https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JIsypT45UVM
The dark powers want to use symbol in a way that sort of obfuscates what’s really there. Powers are always based when they have a kind of a bent agenda. They have to have some kind of lie that’s inherent to the way they’re working in the symbolic world. Because true symbol is integrity between what’s on the inside and what’s on the outside. It’s kind of the way I think about glory. True glory is like pure integrity of what’s on the inside and the outside. Like a piece of amber, you know, and you put it up to the sun and it’s just like this beautiful translucent thing that you look through and it’s solid all the way through. Whereas a distorted symbol, and now we get into things like idols and advertising and words and stereotypes and things that kind of like have a certain force socially, They’re all predicated on some kind of a lie. They have a duplicitous nature. They function precisely because the inside does not have integrity with the outside. The outside has more of like a grandiosity, which we kind of like almost attribute to things by virtue of association. But they’re hollowed out. They really don’t have integrity of meaning. This is Jonathan Pajot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So hello everyone. I am very happy to be here with Ted Lewis. Ted Lewis is the director of the International Jacques Ellul Society. And Christian Roy, who you may have seen on this channel and is a good friend of mine, presented us. I myself have read some Jacques Ellul. I’ve struggled with Jacques Ellul. In some ways I feel like his insight on technology is very important for us right now to understand the problem of civilization, the problem of technology. But also, of course, as an Orthodox Christian and as someone who makes images, I’ve struggled with some other aspects of Jacques Ellul, which is what I see as the two negative vision of the city, of civilization, of the image of spatiality and the kind of the possibility of these things to manifest in the world today. And so I’m really excited to be able to kind of engage this discussion with Ted. And so Ted, thanks for coming along. Yeah, it’s great to join in here. I think a lot of people will know Jacques Ellul, but maybe several will not. So could you give people a sense of who he was, what’s his importance for us today? Yeah, I’ll be glad to. Jacques Ellul is a mid-century thinker and in many ways is a pioneer in the area of critiquing technology. And his prominent book, The Technological Society, came out first in 1954 in the French edition, 1964 in English. So we’re coming up on a 70th year anniversary. But even before that, during the Nazi era, Jacques Ellul and his friend Bernard Charbonneau and others in the personalist context in France were very concerned about how the force of technology and a mechanized world would have an effect on society as well as our very humanity. So one of the threads through all of his writings, I mean, he wrote a lot, 40 books, died in 1994. But the thread through all of that is sort of a warning that if Western people do not really come to terms with how the force of progress and technology, when it’s untethered from ethics, will end up having a deep effect on even the way we conceive ourselves as human beings. A simple way to think about it is to think about how environments influence us. So Ellul kind of split things into three zones. There’s sort of like a time where nature was our environment and social villages and cultural things are primarily rooted in how nature forms and patterns human life. And then the next stage has to do with just what he calls the environment of the social. This is the society we might think of the Greek city state and the Roman world and into the medieval world and Renaissance and the social world has more influence from how humanity is starting to lift itself away from nature and to create new ways of thinking and being and science and whatnot. And then for Ellul, technology itself becomes a third kind of environment, an environment which informs who we are as people. It almost becomes totalistic for him. And some people think he’s too far with that totalistic way about technology as a force dominates every part of human life. But those are some broad strokes around his writings. Yeah, I think the thing that for myself made me feel close to Ellul is that he definitely seems to understand because it’s important for people to understand that Ellul was also a very serious Christian. His insight, much of the way that he thought came from the Bible, came from his own. Was he Protestant? I don’t know what his tradition was. Yeah, primarily identified with the French reform and had quite a bit of influence within France and in those circles. One of the more significant things is before he was really a Christian, he had read Karl Marx. He fully embraced a Marxist approach and in many ways that continued to inform his sociology. And then he starts to read Kierkegaard. I think he’s known for reading just about everything Kierkegaard wrote, which is really astounding. And then he started getting introduced to Karl Barth. So Kierkegaard and Barth kind of advanced his Christianity out of a traditional Calvinist reform zone into what you might call more of a dialectical perspective of faith matters. And so one of the things that impressed me was that he does seem to really pick up very much on a clear strain in the Bible, which is the, you could call it the Canite image of civilization, which is that we find in the first chapters of Genesis that civilization is an issue of the descendants of Cain and is in some ways a kind of reaction to the curse and compensation for the curse in some ways to think about that. That he seems to see the city in that vein and civilization and the technification of society in this kind of