https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=fM-3AwoOHN4
Why is it that these reductive, inadequate, artificially ahistorical, irrational, utterly low grade kinds of analysis have become so dominant? I think if we can’t answer that question, it is difficult to transcend their hold on those who ascribe to them. Well, you said that the woke phenomena is an index of the vast longing slash hunger of our moment. I mean, the other thing, one of the other things that Rossi said that was quite interesting was that when the new doctrines entered the private school that he was teaching, he was initially highly supportive of them because they came in flying, let’s say, the anti-racist flag. And like who isn’t happy about anti-racism? And so if you take it at face value, well, then you get to put yourself on the side of the heroes that are fighting against those who oppress people on the basis of arbitrary characteristics like their race. And so that certainly accounts for some of the attraction on the positive side. I mean, the negative side is, well, the opportunity to tear things down for the sake of tearing them down in the name of some higher moral virtue that just covers the real motivation, which is to tear things down because you’re envious. But, you know, to give the devil his due. Well, there’s something to be said for working, identifying with a movement that purports to be serving the interests of the poor and the dispossessed and those who are prejudiced against and to take to task those who are perpetrators of such things. And so I see that as part of a religious impulse to do the good. But it’s so incomplete and it’s so dangerous in its incompleteness because, well, partly because it provides, say, a too convenient enemy and partly because it does dispense with the richness of the past. And well, and then it brings with it in its wake, let’s say, all sorts of ideas that are entirely counterproductive. I mean, it contains within it a fundamental critique of the idea of free market economies, for example, which to me is just a disaster. It just from a computational perspective, we can’t do with central planning what the market can do with computation because it’s distributed and it relies on the choices of everyone. It’s a much more effective computational system. But we seem to have done a pretty bad job of defending it. Well, I think it’s it’s it that’s a very, very good statement of the problem. Why is that so? I mean, it’s. It well, let’s say a few things. The first is that I do think the whole woke thing, which, you know, for whatever minutes, for whatever, whether that what that even what that word even means is, I think it is a good question to dig into fairly carefully. But I think it is an index of a search for meaning in a deep sense, at least for many. Of course, there are many people who just cynically take things up. They know it’s a power move. It’s a power political move. They know what they’re doing full well. It’s it’s it’s wrong. It’s reductive. It destroys people’s lives. We know that’s what’s at work. There are always people who will do this. But in in a much larger sense, I don’t think that’s an adequate analysis. I think that at a larger level, it is an index for a search for meaning. And we, I think, need to to remember Aristotle’s fundamental insight into the human psyche, which is that, you know, one is only ever moved by some kind of a perceived good. That’s why for Dante, you know, you go down to the bottom of hell, it’s just an allegory for him about this life, not a vision of the afterlife. Things are frozen. There’s no movement at all because the good of intellect or even any perceived good, however limitedly or obscurely perceived, is gone. It’s just frozen. And so whenever there’s any action at all, it’s because there’s some kind of a perceived good at work, even if that is completely misperceived. I’m saying it’s a perceived good. We never do anything at all. You don’t go up to make yourself a sandwich or go get the mail or say hello to anyone without some kind of a perceived good. And and so the second thing I would say is that I think we need to think of times when there is a significant therefore, we need to think about times when there is a significant amount of momentum behind something. It could be national socialism in the in the 20s and 30s in Germany. It could be the movement to Scottish independence in our own day. It could be the so-called woke movement. Black Lives Matter, whatever, whatever, whatever lens we want to look at this from. We need to really honestly ask ourselves the question, what is moving in this? And I think it’s clearly the case that from the from what I understand about the the formation of the complicated historical movements that led to the Second World War, that there was in Germany, at least I would be very surprised to learn this is not the case, a vulnerability to. And. A. An ideological standpoint that gave a defining collective purpose, and that seems to me to indicate a lack of that not being done in a better way. You could say the same thing, I suspect, about Scottish independence. Is it really that Scottish independence or is it that well, you know, if you were in Canada, in Quebec, and you were a lapsed Catholic, a French lapsed Catholic, you were four times as likely to be a separatist during the separatist uprising, say in the 1980s and 1990s in Canada or 1960s through the 1990s. The Gallup Gallup poll indicated that. And so, you know, Quebec was the last place in Western Europe in some sense that, so to speak, where Catholicism. Dissolved, and that didn’t happen till the late 1950s, and it was instantly replaced by a radical nationalism, which really, I mean, I watched it from the outside. I was in Quebec for much of that. It was impenetrable. You could see that it was a displaced religious doctrine. The state had taken the place of Christ. That’s the simplest way of putting it. Well, that’s a great, I think that’s a great that’s a great historical example. I mean, I think that at a minimum, what many people perceive in these these these sort of so-called woke movements is at least some. Incipient or inchoate vision of justice that the least of these among us matters, the different among us matters. Now, of course, I think that the standpoint that is through which these things are viewed is completely tragic and unfulfillable, unable to fulfill the very ends that it seems to bring about. But what but the conservatives and free market lovers and all these people are very often lament the fact they say, why is it that, you know, this we call it the left, call it whatever you want, seems to beat us on the moral argument every time, despite the fact that we know that that that our systems and the ideas that we espouse historically have been shown to be superior to the very values that the so-called left is beating us at. And I think that this does raise the fact that it. You know. I’ve been reading a two piece, wonderful coffee table book, and I had a wonderful conversation with him recently about how much better everything is getting in terms in absolute