An Atheist in the Realm of Myth ｜ Stephen Fry ｜ EP 169 (fFFSKedy9f4)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=fFFSKedy9f4

I’d like to announce my new book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life. Unlike my previous book, Beyond Order explores as its overarching theme how the dangers of too much security and control might be profitably avoided. Because what we understand is insufficient, we need to keep one foot within order while stretching the other tentatively into the beyond. I hope that people find this book as helpful personally as they seem to have found the first set of 12 rules. I’m pleased to have with me today Mr. Stephen Fry who’s been described by more than one of his compatriots as a national treasure. If you want to develop a quick inferiority complex, I would recommend going and reading Stephen’s Wikipedia page. He’s a prolific actor, screenwriter, playwright, journalist, poet, intellectual, comedian, television presenter, advertisement presenter, magazine author, autobiographist. It’s a remarkable body of achievement and an intellectual figure in his own right who’s known at least in part for his discussions with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and the humanist atheists. It’s partly for that reason that I wanted to talk to him. I met Stephen much to my pleasure during the monk debates in Toronto about three years ago when we discussed political correctness, which is one of the things I want to talk about and touch upon today. But mostly I’m interested in talking to him about the relationship between narrative and empiricism and rationalism. And so thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me. My pleasure. Lovely to be here. So let me ask you and then we’ll go forward formally. What do you think we would be best? What do you think would have the greatest impact with regards to our conversation? As far as you’re concerned, I mean, there must have been a reason that you some reason apart from just being agreeable to to do this. What do you think we might be able to accomplish? Well, uniquely, it’s a little like the monk debate we shared a platform with. It’s really because I’m so tired and distressed and worried by the the great fissure that has opened up the culture wars, whatever we like to call it, the assumption that that there is your friends and your enemy and no ground in between. No commonality of no cohesion of viewpoint, no shared things that can happen between people who apparently represent different ways of looking at the world or different ways of trying to organize the world or whatever it might be. And the very fact that I knew some friends of mine who disapproved of you would would think I was doing something wrong by associating with you. And I hope our debate showed that wasn’t the case. And I felt this would take that further forward to I do. I do think, you know, the last best hope for our society in whichever way you want to look at, whether you want to look at it as some version of the West being able to stand up to the pressures put upon it by China and Russia and other countries that are less interested in in economics and in the traditional political sense of liberal or kind of open society or whatever you want to call it. But that if we continue to fracture and we continue to find enemies amongst our own kind so much, then really it’s a very, very sad look. I’m hardly the first person to say this, but and I think you are, you know, a very interesting thinker and writer and talker. But it’s it’s clear that there are many who really admire you and like you and follow you who with whom I would have less in common than perhaps with you. I think on both sides, if you want to call them sides. It’s very easy to be a bit lax about disavowing people who like one, but whom one doesn’t like. You see what I mean? It’s it’s it’s so flattering to the ego to have followers, to have people say, you’re great. I love the things you say that it’s quite hard to say no, but you’ve misunderstood me. That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I meant at all. To quote Elliot. So. Obviously, I’ve spent some time. Pointing out what I regard as the excesses of the radical left. I’ve certainly spent no shortage of time pointing out the excesses of the radical right in my classes, particularly, but I’m not publicly known for that specifically. It’s my resistance or or or yeah, my resistance to certain maneuvers on the side of the radical left that propelled me into the public eye. I’ve thought for a long while that the only people who can probably control the excesses of the radical left are people who are in the moderate left, not people on the right or on the extreme right. They’re out of the argument to begin with, and it’s this is associated in some sense. The difficulty of this is in some sense, the difficulty that you just described. If people have an affiliation with you, then it’s much more difficult to differentiate perhaps where you should. And so perhaps you see on the left, the moderate leftists and then the more extreme leftists, but the left extreme leftists are also on the left and they’re friends of a type. And drawing that line is extraordinarily difficult. And that’s actually why at least part of the reason why I’m leery of any attempts to restrict free speech, because in those cases of difficult differentiation, the only possible solution we have is dialogue about the problem, about exactly where to draw the line. Because otherwise we can’t. No one knows how. And I guess it’s because extremism also exists in degrees. And so you say, where do you stop? And well, that’s very, very difficult to say, especially among those who think like you, except for certain exceptions. Yes, this is this is very true. And it’s a sort of basic philosophical point, isn’t it, that you can draw lines between what is reasonable and they can be very narrow lines. But if you keep drawing them out, they become extreme. So, for example, you can have a what some people might regard as a reasonable age for the termination of a pregnancy due to some, you know, some issue. But if you keep adding days to it, it then becomes a serious problem. And anything in that nature of of differentiating and drawing lines is bound to is bound to cause that to be a problem. And I, however, I’m less confident than you are that the left would be persuaded by someone like me, the hard left, the one wants to call it extreme left or the radical left, wherever it is. And this may sound a bit like a bit of boohooing, which is very easy to do. But if you’re a soft liberal, as I think of myself, I can’t find any other designation. But that sort of thing, the centrist, these are insults to the left. I mean, in English politics recently, for example, centrist was the boo word of the Corbyn East as the the the more socialist end of the Labour Party, a party I’ve been a member of since since I could vote. And I felt very, very, very much buffeted about and despised for my oh, dear, but really, and oh, must we, you know, it’s very, you know, I do think of myself as a sort of cardigan, and this slipper old fool who is loathed on both sides. And it is, of course, historically true that in the 1930s, which is the decade we always go back to when we were very worried about the direction we’re traveling in now, the communists and the Nazis both were absolutely a one mind when it came to people like me, Jewish, semi intellectual, soft liberals, you know, who went, oh, no, but shush. Because we didn’t have any positivity and certainty we didn’t turn. We didn’t, you know, it’s. And as I say, I know it sounds like I’m sort of taking on a victim status here that oh poor liberals, because after all we’ve ruled the world for 200 years and part of the political and cultural argument in the world at the moment is that the liberal project, the enlightenment project, if you want to call it that has failed. I would say we’ve cooperatively guided the world, because I think ruled is the wrong term. Well, it’s a really important distinction because that power is grounded in the sovereignty of the people and imperfect as that may be. It’s more grounded in the sovereignty of the people than any other system we’ve ever managed to whip up. So, I mean, it’s it’s difficult also because it sent her it’s difficult to make centrism dramatic and romantic. And it’s much easier to make extremism dramatic and romantic and that’s one of its primary attractions and that attraction should not be underestimated and it’s partly why I’m so interested in talking to you because you are this incredible dramatist you have this unbelievable talent that manifests itself. In a manner that I thought I was reading your Wikipedia biography in some detail and it requires that I thought if you want to give yourself an inferiority complex quickly going through your Wikipedia entry is a very good way of doing that. I mean, you have 50 films and like 40 TV shows and five novels and seven autobiographies and a career in comedy that was absolutely outstanding. That would have been a lifetime achievement in and of itself and a whole variety of honoree doctorates and and you have an intellectual end. That’s not trivial as well because you were involved with Hitchens and Dawkins and the horsemen of the of the atheist movement. Yeah, and I want to really want to talk to you about that too because I especially am interested in your opinions because of all those people, you’re the one that has the most connection with with with with direct drama and literature and fiction. And you you you just published a couple of books myth mythos heroism heroes heroes and there’s there’s a third one in that trilogy escapes my mind Troy Troy and so you’re obviously extraordinarily sensitive to the power and necessity of literary accounts. But then you’re also a humanistic atheist and that’s very I’m very curious about that. I mean someone like Dawkins he’s so rational that I think for him and I don’t know if this is fair and it might be a bit of a of a stereotype but it’ll do for rhetorical purposes. He’s not gripped by drama in the same way you are and there’s a truth in drama that’s not trivial and that truth is allied with religious truth. So I want to go there too. I can’t speak for Richard it is just been his 80th birthday so we wish him happy birthday and he’s he’s not the the shrill beast of atheism that some people regard him as but I won’t speak for him obviously. But but what I would say is that yes you’re right he’s a rationalist and I don’t think I am I think I’m an empiricist and I think that’s part of my love of drama and myth and story and literature and history even is these are all to do with experience