https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lM5N7MgqTDw
So the first presupposition is that there is a logos in the cosmos, right? Is that there’s an order in reality itself. Okay, because otherwise why bother investigating it if it’s not… And then that order is comprehensible to the human spirit. Right? So not only is there an order, but we can understand the order. Now these are axioms, right? You don’t start the pursuit without accepting these axioms. Okay, the next axiom is, if we understood the logos, that understanding would be individually and universally beneficial. It would make you a better person. And communicating what you discovered would make society better. So not only is there a logos in the cosmos, and not only is that logos apprehensible, but fundamentally that logos is good in that it’s expanded understanding will be of universal benefit. Now, not only are those religious presuppositions, because they cannot be established on scientific ground. They have to be accepted before the enterprise begins. They’re also specifically Judeo-Christian, right? And then there’s a third, fourth element, religious element, which is in order to be a scientist, you have to conduct yourself in an ethical manner, which is that you have to allow your investigations into the intrinsic logos of the world to reshape your own tyrannical presuppositions, right? You have to take your hypotheses and you have to throw it against the world. And if it doesn’t withstand the contest, then you have to be willing to abandon it. And that’s also, as far as I can tell, that’s also a religious praxis fundamentally. And so the scientific endeavor that the enlightenment types claim is the precondition for modern flourishing is actually inextricably embedded in the biblical tradition. And I think that also explains why science emerged in Europe and nowhere else. Yes, I think you’re right. I agree with that. And I think that if you play that out, if you look at the enlightenment tradition and what it becomes in the 20th century, in the late 20th century, when we get to critical theory, when we get to the postmodernists, and you’re hinting at this, is they reject the scientific enterprise as you’ve been describing it almost completely. Their position then becomes, there is no objective truth, there are only points of view. You know, there is no place of neutrality to stand in the universe. There are only situated persons with situated points of view. There’s no such thing as any universal anything. And so all we can do is describe our own experiences and that’s best done on the basis of power relationships. Right, so the enlightenment attempt. Well, it’s only done on the basis, it’s not even best, it’s that there’s no alternative. That’s the most nihilistic claim of the radical postmodernist types is that not only is it a power game, it can’t be anything other than a power game. And all claims to the contrary are just subtler expressions of a power game. God, it’s brutal, it’s a brutal doctrine. It is, it is. And my argument would be that is not the enlightenment getting off track, is it worth? That is where the enlightenment leads you once you say that the only standard for any truth, the only standard for any reality is going to be this Cartesian idea that only what we as humans can hold our own minds, can affirm ourselves, can verify ourselves, only what we can control. I really think that the Cartesian enlightenment attempt to define truth apart from the biblical tradition or any religious grounding is an attempt to control it. To say if we control the knowledge, then it’s real. And as it turns out, you can’t. And so that’s why. It’s also, and I found this out when I was investigating the Tower of Babel story and its association with Luciferian presumption. So it’s the descendants of Cain who turned to building cities. And it’s the descendants of Cain who first build weapons of war. And also Babylon in particular is founded by Ham and Ham is the son of Noah who laughs at his own father’s nakedness. Right, so that’s all tangled up in the story of the Tower of Babel. Now, what seems to happen, and I see this with modern Luciferian intellects. You see this on the engineering front often. Like I have a lot of respect for engineers, but they tend to presume that the proper way forward is a technological way. Is that the way you deal with the fundamental existential concerns of life is through technological mastery. And now it’s obvious the case, and you make the case for this in your book, that human productivity, including tool building productivity is admirable. But the question is, like do we worship the tools or do we worship the ethos that utilizes the tools? And are those separable? And I think the way the enlightenment types went wrong is that they didn’t understand that there was an ethos that made objective science possible and that that ethos was encapsulated in a narrative, not in science itself. And that technologists are making the same problem. We can just solve this with technology. It’s like, well, if evil people control the tools, then the tools will be used for evil purposes. So I read this great book once called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by a man named