Original Sin and the Meaning Crisis - with John Vervaeke (9GJDFhLSRC4)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9GJDFhLSRC4

Welcome, everyone, to Voices with Raveki. I’m joined by and with my good friend Jonathan Pajot, whose work on the symbolic world deeply resonates with a lot of what I’ve been doing work on, and as many of you know, and I find Jonathan brilliantly insightful and his reflections on the symbolic aspects of existence and his ability to reshine and refurbish these stories so that they can shine for us again is often, you know, it sort of catches you. It’s deeply impressive. So thank you, Jonathan, for coming. Oh, it’s my pleasure. I always enjoy talking with you, you know, ever since I discovered your work and kind of discovered the language which you’re developing also to talk about these subjects. It’s been really helpful to me. I find myself thinking in the categories that you are bringing forth, and especially speaking to kind of a secular audience or also convincing Christians that the words they use have meaning, you know, because sometimes we have this kind of internal language and it stops to actually be meaningful in the world and it just becomes like a kind of magical language. So I’ve been using your expressions on attention, the idea of relevance realization, all of these expressions have been good to help people re-see things in a different frame so that they understand them. So I really appreciate our discussions for sure. Well, thank you for saying that, Jonathan. I aspire to this being true, that above and beyond trying to, you know, convince or persuade people about my specific claims, truth claims, theoretical claims, proposals, practical endeavors, etc. I aspire that I do afford, you know, a vocabulary and a grammar for people that helps them to clarify and develop their thinking. I mean, that’s the art, that for me, that’s the way in which I try to enact the Socratic ideal of being the midwife, right, the midwife for other people. So thank you for saying that, that means a lot to me. So what I wanted to start off specifically talking about, you released two excellent videos and I’ll put the links to them in the description of this video. One was on, I won’t get the actual verbatim name, one was on sort of the religious nature of a lot of the demonstrations that are happening around that were sort of galvanized into existence by the death of George Floyd and then you did a follow-up, they’re sort of like part one and part two, yeah, one on the the iconoclasm, the destruction of images, the pulling down of statues, and one of the things you did was you put your finger on a huge important aspect of this that is being completely ignored in the mainstream media, but I think is of vital importance. As has happened in the past between you and I, I, very convergent, I was coming to very similar concerns and reflections, and I’d said some things early on about how COVID was going to accelerate the meaning crisis and cause just a mental health tsunami and you’d see, you know, a proliferation of conspiracy theory thinking, you’d see purity code behavior, human beings are going to respond in, you know, a fashion to this invisible ubiquitous threat that’s causing them to isolate, and as you, I like your invocation of the symbolic idea of fasting for most of their connections, and so, and then I saw all of that, and then when the protests began, I had a reaction that made me sort of recuse myself from commenting on that publicly. Part of it was a concern that what you said in your first video of just, you know, saying something that would be premature polarizing, it was difficult to say anything that was going to be heard with, that had any kind of nuance or reflection to it, so part of it was just that kind of caution, but there was a deeper issue for me. I was very concerned, and I talked to my close friend about this, that I would fall into a kind of self-deceptive bias when I tried to talk about any of this, so give me a moment please, I don’t mean to trespass on your patience, but I want to, in order to try and articulate this, and this has helped me upon reflection, I want to invoke Weber’s distinction between the manifest and the latent function, so to give you a classic example, Weber talked about the manifest function of the bureaucracy is to facilitate information traveling upward and decisions traveling downward, and that’s its manifest function, but it has all kinds of latent functions, it has the latent function of allowing people to diffuse responsibility and shift blame onto others, and Kafka, of course, brought this into high art, he showed us how the latent function can put us into a tragic situation, because our commitment to the manifest function binds us in a tragic fashion to the latent function, that can be hypothetical to it in kind of a profound way, and so I was looking, I’m watching this, and I’m saying, well, yeah, that’s horrible, and racism is a horrible thing, and what we’re seeing has been happening here, and there’s definitely, I know this, because what’s happened since 9-11 and the Patriot Act, there’s been the militarization of the police, and that has been a very dangerous thing, and I know there’s nasty tricks happening, there’s voter suppression happening, and all kinds of bad things, and people are feeling, I think, legitimately manipulated and disenfranchised in powerful ways, and this is meshing in ways that we’re all finding it hard to understand with a history that has disadvantaged certain groups of people, and all of this is going on, and I’m saying, yes, these are issues that all get addressed, so my, I don’t mean to sound Freudian here, but my sort of conscious, explicit awareness is going, yes, yes, yes, but I’m having this negative visceral reaction to all of this, and I’m trying to go, what’s going on, and at first I’m, oh, you know, I’m making all these things, and I can feel that I’m in the grip of something, and so I’m talking about this with my friends, and I’m reflecting on it, and I’m, you know, journaling about it and everything, and I’m coming to realize, oh, oh, and Jonathan, you know that I respect your allegiance to Christianity, I’m speaking about me here, okay, so I said, oh, this, I’m back in my fundamentalist church, and I’m the 10-year-old again, and I’m being traumatized by a puritanical form of Protestantism, I’m being told that I have an original sin, that I, not because of any act that I committed, but that is just because of how I was born, and that there’s an aspect of this that is unforgivable, and that is, you know, I’m not a Christian, I’m a Christian, and that there’s an aspect of this that is unforgivable, no matter what I do, and everything I try to do to overcome this just makes it that much worse, and that I need, I need to be absolutely contrite and guilty until some external, obscure authority will finally pronounce you know, saved or whatever, and that, and then what this brings with it, you know, is bonfires, and I mean, I’m not being hyperbolic, Jonathan, I’m talking about gathering behind the church and putting the rock and roll albums and the books into a thing and lighting it on fire, like, can you imagine? Oh yeah, I’ve been through that too, I grew up with that kind of stuff as well. Okay, and so, and so I’m realizing that the latent functionality of this is so reminiscent of kind, of a kind of puritanical fundamentalist Protestantism, and again, I was noticing the same things you’re noticing, you know, the acts of contrition, the throwing down of the stones in the high places, like from the Old Testament, right, where the prophets are always doing that, right, the kneeling and the confessions, and the statement that there’s nothing I can do about it other than feel guilty, I was noticing how this is, was tremendously religious, and that, that, as I said to others, that upbringing, like that upbringing traumatized me, I mean, I remember, I remember going to the minister in the church with my mother when I, because I read the Bible regularly, daily, and I came across the passage in the New Testament about the unforgivable sin, oh, and this just, I fell into, I mean, Cartesian skepticism was nothing compared to the well I fell into about, well, how do I know what it is, and how do, and how, like, did I just do it, and if it’s unforgivable, I’m now doomed, I’m doomed, right, and that feeling of being doomed and trapped, and, you know, and I went to him, and I wanted, what I wanted was a clear definition of what it was, and I got, I just got, you know, the usual, you need to have faith, and it was very unhelpful, and so, I was realizing, oh, John, you better keep your mouth closed about, because even if you want to speak about this, this is just going to come flowing through you, because, and it’s going to, and you’re going to, it’s a, because you have an incredible bias, it’s very hard for you to see this in a positive light, even though sort of intellectually you can understand these important things that we’ve already mentioned, you know, the racist history, you know, the subversive disenfranchisement of people, right, the militarization of the police, all of these things are real, and they need to be addressed, but I realized, if I try to say anything about this, my chances of speaking in a way that I think is clear, we’re, like, going to be seriously undermined, so I just sort of held back, but then I saw your videos, and I thought, well, maybe, maybe with Jonathan’s help, I can talk about this, so I don’t intend this to be a therapy session, that’s not what’s going on here, I want to be really, I want to be really open with you, about where I’m coming from, and I think your video actually points out that this tension, well, let me, I might be too bold, it suggested to me that this tension that I’m finding in myself is not exclusive to me, that I sensed in you, not to the degree I’m talking about, but also a tension between, you know, what