with human experience the register of human experience. Of testing an idea against what actually happens and how people actually behave rather than devising a system of reason. And it’s not the reason when the empiricism are always absolutely opposed but they sometimes are and in the in the history of science they have been you know you could argue that Pascal was a rationalist and and Newton was an empiricist for all his great mathematics and so on. He actually took a piece of cardboard and punched a hole in it which is something that a rationalist probably wouldn’t wouldn’t do. So it’s experimenting in the crucible of human activity and observing what people say and hear. These are the things comedians do all the time. It’s the comic it’s it’s the comic mode is to hear somebody say something grand and then say yes but GK Chesterton is the perfect example of that. Now he was he was certainly no atheist he was a very religious man indeed and a great hero of the Catholic Church and some people even believe he should be if not be atified even sanctified. But he he was a huge influence on me as a teenager growing up because I read his essays and here’s an example. He read the he opens an essay by saying I read in the newspaper the other day this following sentence at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw. Modern woman rises to take her place in society and I thought to myself this is very good news very encouraging. I wonder if it’s true. Let’s see now who’s a modern woman. Oh Mrs. Buttons. She comes into clean every Tuesday and every Thursday. She lives in Clapham. She comes on the omnibus and she scrubs the floors and she has three children. And if I say to myself at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw Mrs. Buttons rises to take her place in society I realize the sentence is not only nonsense it’s pernicious nonsense. And that’s a sort of almost comical example really of saying you don’t trust an abstract statement. You do not trust someone saying a plus a equals to a because there is no such thing in the universe as a and although we’re all capable of doing substitutional metaphor rising or algebra as it were with ideas. The fact is it’s much better to say one thing of something that is real that we know plus another thing of something that is real that we know and have experienced is two of those things. Once you start abstracting and and and that’s what rationalism often is. It’s it’s going off on an algebraic journey which can produce beautiful thoughts and ideas and beautiful schemes. But for me it is beating that out on the anvil of human experience is the absolute key and it’s a long intellectual tradition empiricism and I think we’re in danger of losing it in a way because I want to unpack three things that you that you just said that are very very complicated. So the first thing you did was draw a distinction between rationalism and empiricism and you associated Dawkins more with rationalism and yourself more with empiricism. Yes, not entirely, but yeah. No, no, no, fair enough. Just as example and and you you did that in an attempt to also describe the effect or influence or consequence or reason for your interest in drama or for the fact that drama grips you. So I want to start with the distinction between human or between empiricism and rationalism so everyone listening understands. So walk us through that first. Well, empiricism is is is an intellectual tradition of of using experience or trial and error or experiment to to prove or disprove or to investigate an idea. So if you have an idea, I mean, a perfect example is in the 18th and 19th century, a lot of women were dying of childbirth at childbirth appalling deaths, what we would now call septicemia. The babies and the mothers were dying and nobody knew why, because there was no germ theory. Nobody had an idea that there were these tiny things that could infect our systems. So people tried to reason and they said, well, maybe it’s the smell because it’s a bad smell around. There was a miasma theory and other people just said it was God or other people said that it was some moral quality on the part of the women. And but a man called Semmelweis in Hungary, Ignas Semmelweis, tried lots of different experiments. He he he chose a certain number of people to do different things on what we now call cohort testing, you know, or not quite random double blind testing such as used in meds in medicine to prove the efficacy of something. But eventually he he got a group of medical students who were attending on these births to wash their hands before doing it. It was an almost random thing to do. And suddenly the death rate dropped. I mean, absolutely plummeted. And the reward for Semmelweis? He was sent to a madhouse because nobody believed where he died. I believe the rationalist said there’s no reason that that could be that could be right. But a true empiricist would say it almost doesn’t matter what the reason is. The fact is, it’s repeatable and verifiable and and even not understanding because it took later till Koch and Pasteur and microscopes could show what the process was. He actually did end up in a you know, and he’s a hero man. I went to Budapest to go to the Ignas Semmelweis Museum in in Buda just to sort of pay homage to this remarkable man. And I mean, it’s a bit unfair on the doctors. They had no reason to know, if you like, but that’s the point. They had no reason to know. An example we all deal with of empiricism, which can be very annoying, is in insurance. What’s called actuarial tables or actuaries are people in insurance companies who look at the statistics. And if they discovered that when your name is Jordan, you are 10 percent more likely to have a car crash, you would pay 10 percent more of premium on your insurance. And it’s no good you saying, but why? They would just say those are the odds. That’s the empirical truth. That’s the epidemiology of accidents, if you like, is that people call Jordan or more famously, of course, actors pay more. And you can then try and look for a reason. And that’s a very valuable thing to do, because we all want to know the reason. But sometimes I think there is a beauty in testing and looking and seeing and trying things out and experimenting. It’s not a discount reason that the two go together in finding out the truth. So how do you associate that with your interest in literature and your clear recognition that the dramatic end of existence is valuable? Well, I suppose it’s I mean, in an obvious way, all literature people, literature snobs, I might say, will look at politics. I mean, all through my life, I’ve looked at people like, I don’t know, Margaret Thatcher or indeed on the other side, Gordon Brown, and thought if only they read Shakespeare. Why? Why? Why? Why do people read books of political philosophy and books on this being a good idea on, you know, how parliamentary history without actually reading about how humans behave and seeing how evil and good are played out in drama? Because I think not just literature, but ceremony and ritual are extremely important in in understanding everything. And you don’t have to be religious to to believe in ritual. I love liturgy. I love church liturgy. I am absolutely passionate about hymns and songs and the Eucharist and the language of it. You know, the the the outward and visible sign of an inward and visible grace is one of the most beautiful phrases, I think, ever written in the in the in the in the book of the Eucharist of the Episcopalian Church, as Americans call it, or the Anglican Church, as we call it. And there are magnificent shortcuts available if if you look at ceremony and the dramatization of of human issues, rather than attempting to abstract some essence from them, some truth that you can say that is applicable to all. It’s in the sense we’re all children who have to be shown puppets before we understand. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. I’ve stopped. No, no, no, no. Well, it’s just it’s just stopped and made me think. I mean, the reason I got in interested in religious thinking, I went down the pathway that you’re describing. I mean, that’s why I got interested in religious thinking, because from a psychological perspective, I mean, the first thing that I realized, and I believe this is what you just pointed out, is that there are truths embedded in fiction, for example, or in spectacle, ritual, drama. And, well, then you ask, well, what is it, though those are attractive, and they’re entertaining, and they they automatically engage our interest and but way more than that, they’re also that which culture centers itself around. Greek tragedy, for example, which seemed to be integrally associated with the hallucinion Greek mysteries, something that we we know very little about, unfortunately, but for me, and I was influenced by Carl Jung in this mode of thinking, culture is nested inside a narrative structure. By net by necessity, I even believe that science is nested inside an narrative structure, because the narrative structure is what makes the science practically applicable and useful. Yes, what else is the standard model, but another way of saying a narrative structure, the standard model is just that. And that is the basis of physics today, isn’t it? It’s a story. Well, and well, and the idea that we have that science is a useful endeavor, the fact that we’re looking to the material world for redemption. That’s all part of a narrative and I was absolutely staggered by Jung’s analysis of the emergence of science out of alchemy. In his notion was that the alchemical tradition was a 2000 year old dream, a narrative dream, a counter position to Christianity with its emphasis on abstracted spirituality, suggesting that what we lacked could be found in the depths of the material world. And that was and and and so there was this motivational dream that if we paid enough attention to the transformations of matter, we could find that which would confer upon us eternal life, infinite health and wealth. And Jung’s point was, well, until that dream was in place, there would be no motivation to undertake the process of the painstaking analysis of the material world that didn’t produce any immediate gratification. And it took thousands of years for that idea to assemble itself with enough force so that we could start to have scientists. So the narrative operative thousands of years before the before the before the technical process was instituted and laid the groundwork for it. I thought that kind of incredible and maybe also took that time for for the brain of humans, if you believe Julian James and I kind of do in a metaphorical way. I don’t know if you know his