line, let’s say Canite line. And you really have to understand Alul’s critique of the city and he does come on pretty strong as a follow up to Harvey Cox’s book, The Secular City, where Harvey Cox tends to have more of an open mindedness, like now that we’ve come into the fullness of modern society, all the virtues that might come with that. What Alul saw in that was a sacralization of the city. So it’s not the city per se with all of its architecture and structures and institutions for Alul that’s most problematic. It’s the fact that it gets lifted up like a Tower of Babel as something that becomes autonomous with its separate law, autonomous from God. So that’s really at the heart of Alul’s critique of the city is it becomes archetypal, just like the Tower of Babel, of human enterprises that don’t know how to be more interactive and participatory with God in a spiritual realm. Yeah, and in this way, this is where in some ways it starts to rub with me in terms of, especially being an Orthodox Christian, is that his interpretation of that leads all the way into his vision, for example, of image making and also of liturgy, how he saw liturgy as something similar to this process, you know, where he tends to be suspicious of all formalizations, you know, any type of formalization seems to be suspicious and prone to becoming idols. And his approach seems to be a kind of desire to desacralize or demythologize, you know, very much like Karl Barth, very much in that sense, where in some ways he sees Christianity as the ultimate desacralizer, you could say, that desacralizes everything. Do you think my understanding is right in that? I think it’s fairly good. And you have to understand that Alua once went to a Nazi rally, sometime in the later 30s, he was at one of those rallies, and he even admitted that he felt the pull, the magnetism, the group energy, getting drawn into that. And so his reaction to ceremony and ritual and the use of arts ultimately has to be understood through the lens of how it can be used to manipulate society. Of course, he then writes Empire of the Nonsense, where he kind of feels like most modern art is itself sort of, you know, dominated by a technological flow within the 20th century. So he doesn’t have a whole lot of positive things to say about modern art. So what is his view of, let’s say, because there is an eschatological image of the city, right, in the Book of Revelation. And so how does he reconcile those images together? Well, I’m glad you use the word reconcile because that is a word he likes to use where image and word come together in a fruitful way. So probably the most important book for this topic of his perspective on images and liturgy and all of that is The Humiliation of the Word. It happens to be one of my favorite books, and I was able to bring it back into print recently. And at the end of that book, he has a whole chapter called Reconciliation. And by that, he’s talking about Jesus’ Word of God, ultimate image of God as reconciling word and image in a way that restores the balance of both. And then that has implications then for other aspects of Christian life. So even though he’s very, very hard on image and he prizes word, I mean, the very title, The Humiliation of the Word, is sort of like grieving over the fact that we are an image dominated society, image saturated. And we prize more what we see rather than what we hear. And he goes into great depth about how the loss of our capacity to hear well affects our thinking, our way of relating to the spiritual realm and to God. And it kind of roots us much more in the here and now. So bringing back a restoration or reconciliation of word and image for him is the pathway modeled by Jesus to bring us into a better zone. And so one of the things that made me fascinated to talk about this is that recently, you know, Kisan gave me this wonderful edition of the ILLUL Forum that deals in large part with the question of how Jacques ILLUL talked about principalities and powers. This is, I think, something which is extremely relevant today. As we’re noticing, one of the things that social media has done and the internet has done is that it has accelerated the question of the relationship between attention and the way in which social forces function. And what it has done is that made it possible for us, because it’s accelerating it so much, it’s helping even secular people see the types of agencies which take over and act through people. And it’s made it easier, at least what I’ve noticed, it made it easier for me to talk about this notion that there are types of agencies or principalities, powers. You know, St. Paul uses different words to talk about these that kind of, let’s say, have a type of agency over human behavior. And this in some ways is one of the subjects that ILLUL has treated, you know, in a moment where it was in some ways very unpopular to talk about these types of subjects. So can you give us a sense of how he perceived these types of transpersonal agencies? Yeah, it’s a big topic and I have to be humble to say I’m still sort of unpacking his perspective and then what I think about it. He definitely felt and believed that there were real principalities and powers simply because the Bible treats them as real. And Marva Don is someone who did a fair amount of work with this topic. She did her whole dissertation on ILLUL’s view of the powers and principalities and then wrote some other things about it. And she highlights that ILLUL kind of hedged a little bit on what might be called the ontological being of powers when it comes to agency and personification, which, you know, through Christian tradition, when we think of powers as having volitional dimension, I would say he wasn’t like fully there in his descriptions, as you’ll find in other Christian writings. And yet for him, they do have independent force