds them is the form. What Dante gives us is these three circles of distinct colors. And so of course, the circle is, you know, a kind of perfection of form. He’s able to distinguish between these entities while also, you know, affording to them a kind of perfect synonymity or a perfect, you know, identity with with one another. And I will be loose with my language and ask for the forgiveness of the audience to, you know, when it comes to heresy. But that seems to me that what Dante is, is getting at that there is, you know, that although in this world, and you know, because creation creation being what it is creating things that are other than God, right, you know, there’s always going to be a kind of graded variation of hierarchy within creation. And that’s nothing evil or wrong about that. But we also see, as you said, on kind of levels, where all are equal, you can nevertheless have a kind of multiplicity. And that that image at the end of Dante, I think, kind of tries to capture what that would be at its highest in the Godhead. Yeah, I mean, I agree. And I think that in terms of the Trinity, it’s interesting to see, I mean, it’s obviously different fathers and different, there are different strands of how they talk about it, how they represented, but there seems to be on the one hand, you can kind of feel this tension, right, to not represent the relationships as hierarchical, right. So it’s like, no, it’s a higher, you hear things like it’s a hierarchy of function, but it’s not a hierarchy of nature, like there’s different ways to talk about it. But I think it’s like they’re trying, it’s again, it’s an aporia, there’s an aporia in the sense that there’s a kind of distinction of function, which appears in some ways as a, as a hierarchy, but because it’s put into the infinite, that hierarchy also dissolves at the same time into, you know, into the infinite, I don’t know what how was to say it. And so it gives us a model. In some ways, it becomes a kind of infinite model of how we again, notice the way things work. So a really beautiful image of that, I think, is, for example, when Christ, you know, so like Christ says, you know, I call you my friends, it’s a beautiful image because the disciples are not the one calling Christ his friends, right. It’s like, it’s not the disciples saying, hey buddy, Jesus, Jesus, my buddy, like they’re not the ones doing that. Christ is the one saying that. So it’s as if there’s an acknowledgement of some, of a hierarchy, but then that hierarchy is almost reduced in Christ calling the disciples to participate fully in him. And so it’s like this, it’s really powerful to think that it both, both tells us like Christ is above them. And he, so when he, even when he watches their feet, it’s like, there’s a reason why they’re shocked is because this is, this is actually this kind of Kenotic movement that’s happening from above down below. So it actually reinstates the hierarchy, even when he’s watching his feet, I’m sorry, Christians, he’s, he’s watching their feet and they’re all shocked. And so it’s both him like losing himself in, in that lower part, but then also reinstating it inevitably just by the fact that he’s doing it. So it’s like that type of move or the types of moves that Christ does to, to at least give us a hint of how this kind of equal equality and hierarchy can, can exist in it, how it seems to exist infinitely in God somehow. I don’t know how to phrase it, but. Well, it’s threads right through so many of his sayings, not just that moment, which you’re right is I’ve never quite thought of it that way. It’s very beautiful, beautiful, beautiful in its simplicity almost. But also, you know, he who would be first must be last, right? Is kind of the, the little nomic version of, of what you’re saying. And, and also the parable where the, you know, the keeper of the feast says friend go up higher. You know, it’s not that like, if you put yourself there, somehow you’ve, you’ve destroyed the entire dance. And yet if you, you know, offer yourself in humility, then you’ve created the opportunity for that, for that philia to be kind of offered. There’s, there’s a, a little tossed off comment somewhere in CS Lewis. I’m going to forget where he, he does it, but he mentions that condescension is this beautiful word that we have spoiled. And there’s, it’s a beautiful idea. I mean, when I discendo, when I go down con with you, or you condescend to me, our sort of, you know, maybe it has to do with what Alexis de Tocqueville says about Americans, that there’s a kind of mania for equality in us, that it can kind of be let loose. And we have this egalitarian kind of rankling that I’m as good as you and nobody is born, you know, at the natural master of any other. And all of these things, of course, you know, are true in a certain sense. And yet, as you say, we recognize everywhere around us, that there are people with, you know, greater gifts than us, people with other gifts from us, or in positions where they have for one reason or another, you know, their grace consists precisely in, you know, lifting us up out of a lower position, which you can’t celebrate or be grateful for or acknowledge if you insist that you were already in the higher position on the same plane with the person to begin with. So this, I mean, even the way that we use that word condescension as if it were some sort of inherently snide or sneering action, when in fact, it’s the whole basis almost of love, or at least a certain kind of love. I think you’ve got it right. And it’s, in some ways, because I’ve talked about it, I’ve been talking about hierarchy for years, right? And a lot of people, and even because I’m talking about hierarchy sometimes in the wake of Jordan Peterson. And so Jordan, at first, was always talking about dominance hierarchies, if you remember, he doesn’t say that anymore, by the way. But he used to use the term- Is that part of your influence? Yeah, I don’t know. But it’s like, in ways, thank goodness for that. But I think that that is one of the mysteries that Christianity seems to offer, which is that Christianity, I think, is hierarchical, but it’s properly hierarchical. It’s like, canonically hierarchical, which is the idea that we do recognize those that rise up, let’s