book. Yes, I do. I’m sure you do. Yeah. That maybe, you know, our brains weren’t even capable of processing in that way around the time of between language and writing the, you know, that sort of time. We were finding ways of of describing the world to the Egyptian. I believe I’m right in saying this is the derivation. The magic became alchemy, which then became chemistry and and it became drilled down into an investigation. But first you had to believe that there was a chemist. There was a magic inside everything inside substance to which we could be tuned. And yes, right. A redemptive magic. Yes, if you like. And this is not to repudiate science and numbers. And, you know, a very good friend of mine was a priest said, you know, physics is a theology that makes machines work. And there’s there’s some there’s some sort of truth in that. And I love, for example, the story. I tell this in a footnote in mythos, but it’s very, very early on in Greek mythology when the first the primal, the primal entities, the primal deities are Uranus, the sky or Uranus as as children. We love to call him and Gaia, the earth who mate the sky and the earth mate is a common theme in what they call a mytheme in lots of different myths. As you can imagine, the sky and the earth mate and they produce whatever is in between the zone which we inhabit between sky and earth. And that next generation are called the Titans, of course. But and and there’s the famous story of the birth of Zeus, his father, the Titan, eats all his children and the mother Rhea is determined that the last child, Zeus, shouldn’t be eaten. So she goes and gets a rock from close by where where where she lives on Mount Orthrus and she covers it in swaddling and hides it under her legs and then makes the child makes the noise of childbirth. And Kronos, the Titan comes, thinks it’s a new baby, swallows it whole and the actual baby is then born on Crete and becomes Zeus, the leader of the next generation of gods. But the stone she takes is from magnesium in in Greece, which is near Thessaly. And it’s a stone that the Greeks have noticed had a very extraordinary property, which is the most interesting property that any object can have on earth and is very rare and that it can attract things remotely from the earth. And so it’s stones that have this property are named after that part of the world. They’re called magnetites. And from magnetites, we get magnets and the story of magnets and how magnets were then joined by Thompson Faraday and others to make them. And Maxwell took to make the electromotive force that allows you and me to talk the way we do and to use that action at a distance, which science is brilliant at turning into extraordinary magical machines. The Greek for at a distance is tele. So it’s a very interesting thing. And and that is the and gravity is the same thing. Something moves and there’s nothing that moves. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And that’s what we do. And and gravity is the same thing. Something moves and there’s nothing between it. And and it makes us thrill. And science can do that. And what we’ve never found a way to do is is or at least what we try to find is to do the same with with our fellow people. But our fellow people are you know the world is surprisingly stable. There’s magnets around the place and there’s gold and this stuff and you dig it up and you can do terrible damage to it as we have. But we have moved from from small groups to clans to tribes to nations to this strange myth of a nation and so on. And the individuals within it are much less controllable than the objects around us. And yet we can control those objects so superbly that it gives us an idea that we that we have a special place and a special power. And it’s I suppose really what we want to do is to reconnect ourselves to the same motive forces that that are thrilling like magnetism and electricity that exist in in also all throughout nature that we look at them. You know, which of us can’t honestly almost sob with joy when spring happens. And you see that once again these leaves are being pushed out of dead branches and blossoms and insects are flying towards them. There’s this fantastic process going on and somehow we’ve allowed ourselves to feel outside it as if we are special. We’ve given ourselves a godlike status, which is very dangerous, I think, and very foolish. And the more I look back, the more confidence I have in looking forward. I suppose that’s one of the other reasons I love myth so much. OK, so all right. So, um, you described yourself as an empiricist and then you talked about. You started to talk about the attraction that the mythological and narrative world has for you and some of the reasons for that. And then but you also just differentiated between you and Dawkins to some degree. And so while I’m curious about why. Oh, I mean, he’s I mean, I’m as I said, I can’t speak for him, but you use the word rest and I understand originally. And I and I don’t I don’t have any particular points of disagreement with him. I’m really fond of him. He’s a friend. And I only feel sorry sometimes that. And this is a cheap point. It’s, you know, we’re most of us a bit fed up with this attitude that it’s all about presentation. And I could argue that Richard’s presentation, his passion is real. His love of science is real. His love of the joy and the wonder of discovery is real. He’s written books on wonder, which is a huge and marvelous and much under explored human. And a primary religious instinct. Yes. And and yet science has shown us and it really can just can’t be contested that we are part of a continuum of life. DNA demonstrates this. The DNA we share, not just with our close ape like and and and and other mammals, but also with plants and flowers that also have DNA and as we know, soda viruses and and and yet or RNA. And. And yet I don’t think I think it’s fair to say that blackbirds don’t look at the sunset and go, my God, that’s so beautiful. Did you see that? I want to paint it. I want to remember it. How is it, you know, this this sense of literally of marvelling? It’s the only world we know. When we’re born, we don’t think, of course, there are seventy thousand other globes with much better sunsets. This is the only thing we’ve ever seen. And yet it staggers us. It surprises us. We’re surprised by what is the case, to use the phrase that Wittgenstein loved. You know, the case is everything around us. And we don’t know another one. And yet we go, wow, why should we go? Wow. What is absolutely ordinary? There must be a reason, I suspect, that we are astonished by the everyday, by the fact of what we see when we look out of the window or when we go for a walk. We’re astonished by buds and grass and rabbits and sky and clouds. These things are astonished. We’re astonished by what we want to imitate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I’ve thought about that idea for a long time. It’s not a casual response to your question. Well, the sun is a hero. The sun is the hero that fights the darkness at night and rises a new in the morning. The sun is associated with consciousness. And we have to imitate the hero and we see what we have to imitate everywhere. And it reduces us to a state of of awe. And awe is an invitation to imitate. And imagine. So you see what you are not yet, but what you could be. And you need to see that because you need to turn into what you could be, because what you are is not sufficient to redeem you. I see that from a Jungian point of view, but I’m and Joseph Cambly sort of way, too. But in terms of the way myths and then religions developed, the idea of imitating these symbols of complete power and creation, like the sun, whether it’s Ra or whether it’s Apollo or any other deity or sense of solar greatness, you were supposed to supplicate or sacrifice to or acknowledge your weakness to. But we could sacrifice. Look at sacrifice. That’s a great. That’s a great inward point. So I ask my students, especially the children of first generation immigrants, what did your parents sacrifice to put you here? And they can answer that instantly. And sacrifice like we look at sack ancient sacrifice and we think about it as something that is not there. We think about it as something primordial or even detestable, especially in its more extreme forms. And no wonder. But we had to act out sacrifice before we could psychologize it and understand it. And what we learned, and this is absolutely crucial, this issue of sacrifice. What we learned was that if we gave up something that we valued in the present and so that could be a false idol. That’s one way of thinking about it. If we gave up something in the present that we valued, the future would improve. We learned that we could bargain with reality itself by sacrificing counterproductive values to move ahead. And so we acted that out long before we could make it into a psychological truism. And so there is that supplication element. But it’s also the case that you should be prostate in some prostrate in some sense in front of what’s ultimately ideal, because otherwise you don’t have the proper humility. Yes. I mean, I see what you’re saying. It makes rational sense. But then the empiricist in me says, well, OK, I’m the mother of some of those children in Mexico who are being slaughtered to the gods in order to make the harvest better. And lo and behold, it doesn’t work because there is no causal relation between sacrificing children on a pyramid in Texacoatl and the harvest improving. In fact, there may well be an earthquake the next day and more people die. That very often did happen in the whole civilizations. Mayan and Mexican and others disappeared. And the more they were threatened, the more they sacrificed and the less use it was. So there was no it may have had a psychological purpose that I don’t know. I mean, it seems to me the psychology of sacrificing your children or even your very rare cattle upon which you may depend for a year to eat to gods who will apparently pay you back. Who will apparently placate you by making a better harvest or not send a tidal wave this year that will destroy the port and all the other things that our ancestors found in the contingent world in which they an unstable world in which they lived. So I can understand why a 19th century figure like Frazier or, you know, the Golden Bower or like Mary McCarthy or the younger Joseph Campbell can make wonderful myths out of myths. They’re telling a story about stories and telling us what they mean. Well, I I don’t refute it. I repudiate. I I allow myself to believe. No, actually, yes, it’s it’s all very well. And you can you can build a very nice theory about