beyond what you could just study empirically as a social scientist. Just a couple of examples for him was like the power of mammon, which is a biblical word related to money and wealth and material things, which have a certain power then over our need to protect our what we save. It’s similar to the way we kind of think of a power over someone who has an addictive or a compulsive relation to what enslaves them. And everyone who is in the recovery world kind of knows that these powers are way beyond what they themselves can control. And that’s why we use terms like agency from beyond, because it’s the metaphoric language that helps us be honest about the fact that there’s something greater that’s influencing us. Yeah. In the text that I was reading, there’s a letter from Jacques Illul to Marvin Donne. And he seems, at least in some of the parts of the letter, to be wary, to be cautious. Like you said, it’s as if he’s a little… he tends to have a bit of a reductionist approach to it, where he doesn’t want to fully talk about agency. But, you know, let me just read a little text from it here. And so he says, he talks about these powers, and he says, that is to say, they certainly exist, but not as entities comparable to human and materializable persons. They exist in as much as they are manifestations and not as beings. Thus, one finds the evil phenomena, the fact of money, of the city, of the state, and of technique, and these phenomena reveal the existence of an evil spiritual power, but not as a sort of powerful angel reigning over the world and using money or the state. And so Satan is the accusation, therefore everywhere there is an accusation, there’s Satan, but it is not a personage who provokes and produces the accusations. The accusation exists by itself. And so in that, I can see that he’s really struggling. He is really struggling to talk about this. And in some ways, I feel like I kind of understand, especially in the moment where, in the time when he was writing this, you know, how he was dealing with this, but there’s a way in which, in some ways, what he’s saying about these agencies and powers is something that a reductionist would say about us, about humans. He would say, there is no agency. There’s only the fact, there’s only the action, there’s only the cells, there’s only the electric impulses, you know, in your brain, because you cannot detect through agency, through material calculation. Like you can’t, agency always appears above, let’s say, the material facts. And so I was a little surprised because I really do think that someone would take his argument and apply it to a person and it would be as valid as the way that he tries to skirt the problem of transpersonal agency by attributing only the factors. I understand that it’s difficult because we are materialists and therefore we’re not used to thinking analogically. And so when we think of these angels and we see these beings with wings, we kind of freak out because it bothers us to think that way. We can’t think that even those representations are always analogical to some other form of, yeah, to an invisible agency, let’s say. Yeah, this is a deep topic. I might kind of come at this topic from a different angle and I’d like to throw out the word symbol. Symbol, you know, sim Greek for with, bowl, Greek for throwing something. You know, we get our word ball from that part of the Greek words that have the bowl in it. So symbol, to throw with, parable, to throw beyond, diabol, or diabolic, to throw apart. So the reason I kind of want to start with symbol is that in a way, God’s effort to reach humanity, and C.S. Lewis is kind of big on this, has to go through symbol to reach us. And that doesn’t mean that we can deconstruct it and then there’s nothing there. We come to realize it’s the necessary means for one realm that’s so incomprehensible and beyond to reach us has to go through metaphor and symbol for us to make sense of it. And so I think even when it comes to the darker powers, all we have is language and symbol in a way to apprehend it. Yeah. But like wind, like gravity, like frequencies now that, you know, make our garage door go up and down. We, we know that this stuff is like really happening because we see the effects. And so I think that’s part of being just limited human beings is that we have to learn to, to know that we’re really not going to get that much more than symbol. And yet that’s still a rich area for us to traffic in. And what I kind of find interesting is that the dark powers want to use symbol in a way that sort of obfuscates what’s really there. So powers are always based. And I mean, when they have a kind of a bent agenda, they have to have some kind of lie that’s inherent to the way they’re working in the symbolic world. And I think that’s kind of the reason why I think that’s important because true symbol is integrity between what’s on the inside and what’s on the outside. It’s kind of the way I think about glory. True, true glory is like pure integrity of what’s on the inside and the outside. And it’s not like you put it on the floor, you know, and you put it up to the sun and it’s just like this beautiful translucent thing that you look through and it’s solid all the way through. And now we get into things like idols and advertising and words and stereotypes and things that kind of like have a certain force socially. They’re all predicated on some kind of a lie. They have a duplicitous nature. Yeah. And they function precisely because the inside does not have integrity with the outside. The outside has more of like a grandiosity, which we kind of like almost attribute to things by virtue of association. But they’re hollowed out. They really don’t have integrity of meaning. Yeah. Would you say that the very because this I think would fit well with what you said, which is that the lie in some ways is the