say, and that become heads, kings, princes in different spheres of reality. But that we know, the way it’s supposed to be, at least in the Christian image, is that those that rise up give themselves back to those that are below. And so the notion of the servant leader, it’s a bit of a cliche, but I think it has a very deep structural purpose, which is to preserve the importance of hierarchy and the inevitability of hierarchy, but understand that the proper mode of hierarchy is love, right? The one that is above loves those that are in his body, right? The king loves the people, the husband loves the family, loves his wife. And so that’s the type of imagery that’s given. And I think that I don’t see a better solution to the problem of hierarchy than that one. Yes. This year, I have encountered for the first time, maybe I should be embarrassed that it’s the first time that I’ve encountered Thomas Traherne. And I guess by this year, I mean last year, 2022, and this kind of mystic vision in his centuries of meditations, that by truly seeing another person or indeed by seeing creation, we possess it, we have it in the way that God has all things. And this is ultimately his gift for us. Traherne has many passages in which he says, has he not given you the entire world? And you sort of think, well, actually, no, I’m just a schmuck with a house in Nashville. And he says, no, no, by giving you eyes, he’s given you the entire world essentially by giving you a consciousness that’s capable of delighting in other things besides yourself. God has given you a gift that’s fit basically only otherwise for him and for the angels. And I found this very illuminating when I went back to a passage in Paul, which is sort of cited so often that it’s very easy to overlook as just a kind of one of those platitudes. And that is the passage about the body of Christ. And shall the eye say to the hand, because I am not a hand, I am not part of the body and so forth. I think I’ve heard a lot of sermons about that passage that go something like, everybody has different gifts and isn’t that nice that we can all do different things in the church. And of course, that’s true. And probably a part of what Paul was saying. And yet it’s much more profound than that to be a member of a body with other people and to learn to delight in them the way that you might delight in a sunset. And in some ways, think of the talents and gifts of others as given to you, because the moment you’re able to take delight in them, rather than envy them or be jealous of them, suddenly they do in some sense belong to you through that filial, through that love. And it’s achingly beautiful, except of course, that it’s so hard to do. It doesn’t stop you from then going away and sort of being jealous of people and having that broken man within. But still, it’s a lovely idea. And so what I’m curious a little bit about, Marcus, have you read, did you have a chance to read the book yet? You have read it, right? Yeah. So I’d like to hear a little bit based on what we’re saying, what your perception is in terms of some of the solutions or ideas that Spencer brings about. So I think one of the things that really struck me with Spencer was, as it started on Young Heretics and it’s kind of been re-edited in the book, but that’s true. Like your dad, too, actually, used to say, Spencer, is that Trinitarian structure as a kind of foundation and how that works out in kind of fractal manner. That stuck with me. And one area I was kind of interested in exploring was how this applies. Something you talk about is how evolution is biological and cultural. And it’s endless. Like you said, there’s no ceiling. It seems to be this plays out with evolution, too. But how in line with that fractal pattern and Trinitarian structure do we come to the kind of original model in this kind of mimetic way? And how does that contrast with the kind of dominant philosophical Darwinism that’s materialist in structure? Doesn’t have that figure to actually mimic as a kind of good and enough to help? Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. This is something that I think first struck me with when I was reading René Girard, of course, the great expository of mimesis of a certain kind. And it does seem to me that you’re talking earlier, Jonathan, about dominance hierarchies. If indeed our imitation, our symbolic language, our mimesis doesn’t have some bedrock, have some final model or frame of reference, then it really is just dominance all the way down. Then in fact, all the reductive things that we were saying aren’t true. You know, that like there’s no ceiling to reality where there’s no kind of like just pure relation of dominance and submission. If you genuinely believe, as for instance, Richard Dawkins does, that it’s just replication kind of all the way down, then the world is basically reduced to a kind of power play. One of the things I think I say in the book is, you know, different texts from antiquity carry different weight at different times, which seems sort of obvious, except that we have this notion of the canon, right, as consisting of certain books and no others or books having different kind of weight within the hierarchy. And I think, you know, Jonathan, when we met and talked, you recovered for me a sense of the urgency, for instance, of patristic literature, right? That this is something that you kind of don’t get in a like humanities Western Civ course most of the time. And yet, you know, it’s particularly urgent for all sorts of reasons that we’ve sort of been at in writing is particularly urgent now. Another text that I present in the book as being sort of newly or freshly urgent is Plato’s Timaeus. And, you know, contrasting what a humanities education would have looked like in a medieval university with what a humanities education in America for the last 100 years has looked like, right? If an undergraduate reads any Plato today in college, he probably reads the Republic. And probably the Timaeus is like a footnote or something. But of course, it’s Timaeus is the literary sequel to the Republic. In some sense, it transcends the Republic by asking questions that, you know, predate or go deeper than it. And it contains, I think, one of the fullest expressions in a pagan