Richard Landis. And he analyzed Japan in particular, because he thought Japan was a very interesting case history. The Japanese have a very disciplined culture. And after World War II, it was a westernized culture. And Japan is very, very wealthy, but Japan has no natural resources. So then you might say, well, what’s the basis of Japanese wealth? And the answer is something like, well, it’s an ethos. The Japanese are very disciplined and the fundamental transaction between two Japanese is honest. Like I think you could say that there isn’t any other natural resource, except air maybe, you know, the air we breathe. The only natural resource is trust. And trust is predicated on, like you can’t trust productively unless people are honest. And if people are honest and trustworthy, then they can cooperate in a manner that makes abundance not only possible, but inevitable. And that means that the technology has to be embedded in an ethos, and that ethos has to facilitate trust. And so the way that you make a society rich isn’t as a consequence of them being blessed with natural resources, say, or even with technological prowess. It’s that all of that’s embedded in an ethos. And that ethos is the one that enables people to cooperate and compete productively and generously. And that’s the ethos that seems to be laid out in the biblical corpus. And though that’s the case you’re making in your book. I agree. And you could just ask yourself, Jordan, I mean, you think about our technological advances, you think about AI now, but why is it? I mean, if you look at science alone, my contention would be science alone is at a loss to explain why those who are not the most intelligent, however you define it, why those who are not the strongest, however you define that, why they should not be privileged in some way. In other words, if you look at the natural world where that is true, right? And this is Darwin, natural selection. And you had the social Darwinists of the last century who we rightly despise and condemn now, but they would have said, that’s just science. We’re just applying to the human realm what we’ve observed in the natural scientific realm. And why should it be that those who have the AI technology that can displace thousands of workers, why should they not be the ones who have most power in society? I don’t know that science can explain that to us. Well, there’s a rationality there. Like I think the rational stance is that if I can take what you have, then why shouldn’t I? Yes. Like why isn’t that a rational stance? In fact, the Romans would have thought that was a rational stance. Absolutely. And the Greeks would have thought that was a rational stance. And I would say it’s partly because it does have its own self-evidence. If you’re weak and despicable, and I can just take what you have and there’s nothing you can do to stop me, why isn’t it the case that your own contemptible weakness isn’t evidence that I should be allowed to do whatever I want with you? That is not irrational. Now that doesn’t mean it’s not wrong. Now I would dispute to some degree, if you don’t mind momentarily, the social Darwinist argument. Because I talked a lot to Franz De Waal, the primatologist. And De Waal has shown quite clearly that among chimpanzees who do have quite a patriarchal social structure and who are extraordinarily powerful physically and brutal beyond belief, like they hunt colobus monkeys, those things weigh 38 pounds. And they eat them when they’re alive. There’s no pity in chimps. And so the chimps will tear each other apart and they do that in their chimp war. But De Waal has shown very clearly in his analysis of the chimps that he’s studied over the last 20 years that the biggest, roughest, toughest social Darwin triumph male is very, very likely to meet an unbelievably violent end and to rule very briefly over a very unstable and malfunctioning community. He showed that the stable alpha males, sometimes they’re the smallest male in the troop. They’re the most reciprocal individuals in the entire troop, male or female. They do the best at tracking social relationships and engaging in essentially reciprocal altruism. And so that’s the basis for a stable polity, even among chimpanzees. So it’s another bit of evidence, but this time from the scientific side, that power, it doesn’t look like in a biological community or in many biological communities that it’s power and dominance per se that are associated with, let’s say, biological success, reproductive success. So there are situations, baboons are more violent, but even then, it’s by no means as simple as the most powerful male is the one who propagates his genes forward. And it’s certainly not the case in complex social organizations. Not true with rats, for example. Yes. Well, and it may be just on the social Darwinist point that we could say the social Darwinists were crude scientists. They didn’t make their argument as they might have. They didn’t understand the science. But I would still press the point, Jordan, that even then, even in these other species that we observe, do we observe these species sacrificing their lives for one another? Do we observe them carrying on the kind of moral interactions that we say, that’s praiseworthy? You