autonomous existence of the thing itself that is, you know, the state presenting itself as the summit of authority, for example, that itself is the lie which forces the disjunction between the outward appearance or the outward symbol and the interiority of what is symbolized. And so it forces, you know, when a state believes that it is all powerful, like in the authoritarian states that we saw in the 20th century, it is forced to use a religious language, which is not appropriate for itself in order to apply it to itself because it is in some ways like the tower babble taking up the place of God, we could say. Yeah. And I think what fits with what you’re saying is the is the phrase pretentious powers. One of alleles favorite verses right out of Second Corinthians 10 has this phrase of pretentious powers, you know, that we can deconstruct and bring captive to the Lordship of Christ. And by pretentious, it means it has the appearance of being very powerful. This is this is what I call the outside manifestation of a power that presents well like a state, like a nation, you know, like a new car or whatever. But on the inside has some contradictions, what you’re calling a lie. There’s always an Achilles heel, you know, on the inside of these duplicitous symbols because they’re they’re they have to continually be propped up with falsehoods and narratives and, and things which, you know, again, lack the integrity of meaning of the way things are. Of the way things truly are in the world. And so one of the ways that I so this is I think in terms of a little, maybe I can phrase it this way because I think it relates to what we’re saying now, which is that it seems to want to portray the negative, the negative in the sense that in some ways, right, the crucifixion of Christ the humiliation of Christ, the capacity to embody weakness subverts the whole structure. Right. And so in some ways, it exposes the powers, right. And that in the same similar to the way that the renegera talks about. And I think that in that sense, he is completely right. And there’s something about what he’s saying which pierces very truly, where I wonder is that in scripture, there’s also a whole other strain, which is the tabernacle, the temple, you know, and even Ezekiel’s third temple, which is a kind of vision of an eschatological temple. Yeah, and, and, and the same. And this image of the Son of Man and so for example in Revelation, you have this final image where you have to. So even in the text I was reading, you know, he was alluding to the lamb. And to the to the idea of the lamb as this this insane image right it’s like why the lamb at the summit of the of the hierarchy right this, that’s the subverted image but in the, in the vision it’s actually two images right it’s it’s the Son of Man, and the lamb. So it’s the, the king judge ruler, and the lamb joined together so there are these two strange in scripture it’s, it can seem contradictory, but they’re there right the vision of the the tabernacle or the God asking Moses to build a tabernacle is is very much using tropes related to Kane you know the bezel L. And so, the way that he’s described as an artificer you know the only other person called an artificer in scripture I think is is to book came. And so, it’s like there’s this whole other strain and that’s the one that that I see a little. And I think that’s the one that I ignore which which what I think would lead them to say to be something like a Christian anarchists like it’s as if all structure is is dangerous in itself so I don’t know if what you think of that I’m kind of poking here but I want to know what speaking more more of my thinking than trying to represent a little yeah okay okay then I will come back to him. But if you think about renais Gerard’s concept of sacrifice as having cultural root edge in the Hebrew tradition as well as the ancient Near East. And from his perspective, it’s slowly is being. It’s evolving into a new perspective which up ends the whole sacrificial system itself it’s like a counter narrative that involves non violence and forgiveness and relationality and upending. So it’s, it’s possible, I think that when you look at liturgical and artistic and you know those physical traditions that come out of the Old Testament that those themselves have a type of evolving understanding. So by the time Jesus is talking to the woman at the well and in Samaria. He says you know it’s hey it’s neither that temple or this temple people are going to worship in spirit and truth. I think a little kind of shares a little bit of that kind of sympathy where the temple itself has has like aspects of legitimate tradition, but ultimately it, it becomes not just replaced by something spiritual but it actually becomes sort of. There’s a tension with it there’s a subverted element and Jesus himself is using language to confront the temple institution itself by kind of broadening people’s minds into into these paradoxical ways of thinking that are trans cultural. So I don’t know if that’s a window in talking about that but I think a little kind of shares some of that sense of there’s a trajectory, just like a trajectory for Gerard about sacrifice maybe there is a culture to. And I think, yeah, and so I think that that’s it maybe I have a yes and way of thinking, you know, not a, not a, not a this but this or like I tend to have a yes and we’re thinking and so, and so, even in the story of Christ you have those images and then you also have the He cleansed the temple he wanted to purify the space that that God had established. Then I also think of the eschatological vision, the image of the heavenly Jerusalem is very powerful because it seems to solve the problem because the way that it’s presented is, is that the kings of all nations, you know, offer their crown up into the heavenly city, and all the glory of all the