https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hbsS9wiIfLU
But let’s start with the book, at least some of the themes of the book, if you don’t mind. You talked about you started by talking about the collapse of grand narratives. And that’s a theme that’s very interesting to me. And I have a hypothesis that I’d like to run by you and see what you think. I I’ve been talking to a friend of mine here. And we’ve been hypothesizing that maybe there are two large scale grand political narratives. With an archetypal or mythological basis, and one would be the promised land. So that would be the bright future that we’re all headed to. And different versions of that would be put forth by the right and the left. But the what what the hook is, is that something better awaits us. And there are certain strategies that we could use to attain that. And if that fails, then we have something like the infidel, which is us versus them. And so one of the things that struck me when I was reading your book was that it isn’t obvious that we have a promised land narrative that’s functional in the West anymore. Partly, I think, perversely, because things have improved so much on the material front, that it’s not really even obvious how we could extend our mastery of the material world to produce a better future. You know, we’ve plucked all the low hanging fruit. And we’ve been able to do that. And so that, for most people, I mean, I know inequality exists, I know there’s relative poverty, but there’s no straightforward solutions for those either, or even solutions that necessarily would appeal to the imagination. And so maybe we’re stuck with some variant of the infidel, which is not a very, which is certainly not a grand narrative that’s designed to bring about peace. I don’t know what you think about that. But I’d also like your your take on grand narratives as such and why you think they’ve collapsed. Well, first of all, it’s really, really good to see you, Jordan. Thank you. I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is. I’ve missed you, as very many people have. So it’s really wonderful to see you. I appreciate that. I’ve missed being around, believe me, and all the things that I was engaged in. Hopefully that’ll start up again with this as part of it. I really hope so. Yes, it’s been on my mind for a long time. I’ve written around this subject in a couple of books now that the oddity of the position of Western man at this point is that he and she lack a grand narrative, lack an overarching explanation of what on earth we’re doing here. And I think you and I probably have the same experience that when we were allowed to still congregate in public spaces, whenever you addressed anything around this issue, the whole fell silent. You know, I’ve noticed for years that there’s all sorts of minutiae that our societies are exceptionally good at talking about. But we’ve become not only poor at talking about, but apparently uninterested in the most important questions of all, such as what exactly we meant to be doing with our lives. What are we meant to be doing with our time? We all know we’ve got a finite amount of time. So how should we occupy that time? Well, and it’s funny because I would say in the past, to some degree, that question was answered for us by deprivation. You know, it was obvious what we were lacking. And so when it’s obvious what you’re lacking when you’re hungry, when you’re truly hungry, there’s no question about what you should do. You should eat and if you’re freezing and if you’re overheated and all of those things, the desirable future manifests itself automatically in front of you. In some sense, we’ve been deprived of deprivation and are suffering from an enemy of prosperity. Yes, and I think for some people a form of boredom and yes, too much time on their hands and much more. There are different ways of circling around the same answer to the problem. But it’s been very striking to me for a long time that particularly in political terms, the left has been really quite interested in this gap. It’s recognized the size of it and has sought to fill it. In recent years, as I say at the beginning of the matters of crowds, the most obvious way of filling it is with the horrible and dysfunctional and retributive replacement religion, which is identity politics, intersectionalism and all of this. As I point out, it’s in some ways a curiosity, perhaps also an inevitability, that let’s say the respectable right at any rate has been pretty uninterested in answering these questions and hasn’t even nodded to their absence. The right has in our lifetimes been very interested in issues of economics and that’s, of course, crucial, as you alluded to earlier. I mean, if the economics are going well, you know, a lot of other things go well as well. When they go bad, absolutely everything goes bad. So in some ways it’s understandable that the right has been interested in economic questions, but it has left the identity, as I said, I repeat, the sort of respectable bit of the right has basically left identity and meaning questions. Say, well, you know, find the meaning of things where you will. If you come across it, great, we couldn’t be happier for you, but doesn’t seek to address these questions. Maybe it’s partly because the collapse of religious belief hasn’t been as thorough on the right as it has been on the left and still there’s still more people who are oriented in the conservative direction who have some at least some vestiges of their traditional religious belief. But, you know, well, and I would say, too, though, that it isn’t the left that’s been concerned with questions of identity precisely. I would say more. This is definitely the case in the United States. I think it’s true in Britain and Canada, too, that it’s the radical left because the moderate left. I have a friend in L.A. who’s been working on messaging for the Democratic Party. He’s been doing that pro bono as part of an independent group of Hollywood writers who’ve produced about a billion dollars worth of advertisements. They’ve been attempting to craft a centrist Democrat message, and it’s quite difficult because well, and the reason they’ve been doing that is because the radical left has a narrative and regardless of what you might think about it, it has motivating power. And in the absence of any other narrative, it tends to dominate. And the problem with generating a centrist narrative is that it tends to be incremental and incremental narratives tend not to have much persuasive power. And so you might say that what’s happened is that there’s still a subset of people who for whom for one reason or another, and that might be race or gender or sexual identity or any of those things, any minority status that would bring about it, a felt sense of alienation that the narrative is clear, which is to either restructure society so that alienation disappears or to. Well, that is the narrative is to restructure society so that that alienation disappears. And yes, and even though that may not be a narrative that works for everyone, the fact that nobody can construct one that’s more compelling leaves a terrible void in the middle. And it isn’t obvious at all how that can be solved.