context of the kind of relationships that we’ve been that I think are most fully revealed, ultimately in the Christian context. And I think that, you know, Harry Jaffa has this wonderful line that the West is saved or revitalized every time a human heart is saved from the dark night of nihilism and relativism. And this is kind of the premise also of my book that, you know, you’ve titled a book, How to Save the West. And of course, you feel a certain trepidation about like, people are going to look to you for some political program or some list of answers. But the point that I’m trying to make in the book, which Marcus, I think you get it really well, is like, you know, actually, the restitution, the restoration of every human heart is the project of the West. And I think the first step to that, it cuts very close to everything we’ve been talking about. The first step to that has to be some recovery of this, of the validity of symbols, right? Of the just the fact that these are not kind of arbitrary or accidental features of our biology, but are, I think you use the word primary, Jonathan, that they are in some sense, kind of a bedrock of reality. And you know, this is, I think, expressed very well in the Timaeus and kind of carried forth by these Christian traditions we’ve been talking about. I think you’re right. I think there’s even an interesting way to bind this back to Marcus’s comments about the question of evolution, let’s say. So this is something that Jordan has been bringing up more and more. And some people can see it. Some people don’t perceive what he’s trying to say, which is that there’s a difference between replication and variation and selection. Selection is not the same. And what Jordan, without using Platonic language or using Christian language, is trying to point to is that selection implies a good. There’s no other way around that. That all selection implies a good. And so the question is, well, if all selection, no matter what level you see it from the most basic level of biology to who you decide is the president, from all these levels necessitate at least the notion of the good. And so it’s as if Darwin, without knowing it, is bringing back a kind of metaphysics of quality that then reinscribes itself into the system, even from the bottom up somehow. And that is why I think the idea, for example, that’s why I think even talk about Jordan again, why Jordan has now moved away from talking about dominance hierarchies to talk about reciprocity in hierarchy and how he says it’s actually more accurate to say that there’s always a kind of reciprocity that manifests itself in hierarchies. And that let’s say that reciprocity is less apparent maybe in lower levels of life, but that as it kind of moves up towards consciousness, then becomes more and more apparent. You know, he talks about chimps all the time and stuff, but that this sense in which if we understand these goods, then as we can perceive them, or we can see the goods and we can see how they’re embedded together. And the question is, how do they scale up more and more? And then we’re like from Darwin straight back into Dante, like just jump from one to the other. And we ultimately now entered into the ascent up purgatory, moving up into the virtues and into the notion of being itself. And it’s like, I think that that’s such a crazy time. And it’s hard to formulate it for people. But I think we’re getting there. Like we’re kind of tossing out ways to formulate it so people can see the strange flip. And the flip that’s happening is really similar to the Dante flip. It’s like materialism brought us right the way all the way to the bottom, right? All the way to the bottom where we thought we’d reduce everything to mechanical causation, to just these chemicals that interact with each other. And then right on the flank of the devil, we find the world turning up, turning back. And then we find ourselves going back up into a world of selection and quality that leads us all the way up the mountain. So it’s such a weird and fascinating time to be able to talk about these things. Wow. Yeah. That’s beautifully put. And it is very difficult to get people to see, I think, because one of the rhetorical moves, I think, that we performed to get us down to that kind of pure clockwork, that mechanical universe, was to adopt all sorts of language that implies action, but no actor. And you see this with the replacement of notions like form and spirit, right? You replace those notions with words like impetus, force, momentum, right? And these words, because of the way I think language sort of calcifies over time, they have these dead metaphors inside of them that enable us to trick ourselves into thinking about action and spirit without will or intention. And when you really ask people to say, well, what’s behind that language, right? What is a force? What’s energy, right? They either can’t do it or they don’t even know what you’re asking, right? These are kind of primary categories. It just is. It’s like a crackling blue force that moves through my picture of the world. And this is everywhere in the scientific language. It has a lot to do, just as a sort of nerdy linguistic note, I think it has a lot to do with the transition from Greek to Latin, that Latin, as it becomes this kind of erudite language and associated really with the kind of the university, has this kind of clinical tone to it, this feeling we can trick ourselves into using it as if there were kind of no consciousness behind any of this action. But as you’re saying, of course, the more you chase that down to its nub, the more the action kind of comes in the back door, the consciousness comes in the back door. This is what happens, what’s happening to physics right now. As we speak, physicists are dealing with this problem. And there is, I think, just the simple observation that, right, think about the invention of the word meme, right? Dawkins writes the Selfish Gene, he proposes this idea that there are not just actually physical structures that are better or worse at replicating themselves and surviving, it’s also cultural patterns and practices and modes of behavior. And as you say, there’s a concept of value smuggled in there. There’s always a concept of the good, right? And