this might be, sort of, at a manifest level, and then this unacknowledged latent function of religiousness, and then you have some criticisms, at least implicit of this, you had towards the end, you warned of danger in the first video, because the religion that does not know that it’s a religion is not oriented towards the ultimate, and so there’s, like, a critique coming via, or similar to what Tillich would meant, it’s ultimately, it’s an idolatrous, for all of its bringing down of images, it’s ultimately an idolatrous religion, and then I was thinking about this, I was thinking about how, you know, that politics has, in many ways, taken over the domain of religion, I don’t think well, it’s drenched the 20th century in blood, but I know that, well, there’s sort of two, religions are supposed to have, like you said, there’s supposed to be moments of communitaz and transformation, and I’m trying to think, well, what are the only rituals left to politics? Well, there seem to be two, and it was noted how they seem to split between the right and the left, there’s the demonstration of the protest or the rally, and the right likes the rally, and the left likes the demonstration, the protest, and then I’m thinking, and both of these, we have good historical evidence, don’t bring about the new man, the new person, the transformation of human beings, and you know, and all of the revolutions, left and right, the French Revolution, etc. onward, show that it doesn’t bring about that, although there is often religious goal within the French Revolution, and you know, they’re worshipping the goddess of reason and all that stuff, right, it doesn’t actually bring about the promised transformation that it is groping towards, and so I was thinking that, is it possible to talk about this, sort of, in terms that are kind of meta-political, about the latent functionality of the religion, and at that level, legitimately criticize it, without thereby implying that we think, or I’ll speak on my behalf, not yours, without thereby implying that I think that we shouldn’t do something about militarization of the police, the subversive suppression of voting and disenfranchisement of people, and then how that has often allied itself with historical factors that are ongoing of racism, etc. That’s what I’m proposing to you, is it possible, and I’d like to try and explore that with you, but that’s sort of the frame I want to set out. Yeah, I think for sure there’s, I think there are a lot of things to deal with, in what you said, a lot of things to kind of unpack at different levels, I think maybe we can kind of separate them in different parts so that we don’t get completely jumbled. One is to look at the possible reinterpretation of your experience, I’d say, or the notion of the original sin, the idea of Adam, or the fall of Adam, what that can mean, and how we can reinterpret that in a manner which is more useful than your traumatized youth, and I understand, because I went through all the stuff you dealt with, I went through the same, and even the description of like the idea of blaspheming the Holy Spirit, and everybody wondering, like did I blaspheme the Holy Spirit, you know, all of that I understand, but I think there are ways to reappropriate the stories, those stories, and I say reappropriate, is I also believe one of the reasons why I went towards orthodoxy is because they have a different vision of the fall of Adam, one which I think it has that healthier balance, so that’s one, and then the other is then looking also at the way in which these protests or COVID and the protests together kind of just exploded into a kind of weird catharsis, and what that means, and what it’s kind of looking towards, and so sadly the third part, which would be like how to get out of this kind of this bind that we’re in is the one which I don’t know, like I really, a lot of people ask me, so what should we do, and I’m looking around, and I think I don’t know what to do except, I don’t know what to do socially, like I think I know what to do personally, but I don’t think I know what the societal solution is, so maybe that one will be harder. Well, but I do want to talk about that because I’ve been talking about that with other people as well, so, but I’m happy with your proposal, but like I said, I’d like to put it, like I said, into the way in which what’s happening, it has, you know, at the level of the latent functions, there’s, well, you said it, I want to use your words, there’s something dangerous happening in this as well, and I want to explicate and draw that out. I’m happy to hear your revisions, and so I don’t know what to call it, let’s say revisioning rather than revision of these stories, and then, but if you could put that into dialogue with, because, okay, let me, instead of making a statement, let me make, ask a question, it’s kind of a request. I see in, you know, I see an analog to, a strong analog in this movement to that version of original sin that I was brought up with, and let’s remember that the word Protestant means those who protest, I mean, right, and I was brought up in a church where, you know, protesting and constantly declaring what was evil and what should be burnt, or, you know, and that was like, that was daily, that was like, that was daily, the kind of practice. So do you think that I’m incorrect in saying that the version of original sin, whether or not it’s the right version, I’m going to give you space to talk about that, but do you think that that, you know, maybe overly Augustinian version of original sin is, what’s at play in this movement right now? Am I incorrect about that? No, I think you’re definitely right, I think you’re definitely right. And I think it’s something that we’ve seen before in the sense that maybe an inverted version of what we’ve seen before in terms of like racialized vision of the world in the past, which is that we’ve taken the notion of original sin and we’ve brought it down into biology, which is the scariest thing that can happen because it actually is inevitable, like it actually does become inevitable because it’s related, it’s linked in a, not in a really scientific way at all, but in a mythological way, it’s still brought into a term which is using language of kind of biological identity or categories which are material categories. And so the idea of this racialized guilt or, you know, was there in kind of 17th century racism, like kind of neo-Darwinism, kind of social Darwinist racism, this idea that certain races were inferior by their own biology and therefore were made to be slaves or were made to be the lower, and now we’re seeing a kind of weird reversal of that where we’re saying to be a certain race is in itself to be the oppressor, like to be white is to be guilty of the sin of the revolutionary thinking, like it’s kind of like, it’s not completely original sin, it’s like the end of the revolutionary trend in thinking, right, the French Revolution, the Marxist revolutions, and now we’ve come to kind of the end of it where we’re actually bringing it into almost a biological reality where the guilt of the oppressor is a racial guilt, and that’s so, like you said, it does relate to original sin because it means that as someone who has that identity, whether it’s actually legitimate scientifically or not, it doesn’t matter, it’s still framed in those categories, as someone who has that identity, I have no way out, like I have no way out except for two things which are people are doing, which is to self-flagellate and to scapegoat, that is to put myself on the side of find someone guiltier than me and yell at him and tell him that he has to be cancelled and he has to be excluded from society, the only two solutions. Yeah, and that, like I said, I went through periods where the church I was in would be riven to bits by exactly that process, repeatedly, in cycles again and again and again, and when I sort of woke up to that, I was like, whoa, this is like, when I started reading some literature and I realized, the literature showed me what human beings could be other than this, that was like, so. But you’re right, in the Protestant sense, like if you think of Protestant sects and you notice both the puritanist kind of self-flagellation of complete depravity and then the schismatic notion that all of a sudden, the group I’m in is not pure enough, they’re not close enough to the truth, they’re not, and then removing myself with a little, a smaller group and then condemning those on the outside as being, it’s like an acceleration, it’s always been there, it’s there in every structure, like we can talk about that, but there’s an acceleration of it in the kind of fragmentation of Protestantism, and we see it in intersectionality to an extent which becomes completely absurd, where, you know, at some point it’s so obscure that most like regular people don’t even know what you’re talking about when trans-exclusive this and then trans-inclusive and we don’t, most people are like, I don’t understand, and then it’s, there’s smaller and smaller identities which are excommunicating other identities and you don’t know what’s going on. Yeah, so I mean, to my mind, that is the meaning crisis on steroids or methamphetamine or something. That’s right. So, and I think given the deeply deleterious effects which we’re seeing, you and I were talking just before we hit the record about, you know, we’re seeing, you know, people are like, they’re, people that were normally sort of very sane, like in our personal relationships are moving more towards the fringe and they’re filled with anxiety and they’re describing their experiences surreal, I think, you know, the deleterious effects of the meaning crisis are being exacerbated by COVID and then perhaps by certain latent aspects of this. But I wanted to give you the opportunity to make good on your promise that there’s an alternative way, there’s an alternative way and I mean, I’m interested in this both