what these myths mean and who these hero are, what these quests are and how they’re any seven stories. And yes, but again, the the stand up comedian type empiricist system, he says, OK, so I’m a small Roman person under those circumstances. And what does this really meaning to me? I’m sorry. No, I’ve got as Wordsworth put it, it’s getting and spending and doing and having children and looking and hoping life gets better and enjoying life with my friends. But to erect is into a spiritual language and a theater of of of human meaning is delightful. And I think we have to recognize that it’s a game to some extent. It may be it may indeed be true. I mean, I know I’m not saying this to to to demolish your argument, but I’m saying it’s yes. But you know, in terms of sacrifice, the buts are not the buts. In terms of the buts are important. Yeah, that’s are important. And the skepticism is necessary because you don’t want to leave anything standing except that which can’t survive the onslaught. And there’s no doubt that there’s no doubt that the sacrificial idea can go dreadfully wrong. And I but I would say that that’s in the nature of of the attempt, because it’s obviously the case that sometimes you make sacrifices towards a certain end, which is clearly an attempt to bargain with the future as if it’s something that can be bargained with. Yes, but sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. And later after that, the the cultures of sacrifice around the world came a new system where it was the gods who sacrificed themselves, which is like the Christian myth or the many of the dying and reborn kings in various myths that that that James Fraser in particular wrote about. And there Christ ransomed himself as it was. So suddenly it’s it’s it’s as if human said, this sacrifice is getting us nowhere. If God really loves us, he would sacrifice himself or herself for us. And that is one of the one of the meanings of the incarnation and the the the Christian story, is it not? And it’s not unique in any way. There are many other stories of of divine divine figures being sacrificed to save the society that they in which they make themselves flesh. You sacrifice your short term impulses for the long term good, I suppose. That’s one way of thinking about the discovery of the future. That speaks very well to your books. That speaks very well to your books because, you know, underlying both your excellent books of rules of behavior is that I don’t mean this in a bad way. The simple truth of of deferred pleasure being something that seems to be or deferred advantage being something that seems to have gone out of human culture lately, that we, you know, we’re all a bit veruca salt. I want it. I want it now. You know, and as you as you said about sacrifices, you you you suffer or you you find, you know, in some way you you defer what what pleasure might positively be yours now in order to have a future advantage. Yeah, right. And then we have an immense discussion that lasts forever about what that optimal future advantage is. And that that’s part of this religious investigation because you might say and this is something that’s manifesting itself in Christianity, which is, well, we’re trying to produce something better in the future. And so then you ask yourself, what does better mean? That’s the first question. And what the what does the future mean? Those need to be answered. And then the net the final question is, well, what’s the most appropriate sacrifice? And so you get an extreme version of that in Christianity, hence its narrative power, which is, well, you sacrifice the most valuable possible thing for what’s of ultimate eternal value. That’s the underlying structure. And in some sense, it hits a limit because it’s God himself who sacrificed. And the purpose of the sacrifices, the is the establishment, the redemption of humanity and the establishment of of the kingdom of heaven eternally. So that there isn’t anything better than that by definition. Although I know if I was to raise out to Sarah or a Marxist view of this and say that it’s about the power over the people, which basically denies them any kind of pleasure now on a promise, which is unprovable of a future glorification in some kind or another, either for their children or for themselves in a heaven whose direction they can’t point to and not just out to certain Marxists, of course, many, many secularists and atheists like myself have said, you know, there is a there is a story to be told about religion, basically stopping ordinary citizens from having any say in in in their life and their world. They are told what the truth is. They are told where power comes from and where it resides, and they are told that their poverty and their subservience and their sacrifice are for the greater good. And they they must take that authority on its word. And the meaning of the Enlightenment was that throwing off of those shackles of Aristotelian ecclesiasticism, which constantly laid down these these categories of authority. And people began to question them and say, I wonder, because I think we might just talk about is I know it interests you. And there are people written quite a few books about it lately is the distinction between a hierarchy and the network in terms of how you order society that and these religions and these sacrifices all came in hierarchical societies rather, it seems, in in in ones that might be called networked nodal. Some other word I know Neil Ferguson has written about this, isn’t he? In a book that I can’t remember its title, it’s got the word tower in it. But it’s one of the objections people have to the modern, liberally produced world is that morality is relative and that hierarchies are toppled and that power and authority are no longer seen to reside in something. And some agree, you know, the curtain is pulled away and the Wizard of Oz is revealed to be nothing. A silly, foolish snake oil salesman. And the answer lies within ourselves. So I have to stop you there because I can’t answer. I won’t be able to ask this question. There’s so many things that you’re saying that I want to ask about it. There, there, there, there’s. Okay, so with regards to the idea of the opiate of the masses. Okay, well, the first thing we might note, I think reasonably is that Marxism is the methamphetamine of the masses and whatever whatever flaws Judeo Christianity might have had in terms of its corruption was certainly matched by the instantaneous corruption. Yes, but the fact that a Marxist has a critique of religion does not mean that it falls because Marxism itself falls. No, I agree. Okay, so that there’s a second question there. And so the second question would be something like, is the corruption of the church that you described intrinsic to the nature of the church and its doctrine or is it the corruption of something that’s valuable? Now, let me make two arguments for that. One is that the corruption is intrinsic, and the whole thing should be just dispensed with. And I would say that that’s the perspective of the fore horsemen fundamentally. Yeah, and it might and all religious people themselves. I mean, Thomas Cranmer, who wrote the prayer book during the Reformation, there’s a great phrase in it. There was not anything by the wit of man devised that has not been in time in part or in whole corrupted. Absolutely. And I think that’s also an existential truth. I mean, you just talked about Kronos. Kronos devours his sons. Well, Kronos is the archetypal tyrant, and he’s also time. And both time and the archetypal tyrant devour their own sons. So if you’re a tyrannical father or a tyrannical statesman, instead of encouraging the development of the young people in your charge, you crush them and destroy them. He also castrated his own father. So that’s a repeat. I would say that that’s something like demolition of the utility of tradition. I mean, in the Egyptian mythology, you see Horus, who’s the son fundamentally, both the actual son, the heavenly son and the son, and Osiris. And for the Egyptians, Horus and Osiris had to rule simultaneously. So Horus didn’t castrate Osiris. He rescued him from the underworld and joined with him so that the tradition, which was represented by Osiris, which had a Kronos-like element because it was tyrannical and destructive, had to be allied with Horus, who was essentially something like, I would say, something like empirical attention. It’s something because the symbol is the eye. And so it was like alert tradition. And that’s different than the castration of the father. That’s the rescuing of the father from the underworld when he becomes corrupt and senile. Now, when you just published mythos, we refer to this mythos, heroes and Troy. And so I would say, and you tell me if I’m wrong, but from the outside, it looks to me like you’re involved in a philosophical archaeological expedition to find things of value in the past and to bring them forward into the future. And that’s what I am trying to do, at least for me, I would say, with regards to Christianity. It’s like I know the critiques and I understand the critiques. And it’s not like I’m not, what would you call, sensitive to their finer points. It is an open question, right? How much of the tradition? Look, I know in Britain right now, there are people who say that flying the flag is an imperialist act. And so what are they asking? They’re saying, well, is our tradition so irredeemably corrupt that we have to abandon it wholeheartedly? I can speak to this very directly because it’s something I find very, very interesting. Again, it’s so much of it is historical ignorance. For those who are obsessed with the flag and the politicians who want to fly the flag, I would urge them to read Rudyard Kipling, who is supposed to be, in some people’s eyes, the poet and bard of British Empire, of the Raj, the spokesman for this very thing. There is a scene in one of his masterpieces, Stalkian Co., a book set in a school, where a politician comes to the school to give a speech and he has a flag. And the schoolchildren are outraged, absolutely horrified. This takes place in the second year of Gladstone’s five-year premiership at the absolute height of the British Empire. The Queen is on the throne. Her crown and her flag are fluttering all over the world. And these boys are at this special school, which is actually a kind of feeder for the British Empire. They’re all be sent out to fight in Afghan wars and in India and in the Boer War later on. And Kipling describes how they die. But the idea to them that anybody would dare to wave a flag and ask them to value it was so disgusting they could barely speak. It’s a very extraordinary passage where he