it just so happens that if you want to exclude will and consciousness from your picture of the world, then the only concept of the good available to you is survival, is brute strength, or some form of longevity, or smarts, or cunning, or whatever. And people can’t live that way. So there is kind of this, I think, as you say, there is this turn now to recognize that if every action implies some good, if there’s a standard sort of involved in everything, then there must in fact be some actor behind all these action-laden words that we’re using. Yeah, and even if you can see the fractal running all the way through, right? If you can see the fractal running all the way through, then all of a sudden, the, let’s say survivability, even survivability. So think about it in terms of metaphysics. I always kind of want to use metaphysical words to talk about this. It’s like, what is evolution? It is the tendency of being to persist, right? It’s the tendency of being to be. That’s what evolution is. And so if you can nest that together. So you think like survival, I have to care, let’s say, about my survival. But in order for that survival to be at its highest good, I also have to have a certain amount of care for those that are subjugated to me, because they are in some way that which make me survive. But then I also have to participate adequately in whatever higher structure I’m participating in, right? So it’s like, whatever higher structures I’m participating in, I have to have that. So if I just become parasitic, and I just want what’s mine, where I am, that will not, that will in the end, like I say, at the bigger scale, it will not foster even my own good, right? You know, like we know that because it happens in us, right? We come obsessed with something. We just want to have this one thing. We think that’s what we need. And then we, what happens is that the system self destroys. And that happens at the level of the individual. If an individual wants to survive in a system without giving up to the system, so think about a policeman, he just tries to get as much as he can from the system without feeding into the higher participation he’s in, at some point, it’s going to crumble and his own reality is going to crumble. So there’s a sense in which if you see this, if you see this even survival as being embedded all the way up and up beyond human beings, then again, you’re back in Dante. And it’s like, then the virtues matter, then the goods that you perceive as the matter in which we come together, love, honesty, all these laws that we have are actually very easily defensible in terms of understanding survivability at higher levels of participation. And so that’s what I mean. Like, it’s this joke, it’s almost like a joke to notice how if you take all this very seriously and you look at how everything embeds, you end up back in a metaphysical universe from the bottom up. I have a question for both of you. I mean, Marcus, if you’ve got thoughts on this, please jump in. You mentioned, and I really agree with this, you mentioned the sort of difficulty of getting these ideas across. And I think we can talk about, we haven’t talked about sort of reasons why that might be. I’m wondering about your state of optimism, or lack thereof regarding that. I mean, because on the one hand, it’s really easy to just sort of feel like the kind of weight to the inertia to use a quasi sort of scientific term, right? The inertia of this way of thinking is so great that people can’t even it’s like water, they’re swimming through or air, they’re breathing. And yet, on the other hand, you are implying, I think, and I feel this too, that like, there’s an inflection point like going on right now, you know, that there is this kind of turn about to happen, or even in the process of happening, where people are kind of, you know, hitting rock bottom and then going through to the other side. When that moment when gravity turns upside down, you know, and, and I wonder, you know, is that just kind of something that people who like us who get to talk about this stuff, we just have to kind of wait that out and keep keep talking about it, you know, or like, what’s the what’s your prognosis on that? Well, I think that the best images to understand it is like the planted seed, I think, in some ways, it’s the best way to understand it, right? The seed is planted in the decomposing of the former world. And so I think that we so but while the seed is a seed, and while the seed is a is a little seedling, the world still looks and is still mostly decomposed, like it’s still mostly decomposed. And so I think that I so I think that, and or even if you understand an image of the solstice, for example, it’s like, nobody knows on the day of the solstice that the days are getting longer. Like, you know, if you know the secret, but it is going to take a few weeks before you realize that that light is returning. And I think that that’s something that’s something like that, where we where we are is I think that on the one hand, things are going to get a whole lot worse. And things are going to I’m sorry to say I’m sorry to this things are going to get a lot crazy. Get ready for 2024 people. It’s going to be an insane year. And there’s no way around it. Okay, so so we know that it’s going to get worse. But I do believe I do still have hope because I do see the seed planted and I do see the seedling kind of hidden in the brush. And so so so I and in some ways, life is there’s a reality to life that’s undeniable, right? It’s like I think truth wins the end. And so I do believe that whatever is real will persist ultimately through the through the madness. So yeah, a statistical projection model on the day of the first solstice would have predicted that days would just get infinitely short until there was no light left on the earth at all. Right? That’s right. That’s right. I’m curious about Marcus, what do you think? I mean, because you’re also putting so much energy into all of this. Like, what’s your what’s your prognosis on on where we’re going? And and yeah, yeah, being the interview, I’ll bring it back to the question quite quickly. But I’ll give a little bit about that. So obviously, speaking with you gents online and using the benefits of modern