know, where a stranger will give his life for someone else, where they will put themselves in danger in order to protect people they don’t really even know. We look at those things and say, that’s praiseworthy. You see the rudiments of it, you know? Just like you see the rudiments of language. You can see it starting to emerge even from the bottom up. So you see it among rats, for example. So I’ll tell you a very quick story. You may have heard me tell it before, but Jacques Panksepp established this with rats and it’s a killer observation. I think it was Nobel Prize worthy. So if you pair two male juvenile rats together, if one of them has a 10% weight advantage, he can beat the other one in a wrestling bout and rats like to wrestle. And it’s easy if you watch rats wrestle once to assume that it’s a form of dominance and that the big rat wins, the big powerful rat wins. 10% weight advantage will do it. And so you could imagine that’s a scientific observation. You pair two juveniles together, they wrestle, the big rat pins the small rat, the big rat is now dominant. He’s the victor and that has implications for his potential reproductive success in the future. But Panksepp, this is such a crucial move. He realized that rats lived in social organizations and that they didn’t play once. They played repeatedly. And someone you play repeatedly with is a friend, right? Because otherwise they won’t play with you repeatedly. So what Panksepp showed was that if you take the rats, again, if you put them together again, the little rat who lost has to ask the big rat to play. That’s now his role. So he has to do the play invitation that mammals engage in. Then the big rat will play. And playing isn’t aggression. Almost all mammals can distinguish between play aggression and genuine aggression. They are not the same thing at all. And you know that if you have a dog or a child for that matter, if you have any sense at all, you can tell the difference. It’s like the definition of sense that you can tell the difference between play and aggression. Anyways, if the rats are paired together repeatedly and the big rat doesn’t let the little rat win, at least 40% of the time might be 30. Some significant proportion of the time, the little rat will stop playing. And so you have an emergent ethos of reciprocal play that’s a consequence of repeated matchings, right? And that’s the same idea in some sense that you have to play with your future self and that you have to play with other people is that you can think this is the optimistic union of the scientific enterprise, let’s say in the moral enterprise, is that there might be an implicit ethos in complex social organizations that’s a consequence of what would you call the necessary constraints that emerge if you have to repeatedly interact with someone, right? You have to treat them like, well, what? Maybe you have to treat them like they’re of fundamental worth. And animals can do that to some degree, like the chimps. Chimps have decades-long friendships, you know, and they will go out of their way for each other. They’re not that good at sharing food. Like there’s limits, you know, like serious limits. But you can see the glimmerings even among our non-human cousins, let’s say, you can see glimmerings of a deeper ethos. Yes, yes, and that makes sense. And I suppose that the way that the biblical tradition might capture that is something like natural law. You might say that there’s a natural order to the universe and you see it, you see glimmerings, to use your word, you see glimmerings in other species and so on. But my point is that I think I still hold to is that it is difficult to derive from merely observations of biology or science alone, a moral code of the kind that we live by and say is praiseworthy. And my point in that is, is that this is where I think there’s a certain arrogance to the enlightenment tradition that will ground it all on science, will do away with religion, particularly biblical religion, will get rid of all of that, will ground it all on science and then we’ll all be better. You know, I think the 20th century, and no one has written about this more than you, the 20th century, I think, is in many ways a refutation of that, where did we do better in this century of science and technology? I don’t think that we did, I don’t think we did. No, and you know, the atheist types that I debated with, one of those questions that always annoyed them was, well, you know, were Marx and Stalin and Mao humanists? Well, no, no, you know, they don’t count. It’s like, well, I think they count. They actually count. And it’s not like communism wasn’t rational. You accept a few axioms like to each according to his need, from each according to his ability, which sounds self-evident and rational. You accept that and the whole bloody nightmare emerges and Solzhenitsyn did a very good job of delineating that. Like the communist catastrophe was not an aberration from an ideal, it was the manifestation of the implicit nature of the ideal. It was the genuine article, which is why it did the same thing wherever it was implemented. You know, that isn’t real communism. It’s like, yeah, freed so. After the 20th experiment, we can pretty much establish that.