describes their horror at this politician using the flag and claiming to own it. He makes the point that one’s relationship to one’s country is intensely private. And it may be that one has great love for it, but it’s a love that is complex and confounded with all kinds of disappointment and hatred and fear and shame, as well as love. And it is one’s own thing. But to fly it and to wave it and to say that it means this is a lie and an imposition on the personal experience of those boys in that story. And I would urge everyone to read that because it comes from a surprising source. It’s no accident that the best writers say the same about burning it. Is it the same kind of because you you just offered a balanced account because you said, well, if you’re sensible, let’s say and that that your feelings for your country. So let’s say your feelings for your tradition or your regard for your tradition is a complex mix of of emotions from abhorrence and shame and contempt to love that entire distribution. OK, that seems to me to be appropriate. And my sense is that that’s expressed mythologically by two figures of tradition, one the wise king and the other the evil tyrant. And all cultures are a meld of both, although to a greater or lesser degree, because you get pure forms of tyranny and pure forms of benevolent rule. Hopefully, I think that’s a reasonable proposition. OK, so it’s complex. But what you’re willing to accept that complexity. But what I and what I see, and maybe this will tie us back into the political discussion that we sort of started this off with, is that in radical movements, radical critical movements. And I think I place the atheist horseman in that category. There’s no the love is not there. The respect is not there. The the pointing out of the flaws is there and the contempt is there. But the attempt that’s not good enough. Look, if you read a piece of literature, you want to dismiss that which is no longer relevant and extract out that which is crucial. That’s critical reading. It’s but the purpose isn’t to dismiss. Fundamentally, the purpose is to mine. I would say another another very central piece of literature for me, higher literature than than Kipling, most people would say, is one of Flaubert’s short stories. And Kierke Sampler, Simple Heart, which is about this poor peasant woman, Felicite, I think her name is. And there’s a scene in which she kneels in front of a stained glass window. And this is where the parrot comes from that Julian Barnes wrote about so brilliantly in Flaubert’s Parrot. But she’s incredibly simple and incredibly ignorant and uneducated, but also incredibly devout. And she kneels there with her knees up in desperate pain because she spends her whole life on them scrubbing floors. And she sees this extraordinary stained glass and Flaubert is able to describe the incredible corruption and venality that went into the spending of the money on this stained stained glass and the lives of the corrupt priests who did it, but also showed the light coming from her rather than from behind the glass. It’s a very holy moment. And it’s anybody who dismisses religion would be well to remember that devotion and piety can be wonderful things as well as terribly brutal things. And OK, so I want to understand the difference. Right. OK, I’m going to read something and forgive me. No, I want to go here. You’re face to face with God. Bone cancer and children. What’s that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world where there is such misery? That’s not our fault. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean minded, stupid God who creates a world so full of injustice and pain? And then one more, because the God who created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac, utter maniac. I’ve been in the Brothers Karamazov. Yeah. Right. Right. Now it’s OK. So what happens in the Brothers Karamazov is that Ivan wins the argument. Yeah. But I lo sia is the better person. Completely so. And we love it. Yeah. It’s a book. We want to read. I would urge everyone to read the Brothers Karamazov because I do think it’s a work of genius. There’s a lot about Dostoevsky I really dislike because of his influences. Again, people who don’t understand Dostoevsky think he’s a champion of right wing religiosity without understanding that he went through an extraordinary life experience to come to where he did come and that his novels show his full understanding of all kinds of different points of view. But in terms of the dialectic of that issue about how how there can be a God, I mean, I was answering a question that I was asked. I know. And I’m not trying. Of course. I’m not really not trying to put you on the spot. My point is I don’t believe there is such a being. But if there were and he were the kind of being that has been worshipped and described by various religions around the world and monotheistic religions, then I would have many bones to pick with him. But of course, I don’t believe there is such a thing. But the the argument from evil, as it’s known, is a very old one. And it goes back through the through the medieval religious figures as well as later humanists that this idea that it is it is very hard to square this loving God who has knowledge of every hair on our head and adores us and and adores little kittens. He also, as I say, bone cancer in children, but also life cycles of insects that whose whole aim is to burrow into the eyes of children in Africa and and lay their eggs there and cause blindness for those children. I mean, you could quite easily picture a universe in which there weren’t such an animal and in which children were not sent blind with pain and horror by the various bugs and fungi, fungi and insects and viruses in the world. It isn’t necessary. There’s a worm. There’s a worm in Africa that burrows under the skin and it’s long worm. And if you you can pull it out with a pencil and wrap it, but it breaks. It’s fragile. And then it gets infected. It’s a terrible thing. And a doctor recently made it his life’s work to eradicate that and did it successfully. And so then I would. So I read what you wrote. And I mean, I take it very seriously. And and I it wasn’t I wasn’t throwing it in your face. I brought it up actually because of what you said about flow bears attitude, you know, because what that lacks, what your statement lacks is exactly what flow bear highlighted in that woman on her knees. And and I’m not saying this is a simple solution. Right. And then and I would say, so let’s take the argument you made there. And there’s a there’s a direction that goes in that’s nihilistic and resentful and vengeful and angry and all understandable. But to me, counter, it doesn’t look to me like there’s anything good in it. It looks like it’s entirely counterproductive. It makes the problem it purports to have been generated by worse. And so the question is, what’s the appropriate attitude given that the argument you make is actually an extraordinarily powerful argument? And I don’t know the answer to that. But I but I do know, I think that resentment and anger and even the motive that would make you want to say that to God himself, I think that’s probably not helpful, even though it’s so well. I came to that with great difficulty. I mean, I’ve had my reasons to be resentful and angry, especially recently. Because I’m suffering a lot of pain. And it makes me resentful and angry and wanting to shake my fist. But I found upon intense consideration that there was nothing in that that didn’t make it worse and that therefore that must be wrong. Even though it’s justifiable. I completely understand. And you must remember that my response was to a question I didn’t see coming. And it was amused. It was because I don’t believe in this God. It’s not an issue. I’m not really resentful and angry about the fact that there’s evil in the world. I’m sorrowful very often. And I’m united in my admiration for the fact and the real belief I have that most people fundamentally, given this dysfunction or this deep trauma, most people are so good, are so anxious to be good, are deontically good, have a sense of obligation and drive in them to be better than they are. I think that’s one of the key things I love about humanity is not just that we are dissatisfied with things that are wrong and can be improved, but with ourselves, we are dissatisfied and that most of us want to be better. I know that’s true of me all the time. Every time I go to sleep, I think, how did I screw up tonight? Today? How can I be better tomorrow? Why am I so bad at this? Only I could manage that in moral terms, genuine moral terms. Yes, I think that’s an extraordinarily common experience and very much undernoticed. And part of the reason, as far as I can tell, that the talks that I’ve been giving, let’s say have had the effect that they’ve had is because I do point out that that’s not the case. I point out that that’s an extraordinarily common experience, that that that self-tortured by conscience. And it does indicate this striving towards a higher mode of being. The other question I have when I look at the the the response that that I just read is that the amount of the world’s evil that’s a consequence of our voluntary moral insufficiencies is indeterminate. You know, so you might say, hypothetically speaking, that as part of God’s creation, we actually have important work to do. And if we shirk it, the consequences are real. And you might say, well, that’s just an apology for God. And perhaps that’s the case. And perhaps there’s no God at all. And so what the hell are we talking about? But but I do think it’s an important issue. I mean, your life is characterized by a stellar level of constant productive creativity. That’s that that’s you. And you’re offering that to the world. And that seems necessary. And maybe it’s because the problems are real and important. And the role we have to play ethically is of paramount importance. Truly. Why else would we torture ourselves with conscience? And I would say that’s the flowering of the religious instinct within you. Well, you could describe it as that. But then, you know, there are free. I mean, you used a phrase earlier than I wanted to say, Whoa, hang on. I’m not sure I know what that means. A higher mode of existence. I don’t see. I remember having this argument with John Cleese of all people some years ago. He was a great lover of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Gill Brown and people like that. And I’ve always found them slightly hard to take. And he talked about he I think the phrase he used was a high level of consciousness. And I said, I don’t. And again, this is my empiricist thing. It sounds cynical