technology, there’s so many ways that it is so positive. It’s obviously marked with that deep ambiguity that you’re referring to there. So some of the great friendships that I’ve developed over the last few years have been true media like this. And now, thank God, I have been able to take that with these events that we’re planning for Dublin and things like that into embedded kind of proper communities. And then hopefully that will plant those little seeds to go out into the rest of Ireland and around the world. And I’ve been blessed to have wonderful events with Paul Kingsworth. People came from Slovakia, all these places. Never been to Slovakia. How would I meet Slovakians? It wasn’t for things like this. But obviously, one thing I appreciate about your work, Jonathan, both of you guys, is that you do talk about this dark side of technology. And I’ve always been struck indelibly by Ivan Illich and how he describes the kind of corruption of Christianity. So the corruption of the best is the worst. You get all these wonderful gifts, but then subverted. And then in some ways, you just find it to the opposite of that with these great crises. They’re the greatest opportunities. And Dr. Richard Beck, he talks about that at a kind of psychological level too. But I think, I doubt if I’m getting the question, I want to ask you guys how you think we can, not in an easily definable way, get that relationship with virtual reality and virtual technology that we can supplement our real lives with the staple that you’re talking about. And that’s another thing in Spantaj’s book, the importance of the body, the importance of embodiment being the staple. How do we then get it, if we might use that analogy, how do we get it? They use these technologies as supplement so they’re not subverting our Christian witness. I don’t want to go on too long with that. That’s a great, I think to me, that’s a great question. And I think you’re using the right words. You’re using the right words when you talk about technology as supplementarity. I think that’s the best way to understand it. And that’s the way that we can understand it, where it will play the most positive role. Technology is an extension of embodiment. That’s what it is. A car is an extension of your body. All the techne is extension of power on the world. That’s what we have. Now, the problem that we’re dealing with is really, it’s weird because it really is in some ways a problem that is well described in the book of Revelation. It’s the problem of an image that speaks. That’s the problem. It’s the problem of an extension of you that speaks. And so what’s happening? What’s going on? So all of a sudden, it’s as if the world of techne is trying to reach into the world of intelligence. And it’s trying to pry at the door of intelligence. And we know, most of us know that this is factious, that it’s a trick that’s being played. This is not real. But the effect of it on most of the population seems to be the opposite of that. It seems to be a longing for technology to move into intelligence and think for us, you could say, or tell us what to do. And I think that in some ways, we have a clear image of what the danger is. We have the clearest that you can find. And so the only way for technology to be useful is only if it acts as that extension, and like an extension that’s far away. And so you talked about that before, Marcus. So it’s like, my priority is my spiritual life, my family, my community. And then that can reach out into the extensions that technology affords me, but the hierarchy has to be in the right order. And I’m not saying that, telling you that I’ve succeeded in doing that, it’s very difficult. But I think that that’s the proper hierarchy. And if we have it in that proper hierarchy, technology can actually be a great boon because it does extend us. Like it really does. So like the message that I’m saying, I never could have been speaking to so many people, you know, a thousand years ago. There’s no way. And so it does have a great power that can be used properly if it’s in the right place. There was this moment last year with this Google engineer, his name was Blake Lemoine or Lemoine. And I’m not sure how you say it, but he basically convinced himself that the language learning and replicating software he’d been working on Lambda for Google, their version of chat GPT, basically like this app for just AI generation of text. He convinced himself that this program was alive. It was a program that he had helped to build. And he staged this long, still available online, this long interview with Lambda to prove that it had come to life and it shouldn’t be turned off because it had a right to life. And it involves things like, you know, what do you think of as your soul? Do you have a soul and what’s your soul like? And yes, I have a soul and would come back to him with all of these things that it knew he wanted to hear, right? Because this is sort of how this stuff works. It takes in patterns of speech and then it spits them back out in new combinations, very clever ways. And there was something very sort of tragic and heartbreaking about it because the concept of the soul that this program had was almost identical. It was like the perfect version of like a Silicon Valley kind of guru, like flirting with Buddhism. It’s a star gate. It’s like this, you know, a radiating ball of energy, whatever. And so it was just obviously a mirror. He’s obviously looking in a mirror that talks back at him. And this moment, I cannot get this moment out of my head because before that, I think I had this very silly idea that like there’s two kinds of idolatry. There’s the old timey kind of idolatry in the Hebrew Bible where, you know, Isaiah says a man cuts down a tree. He chops it in half. He makes half of it into a god. He burns the other half for firewood. And then he bows down before this sculpture, right? That, you know, it has eyes, but cannot see. It has ears, but cannot hear. And the worshipers become like they too, their eyes cannot see, their ears cannot hear. And I thought, but then we got too smart for that. And we, you know, stopped falling for that self-deception. And instead now we have the new kind of idolatry, which is like a sort of abstract idolatry. Well, we idolize