philosophically and personally. I typically try not to get too personal in these conversations but this one has to be different for the reasons I’ve already articulated and I’m putting my trust in you about this. So that there’s an alternative way of conceiving of the myth of original sin and you know I use that word in not in a pejorative fashion but and so what do you, what is that alternative understanding for your mind? So the way to understand it is to clearly differentiate between sin and death. They’re related but they’re different and so in scripture it says the wages of sin is death right and there’s an idea that even in the scripture it never says that we inherit the sin of Adam. It says that that we because of Adam’s sin we are in death, like we are in the in the in the we are living in a world of death and that’s really the best way to understand it which is that sin causes death. So you you have a purpose, you miss the mark and that’s that’s what death is and so there’s a there’s a brokenness that you break the system breaks down as you miss the mark and this is happens at every level of reality whether it’s in your own life or in society or or the entirety of the world. When when something misses the mark then there’s a breakdown which happens. Now we inherit the breakdown of that which is before us right. We inherit death so we are born in families that have missed the mark. We are born of parents that have missed the mark. We are born of systems that have missed the mark and so because of that we we live in a world which has an aspect of it which is broken. We still have the aspiration of hitting the mark and that’s that’s what kind of guides us and makes us want to live but we have to live with the consequences of that of that of that miss and the difficulty is that when you’re in a world of death that is when you inherit the consequence of sin so when your parents miss the mark and they will and we know they do yeah you inherit that and it makes it more difficult for you to hit the mark because you have all the baggage which comes and you have inherited the patterns of being that will make that worse right which will which will increase the brokenness which will tend to fragment okay and so that’s the manner in which we need to understand original sin that’s what it is. It’s the inheritance of brokenness. So that and I hope I hope you take this as a helpful thing that to me reminds me of you know certain interpretations of the Buddhist notion of karma that there are these patterns at work and and we and we and we inherit them and they affect our behavior and they they cause suffering and the way I sort of understood this at least psychologically and existentially is as you said you know we we pick up from others our parents our friends and our culture we pick up and that you know here’s where historical racism does matter right we pick up patterns that are shaping us and moving us in ways that are detrimental to our aspirations. Is that is that a fair yeah exactly yeah but the idea is the idea is of course the very desire the very aspiration that is the very possibility we have of conceiving the good and of seeing the point that we’re aiming at right of of of seeing it in our view and and moving towards it right is is the very how can I say this is the reminder that we are not that we don’t fit in this broken world that we are that we are we find dissatisfaction in the brokenness. So that’s what causes our suffering but it’s also what what can ultimately cause our hope because we see we can see that we’re not made like there’s something in us which wants more than this brokenness and this this world of death there’s something in us which is which can see that which we can aim towards and which is the good of course and so that is really the and so what let’s say what Christianity shows us and like what Christ shows us is that the manner to reach the the manner to reach the the aim in the brokenness is to a certain extent embrace death and that’s really the that’s the hardest thing is to embrace death consciously embrace the the brokenness consciously and therefore we don’t become slaves of that brokenness right is to see your sins to see the place where you miss the mark instead of just blaming your parents because that’s what you will want to do right you want to blame your parents you want to blame the system and your right to because the system is broken your parents are broken everything there’s an aspect of everything that’s given to you which is broken not fully but there is an aspect of it which is broken and the solution is to is to actually rather see your own death the places in you that you’re that you’re dead and recapture the the vision right recapture the the aim so this this brings me to a central question that I have about this thank you for that I think that was very helpful so let’s shift the discussion onto mortality then and the interesting thing of course and you’re aware of this I know in the greek world is mortality has and Heidegger developed this a lot it has a much more encompassing notion to it and then that’ll help lead me to my question to you you know because one of the great sins and I think this is the right word in the greek world is hubris right which is to in some sense forget your mortality right right and to think that you can that right that you can be a god and you know this is captured in great literature you know Conrad’s heart of darkness which of course is now a contentious work but nevertheless Kurtz’s big sin is hubris right he forgets and Marlowe’s Marlowe’s heroism is he commits himself to his humanity that he will preserve his mortality and I’ve been talking to my son about this because you know he lives with me now partially because of COVID and you know I’ve been exposing him to certain ideas and he’s going but you know but I want certainty and I’m saying well um yeah but you can’t part of what being you know be embracing your mortality is to realize that no matter how good your idea might be you’re ultimately a fallible human being they’re finite and he was going but I don’t like this and I said but your mortality isn’t just right and you’ll see how this connects to what you said in a sec your mortality isn’t the fact you know like in told stories Ivan Illich Ivan Illich knew he was going to die right it’s not it’s not that your mortality is that like you said in in some fundamental way you know we are finite we are broken we are not gods so and I’m seeing this in my discussion with him how do you how do you because I’m trying to work this with him as a father getting people to embrace their mortality is good because it prevents inflation it prevents hubris it prevents I suppose it would prevent blasphemy too from a Christian perspective and as you said it helps people to not not to fall into the error of by criticizing others I implicitly remove myself from that criticism right I see all of that how do we do that without the without traumatizing them sorry I sorry that was a bit of a garden path I blow no I I think there I think there has to be I’m sorry that what I’m going to say but I think that trauma is part of the experience like I think that death is traumatic but we don’t want to be cruel is what I’m saying no no right no I understand but death is death is is traumatic like there is a trauma in death um and so we need like the the church fathers and the the ascetics they always say two things they say remember god and remember death those are the two things you need to remember I always kind of joke around and say you know that’s the the Christian version of uh of like mindfulness you know it’s like remember god remember death right and so the idea is that if you if you are if you kind of remain in your death then like you said you avoid all the problems that you talked about and the strange paradox in Christianity is that by doing that you actually do become god yes like you you you actually do become deified ultimately if you do those two things right but it but it’s a non-inflationary exactly and that’s the kind of the paradox of it’s the the paradox of of of creation and the paradox of uh of the garden of eden which is that if adam had submitted to the will of god and not eaten of the fruit of the tree then god would have given him the fruit of the tree that’s the that’s the tradition right that’s what many saints have said and not only that but that that would have been his access to the tree of life which would have been perfect communion with the divine and so it is in humility that we actually reach the highest it’s interesting I just read this morning when I was doing my lexodivine a rilkes passage where he talks about uh we throw a ball into the infinite and then it returns to us differently it returns to us heavier and in it’s only in that in in having done that that we actually get to feel the true weight of things and it sounds like uh you’re saying something very analogous to that so but what how do we avoid the trauma I all I can say is the idea is obviously to place the trauma ultimately to place it in christ like the ultimate trauma right is is communion like that’s the ultimate trauma if you really take communion seriously you are engaging in a traumatic experience you are eating the flesh and blood of the god man like you are you are at the foot of horror like we talk you know you talk about horror a lot in your in your in your um in your lectures and I one of the things I do want to bring up to you is that that is why communion one of the aspects of communion is to bring you into that horror in a manner which will which will save you and not destroy you right in a manner in which you can integrate it in that it’s both a participation in horror and a communion of love at the same time in a paradoxal way yeah I mean well maybe we can talk about this at some point I mean I do think the other sacred brings in simultaneously it’s the symbol on right the the the horrifying