and skeptical. It’s not meant to be. But what level? Describe a level. What is a higher mode? Why higher? What’s higher than another? Are you saying it in terms of animals? It’s a view. It’s an old fashioned Huxleyan view of evolution that most modern Richard Dawkins, for example, modern evolutionary scientists and so on, the ethologists would would deprecate to say that there is a higher level of being a higher mode of consciousness. Is it just like saying, well, you’re better educated. You’ve read more. You know more. Is it you’ve somehow been enlightened? But a fair clowns effect, as the Germans would say, which is which is not necessarily intellectual, but is somehow spiritual. And if so, when show me an example of it, show me something that’s not necessarily intellectual, but is somehow spiritual. So I think someone who has a higher mode of existence than I do. I can, I can answer that. I think to some degree. Three ways in three ways. One, that higher mode of existence is what your conscience torches you for not attaining. OK, OK. I always find conscience torches me for not changing is that I was rude to someone yesterday and I shouldn’t have been right. But it’s the shouldn’t part of it. Yes. exactly David Hume the problem of ought yeah well and then you think you think you think about how it manifests itself you don’t this is why Nietzsche was wrong you cannot create your own values right the values impose themselves on you independent of your will now maybe there you participate well that’s what your conscience does and good luck trying to control it this is very anti-nietzsche isn’t it well i’m a great admirer i know you are that’s why i was that’s why i made the point well well opposite to his philosophy but it’s well so Jung embarked on a lengthy critique of Nietzsche and it’s part of his work that isn’t well known i would say but and we’ll leave that be except to say that the psychoanalysts starting with Freud well not really but popularized by Freud and systematized showed that we weren’t masters in our own psychological house right there were there were autonomous entities yes and those would be the greek gods to some degree that operated within us and we were which is julian janes’s point exactly yes we’re in yes yes i have my problems with james but as a overarching idea there’s interest in it okay so there are things happening with us and to us in the moral domain that we cannot control and that’s a that stunned me when i first learned it as a proposition it’s oh yes look at that here’s one what are you interested in yeah well that grips you okay number two what does your conscience bother you about okay that’s you’re inadequate by your own standards now what adequate would mean that’s a different question but it’s defined negatively by conscience yes and then better there’s one that i said i would lay out three you can look at jean piaget’s work on developmental psychology development of the subject yes he was a genetic epistemologist he wanted to do was this is what he wanted to do he wanted to unite science and religion that was his goal and he wanted to look at the empirical development of values and what he concluded at least in part was that a moral stance that’s better than a previous moral stance does all the things that the previous moral stance does plus something else yes yes and you can say the same thing no i was a scientific theory i remember i had a great i i loved piaget and i his observation was so empirical of course yes absolutely the development of the child and the not quite the theory of mind that wasn’t his thing but but but similar developments and signposts where people become aware of self okay so so now piaget looked specifically at the development of morality and he was one of the first people to emphasize the importance of games and what he showed what he showed was that at two years old let’s say a child can only play a game with him or herself but at three both children can identify an aim and then share it in a fictional world so that’s partly pretend play and the beginnings of drama and then cooperate and compete within that domain yeah and then what happens and the game theorists have shown this is that games out of games morality emerges there’s a reset so i’ll give you an example and this is a crucial example so if you pair juvenile rats together the males they have to play they have to rough and tumble play because their prefrontal cortexes don’t develop properly if they don’t anyways they have to play you pair a big rat and a little rat teenage rats together and the big rat will stomp the little rat yeah first first encounter so then you say power determines hierarchy yeah okay but then you pair the rats multiple times like 50 yeah then if the big rat doesn’t let the little rat win 30 percent of the time the little rat will stop inviting him to play and so you get an emergent reciprocity even at the level of the rat yeah that is it’s it’s fascinating isn’t it and it’s it’s not dissimilar to the theory of mind games that were devised by simon barron cohen and others in the question of showing how neurodivergence develops in the autistic spectrum for example but one of the things so interests me at the moment because of the pandemic which is slightly close to this that you might be able to help me with is i’ve been very interested in as i have been over the years at how completely out of favor bf skinner and the behavioralists have become uh since i guess since man you probably don’t admire that much since noam chomsky rather demolished bf skinner famously um and on the language front on the language front but also the whole nature of behaviorism and looking at rats and their behavior has but when it came to this pandemic one of the things that was hidden from the public was that every country had its scientific committees which were mainly composed of course of virologists and epidemiologists and immunologists but always behaviorologists too because the secret to getting out of the pandemic wasn’t just following science and tracking a microbe an invisible virus in the air it was how people would take it and sherlock holmes in the second sherlock holmes book which is called the sign of four says to watson i remember this it’s very interesting he says you know watson the statistician has shown that we can predict to an extraordinary order of accuracy the behavior of the average man he uses the word man where it was now we’d have to say human or man and woman be not i mean the average man we can absolutely predict how they will behave but no one has yet and probably never will be able to to predict how an individual will behave so we we can be talked about as a mass and advertisers and politicians and syphologists and all kinds of other people are very good at knowing how we behave as a group but as individuals we are unknowable without face-to-face conversation and the history and so on so that was one and the other one which i think is connected was i believe it was a bf skitter experiment and it’s one i absolutely love because it makes me wonder whether all these kind of conversations are maybe ultimately a waste of time but he said if you take a load of mice and put them on a perspex tray and float them on the water because they are unaware of the risk they’re in they move around randomly and their random movement makes the tray even they’re just randomly moving around if you scale it up and put humans on it they sink within seconds because they think oh we’re tipping we must run to this end and of course they all run to that end and so it tips over in other words consciousness of the problem attempting to deal with it being aware of it is the the biggest problem of all and that’s something new to us because in the old days we lived in small groups who just didn’t know how awful humanity was what sins we were committing how dreadful we were making the world it was only through the telecommunication and through the that you know the recent development of the global village or whatever you want to call it your countryman mcclellan that we have actually become aware and are now likely to be running around in that tank and causing it to fall over whereas really we should just be unconscious and get on with living and and and and randomly run about in our tank and then we’ll never sink does that make sense I want to answer the behaviorist question it’s transformed into behavioral neuroscience and and and affective neuroscience and being taken over primarily by the biologists and part of the reason it’s vanished is because it’s become more and more difficult to do animal experimental work for all sorts of reasons and because it requires a tremendous amount of technical expertise right so um so that area of conditioning is also vanished with it no it’s transmuted and become more sophisticated and and been incorporated into all sorts of theories the most outstanding behaviorist was Jeffrey Gray and he wrote a book called the neuropsychology of anxiety which is an absolute work of genius and it’s very heavily influenced by the skimmerian tradition right so um I want to tie something back again and I’ve been poking you about this and I don’t want to stop yet back to um the distinction between you and and um Dawkins because I see you as a border figure you you’ve got one foot in the the rationalist human rationalist humanist atheist um empiricist world firmly planted but then there’s the artist in you which is a major part of your personality and and and and obviously a part that’s incredibly productive and very well received and that has an intellectual end as well the that domain that second domain that you occupy isn’t formalized the investigation of that isn’t formalized as well by the atheist community oh you’re right they they lose what’s there and they don’t value it properly and they and that’s a that’s a problem like with Dawkins for example I I get letters from lots of people lots and lots of people and lots of them are nihilistic and because they’re nihilistic they’re suicidal I had a friend I went for a walk with him the other week and he was a communist atheist when he was a kid he grew up in Poland and he had criticized his family for celebrating Christmas because it was irrational and then he realized at one point he said I could kill Christmas and we just have another week weekend that wouldn’t actually right right because there’s a magic there that that rationalism can destroy and and and for reasons I have exactly that problem politically with the royal family which on the face of it is of course preposterous more preposterous even than Christmas and religion is the idea that we still have a royal family but but you have a ceremony