nations are elevated into the heavenly Jerusalem. And so it’s not that the nations are destroyed. It’s not that the kings don’t exist is that there exists in the proper order. So whatever set whatever particular glory a nation has is given up to something higher and that’s its glory actually right it’s like that is what is glorious whatever it can offer up and whatever it doesn’t hold on to itself and and tries to, you know, like, like the kind of the kind of dangerous nationalism that we can see that that is actually a kind of way in which all this participates on this so there isn’t a, there isn’t just the negative part there’s also this kind of positive way that we can that civilization that art that culture that that that that authority that all these things party can participate, ultimately in the kingdom. So I think I would affirm that and there’s, there’s a affirming incarnational blessing of things that that are with integrity reflect the nature of God and the intended, you know, creation that was set out for us. And at the same time, Jesus is the great distrubar of everything in every culture that does not align with, with all of that. Yeah, that’s kind of the way that I, I tend to, I tend to see it myself. Yeah. So, so in terms of in terms of how do you feel that it will speaks now because, you know, we’re seeing in some ways the the radical acceleration of technification you know, everybody’s talking about AI right now it’s it’s wild because it. It’s as if now these principalities and powers are almost like appearing in front of us. And so what do you what do you think. Well, just as an aside, I’m, I’m a real fan of CS Lewis is ransom trilogy. And the third one that hideous strength is, you know, you can get away with saying things in fiction that you can always convey and nonfiction and so I just think that that’s a great example for us to think into some of the trends that that we’re wrestling with now when you think about how related to institutions and whatnot. For a little. I personally think that one of his most important books for our current time is the technological bluff. It, in many ways, is the third of a trilogy if you start with the technological society, you know that he wrote in the 50s and then in the 70s he wrote the technological system, which adds some new perspective on his original thesis. And then thirdly, he wrote the technological bluff and by bluff he’s, he’s talking about how technique driven methods in our society present well to provide solutions, even uses the word salvation that at times, you know, because of this problem, this technology is going to save us from what not. And yet the bluff is we really don’t know exactly how the, the rollouts are going to look we don’t know what all the effects are he uses terms like consequences are unforeseeable. They’re unpredictable. Sometimes even unmanage unmanageable. Yeah. And because we have such a high general faith in technology we think that’s the only way to really solve something you know we have a pandemic which arguably comes out of a technological mule. But now we have to find a technological solution to deal with it well now that presents some additional fallout challenges. And this this is the bluff that he says, we need to call if we’re really going to not let ourselves be in these cycles of technological soteri ology. Yeah, yeah, yeah and one of the things that it seems to present which is very powerful is that in some ways. What happens in a technological state when it happens when the technological takes over the narrative is that it’s only means that matter that that in some ways, we don’t even know what the goal is that it’s only the implementation of means which seems to be the very the very nature of the entity itself, and it’s almost like you said it’s as if, and then the the side effects of the implementation, create new needs and new problems that have to be sorted out by the implementation of more and more efficient and technical means and it makes you feel like you’re moving, and you’re moving towards something, but there is no, there is no endpoint, besides what more technical efficient things like you know what is the purpose of all this where we go. Well, when we get away from yeah healthy sustainable systems that have given take and balance and, and whatnot. Yeah, there’s a sense in which we you know, for example like the, the, the idea that this the technique, the techniques, this technique, you know, is supposed to make us happy I guess it’s I guess maybe that’s like the best thing that you can, or like the most positive idea you can makes it easier, maybe, in order for us I’m trying to be generous to the, to this kind of run towards technicity to make it to make life easier to make to make things for us to do the things that we care about which are not related to life or something like that like leisure and and and and pleasure like that but but we can see through like the increase in depression and the increase in kind of a kind of madness that people are falling into you know especially as as identity starts to fragment, you know they they don’t know where to look for meaning. Yeah, and I think this aligns very well with with CS Lewis is abolition of man. Yeah, another one of my favorites because he in the same way you’re talking about means separated from ends that fits well with what Lewis calls you know agendas of progress being untethered from traditional ethics. Yeah, because ethics are ultimately about understanding our best ends, and then balancing ourselves and in relation to those. We have a claim on on society to create good ends. But once once you remove traditional ethics from the realm of applied science, then you can see how the means becomes more dominant it’s it’s the same way in the artistic and image culture where the form begins to dominate over content and meaning. Yeah, you