function and the homing function in a profound way and that that goes back to so I mean there’s two things I want to say one is like I’m trying to but there’s there’s a notion of mortality and isn’t it in the symbolism of carrying your cross that’s analogous to the buddhist notion that mortality isn’t just death but that the idea that moment by moment I I’m dying there’s yeah there’s little deaths all the time and that if I try to avoid that if I try to um get some kind of permanent hold on things I’m I’m I’m just gonna I’m gonna cut myself on that and then I’m gonna cut other people it’s again is that um is that a is that a correct analogy yeah of course yeah like if you look at if you look at the prayer of Jesus the the basic mystical prayer of the church it has two it has two parts right it says it has an invocation it says lord Jesus Christ son of God have mercy on me a sinner and so it’s like there’s this invocation and this remembrance of my own brokenness remembrance of my own incapacity and so those two movements simultaneously they’re the ones that will and it’s and it’s it’s also and because I think one of the problems of the of the trauma of the protestant is to a certain extent the idea that it’s weird like the idea that you should be pure right that you should be but you can’t and so it’s like what then what what do you do right you just remain in this strange broken uh broken self but if you rather see it as this this necessary part of being a human person and moving towards the good then it then it’s not as traumatic because you you’ll then see that even the saints lived in you know in the most difficult temptations that the saints were struggling with their passions you know and those who reached the highest had the same frustrations you did like they no one pretends to be if you there isn’t like the holier the person that’s holier than now and that kind of just if you read the lives of the saints you see the story of broken people who their whole life struggle with thoughts and with temptations you know and are delivered by God but it’s like okay if they struggled so for 30 years you know you read you read crazy stories of the saints where it’s like for 40 years he struggled with the the thought of of fornication and it’s like what he struggled with that for 40 years he actually struggled actively with that for 40 years okay so i need to stop complaining because seriously i’m there’s no way that i’m doing that so juhanan talks about this uh in connection with uh playdo and socrates he talks about it in terms of he has a book called finite transcendence where he said that but theta was always uh trying to keep this tension alive between the relationship to transcendence and the acceptance of our finitude of our mortality and so i’m wondering then if there is something like a feature of wisdom i know you have your particular christian commitments and i’m not trying to trespass on those but you’re also not you’re not you’re not being offended which i thank you for when i make these connections to other other things you you find them i think valuable at least in discussion but make that there seems to be a feature of wisdom which is this kind of tonos um between right the aspiration in transcendence and then the deep acceptance of of our humanity and our mortality and keeping them always together is and there’s a finesse to that there’s a dynamic i can’t give you a rule or a recipe for doing that it’s an ongoing ever evolving capacity would you would you would you think yeah it’s a motive it’s a mode of being it’s a way of being which is what will kind of hold those two things together and i think your image of wisdom is particularly good in the sense that wisdom at least in scripture at least in the in the bible the way that wisdom is seems to really be the capacity for those for let’s say the the principles or the ideals to be united with the particular like that seems to be you know it’s like the wisdom always comes as like advice on how to you know how to find the good woman or how to how to live your life how to deal with money like that’s how wisdom comes but what it’s it’s patterning something which is which is above you know yeah aerosol has that with sophia and fromesis being brought together right sophia is your grasping of these universal and profound principles and then fromesis is how do you make them contextually relevant in a contextually sensitive manner so this now brings me back around then it sounds like this this deeper reflection on well let’s use the word sin for now this deeper reflection on sin you know affords us what might be missing in what we’re seeing in the demonstrations that that and this this is part of my concern that you talk about the you know inclusion as the sole value i talk about something similar in that that justice is the sole virtue and a very truncated sense of justice the greek sense of justice was always simultaneously external with others and internal with oneself that’s really clear and what we have is a completely we get none we get a reduction of all the virtues to justice and then just the the social aspect of justice hence the name social justice yeah we’re not sure exactly what what that justice entails in terms of its particular like how it’s going to manifest well and that goes to the point i want to make because i i i have a concern that we are losing the other virtues i mean the greeks had at least the cardinal four and then the christians add the next the sacred three and so we at least had set we at least have seven we should be talking about right we at least have seven we should be talking about and we were just talking about one one of the ones that’s considered something like a meta virtue which is wisdom you know i shared the what i think one interpretation of socrates that socrates saw that each virtue was a way of being wise in a particular situation the virtues aren’t separate things yeah of course particular ways of enacting and so to me if that argument is good and i think it’s a good argument talking about justice without having concern for wisdom seems to me to be like really really almost oxymoronic it seems to be um self-contradictory self-undermining and that’s a very dangerous kind of thing to be for human beings to be embracing embracing committing yourself deeply to something that is self-undermining in its foundations um is a very problematic thing to do what do you think about that as a no i totally agree and that’s why it’s one of the reasons because the idea of the idea of justice it seems to have something to do with equality although it’s ill-defined as well like what exactly do we mean by equality and what because obviously equality is a strange term because you need a you need a category to declare equality because you can’t have equality in everything because then everything would just be the same like it so so equality is a complicated term and so it seems like you know it’s like the what is it the the intersectional it’s like the diversity equity inclusion right that’s the those are the three kind of values that kind of mesh together in this idea of justice um and so the difficulty is of course that the rev like the revolutionary aspect of it is what you you also talk about in the sense of it undermining itself it ends up eating itself and it ends up eating itself by its very mechanism which is that i hate to say it this way but it’s it’s inevitable to come to the fact that there is no such thing as equality right in terms of actual total equality right because it what does it mean like everybody’s smarter stupider than others some are taller some are shorter you know and and and it it’s individually true and it’s true in different categories and different cities and it’s like there’s difference you know you can’t have equality and so this like weird desire for equality ends up being ends up being a kind of power play it seems not not really a desire for equality but a desire for power so so i wonder if there’s something going on here kind of displacement because um and and and this this is going to be really you have to move very carefully here um so i think what people want to do sorry that sounds pompous but it’s hard to talk it seems it seems plausible to me to propose that what people want to do is reduce the suffering of pain and distress and then they and then they they have they’re making a claim that most suffering or distress or maybe all right is caused by inequality and of course there is truth to that yeah what you know when resources are not being distributed as fairly as they can and fairness is not the same thing as equality this is part of the problem right because justice is also supposed to be about fairness just about equality um and so when we do cause we cause unnecessary suffering so so let me try and give you a bit of a quite riff on this i see um the the the left as really sensitive to the fact that human beings are so i’ll use a greek term here but you’ll you’ll find a christian analog i’m sure that human beings are really subject to fate that there is just shitty things that happen to human beings because they’re finite and they’re limited and the world is an overwhelming machine and there are historical forces and material forces you know you might even say powers and principalities at work right and people are just subject right and and that we we have to do and that people therefore deserve our aid even if they haven’t earned it because if we don’t do that we are and this is like the aspect of sinigin we’re ignoring the fact that we are finite and we are subject to forces beyond our control the left gets that and and i think the right tends to forget that and that’s why the right often comes off as cruel but what the what but right but what the left forgets is what the right is no matter how you know how haphazardly they do it and stupidly they do it is the right tries to remind people that even though we are subject to fate and