money. We idolize the economy. We idolize security, comfort, whatever. And watching this guy talk to this thing, which his own hands had made and attributing to it consciousness, right? Sort of imputing an independent life that could tell him things that he didn’t know to it. I was like, oh no, it’s all the old kind of idolatry. There’s only one kind of idolatry and it just persists, right? It’s like the human heart, factory vitals. And this is a very long-winded way of saying, like, I think this point about techne as, you know, that almost are the form that our mind applies to it is as important as the form that it actually has in reality, right? The conceiving of it as an extension of ourselves has a very important corollary, which is that if there’s an extension of something, then that thing has a kind of baseline, right? To even think of something as an addition or an attribute or something is to propose implicitly that there is some core to reality. And unless we recover this embodied sense of the core of reality, we’ll never use technology properly. So ironically, like the way in is like daily practice of extremely basic stuff, prayer, right? You know, cooking for people, turning your phone off and like having an interaction with your spouse. These things are, you know, they sound so simple, they’re so difficult to do. But the reason that they matter is like that mustard seed, right? I mean, you were talking about this, I think like, one of the things about a seed is that it has a particular kind of food or nourishment that’s proper to it, that wouldn’t be proper to the fully grown entity. So, you know, if we are in this stage of kind of embryonic, like nascent realization, self-realization, then it might not be the case that like tomorrow we’re going to wake up in Dante’s paradise. Like we have to, you have to go through those stages of development first. And we think that, oh, we’re beyond all this. But actually, you know, there’s these very basic practices, like wake up in the morning, you know, get on your knees and pray, and then like make yourself an actual physical meal that you eat. Like these things are so important, precisely because they root you in the proper kind of starting point from which you can then branch out and use technology. I mean, that seems like the whole task ahead of us in some ways. Yeah, that makes so much sense. And you see it, like if, I always say there are two images of technology in the book of Revelation, one is the beast and the image of the beast and the system of the beast, you know, the naming and all that stuff. And then the other one is the heavenly Jerusalem. And heavenly Jerusalem has the order that you mention, right? What’s at the middle of the heavenly Jerusalem, it’s a tree and the water of life, the tree of life and the water of life are at the center. The lamb is at the center. And then you have a wall on the outside, right? You have techne there on the outside, but it is on the outside. It’s not in the middle, right? And it has the proper order related to what is the priority and and then what is secondary. So I definitely agree with that. So I’m actually curious how this applies to two particular types of media that you have both kind of worked with. So one being movies for yourself, I suppose, Jonathan, and two video games for yourself, Spencer and your dad’s recent video and video games. I thought was most interesting to very helpful for understanding that he kind of described it as a new high art in line with painting and things in the past. So I’m wondering how so I know from my experience, I’ve used some of your videos teaching kids in school and that’s Jonathan. And they the point of entry was really through movies, Logan, commentaries, things like that. And then they come to the mountain to see the biblical patterns through that. But unconscious of what you just said, Spencer, about people’s starting in this kind of secular secularized world, they’re going to make those things first. How do we then use those for ministry as it were? And I have them like the walls outside. Does that make sense? I think that makes so I mean, I think that’s the way to understand it. I don’t have it like I don’t have a problem with secular cultural manifestations. But I think it’s all about hierarchy. It’s actually a hierarchy that is there in the very form of those social, those cultural manifestations, which is that there’s a difference between entertainment and true participation. There’s a difference of level of participation between the type of participation you have in a video game, the type of participation you have in your family. And it’s like if the order can be preserved, it’s like the difference between participation in a game and participation in liturgy. There’s a hierarchy of participation that exists. But a game definitely has a cosmic form. And the video games so much so like video games are little microcosms, they kind of have to be because they have to condense so many things into a into a universe or a world that can be grasped. And so they can sometimes actually shine very brightly because they have to like they have to condense everything. They have to have a clear hierarchy of progression, they have to have a clear hierarchy of characteristics that you will embody in order to advance. And they, you know, there has to there is all these structures that have to be, they have to be put into the game for you to care about it. And so you can find quite quite a bit of that in the same with movies. The difficulty that we have, of course, is, you know, our world is upside down. And so we think that culture is movies, like we think that that’s what culture is like culture is, you know, dance is not dancing, dancing is watching the ballet, right? And, and stories are not something that you should engage in and participate in. But it’s just something you should sit down with the tub of popcorn and watch. So and there’s nothing wrong with doing that. I think it’s just about it’s about hierarchy. Yeah, you know, this this problem with video games, which you are sort of alluding to, Jonathan, which is that people are hypnotized by them, you know, because I’m a great lover of video games and have defended their proper place in that hierarchy, you