see that I mean advertisement is the ultimate example of that you know and and I mean it’s, it’s fascinating that I don’t know if it will. I mean I for sure CS Lewis had that intuition, very much so, which is that in some ways, the, the increase in man wanting to to control himself from transcendent, you know, attachment, the desire for men to kind of fulfill his own destiny to fulfill his own will, and to kind of fulfill his own desire for power, ultimately leads very surprised, it’s not that surprising but it can seem to me that we’re seeing an anti human narrative ultimately when some ways, you know we’re seeing it now in the more extreme version of the environmental narrative where it’s almost as if humans are just parasites in the world and that they, you know, all they do is consume, and it and you see it now with AI, as well. This kind of idea that we that you know we need to be transcended ourselves like we were going to give birth to something that will ultimately destroy us or consumers and there’s almost like a suicidal ecstasy. It’s very, it’s very disturbing to see that that’s at the end of this, this kind of desire for technical power but I don’t feel that insight on that if you know that he had kind of foreseen something like that. Well I see what you’re saying as requiring social compliance. In other words, you can only go in that direction, if you, if you don’t allow for dissent, and that everyone has what might be called a shared reality. And since you’re in Canada, I’ll reference an interesting video that comes out by Horizons Canada, which has a Tower of Babel motif in it. And what’s really interesting about this narrative, the narrative because it’s all about where technology and and humanity find a way to work together for a better future. But it has a Tower of Babel image in it, you know that’s that’s all about, you know, people all coming together for one big project. And it reverses the narrative because God is now the, the antagonist in a scenario where it’s good for people to come together think alike share one language and create a better shared future. It’s unfortunate that that project was thwarted and God scattered people laterally back, you know, back into their creature hood. Yeah, and this is something that has been going on for a while that you know the building, one of the main building for the European Union, I think it’s your one of these globalists association is literally designed based on Bruegel’s Tower of Babel. And, and that when the European Union started to kind of meet one of the posters they put out was a huge poster of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel and it was like you know we’re going to basically we’re going to finish the project you know we’re going to finally do this. Right, and you know the those 16th century artists there’s so many Babel painters. Many of them show the tower incomplete as a both social and theological statement. Yeah. Because, because the, the fact that it was not completed is itself a commentary on on the, you know, the, the false efforts to try to build something independent of God. Yeah, and that’s the right that’s the right way to see it is that to imagine that anything is complete is the sin in itself right yeah imagine that anything can be self contained and complete is that is that is the air of idolatry. So here’s a nice way to bring our topic back to powers. And speaking of 16th century Did you know where the phrase hideous strength comes from. No, no, I don’t know. It’s a tower of Babel phrase. Okay. David Lindsay a poet from 1555 wrote about that hideous strength and the shadow that it casted six miles in length. And so this is Louis as a medieval and Renaissance scholar of literature comes across this poem recognizes this phrase hideous strength as about the archetypal force of the Babel project and then uses that all through that hideous strength and of course, the nice, which is such a playful gesture like acronym for the Institute of the technocrats, because they’re aspiring upward, you know, to have, you know, to build a utopian society. They poke through the heavens, so to speak, just like my hand sort of poking above the box here. And without them knowing it that opens up a portal for other benign celestial powers to come down to earth and to support the, you know, the team that’s fighting against the bad side. So they brought down on their heads their own demise. Yeah, this is a beautiful image to say that powers have a duplicitous nature. Because on the outside, again, they present well with great force and, and, and everything but on the inside there’s an insecurity and a lie and a contradiction, which, which means that they’re, they ultimately bear the seeds of their own destruction. Yeah, and I mean, I’m interested in knowing about this as well if, because one of the things I haven’t seen in in a little also is a mention of angels that is, there is a whole vision in Scripture of the divine counsel, you know, this is something that is becoming, I think, with good reason more, more popular and talked about today the idea that that and the way that it was recuperated in Christian mysticism right for example in Dionysus is divine hierarchy. And he literally uses the words that St. Paul uses to describe what he’s talking about in terms of negative influences that that that that oppress us, he uses them to talk to them about them in terms of their positive, you know, as like a, as levels of manifestation from the divine down into humans And so, you know, he’s got his own powers, all these things are used by Dian, Dionysus to describe the way that God kind of descends into the world. And so has he did, has he talked about that, like the reality of angels that say in the New Testament as well? I think he kind of hedged on that, you know, you got to understand that he’s, he’s starts out as a Marxist. And so his, his notion of power and forces like akin to the fetishism of commodities. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and so ultimately, when when a little has interest in powers and principalities biblically, he’s interested in their function, not their ontological being. Yeah, he’s not denying their existence. I think this goes back to the symbol thing he recognizes that everything is symbolic, whether it’s the New Jerusalem or or winged beings or whatever, as a way to help us grasp that there’s something there that’s additional to our, you know, our human cultural realm. Yeah, but even in like even in terms of functionality, and if you think about St. John in the in the book of Revelation, when he addresses the angels of the cities, right. And so there’s a sense in which in that case, the angel of the city right or the the principality of the city is not seen in a negative way. It’s just seen as, you know, the, it’s a kind of a place where the identity of the city comes together in its agency. And so I address this, this angel in a positive way, not in a negative way. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I mean, as I think that that image that you just gave us of the Tower of Babel poking through, you know, and then the surprise that it lets in, you know, benign principalities or good principalities. I think that that’s something that we’re already seeing, and it’s very interesting. So a good example is that during during during COVID, especially in places where the, the power of the state was felt very strongly all of a sudden, it’s like, it kind of exposed certain things which were already there hidden certain capacities that the state had that people didn’t realize that that were there. And then all of a sudden this crisis, get you know exposes and makes real the capacity for the state to really control us you know in ways that we didn’t think were possible both through narrative through kind of inner propaganda like using tools of propaganda inside our the country but then also real power of like, you know, when I was in quarantine the policemen showed up in my, at my door right it’s like these are real. These are real power steps. But another thing that happened is that it in seeing that agency and in seeing the the state act with such force and and and feeling I was like nobody’s controlling it right exactly like an agency it’s like why is it happening all over the world. And there’s nobody in charge of this and there’s nobody with like that is like is there’s no like evil genius sitting there rubbing his hands and and making it happen it’s just it’s just like it’s it’s a form of. This is a pattern which is laying itself in the world. The reaction to that for a lot of people was conversion. You know, like in the Orthodox Church we have seen a massive wave of converts at the end of coven and I’m talking parishes doubling tripling all young people that through this desire of the state to gain absolute power they were able to perceive something about how the world works. And made them want to, to to attach themselves to something higher you know. And that probably did not happen as much in the mainline denominations. I don’t know, I don’t know I just know about of course my own my own my own church. And so why would you, I don’t know why would you think that wouldn’t have happened in the mainline dominate in denomination for example, because most mainline denomination And so, you know, many of the denominations lean a little more progressive and liberal, at least in the United States. And so they were more compliant to not gather. They were more of a little down more. And many of them are struggling. More so with not just attendance but leadership transitions, vision of what their church, you know direction is. And in churches which might not have struggled as much with that sense of compliance to official narratives. There was probably more of a sense of resistance and alternative community. And perhaps that becoming a an attractive magnet for other people seeking community. Yeah. And even the even like the, I think, because one of the things that happens in these totalizing. patterns is that they, there’s a sense in which we need to be reduced to individuals like we need to be reduced to just dots, you know, without, without competing allegiances you could say to the to the massive power of the state. And that, and then reducing people to lonely you know to like, you’re just a lonely, especially those that didn’t have families, lonely guys lonely women you know sitting there in front of Netflix for a whole year. I think it also made the problem very acute, where people realize no actually I need intermediary communities I need real connected places where I physically go and talk to people and have and and do that with with something that is meaningful and, and not just, not just Yeah, not just arbitrary. A little talks about that as a key priority and his book presence in the modern world really his first major book written in the mid 40s. And in contrast to institutional systems that want to have a one way communication to kind of control things he talks about needing to be with neighbors, needing to have real conversations, pricing localism. And, you know, and later of course his famous phrases you know where dialogue ends propaganda begins. So he had a pretty strong advocacy for those local real life relationship dynamics as a way to kind of maintain a type of resistance in the world. I think that’s a good place to transition and and and and let’s move into the last question that I have for you is maybe you can tell people about your work and and how you see what kind of solutions you see for modern people in this, this increasingly technified world and also increasing centralized authorities. How do you see people finding real life solutions for that