people should be aided beyond what they deserve or have earned right human beings are nevertheless also responsible they need to culture virtue because every human being is bicep by self-deception and the only person that can get out of self-deception it i can’t get you out of your own self-deception i can give you guides but you have to go through it like you have to go through it i can’t do that for you right so if it to put it in a slogan you know the left remembers fate and forgets virtue and the right remembers virtue and forgets fate and so so what i’m trying to get at is how how could how could we change this discussion about justice so that we could put it back into what it was supposed to be paired with which was suffragette right we pursue just the external justice of trying to reduce the suffering of others that are caused by history and fate has to always be counterbalanced by suffragette the cultivation of the inner justice of virtue and that those for the greeks it was it was it was axiomatic that you had to talk about those two things together somehow we have gotten to the point where we only talk about one side of this and i find that also a very lopsided thing sorry that was a long thing to say but i you know you’re a deep thinker and i want to give you a lot to wrestle with yeah well i it seems like the way that at least when i look at the way that things happen in in the bible and kind of the way the emphasis that christianity has put on it is obviously it’s christianity is obviously very very preoccupied with the poor preoccupied with the poor in the broadest way you can interpret that and those that have less and those that have little right uh whether it’s you know whether it’s the poor in terms of their own let’s say spiritual poor or it’s poor even physically in terms of their material poor or it’s the sick or it’s those that have no recourse like the widow and the orphan this is something that christianity is extremely uh concerned about but the way that christianity seems to have concerned itself about it mostly is to ask those who have to give right to put responsibility on those who have to care for those who need to be cared for sure rather than tell those who are lacking to go get theirs right to like to take it from those who have it and that’s really the difference between the revolutionary mindset and the christian mindset and some people might say well why why can’t it happen like why can’t those that have less just take right take take it back and the reason is because the reason is very practical reason it’s because it’s a self-defeating pattern yes the pattern which will which will destroy itself because there’s always someone who has less than you and there’s always someone who will be there to take from you even though you think you are the one you’re the one who has less and so you take from that one above you but then there’s always someone below you who has less than you and will take from you and as soon as you take from that one above you the power especially then you become the the you become the one who is now in the you know who’s who’s going to be shot like the story of Robespierre is obviously the the most classic example of that happening and so that seems to be the way that christianity deals with it and there are consequences if you don’t and the consequences need to be kind of put in the right position the way i kind of say it is i don’t excuse the peasants for killing the king right but i still think it’s partly the king’s fault right it’s still it’s still because the king didn’t care for the peasants that the peasants ended up killing him and i’m not justifying the peasants actions but i am saying that if you don’t care for the poor at some point it’s going to happen like the the people will come and take theirs if you don’t care for them but it’s not morally justified that they do i don’t know if that makes sense no it does i get what you’re saying but what i was what i was trying to well maybe this is a way of bringing it back yeah like i’m trying to get to this notion that isn’t just about equality or even equity i’m trying like yeah you know you’re right jesus does both you see jesus and the buddha both and they what’s interesting is they both do this they both criticize equally something like cruelty and something like hypocrisy right and so what i’m saying is the the what we’re trying to bring in here as we’re trying to encompass the the nature of human beings is that the notion of social justice especially if it becomes just the pursuit of equality does not have the machinery to deal with it jesus and the buddha are neither left nor right like it doesn’t make sense to talk there right yeah exactly but you’re making sense at all exactly right and so the point is in a very profound way they’re kind it’s not that they’re non-political but they’re they’re if you’ll allow me they’re meta-political oh yeah right they’re trying to get at what what are the values or the virtues people should be aspiring to that are the most responsible and i mean both senses of the word responsible to human nature it right that’s what i see them doing and that’s what i’m not seeing in this movement i’m not seeing the wisdom of you know like we said of trying to balance these things together of getting a deep understanding of human nature i’m i’m hearing a very very superficial theory about human nature and human history and human culture and and and and i don’t think that the version of justice justice is what really concerns me is this version of justice it sounds so easy and and that means that to me means it’s got to be wrong because i mean what i get from all the great philosophers is justice real justice i mean john walsh writes this huge book right like real justice is hard it’s really hard because human beings are so incredibly complex and they have as we’ve been talking about here these you know these opposing forces and poles at work in them that was a point i’m trying to make sorry you’re totally right and i think that like if you look at this if you look at how christ deals with it it’s interesting because you know we talked about responsibility and you can see that in you can see the way that christ talks about like he talks to the pharisees and he says you’re a bunch of hypocrites and he he talks to woe to the rich if you don’t care for the poor and woe to you know uh and blessed are those who are poor for they will receive and all of this like there’s all this and is but he also has several parables where he talks about the poor who don’t care for what they have and the consequences of that like he also has that he also has the parable of the talents where he talks about the servant who receives something and doesn’t make it fruitful and therefore has to face the consequences of not making fruitful that’s what he has and so christ talks talks at all levels at the same time you know i always say like you said he’s meta-political he’s a he’s a judge and a victim he’s the king and the servant he’s all these things at the same time uh in in a very paradoxical way and so he kind of transcends politics and it’s interesting to watch politicians the the politically minded because they see in christ a kind of weird mirror of themselves so the people on the left see christ as a kind of revolutionary yeah yeah bigger and the people on the right see christ as a get your act together type figure it’s like well you know what neither of those really yeah i think that was very well said jonathan yeah so there’s what to do with this what to do with this this weird i the way that i think the way to understand it and you know you talked a little bit in our before our conversation started about the inevitability of religio and i think that’s really the way that’s exactly where i wanted to go yeah this whole discussion seems to be pointing right it’s making a very i think plausible argument about the inevitability of religio the unavoidability of religio in human endeavor and you made uh and human existence and you made this point and i wanted to give you the opportunity to expand on it you made a point of criticizing the the new atheists um you know uh in in how they were sort of saying if we could just get rid of religion uh you know and what they did is you know they identified religion with a you know belief in the supernatural etc etc and if we just got rid of those false beliefs uh then that would be it and then your point is well the people that are in these marches they’re not advocating anything necessarily supernatural something perhaps transcendent but not supernatural etc they’re not doing a lot but nevertheless look at the religious behavior look at how comprehensive and powerful it is and look at how much it’s a response to the way the covet crisis accelerated the meaning crisis you and so you and you you made that and it was sort of a very brief thing it was about two or three minutes in the video but i wanted to give you and i think this is a good context you and i in discussion i wanted to give you the opportunity to expand on that yeah well my criticism of the new atheist you know and i would use stephen thinker as the as the main example just because of the kinds of books he’s written and the kind of statements he’s made about enlightenment and this kind of progress and everything um is that and i think that what you’re doing is is a much better like the cog sai approach and the cognitive science approach is a much better approach to this because there is there is an understanding of what a human being is in a in a deeper way and and there’s an understanding of the reasons why we have certain patterns and the reason why certain things exist within us and what what the new atheist team to want to do is to see the advantage of reason and then want to kind of box the human being in reason and see everything which is outside of reason as the thing to get rid of as the bad thing to get rid of there’s our original sin