and ritual and symbolism is I look at America and I think if only Donald Trump and and now Biden if every week they had to walk up the hill and go into a mansion in Washington and there was Uncle Sam in a top hat and striped trousers a living embodiment of their nation more important than they were that’s the key he Uncle Sam is America the president is a fly-by-night politician voted for by less than half the population and he has to bow in front of this personification of his country every week and that personification Uncle Sam can’t tell him what to do Uncle Sam can’t say no pass this act and don’t pass that act and free these people give them a pardon all he can do is say tell me young fella what you done this week and he’ll bow and say well Uncle Sam oh you think that’s the right thing for my country well that’s what a constitutional monarchy is and of course it’s absurd but the fact that Churchill and Thatcher and everyone had to bow every week in front of this something there’s something and also empirically look at the happiest countries in the world that’s all you need do and they happen to be constitutional monarchies Norway Sweden Benelux Japan they’re always right up there on the list now it may be that we can’t find the causal link between their constitutional monarchy but it might just be something to do with that and that’s it’s a way of answering your question in the same with religion is that I can see the absurdities of the claims of many religions and I can see the history of the wickedness and oppression and suppression particularly in my own instance you know being gay growing up gay and I there’s a long history of religion in particular being intolerant and to this day even this Pope Francis whom I had some hopes for is seems to be beginning to add to an ancient slander and nonsensical attitude towards sexuality which is extremely annoying and upsetting but you know I kind of that doesn’t mean I throw the whole baby out with the bathwater I can see in the same way that I don’t believe in in in Greek mythology in actual fact I don’t believe that on Olympus Zeus lived there with his wife Hera but I do believe Hermes and Hera and Zeus live within us there is a Hermes inside me there is a there is a trickster a liar a joker a cute funny side as well as a harmonic Apollonian and a bestial dynat dynastian side with his appetitive and addictive and and and frenzied and and and I see the value and the truth in in that in those religious manifestations those principles those elements of of my character and the character of the human family in in in Mesopotamia the the god who became supreme was Marduk and he had 50 different names and one of them was he who makes ingenious things as a consequence of the combat with Tiamat chaos essentially which is a brilliant brilliant name but so Marduk was the aggregation of 50 gods so imagine that each of those gods was the representative of a tribe at one point yes and that would be the value system of the tribe personified something like that and indeed the Greek gods derived from those Mesopotamian gods they came yeah exactly a fundamental what development in the history of religious thinking and dramatic thinking well let’s say each god is a manifestation of a value structure yeah and we say well value structures have some commonalities across them just like games have some commonalities across them or or languages have some commonalities across them so then you start to aggregate gods yeah and you produce a metagod and the metagod is Marduk and he’s all eyes because he pays attention like an empiricist let’s say and speech yeah and so the Mesopotamians had already figured out that attention and speech were the key elements of proper sovereignty right brilliant and the Egyptians right they worshiped the eye same idea and it was the eye in part that the Egyptians associated with the immortal soul and they associated that with the proper locale of sovereignty yeah because they started to abstract out the idea of sovereignty from the sovereign and so the sovereignty could be something that was now not embodied in any specific person sort of like the uncle sam figure that you described yes wouldn’t be the i often thought with presidents they’d have a much easier job if the symbolic weight was lifted from their shoulders a fourth branch of government right symbolic which is what a constitutional monarchy exactly is by accident of history certainly not by design but it just somehow the the the bits of the sovereign that were inimical to to human development the tyranny the autocracy the whimsical caprice all these were sort of chipped away because of the right human failings of different sovereigns until by 1688 what we call in british history the glorious revolution when when the bill of rights was written and so on which was the same as the american bill of rights 100 years later essentially but and it became a constitutional monarchy and that was slowly refined as well and and of course i know many people find it absurd and and outrageous and they live in palaces and they’ve got all this money and it’s unjust and of course all that is true and i wouldn’t defend it on any rational grounds but but i would on empirical grounds okay okay and maybe that’s a good difference between rationalism and empiricism so this you were talking about the gods within okay and you said well you you believe that the gods are within and yes i know that i know i understand the claim that you’re making and and the limits of that claim but i want to explore that okay so as humanity advances we’ll say advancement is the aggregation of larger societies are more sophisticated view of the world more technological power that sort of thing more ability to predict and control indeed a longer lifetime yes yes and the things that come along with that and more peace by the looks of things and more food and and the the stephen pinker thing yeah right right this exactly that so the gods aggregate and unify that happens across as cultures collide and integrate the gods integrate and unify it’s the battle between the gods in heaven that’s the parallel development to the battle between tribes for dominance on earth but it’s an integrative process as well as a submission process yeah okay so those are within yes now you have an integrated god within yes that’s what torches you with your conscience yes that’s your jiminy cricket it’s your what philosophers called your deontic or deontological uh okay so yeah then then you ask yourself and this is a dead serious question so imagine that people are exploring the moral domain whose reality is blatantly obvious but but difficult to formalize let’s say we’re exploring the nature of the moral realm tentatively and we develop more powerful and more integrated theories as we progress you end you end up with a unified god so it’s a monotheism there’s a god within then the question is well what exactly is that god within does it correspond to something that’s real or is it just a figure of the imagination but then you say well if it’s just a figure of the imagination what exactly is the imagination you see christian i think partly christianity insists that this integrated god figure also had a real existence that’s that’s how christianity tries to to solve this particular problem yes and and people like c.s lewis and yung to some degree as well would say well once in history someone acted out that unified god so completely that something happened that’s the proposition okay well that’s the limit of the proposition and then the question is well how real is this moral striving it’s real enough so you torture yourself when you don’t engage in it properly it’s real enough so you can’t avoid its call it’s real enough so that you can make moral errors that are so severe that you can doubt the validity of your own existence it’s real enough for that and and but this is an honest question it’s like i i don’t know but it’s an i certainly see how much good is done when people are good and how much evil is done when they’re evil yes but it’s very hard i think empirically to be really boring and use the word again it’s quite you know to build up a list and show that there is more to be done there is more morality on the side of those who followed a particular faith a particular system systematic religion than than those who didn’t i mean you know that it’s can you have morality question that’s the question you have morality without religion that that is okay okay let’s let’s take that for a second move back to the political yeah okay because that’s the key issue yes so let’s say we’re going to defend the values of the west to the degree that they’re worth defending then we are making a claim that the inheritors of a particular tradition have something valued valid morally on their side or we cannot defend that position and and we can’t defend the position i mean look i know this is bothering you what’s happening in the broader public landscape yeah you got tangled up for example with jk rolling right well with what’s happening around her yeah she’s a friend and we’ll remain friends but i’m also sorry that people are upset you know the two things are not incompatible i don’t have to break links with jk rolling to say that i i have huge sympathy and uh and i endorse the efforts of trans people everywhere to to live the lives that they they feel they want to leave it lead and and i hate how that they they are often you know treated and and i recognize the courage it takes to to to yes and you’ve put your money where your mouth is on that front over the course of your whole life i’ve tried to yes yes so it’s not just a claim you can look at your biography and see that but but but you’re disturbed nonetheless at what’s let’s say there’s something that’s happening in our culture that’s not sitting right with you okay how do you defend the damn culture against it without making the claim that we do have something of let’s say higher value that is the consequence of following a particular tradition yes because without that you lost you lose the argument instantly i i mean i think a lot of it is to do with the the the necessity that we we all have of redefining it we have to remember that morality is is a question of manners it is literally what morality means that our parents and grandparents had a very very different and very firm sense of what was immoral if the word immoral was used in the newspaper or by a person then that person’s immoral it would have a sexual meaning it would mean that they lived with someone with whom they weren’t married or they lived with someone of the same sex or that in some way they they were philanderers or loose in their