for their lives and for the families for the people around them. Well, I think that’s a compelling question and my primary work is in the field of restorative justice and conflict resolution for about 25 years and it’s a great calling. And, you know what one of the things I’ve observed as a facilitator is that there’s almost a paralysis of dialogue in in our Western cultures. And I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s the best compliment for my work. I think that’s the best compliment for me. I think there’s a whole general fear that is watching them, not just from above, but students who will say, I didn’t feel safe when that content was presented without warning. I have a friend who lost her job because of that very thing, without any dignifying learning conversation from both sides. So practically and positively, the way I see dialogue opening is in the word story. Usually when we think of civil discourse, we think of people having healthy debate and there’s a good place for that, but it’s not necessarily a starting point. So when I talk about story, I’m talking about people getting into the experiential realm of what they’re really observing and noticing and living through and maybe some hardships that they’ve gone through. And just narrating that across the divides to people that might have oppositional perspective. And what that does is it gets people out of what I call their head zone, where they tend to be defensive, they wanna win arguments and persuade people and into the heart zone, where we tend to think more about our common humanity with others. The heart zone is where we listen better, where we apologize, where we have some humility, curiosity, and it brings us into these story realms. So that’s a big part of what I do in my workshops now with different groups is I’ll talk about what are skills and structures that help conversation shift away from head zones into the heart zones, where there’s kind of a bonding potential. And that doesn’t mean everything just stays in kind of this feeling story zone. It actually creates a foundation for people with differing views to then come back into the head zones and have more capacity and more trust to really have iron sharpen iron at that point. Because I think we still need those hard logic-based conversations, but we’re just not able to start there. So we have to have foundations of shared understanding, shared bonding, shared appreciation for what other people have gone through, and then find ways to come back to the more debatable issues. Yeah, and I think that what you just said is key, because in some ways, what we see, it seems like what we see is an excess of both and a new capacity to bridge, because what you often see the clash, and I see it, you see it even in the sad online world, is someone coming with a story perspective, and then someone answering with a facts logic perspective. And that can go wrong in many ways, in the sense that maybe the person who’s just telling the story just wants to tell the story so that you understand where they’re coming from. Sometimes the person telling their story confuses the spaces, so they think that their story is an argument for the head place, and then there’s a misalignment. But the idea of both, exploring both, and understanding the difference between the two and saying, of course, if we know each other, then that basic place for trust is set, and then we can, like you said, then we can talk about the difficult issues in terms of, more in terms of how reasonable things are and what makes sense in terms of what we’re doing. So that, no, I think that seems like a great approach. Well, Ted, thank you so much for this conversation. I appreciated that you went there with me, because as you saw, like my relationship with Elul is like a 50-50 relationship. And that’s maybe why, in some ways, I haven’t talked about him so much on my channel, but I think for people watching, it’s a good place to leap into Elul, especially as someone who had very deep insight into something, into all the problems we’re dealing with now in terms of technification and also in terms of state powers becoming all powerful and how, as Christians, we can deal with that. So thanks a lot for your time. Yeah, I’m really, really thankful to be here. And I just wanna tack on one short piece that kind of brings powers and story together as a theme. The counter-narrative for Elul with respect to the Tower of Babel is Philippians 2, where Jesus empties himself, not wanting to take on the importance of being like a Greek Roman god with lots of status, but becomes a servant and ends up dying. That’s the reversal of the Tower of Babel impulse to be autonomous. And I think that that incarnational story, and Elul talks about this as a juxtaposition numerous times in his writings, validates the whole notion that we live in a real world, we live in a messy world, we live in a visual world. And so to be able to engage without the same power dynamics, it really does have validation in that story because it’s the ultimate symbol of God reaching us. Yeah, and it’s the surprising image of the one who does that with the headboard, which says that he’s the king simultaneously, that kind of simultaneous clash of imagery where he both empties himself and is raised up to the highest. He goes into death, but then enters into the holy place. Like it’s a, yeah, the story of the cross just kills you. Every time you think about it, it just smashes everything together. So seeing the world through the cross is definitely the way to solve the problem of principalities and powers and how the highest gives itself to the lowest. That’s the best way to understand true Christian hierarchy and true Christian power. So Ted, thanks, this has been great. Well, it’s a delight to converse with you and kind of see where our conversation leads us. All right.