is everything that’s outside of reason needs to be eliminated but the problem is that you can’t eliminate it you know and and there’s a kind of weird utopian vision and the example i always use is the example of sleep you could say and reason and and uh and awakeness you know and the idea of kind of this more this other aspect of us in sleep it’s a good way to understand it it’s as if i told you you could be way more productive if you didn’t sleep like you just have to not sleep and then you could be awake all the time and wouldn’t that be amazing like then you would imagine how much progress you would make like imagine how far you would go if you would just stay awake all the time but the reality is that you can’t that’s not just not part of being a human being and so these other patterns that we have are there and so and they’re extremely important and if you try to get rid of them what they do is they kind of they go down for a little while and then they come back like a monster and then we’ll swallow you and that’s what we’re those are the kinds of things we saw in the in the french revolution in the russian revolution all the the kind of end of atheist cycle where all of a sudden the patterns come back like a big monster to devour you and now we’re seeing very similar things as well we’re seeing a secular religious uh manifestation and it’s akin to the one we saw in the french revolution and it’s akin to the one we saw in the russian revolution and so and and i and i always want to say it’s like the the people who kind of made fun of jordan peterson talking about this it’s like it’s happening right now it’s happening right now look at what’s going on and you can just poo poo it you can toss it to the side but it’s the same pattern happening again and the reason for the pattern is the same like the denial of sorry i get excited then i throw myself me too me too the the denial of certain aspects of the human person is going to come back yeah and so the the idea is what do you do like how do you deal with it and to me that’s why i think that that’s why i think that have a conscious having a conscious religious aspect to you that’s why ritual the conscious ritual is is important because ritual will be there you can’t avoid it now the question is whether or not it’s part of you integrated or whether or not you’re a slave to ritualized behavior and kind of scapegoat and identity forming behavior that that is that is just part of existence i think that was very beautifully said yeah the i i agree i think the first point you made it with the you know the cog sigh and all the stuff on relevance realization and those aspects that are pre-rational and how primordial they are and the importance of ritual so for those of you i mean you’re watching this video you know this work and so there’s arguments there and thank you jonathan for gesturing to them and then as you as you were building on that i thought of this scene and you’ll probably be able to riff on this because it’s on mythologies from a science fiction classic uh you know journey to the center of the earth and um especially in the movie version count sackmussum who’s the villain um they they you’ll see what how this connects in just a sec they come to him and they say well don’t you sleep and he said i never sleep i hate those little slices of death and he represents exact no i think just right so the journey to the center of the earth which of course has all kinds of mythic you know meanings attached to that right but and but he’s the villain and notice how he brings together like your analogy and how it connects back to an unwillingness to accept his his humanness his mortality there’s the hubris in here and his and that cycles us back again to this refusal to accept our humanity to we it’s ultimately it’s again the same kind of it’s a it’s it’s a puritanical kind of refusal to accept our humanity in a profound hubristic way and that and and that i think is what when i’ve talked to people um you know who have sort of come out of the new atheist movement one of the things that they’ll often say that started putting them off was they got a sense of arrogance attached to these people and you know and i’m not talking about and part of it is no doubt personality there’s narcissism and but i think they might also have been putting out their finger on this this sense that right there are aspects of our humanity that are not being given due and this is what i mean again about justice softness and justice play don’t have this sense that you had to give all of the parts of the human their due they had to be given their due regard their due role their due place the attempt to eradicate um it was a deep mistake right and and right and so this this the softness and the inner justices we have to give due regard and due place and due role for all aspects of our humanity if you if you look at if you look at the very first commandment or the very first place in scripture where it talks about something which is holy uh is in the the description of creation and so you have six days then you have the seventh day which is the day of rest and it’s the day which is set aside for god right it’s the holy day and and right there in genesis it says that’s why we we follow the sabbath now that there’s a mystery in that which is very profound and the mystery is that it’s exactly the mystery that the new atheists are incapable of seeing which is that the way that the world is made in the way that consciousness is made and the way that reason is is because it’s a patterning system it can never encompass everything right it it can be coherent but it cannot be complete and you need to leave a bit out for completeness to manifest itself like in it’s in its mystery so you need to leave a bit on the edge that is not closed that isn’t tied up that isn’t accounted for there has to be some aspects which are not accounted for if you try to account for everything that’s the you know that’s the that’s the the most dangerous thing right it’s the yeah and if you also try to see that which is accounted for as totality which is the sin of satan which is the sin of pride which is the sin of adam that’s the hubris and then then you fall because that aspect which you which you which you which is supposed to be unaccounted for which you’re trying to ignore is still there right and and the the fascinating aspect of that margin or the the let’s say the the seventh day is that there are it has two parts to it it has a part which is the the unfathomable of creation right the the the completeness of creation but it also points to the infinite there’s a secrecy in it which also points to the infinite which is why it’s both the day of rest but also the day set aside for god at the same time so it’s both death and the source of life at the same time that’s very interesting your invocation of godel i mean i take godel’s theorem that you can’t have it both complete and consistent to be an example of what i meant earlier by mortality that’s the mortality in the heart of any epistemological project or you know heisenberg’s uncertainty that’s the mortality in the in the in the heart of any empirical observation investigation and more and more of these right and and the the the history of philosophy of the last two centuries have been its philosophy in science at least the more philosophical aspects of science have been the been the discovery of this i’d like your invocation of it because it brings me back around and you know and you i you you may i don’t have you’re doing it deliberately a little bit you’re invoking i heard levinas when you were comparing totality to infinity because he has a book around that right and how infinity is not the same thing as totality because totality is the pretense that you have both consistency and completeness that’s my way of understanding it and and therefore it like if you take the gold gold gold’s argument seriously and you should right that is always a dangerous pretense and that the problem with any any system that claims to be complete and consistent is that it is actually a deep form of self-deception oh yeah that’s for sure so i mean and this is what you know this was this is the great for all of the criticisms i have over them this is the great thing that comes comes out of the whole pragmatism movement of james and pierce and dewey and more recent people uh you know like quine and davidson and they they’ve had a deep influence on me i haven’t had a chance to talk about them very much i will in another series but the point i’m trying to get to here is like there’s a there’s a shadow side of totalitarianism there’s a negative version of it which is strategies of eradication because eradication is an attempt to be completely consistent and complete so there’s an argument i and i’m not advocating for all of his ideas but i just want to give due credit uh colman hughes makes this argument about look we all agree that murder is a deeply immoral act and i’m not playing around with terms well sometimes you kill but when we say killing that’s not immoral we don’t call it murder murder is the name for the killing we regard as immoral so let’s not play that game so we guard murder as immoral but we don’t pursue an eradication strategy in our society because if we were to eradicate try to eradicate murder we would so we would so subject ourselves to a radically dehumanizing totalitarian state that and that’s why no that’s why no culture anyway doesn’t right every culture has prohibitions against murder there’s variations on it of course but you don’t see them saying and what we’re going to do is we’re going to set things up so that murder is impossible you know philip that’s a philip k dick kind of situation scary thing no and you’re right about the the strategies of eradication these these these are extremely frightening because they do they they tend towards exactly what you’re talking about and and i’m afraid that i see the same you