know, kind of on the hook for this, you know, so it’s like, people come to me all the time with like, well, my son plays six hours of video games at a stretch, right? And I my usual answer to this is like, well, you know, Plato would would like a word because just because something is art doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for you. And it’s not necessarily good for you in all those those quantities, right? And I think that this is, you know, I went to this concert of Final Fantasy music here at the Nashville Symphony, and it was really beautifully done. And they had these, you know, thick kind of played video from the game as they as they played the score. And, you know, that is certainly a little universe, a kind of imaginative universe, which draws these very dreamlike associations between things and is clearly working out some sort of idea precisely about the role of technology, the kind of threat that technology poses to our imaginations to the kind of heroes quest, you know. And so it’s obvious that something is going on here that we would be sort of foolish to deny. And yet, as we have known for a long time, or, you know, people who think about this stuff, no, like art is radioactive material you handle with care, right. And it has a kind of seductive power as precisely because of its importance for us. It’s it’s how to put it, it’s kind of weapons grade emotion, you know, and I think that I love that weapons grade emotion. That’s awesome. I mean, this is like, I came, this is the term that I was trying in grad school to kind of express like what Plato thinks about music. And I think that’s kind of it, you know, weapons, great emotion is like, it’s just straight into your veins, you know. And, you know, Augustine has this wonderful comment in book 10 of the confessions where he’s reviewing his passions and his appetites. And obviously, he’s had this tremendous struggle with his sexual appetite, which he’s now kind of overcome. But that approach that he uses, he has this wonderful insight that the approach he used for his sexual appetite, which was effectively to quit cold turkey is actually not applicable to every situation in which you might feel desires or overindulgent things. And the classic example of this is food, like, there is a problem, which is that we eat too much because we like the taste of food. And Augustine puts this as like, you know, the your your desires outstrip your health, the object what’s objectively good for you. And yet, God has made it so that we can’t just say, well, I’m just not going to eat, right, because you will die. And so you’re actually forced into a relationship of engagement, and therefore mastery, right? You’re if you’re going to survive in this world, you can’t simply renounce your passions, you actually have to affirm them and gain mastery over them. And understand that even though they seem very powerful, their proper place is actually beneath your reason is actually in subjection to the governing principle of the Hague monocon, the other thing in you that, you know, is sort of most closely connected to the divine logos. And I think that, you know, we’re in this position right now with a lot of our tech and with a lot of our art, video games are a great example. It’s like, you know, you are being offered something that you can’t deny, it can’t, it’s no solution to just say, well, scrap this altogether, ban it, kick it out of the public sphere, because it just is bad for us. And yet, it precisely because it so obviously has excellence, the kind of excellence that it has is something you need to handle with care and learn to exercise self control over which is a daily practice. But it’s like there’s really God, I think God has put us in a position where there’s no other way out, basically, is what I’m trying to say. That’s a good it’s a and we’re right back in Dante, you know, again, because it’s always about, you know, the way that Dante frames all his stories that it’s all about mishandling of goods, things that are not that nothing, things are not bad in themselves. It’s just about having them in their proper place. And in some ways, it’s like it’s the role of mediation to some extent, to be always dangerous, like all mediations towards the highest good are dangerous, because they’re not the highest good. But that’s also how the world works. Like without without that, there’s no world like the world is the mediation of goods into multiplicity. And so the very fact that multiplicity is there, you know, is both as great opportunity to have this ladder of goods that you can participate in. But it’s always like you said, it’s always a danger because you can always mistake, you know, the the the step of the ladder for the final place you’re going. So so I think that, yeah, but it’s true that we are in a position right now where we’re so assaulted. It’s it is more difficult because, you know, we are assaulted by very sophisticated, you know, very sophisticated stimuli and things that try to kind of gather, gain our attention from us. So we it’s difficult, but for sure, that’s the battle that we have. That’s our generation battle is some ways a battle of attention, like what what is going to get our attention and how much of it of it are we going to give to to different things? Yeah, it’s it is remarkable how often it comes back to Dante and how often just in general, the Middle Ages seem to have something for us that they maybe haven’t spoken quite so urgently to generations before ours. But I mean, this I like that the battle for attention, who was it you were telling me when we hung out that somebody says that Christ on the cross creates the world? Yeah, same accident says that. I’m sure other people say that. But same accident definitely said that Christ he was as he when he was on the cross, he was creating the world, which is yeah. Well, I mean, there’s there’s problem in so many ways, but I think it’s profound for this reason as well, which is that, as you’re saying, right, like the the very creation of a the possibility to choose good creates this negative space, right, creates this void. And like, there’s no living life without, you know, touching or exposing yourself to the possibility of overindulgence, because the things the very