terms. And these are these are this is a wonderful, it’s a very important book. These are wonderful achievements. We should all rejoice and absolutely face face them and be glad for them and the things that they will make possible. But it is also very interesting to note what is not in to be. I mean, there there is there’s no talk about beauty. There’s no talk about architecture. There’s no talk about cultural achievement. There’s no talk about let’s put it this way. There is no talk about many of the things that are most fundamental to the meaning in human life. And that’s not to degrade or denigrate the achievements that are being spoken about there. But it is rather to say that that that if your metric for human flourishing is, do we have enough to eat and are we not getting rained on? And you go through these lists of kind of fundamentally material things, all of which are fundamentally important and not only because they’re material, because there’s also a spiritual dimension to those things for human beings. But the point I’m making is that you see the same thing in Steven Pinker’s work, like the blank slate. I’m sure I hope I’ve got this right, because I’ve read a couple of Pinker’s books. But one of the things so he thinks very much like Toopey thinks. And he wrote the better angels of our nature, if I remember correctly as well, showing that human aggression has decreased substantially over the last number of centuries. But the all of the qualities of humanity that you describe are sort of they’re parsed off near the end of the book into a single chapter as if they’re just secondary side effects of some more profound rationality, let’s say, and it’s the rationality that’s concentrating on material well-being. And I don’t have anything against material well-being and the elimination of privation. But there is. And it’s interesting that you make that comment about Toopey’s work is that that the spiritual dimension, it’s like the list of of of of of what should be attended to to have a meaningful life that I listed at the beginning of our talk. At the end, I kept that off with some attention to be paid for the spiritual or moral or religious element of life to bring everything together. And that narrow focus on material well-being necessary, though it is, does seem to lack to it. There’s something in it that’s missing that’s absolutely fundamental that if it’s missing, undermines the whole project or appears to. Well, I think the bottom line is that there there there is no deep human realization for any individual outside of understanding her or himself in relation to higher order principles, truths, realities. And that’s just what human beings that’s what human beings are. So that is not to denigrate the necessity of improvement in all of these areas that to be so brilliantly chronicles. I don’t betray myself as somehow anti-to be. I’m a huge fan of this. I’m a huge fan of the inclusive institutions that they describe as necessary to human human flourishing. But I think it needs to be said that in the most developed places, so-called developed places of the world, skepticism about those inclusive institutions is higher than anywhere else, or at least arguably so. I think it needs to be said that. There’s there’s there’s nothing in the book about the very disturbing trends of rising suicide, of of rising dopamine addiction, of porn addiction in young and young men, of course, especially these are. And I think it needs to be said that many of these things that appear to be a very fundamental malaise of contemporary life are also related to technology. And one of the paradoxes, I think that I love to ask you about Jordan relative to your own work on the individual and human individual realization is that if on the one hand, human beings are becoming increasingly liberated from the demands of material necessity, I mean, the amount of time it took to they bring up brilliantly to create light, for example, was an immense amount of work or to save up enough calories to make it through a winter. All of these just this is the bone grindingly hard aspect of human existence for for millennia. Then we are very rapidly in the last two centuries. Now, almost every human being in the planet, not everyone, but the vast majority are living at standards of living that were inconceivable by anyone just a few centuries ago. So these are these are these are these are amazing achievements. But it also needs to be said that insofar as if on the one hand, the individuals being liberated from these those bone crushing realities, at the same time, it does appear to be a. Key aspect of modern life that individuals are finding themselves less connected, more alienated and. That the very technology in some respects that liberates them also appears to homogenize in a kind of globally reductive way, such that, you know, as human life is lived on the ground, the frame in which it’s actually lived and in which meaning is derived, that that has become more distant, harder to access and that we have far fewer of the tools we might have once had to make sense of that all important sphere. I’ve talked to Bjorn Lomborg and to Matt Ridley and to Marion Tupi and to other people who are deeply concerned about continuing to make absolute privation, let’s say a thing of the past and and to many people as well who are hoping to ameliorate relative privation, which is more the concern of the left, as you already pointed out. And all of these people are also aware. And Stephen Fry, for that matter, you know, Stephen has allied himself to some degree with the four horsemen of the atheist world and is a dramatist and so understands, at least in his bones, the necessity of this underlying poetic, dramatic, religious, humanistic matrix out of which rationality has emerged and in which rationality must remain embedded. I mean, what it looks like to me is that and I see this dawning realization among people like Richard Dawkins as well, at least by proxy, talking to people who know him and watching what’s happened to him with the humanists, for example, who attacked him, is that this insistence on pure rationality and pure enlightenment rationality doesn’t address the fundamental religious impulse. And the hope was among the four horsemen of the atheist world, let’s say that once we dispensed with this irrational superstition, we’d all become materialist rationalists, you know, of the intellectual caliber of Stephen Pinker. But that isn’t what’s happening. I don’t believe that that can be the case. What happens instead is that all sorts of things that religion should be separated from. The higher life, the spiritual life, the religious life, all of that falls down a level or two and and and pure politics becomes contaminated with the religious impulse. And then it becomes totalizing. And that looks like a catastrophe. And so it seems to me that we need to pull up the spiritual domain again to parse it off as a separate field of what endeavor, study, hope to give it its due. And that’s the role, at least in part, that the university should be playing. Instead, they’re tearing things down.