know and i’m afraid that i’m seeing that right now with covid i’m seeing exactly a falling into a strategy of eradication where we think that we cannot continue to live until this virus ceases to exist yes this is not how the this is not how it works this is a dangerous because the method you will use to eradicate the virus the totalitarian methods you will use will be extremely harmful they will be very very harmful to to to our our health to our community all of these things and it’s like the thing the the difficulty that you understand the desire to eradicate because it’s a bad thing right this virus is a bad thing you want it to go away but once you enter into that strategy of eradication especially with techno states where you you are develop the power to push that capacity of eradication to its you know to to limit that it were not seen before yeah it’s a very very frightening situation a clear example of that is the proposal that we we we start tracking everybody’s movement every movement yeah i i say people do you really want the state to have that power do you really want the state to have that power you really want the corporations to have that power they already have that power to some degree and they use it to manipulate you i look i i and i can’t believe it i saw a bbc article just a few days ago and it was just like a regular article where they’re talking about what the future of travel will look like and in their description of the future of travel they talked about they talked about vaccines with identification in the vaccine that they can scan your body so that so that you and this was a bbc article it wasn’t a conspiracy article it wasn’t like someone it was like this is what travel is going to look like they’ll scan your body to know whether or not you have the vaccine and they’ll let you participate in social things depending on whether or not they can track you it’s like my good don’t you watch science fiction movies i don’t know like am i the only one who watches science fiction movies well i watch them too so i mean and we have to be careful here so covid is very bad oh yeah no no no i want i want to make an analogy here covid is very bad and we should try as much as we can ameliorate it but with wisdom toggling against against over empowering the state and taking a dehumanized view or a simplistic view of human nature in in order to achieve it so we don’t push for eradication we we push for amelioration that doesn’t cost us too much our humanity isn’t that the same attitude we should take for how to deal with the very real evil of racism that we should try which and we should continue to try to ameliorate it but we shouldn’t you know i talk a lot about how you frame the problem is way more important than the method about you know about actually solving it should we be adopting a mindset that is a totalitarian kind of eradication about something like racism it strikes me that that but that argument by analogy means there is a a sense in which we can go too far on this and that doesn’t i hope that doesn’t make me a racist and what i’ve seen is like i saw the interview with don lemon and i forget the name of the actor and he was trying to say he’s a black guy and he’s right he’s trying to say i’m just saying that that you know some of the leaders of the movement are going too far too extreme that’s all he was proposing and he was he was treated with smugness and and and dismiss and in this horrible argument by lemon you know well people accuse martin luther king of being too extreme as if well are are you saying that because sometimes people have misused that word that every time they use it they’re misusing it that’s a really stupid argument can we have a better argument please and it’s like if we can’t even bring up the question that the that we might be framing the attempt to achieve a goal a laudable goal that i fully support then i think we’re we’re in a very very bad place i think we’re getting into a very bad place yeah and you’re right because what one of the things cova did was awaken in us this this this pattern of infection right yes yeah and it awakened in us the pattern of infection and the desire to exclude and eradicate yeah and now it’s being politicized like not not the covid like it’s it’s weird because you can see that there’s there’s no like there’s no narrative connection between coven and the and floyd but there is a pattern connection yeah and you can see that in that it’s awakened the pattern and now it’s playing out in the political sphere well i mean isn’t that a case again i’m talking at the latent level not the manifest level but that seems like a case you know it’s like a clear case of what a psychodynamic person would call displacement right that yeah that you’re you’re being it’s like you said coven puts you like you’re suddenly in the old testament and i don’t mean that pejoratively right but you know you have this ubiquitous threatening things out there in the world and you have to adopt this very you know very you know insular purity code and then you don’t know what it’s going to strike you and then right and they might be infected and and you know the adult and and and then but now what we can do is we can’t we couldn’t do anything about the cove it but i think what your suggestions but i can do something about this over here can do something about yeah and the danger about the danger of the racist thing is the the limit of it because the limit is the problem with racism is that it’s an invisible thing in the sense that it ends up being thoughts and feelings in people yes and the idea that you can reprogram someone and that you can move towards the eradication of thoughts and feelings i mean we know where that leads like we know where that goes and because it can’t happen then like we said like i said before but it’s going to end up looking like it’s scapegoating where we’re going to choose some we’re going to find examples that we can drag out in public and you know and have struggle session watch struggle sessions and have them be humiliated in public so that we can deal with the problem of eradicating something which is which is unconscious bias like it’s unconscious so you can’t how can you eradicate it well i think trying to eradicate that is i mean given what we’ve argued isn’t that the same it’s ultimately committing you at some level to eradicating the machinery of humanity that’s right right and so and so the let’s say that this is i’ve been more and more attracted to renee girard in the past year i would say you know just because of everything that’s happened and i’ve been seeing that his analysis of the situation is is really one of the wisest in terms of the way that he interpret what’s happening and intersectionality i mean he passed away i think around 2010 or maybe a bit later you know he talked about into i saw a quote of his in 2007 where he talked about the machine of anti-christ which is ramping up and he saw exactly what we’re seeing he said it’ll be infinite victimhood looking for infinite scapegoat and so it’s like this perpetual wheel of victimhood which is looking perpetually for more and more scapegoats it like almost like a self-devouring machine and so we’re seeing it that the solution is like i hate to i i know you dislike when i push it too far but the solution is the the image of the scapegoat being the murderer and this and the victim at the same time like identifying with christ and identifying with those that killed him identifying with the capacity to exclude and the reality of also being excluded to a certain extent like those two things together if you can kind of you can integrate them properly and not in a weird disorderly manner can help you have compassion for those who are excluded but can help you also understand that you are one of those who do that all the time yes you’re always doing it but this this is what i meant i i i i i think there’s power in drug argument i’ve only read the one book and i’m not completely at the one i saw on satan fall like lightning yeah but the idea that you can explode the if you’ll allow me to use some of my terms you can explode the cultural cognitive grammar of scapegoating and that the christian mythos does that i thought that was one of the most powerful arguments and it’s a new argument as far as i know one of the most powerful apologetic arguments for christianity that i had heard in quite some time so i i think that is a good point that you brought up but but it does i think it’s it’s situated within this larger past again which we keep coming back to of trying to get to a place where we can simultaneously accept faith and virtue because one of the ways in which you can right one of the ways in which you can address people’s thoughts and feelings is by inspiring them to aspire to virtue rather than trying to eradicate you can try to inspire the aspiration to virtue and and this has been to my mind that you know a very very successful strategy where i’ve been talking a lot recently and akira the don did the meeting wave about it about stealing the culture and i actually use christianity as a primary example of that the christianity doesn’t try and overthrow the political structure what it does is it steals the culture it creates an entirely different culture from the bottom up and then because the problem to my mind what the french revolution shows is you can radically transform the state but if you don’t transform the underlying cultural cognitive grammar and normativity nothing is fundamentally going to change yeah you just change the you just change the ones who are holding the reins and you circulate you circulate the elites exactly right and so whereas what christianity does is and is is it it builds a new civilization buddhism does the same thing right it builds a new civilization islam does the same thing it builds a new civilization and and so that brings us and we don’t have much time i suppose but so that brings me