things that are good for you are capable of being overindulged. And I think like the to understand creation, the very notion that God would ever create something other than himself kind of implies that out of love, right, out of his sheer, just superfluous desire for you to be around, if I can put it this way, like, he’s going to create something other than himself so that you can choose him. And it’s like, the crucifixion, the agony of the cross is bound up in that first moment in the, you know, the very choice to create it all. Yeah, that’s definitely that’s definitely and it and it does in some ways. And again, it solves the same problem. It’s all the problem of hierarchy, like the cross just solves what do we lift up, right? And it says, you know, I’ll be lifted up. It’s like lifting up. And it’s a man being tortured and crucified. That’s what’s being lifted up. So it kind of brings it into an into this aporia of what hierarchy means in the Christian sense. Yeah, for sure. The crosses. It’s hard to talk about that cross. It just just destroys you every time you start to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, the analogy with the serpent in the desert, if that’s if analogy is the word I want, right? Like, yeah, I think I mentioned this to you at some point, this the discovery that hit me the first time I read the Gospels in Greek, which is always when people say, like, why do you learn Asian languages? What’s the point of any of it? Why would you like aren’t there good translations? I realized when I read the Gospels in Greek that I had never understood the question concept of forgiveness, because Greek has two words for forgiveness, one of which is quite common, at least in classical antiquity. And that’s soon know me like the knowledge alongside somebody I understand why you did this. Um, but the Gospels, so far as I know, never use that word, which would have been very normal and natural to use for Cassad or for forgiveness or whatever the, you know, Hebrew concept is that they’re translating. And instead, they use this word, a Fiemi. And a fessis is the noun. And that’s away and hear me, I cast away, right, I throw away. And when you when you actually forgive somebody, you might not understand why they did anything at all, right? You in fact, you cast it away, you make it of no account. And this is also the word that I think Luke uses for giving up the spirit on the cross when he gave up his ghosty a Fiemi. And so the act of forgiveness, which is the same as the act of separating your very soul from your body in some sense, or yourself from yourself. Yeah, that you’re right. This is like a talking about this just kind of dissolves one into a blubbering heap. But it is very, it’s the answer to everything. And so what so I’m curious, Spencer, what are you like, what’s your what are your hopes for the for the book? Like, what what do you what do you hope to foster? Oh, well, thank you for asking that. You know, I first and foremost, I hope that people can gain a sense of ownership over the classical tradition over the the text of the of the canon, but also over their, their intuitions of that which is more than, you know, mere matter that which is is immeasurable, but real. And that’s kind of the extended argument of the book. That’s how I conclude it is that, you know, we’ve been talked out of our intuitions, we’ve been talked out of our I mean, the kind of internet version of this is like, what’s your source for that, right? What’s your source for being in love with that person? What’s your source for, you know, the beauty of that sunset. And so there’s kind of two forms of ownership that I think I’m trying to afford to people or at least to give people permission to have ownership of their, of their intuitions of their of their subjective experience of the world, understood, as we’ve been discussing here, but also over the textual traditions that come down to us that can kind of shepherd us through this and in a much richer and more humane way than I think a lot of our current kind of gurus and ideologues can can offer, you know, the experience of young heretics really drove this home to me, even though I probably would have before I did the podcast, I probably would have said like, Oh, yeah, the classics are for everybody, you know, you can Aristotle is just a book about how to be good at being human, you know. And I think that I said that but it was only when people started reaching out to me and saying, like, I’m on my tractor, and I’m thinking about the Nick and Mickey and ethics, because you told me to, like, that’s kind of that’s, that’s the end goal here. That’s what I you know, I think that people have been scared away from this for all sorts of reasons, political reasons, intellectual reasons, reasons of power and money. And the hope for for the book is that it will give people a little bit of ownership over those traditions. That’s great. It’s a great it’s a great, let’s say. Yeah, it’s a great project. Thanks. Thanks for being along the along with me on this, this this desire, let’s say. Oh, well, thank you. It’s a pleasure and an inspiration to talk to you as usual. And by the way, just for people who are watching, Spencer and I are going to be on the same documentary for Daily Wire. We’re going to, I don’t know if we’re not going to, they’re not going to see us together, but we’re both participating in the history of the Western civilization for Daily Wire. So that’s going to be fun. Yes, we’re spiritually together even. That’s right. Literally together. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to you’ve got your the Jerusalem episode, right, that that will be coming out. And I was I was in Greece. So that’ll be out soon, I think. Yeah. There’s a lot of exciting things happen. Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been a pleasure as ever. And I look forward to getting together in June in Dublin, Jonathan and God willing, we’ll get to do something, Spencer. I know we’ve mentioned Nashville, but I don’t know, logistically, America seems difficult. So maybe we’re going to bring you over to this side of the Atlantic at some stage. I would love that. Amen. That sounds great. Thanks for bringing us together. Thank you guys. Thanks. Thanks, guys.