morals meant entirely to do with the bedroom these were the unforgivable behaviors of a generation that close to us we can still hug them if we’re allowed to in the garden in covid times that that’s how quickly morality changes so the idea of the culture is a false one there is no the culture um that there you know it’s not like a human version of a biosphere even i don’t think there is the state of things that now exist but like when when you were talking about religion and saying this you know this god that what religion has been brilliant at and it’s needed to be but so has science is redefining what god is what god was in 1400 it was kept god was capable of being remarkable things he was answerable for everything and we worshiped him for it a couple of hundred years later a few things have been taken away from him and we could answer for traveling the world and knowing it and discovering how the stars actually were not holes in a black cloth but maybe were celestial objects with the you know and then a few hundred years later and similarly science we use the word cosmos well cosmos used to mean a very small sphere of the the you know as a section of the of the of the solar system and now it’s some infinite thing and there may indeed be dozens of them millions of them who knows according to string theory and quantum theory and all kinds of shredding as number and all the rest of it everything is redefined in each generation so what is left that is absolute and this is where religion has an argument with intellectual progress because it wants to hang on to something that it believes is eternal and and and permanent and utterly always true but there is no such thing the morality you know i mean i did a debate with christopher hitchings actually about the catholic church and and the people defending it when we attacked the their attitude towards child sex scandal said well but in the 1960s it wasn’t such a big sin and what that is actually true but it’s not true coming from a catholic whose whole point is that they are eternally true that their morality is as true now as it was when saint peter founded the church that their enemy is people like me who are relativists who say that there is no absolute morality but that things change according to situation circumstance and knowledge and so that is true of god god alters every day he adds a little bit of a quality here or she does and takes away another bit now no longer responsible for disease and no longer responsible for earthquakes but may be responsible for something else but it’s a shrinking kingdom and so the idea of there being an absolute and an eternal it just doesn’t seem to square with the way we have developed over the certainly over history which is to say over the last 5 000 years since we’ve been able to write things down before that we can only judge how and who we were according to objects and artifacts and architecture but since we’ve been able to write it’s pretty clear that the instability of and i’m not saying this in a derrida way of instability of meaning although i do think you’ve misunderstood derrida i hope you’ve read peter sammons biography by the way it might change your mind about him but that’s a whole other subject but um yeah so i’m i’m so let’s go back okay so let’s let’s go after the eternal verities idea yeah clearly religious conceptions shift although there is there’s a core tradition that remains intact well a tradition by definition stays intact there’s something that identifies it as the same entity across time yes right maybe that’s even mutable but i’ve looked for what might be regarded as eternal verities in the moral domain so let me put a few forward yeah um the beautiful is more valuable than the ugly yeah truth truth is to be sought after in opposition to falsehood yeah um that’s particularly true in relationship to the spoken word uh the spoken word brings about remarkable transformations of reality itself and it’s for that reason that verbal truth is constitutive but also of vital ethic ethical significance it doesn’t that make it all the more important to look at the discourse beneath verbal speech to unto i hesitate to use the word but to deconstruct it to or at least to attempt to look at the currents that run through speech to see and they’re not all derrida or you know lacanian or fucotian whatever the adjective of fucco is they’re not all about power they’re not all necessarily marxist the the project you know the socerean project and the others of looking at where language comes from not just in a philological sense of derivation but in the sense of where the discourse has come from is is paramount therefore and so to say verbal you know it’s not just an utterance is in and of itself transformative or if it is transformative it might be wickedly so or it might be negatively so at least well with regards to your point about the analysis of the of the narratives and even the deconstruction i would say it depends on the motive and it’s the motive and this is i suppose to some degree why i’m skeptical let’s say of the atheist skepticism it it’s it’s destructive there’s a destructive element to it there’s not a there’s there’s no archaeological redemption but that’s nothing to do with motive you said it was all about well that’s not necessarily the case that it has nothing to do with motive motive motive’s a tough one yeah it is i mean if you know my motive is to make money and i make a great discovery it’s as valuable as if my motive was to make a great discovery and i made a great discovery the great discovery is made how is the motive relevant well because your motives determine the decisions you make along the way yeah you know if i’m fundamentally motivated by the belief that being is worth preserving let’s say because on the whole it’s a good i’m going to react and think much differently than if i’m ambivalent about that or if i feel at the bottom of my soul that the whole bloody project is of questionable utility and might as well be shelved and that that that dichotomy that characterizes us you know we have cain enable inhabiting us there’s no doubt about that that’s that’s a fundamental truth and if cain has the upper hand even if it’s in the scientific endeavor the consequences of that manifest themselves and they manifest themselves destructively that’s why that’s why it’s interesting you have to say cain enable because i think this brings us back to the very beginning is is the importance of myth and and also of parable i and and i’d like to end because we’re getting towards a bit where i have to move away um but um it oscar wild is known as an you know a master of epigrams and wit and people mistakenly think of him as shallow or trivial or facetious or vain or peacocky or something but he was very profound in fact and of course he could be peacocky too but um there’s a story that isn’t necessarily at odds with no they don’t rule each other out but here’s an example of a great parable um which is which is why again it’s why i love literature and and and the art of of of wit because it it zooms to the truth so much more quickly it seems to me than so many other attempts to describe or rationalize truth and here’s one where uh wild was at a at a dinner and uh someone was being rather kind of uh envious of someone and being rather unpleasant and wild suddenly said the devil was walking one day in the libyan desert and he saw a monk being tormented by some of his demons and he approached and the demons bowed in front of him and said master and he said what what goes on here they said master for 39 days and 39 nights we have tried to tempt this holy monk away from his god and his religion but he has stayed steadfast and holy to his god and his religion we have offered him powers and principalities we’ve had offered him the joys of the flesh we have had offered him wine and food and riches but he has turned us down there’s nothing that we can do to win this holy man to our cause and the devil said out of my way and he whispered in the monk’s ear and instantly the monk took the petrel cross around his neck and snapped it and filled the air with hideous curses against his god and his church and his religion and swore he would never follow christ again and the demons fell down and in front of the the devil and said master what can you have said in one second that we could not what did you say to him the devil said oh it was very simple i just told him his brother had been made bishop of alexandria now that seems to me a it’s very funny but b it is profoundly truthful and it is this this is the way we show people how envy and resentment are so much a part of who we are that that if you know i mean it’s it seems like a trivial example but it just it’s a model to me that if you want to say something and you want to change minds and you want to to burn people with the the flame of love and hope and connection that we all secretly believe in them that that you know that makes us gasp when we read poetry or makes us feel what love is and joy and all the things that we’re mostly too embarrassed to talk about because they’re a bit soppy but truly they matter more than anything else we displace them on kittens and so on but we really really we care about these things and and the way i think to to bond people to it is not to talk abstractly about ideas necessarily unless you’re talking to someone who has the same reading as you and that sounds a snobbish point but unless you’re talking to someone who’s also read the same books or at least has the same ideas as you or is open to them it just becomes a bit lectury whereas if you can tell a story instead or a parable that’s especially if it’s funny or it’s sexy or it’s you know got some quality that just tickles you know that strokes us then then you bring people to to a to a connection to to and unfortunately most of the most of the world who use the art of rhetoric and persuasion and and and do it for nefarious purposes and maybe that’s the keys to try and to try and build up as you are doing and i hope i’m doing in my own way the the value of story and i’m looking deeply into the nature of characters within stories that even though it’s just a story it might actually be a portal to something really profound that will touch you and change your life that’s just exactly the right place to stop good i’m sorry it has to stop but it’s been one of us three quarters i knew that we would i i was primarily worried about this conversation because there were so many things that i wanted to talk to you about i didn’t know what i would talk to you about well we may have to have a we may have to have a second one in a few months yes well after we digest this one you