towards the third point is you said you you know you sort of despair of knowing what to do and i’m wondering if you i’m sorry i realized i might be daring the pro-hostress thing of proposing some sort of a christian thing to a christian which is a ridiculous thing but i gave you all of those examples and to my mind of the idea of well isn’t the response to do as much as we can to engage in building the next culture and that sounds preposterous but a commitment to that kind of thing seems to me to be the most responsible response to the depth of the situation we are in right now yeah no i think so i think i mean i would say on a personal level it’s it’s just it i mean love god love your neighbor is is a pretty pretty good thing to live by in in the immediate reality and not abstract categories to deal you know to to love the people that you that you encounter with to see in them the face of god is something that will transform at least your life it’s harder in terms of a like a social responsibility for sure myself the way that i the way that i frame it that’s why i’m doing what i’m doing what you said is that i’m trying to help people see the the grammar of culture or see the pattern and and of course one of the things i’ve been emphasizing the most is the importance of the margin and talking about the margin in a balanced way so that you neither have the desire to because both sides want to eliminate the margin everybody wants to eliminate it they want to eliminate the margin either by making it the same as the center by integrating all the marginal aspects and making them equal to everything else or by eradication or by cutting it off and that’s those are that’s the real problem with the like it’s the question we had during the the the first wave of violence of the 20th century you had two sides you had one side which wanted to create an equal utopia and one which wanted to create a hierarchical utopia that cut off the margin that burned it off and so and we’re facing the same it’s like we didn’t deal with it we’re facing the same problem now and we’re seeing the one side now we’re seeing the we’re seeing the the the side that wants everything to be equal but i always tell people that when the nazis came to germany they were on the verge of a communist revolution it’s not the pendulum doesn’t move in one direction no the pendulum swings and it’s a scary thing to watch but this is part of the way in which again the way in which this lack of the lack of of a dynamical nuance in thinking so you know leo ferraro and i talk about this idea that you in in living systems and right you you see opponent processing and i’ve argued right and that what an opponent processing means this is the way you deal with trade-offs and we’ve been talking about trade-offs all the way through right you have opponent processing you like your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system like the sympathetic nervous system is biased it tries to interpret everything as a threat or an opportunity that arouses you and the parasympathetic system is biased and it tries to interpret everything as a signal that you should relax and calm down and and they’re working their biases work in opposite direction but they’re functionally integrated together because that’s how you get the most self-corrective system and what we were supposed to have you can see this in dewey right was we’re supposed to have a point processing but what it’s devolved into is adversarial processing yeah like and this is the eradication idea the other it says zero now it’s a zero-sum game i’ve given up the idea of self-correction i’ve given up the idea of commitment to a process that you and i even though we disagree we can we can commit to like you and i do in dialogue we have disagreements but we see the potential that we can correct each other in valuable ways that we mutually appreciate right there was that commitment and that commitment to that process has been lost like the fact that most americans are more distrusting of the opposite party than they are a foreign threat like what the heck does that mean right what like what does that mean to you like like and so the adversarial eradicate the other destroy the other zero-sum game mentality i think has made the process i think is broken yeah i i think the process is broken and so i don’t i don’t know i i don’t see how i mean and layman pascal and others they disagree with me on this i don’t know how to work within that in a way and so that’s what i mean by steal the culture that i don’t know if working within that machinery is a viable strategy i think no strategy has to be you know jonathan i was at a conference two weeks ago called the movement summit and there’s all these communities of practice springing up everywhere or trying to integrate mindfulness and movement practices and discourse practices and so many of them and you know these people and they’re all and they all want to talk to each other and they want to network and and it felt very different this is it felt very good it was neither you know the revolution of the of the left or the law and order of the right it’s it was orthogonal to that it was these people trying to seriously time and talent and money and energy and commitment to the cultivation of wisdom in on a and a deeply alternative way of being and to my mind that’s where and i know you think it should be given a particular christian slant but i also think you’re charitable enough to include other people of good faith who are willing to work with you i think that’s where the answer to the more difficult problem lies i think there is stuff actually happening right here right now culturally symbolically existentially that is where the diff the difference that is needed is starting to be generated oh but i i for sure agree i think that the seed of the like a way to see it is like that this is horrible because it has bad implications but like the seeds of the next world will appear in the current one right yes like they they’re just hard to see you know the little sprouts are hard to see because everything else is burning in the forest right so it’s it’s difficult to see the the the seeds as this is kind of breaking apart and uh and i mean i’m curious to see how all of this will be integrated i do i do again like you know we we we talked about this before so we’re not going to come to a conclusion but i do i do think that there is a need for a a narrative cohesion and and i and i do think that until until something happens in the west it’s still it’s still the christian narrative so i don’t i don’t see a way out of it for at least you know i don’t see a way out of it so but i i appreciate i do think that the questions that people are asking and that the desire for wisdom and the desire for transformation is one which will bear fruit it won’t it has to if it’s done with sincerity and done you know and a desire for transformation it will bear fruit yeah the point i’m trying to make is thank you for saying that um and and you know from my part i don’t i don’t ever claim to have a foreclosure argument against christianity i i always say that i do not have such a fit um uh but what i was trying to emphasize is it’s there’s not only sincerity there’s depth in like what’s going on here it has the the appreciation for humanity and complexity uh that’s what i’m seeing in these people in this movement of course we’re all flawed human beings i’m not i’m not painting some utopic vision but i’m talking about you know a real a real possibility and the acknowledgement that i think it’s it’s it’s it’s in existence i like your metaphor for all the ways it’s fraught but i do like your metaphor of the seeds i do like putting the two together that the burning of the forest actually fertilizes the seeds in the way they need to be fertilized and perhaps you were alluding to that and your rice smile yeah but it’s not it’s not a fun it’s not fun like it’s not pleasurable no there’s and it means it means death and suffering yeah and i have kids and i and i don’t want this but i want and what needs to happen are not always the same thing yeah um jonathan i think maybe this would be a good place to bring it to a close um um so um i proposed to you privately and you already agreed so i’m going to do it publicly uh yeah i think that you and i and paul should have a have a discussion like this a diologos as i would call it at length for the three of us and i’d like to invite you and then i’ve also invited paul and let’s let’s try and work to make it happen because i think it would be a very beneficial for all of our respective listeners yeah that’d be great i would i would love that we let’s set it up okay so i’ll reach out to paul and uh i’ll try and make it happen so i found um well you could see i got passionate which means this was definitely this is definitely diologos for me i always say that the difference between a diologos and a monologue is both people find themselves adduced they find themselves drawn to a place they couldn’t get to individually on the road and there’s a kind of education in that that’s very different from just sort of thinking in your own head and so i always find that the case when i get into such a dialogue with you and i wanted to thank you for it you had so many so many insightful brilliant ways by which so many insights and brilliant things you said and and not only what you said the manner in which you said the imagery that you used was itself often deeply helpful so thank you very much thank you very very much well you know i really i always enjoy talking to you and i and i really appreciate the insight you’re bringing to the conversation and i’m looking forward to seeing where this is going and kind of how how this is slowly going to to to let’s say play dance together is the best way to maybe to say it so yeah i agree i agree okay so thank you very much all right john it was good to talk to you good talk to you all right bye bye bye