https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WGLLpmY8JR4
You know, when God makes Himself manifest to Moses and calls Him to be a leader, what He tells Him to tell the Pharaoh is something very specific. He says, tell the Pharaoh, to let My people go, so that they may worship Me. Now, the civil rights leaders almost always stress the first part of that statement, but they don’t pull in the second part. And that’s a big mistake, because the second part speaks of ordered liberty. And disordered liberty, that’s the desert, right? That’s where the Israelites end up after they flee the tyranny. It’s a chaotic realm. They can go anywhere and do anything. There’s no up or down. There’s no direction. There’s no leadership. And that’s so terrible that they start to pine for the tyranny, right? Well, they also start to worship false idols, which is definitely a story for our time. But they also start to pine for that tyranny. And you’re making the case, and you make it repeatedly in the book, that self-mastery is the precondition for ordered liberty. And if the conservatives, and you are doing this in your book, if the conservatives could get the notion that the deepest meaning in life is to be found in the mastery of that ordered liberty, then they have a message they can tell to young men in particular. Yes, yes. Yeah. So now you’re writing a book here that’s not primarily political. No, that’s right. And yet you’re operating in the political realm. And so how do you experience the tension between those two? And how do you believe that we could bridge the gap between the motivational, let’s say, and the narrative, the sacred fundamentally, and the political? And how do you manage to do that in your own life? Or do you? And how do you fall short? Good. Great question. I think that one of the reasons I wrote the book, and you’re right, it’s really not a political book at all. But my conviction is that we have in our culture, and particularly on the left, but also some on the right, we’ve lost sense of and we’ve lost touch with our most foundational moral intuitions and moral foundations. And that’s why I go back to the Bible and the book. And I make the case early on that the biblical tradition is in many ways the foundational story and narrative of the entire Western tradition, certainly the American tradition. So I think that we live in a world, and this is true for young men in particular, where there’s no story, there’s no narrative. What is it that it means to be a man? There’s no narrative there. What is it that I’m supposed to do with my life? There’s no narrative. So I think we’ve got to go back to and recover those narratives. And that’s why I try to recover some of the symbolism of Genesis. What is it a man is called to do? It’s called to make the wilderness into a garden, right? To expand that garden. God makes a garden. The rest of the world is wilderness. What’s Adam there in the garden to do? He’s there to expand the garden into the wilderness. There’s something profound there about what it means to be a man. And you talk about a high calling because really what God does in Genesis is he gives his work to Adam. He says, all right, I’ve created the world. Now I’ve created a garden in the midst of the wilderness. Now, Adam, you follow my example. You take this garden, you expand it. You use your responsibility. You use your authority. You use your strength. And you expand it into all the world. And my conviction is men need to hear that story. The same is true. The Bible is making a point with that, of course. That there’s an archetype there, an archetypal pattern of what it is men are supposed to do to expand the garden, to bring order from chaos, to make beauty where there’s chaos. And so I think telling those stories is critical then to recovering in our culture some sense of order and purpose and meaning. And then we’ve got to give in our politics the key is how do we give that voice? How do we then cash that out into policy? And we talk about that if you want. I’ve got all kinds of ideas about that. But I think there’s tremendous value personally and culturally in recovering these foundational stories about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, and what we’re here to do. So I want to go in two directions with that. So the first direction we might say is there’s only three situations that we can find ourselves in. We can find ourselves united psychologically and socially by an overarching narrative. Or we can let that narrative fragment, which means that we’ll be tribal once again, both socially and psychologically. And the cost of that fragmented tribalism is anxiety and hopelessness and social conflict. That’s the chaotic state of nature. Anxiety, hopelessness, and social conflict. Okay, now if you see that, and I think the evidence for that by the way is incontrovertible. If you see that, a question arises, which is, well, what might the central unifying narrative be? Now, what’s happened on the left is the central unifying narrative, although the left is often claimed there isn’t one, what they’ve replaced it with, at least implicitly and often explicitly, is a narrative of power. And this is something you touch on in your book too with regards to the ideas of toxic masculinity. And so the accusation is that all social relationships are structured as a consequence of domination and oppression and victimization. And that’s true for marriage, and it’s true for family, traditional family, and it’s true for economic organizations and political organizations. It’s all about power. And so if you accept that, you can see very quickly why the narrative of toxic masculinity might have arisen and been accepted. Because if you believe, and maybe you believe this because you’ve never had any experience with a good man even once in your life. This is often the case, you know, like I talked to Naomi Wolf recently, who’s been a very powerful voice on the leftist front. And you know, she had some bloody brutal experiences with men. She was raped when she was 11, and that didn’t help. And then when she went to university, instead of being mentored, she was hit upon, and in a way that, you know, was reminiscent of what happened to her when she was early. So then she didn’t get mentored. And her whole conception of masculinity, which I believe is rather fragmented, is predicated on her genuine experience of being exploited and hurt. And then we get a cycle, right? You can see a cycle developing there. And so your claim is that the narrative that’s running through the biblical corpus is a good, unifying narrative. It’s the right unifying narrative. Now, I just talked with Stephen Fry a couple of days ago, and Stephen is very interested in mythology. And although he’s, I say he likes to shake his fist at God, and he has his reasons. And he isn’t convinced at all that there’s a reason that the biblical narrative code per se should be set up as primary. Like, I happen to disagree with him because I think it should be. But it isn’t obvious to me why it should be, you know? And I’ve done a fair bit of delving into mythologies and so forth from all over the world and found lots of useful information in them. So how would you justify, how do you think it’s reasonable to justify your assumption that, you know, it’s back to the Bible to use an old evangelical phrase? Why do you think that makes sense? And why do you think it’s not just like an extension of patriarchal neocolonialism or something of that sort? Two answers. The first one is historical and the more surface answer. And that is for American history, just as a purely historical matter, no text has been more influential. No set of ideas has been more profound in shaping our system of government, our basic moral intuitions than the Bible and the biblical tradition. So in a sense, the first answer is it’s our tradition. Our most fundamental moral intuitions are grounded in that tradition. And I go further. I’d say that’s actually true of the entire Western tradition. You know, Leo Strauss, as you know, had this great saying that it was the interplay of Athens and Jerusalem that really forms the West. And there’s something to that. I’m not a Straussian, but there’s something to that. But the biblical tradition, the Jerusalem tradition, is so foundational as a historical cultural matter, number one. Number two, I would say as a Christian, a practicing Christian myself, I think that its power derives from the fact that it’s fundamentally true. I mean, that there’s a reason why the stories of the Bible, both the Old Testament and the Christian New Testament, are so profoundly effective and transformative in different cultures over time. And certainly in ours, I would argue, and that’s because they touch on something. They’re true. In fact, I would argue they are the truth, capital T. So, you know, whether you accept that second claim or not, I certainly think that the cultural element, it’s just hard to deny that American culture is organized around and derives. It’s, you know, what Charles Taylor would have called the moral sources, right? The moral sources of our culture. The Bible is the moral source. So those would be my arguments.