https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6LIR2zQ-jvQ

Well, I’m pleased today to be talking to Ben Shapiro Ben I think really doesn’t need an introduction at least not to most of you who will be there watching or listening to this given That he’s now one of the most recognized individuals on the American political journalism scene in any case Ben’s an American lawyer writer journalist and political commentator. He’s written 10 books The latest of which is the right side of history how reason and moral purpose made the west great Which has become a number one New York Times bestseller. I think it’s at number four right now I think Ben just mentioned to me that he sold about 150,000 copies since it was released and that was only a couple of weeks ago So that’s going very well. He became the youngest nationally syndicated column in the u.s. At age 17 He’s also one of the most recognized current American journalist One of the most recognized current commentators on the new media youtube and podcasts Serves as editor in chief for the daily wire which he founded and is the host of the ben shapiro show Which runs daily on podcasted radio? he’s managed to transform himself into a one-man media empire and It’s quite the accomplishment and He’s also an extraordinarily interesting person I think to follow To watch in his interactions with people publicly because he’s an unbelievably sharp debater and one of the Fastest verbally fastest people that i’ve ever met So, um, it’s good. We’re going to talk about his book today. That’s the right side of history how reason and moral purpose Made the west great and I can tell you right there. There’s four reasons for social justice types to be irritated just at the just at the What would you call it? The the daring of the title? So let’s talk about it Tell me about your book. Tell me what you wrote it but the the reason that I wrote the book is because in 2016 I kind of looked around and For the record I didn’t vote for either of the presidential candidates in 2016 Neither of them met my minimum standard to be president based on the evidence and I looked at The sort of attitude that had changed in america It used to be that we’d have elections and they were really fraught people were angry at each other people were upset at each other But the rage seemed almost out of control in the last election cycle in 2016 I was personally receiving enormous number of death threats for my positions on on politics I was receiving enormous amount of hatred from the the alt-right I know that there are some of the media like the economists who have falsely labeled me alt-right Which is hilarious to me since i’ve been their most outspoken critic for several years at this point And that year in 2016 I was their number one target according to the anti-defamation league And well, maybe here’s just one of those guys that’s tricky enough to be part of the alt-right and also their enemy, right? You know we jews man In any case I was receiving all sorts of blowback for that at the same time I was going on college campuses and being protested to the extent that I was requiring hundreds of police officers to accompany me On at certain college campuses and I started to think there is something deeply wrong here And it’s not just that we are disagreeing with each other It’s that there’s a certain level of hatred and tribalism that’s building up in american politics that I hadn’t really seen before there was a feeling like Even back as as late as 2009 that america was moving in the right direction post obama’s election There was a feeling like okay. Well, we have the same fundamental principles. We’re trying to perfect those principles We may disagree over the ramifications of those principles Some of us may want more government involvement in health care Some of us want less some of us may want more regulations in market Some of us may want less to redistributionism or not or non-redistributionism But the the fundamental principles things like free speech things like the inherent value of the individual Things like the idea that i’m supposed to generally respect your right to your own labor These these were all things that we sort of agreed on and then we were trying to broaden that out to encompass further groups And as time moved on it seemed like we were moving away from a lot of those fundamental assumptions He started to see rises in the opioid epidemic in suicide rates He started to see a general level of unhappiness crop up that was reflected in the political tribalism I was feeling but was reflected more general as more generally In actual lowered life expectancy in the united states for the first time in decades And I started to think there’s an actual deeper problem wrong here than just we disagree on politics There’s something deeply wrong here. We don’t trust our institutions anymore by poll data Most of us don’t know or trust all of our neighbors All of this stuff Speaks to a dissolution of the social fabric. So why is that happening? What’s And this is nearly unjustifiable. I mean if you look at us just from a material prosperity level It’s unjustifiable if you look at us from a political freedom level. It’s unjustifiable We’re the freest most prosperous people in the history of the world And yet we’re totally pissed off at each other all the time and we’re filling that that hole with anger and with social mobbing on online and with woke scolding And and where’s all this coming from and that led me to to write the book which essentially argues that we’ve forgotten the foundations of our civilization The principles we used to hold in common have deep roots and when we forget those roots We tend to move away from the principles themselves and this is manifested in what I think is the great debate over western civilization right now One side which says western civilization was rooted in good eternal immutable truths that were not always perfectly realized And that over time we have we have moved toward greater realization of and that’s why the west is great That’s why the west has provided material prosperity to the vast majority of the globe It’s why 80 percent of people have been raised from abject poverty since 1980 It’s why you’ve seen this this massive increase in the number of people who are living in decent conditions It’s also why you see a rise in democracy a rise in political liberalism small small l kind of classical liberalism All of this is the result of the west and so we ought to thank the west and we ought to look back to the roots And see what is there worth preserving and then there’s that seems I would say to be a viewpoint that would have broadly characterized both Conservatives and classic liberals as far as i’m concerned right so recently that’s right And then there’s the second point of view and the second point of view has cropped up and become very prominent in the west in the last Couple of decades particularly since the 1960s and that perspective is that western civilization is really just a mask for hierarchy That basically there’s a bunch of power hierarchies and subjugate sub not natural hierarchies Forcible oppressive hierarchies white people against black people rich people against poor people The powerful against the non-powerful the one percent against the 99 percent and all of these institutions things like the family things like The things like free speech itself things like free markets These are actually just excuses for domination and subjugation. They’re not actual principles. We hold to they’re not important principles In fact those principles have to be rooted out so that we can have a better humanity bloom in the wake of all of this Now in my perspective this takes for granted all of the prosperity It seems to assume that the natural state of man is prosperity and freedom when in fact the natural state of man Is misery and short life spans that okay? So that’s an interesting thing right there that i’ve been thinking about quite a bit. It’s it’s as if the radical left I mean There’s denial on the radical left of let’s say biological differences between men and women, right? Everything is socio-culturally constructed That seems to me to be rooted in an even deeper denial of biology And nature in a more fundamental sense. I mean the left worships nature as as something intrinsically positive You see that reflected in the more radical forms of environmentalism and some of the more toxic Antihumanism that goes along with that like the idea That we’re a cancer on the face of the planet or that the world would be better off if there weren’t human beings on it But what seems to not be part of that which is quite surprising to me Is any recognition that although nature is let’s call it at least awe inspiring Which also includes the positive It’s also now unbelievably deadly force and the the truth of the matter is that the natural state of human beings is privation and want right from birth and to blame What and what seems to happen so often on the radical left is that that’s ignored entirely it’s as if the natural state of human beings is Plenty and delight delight in existence and that all of The terrible things that happen to people in their lives are actually can be laid at the feet of faulty social institutions it seems like it’s such a strange position given that the Evidence that nature is trying to do us in on a regular basis is overwhelming I don’t know if the if the left is so positively inclined in a romantic manner towards the idea of nature Because that strengthens their position that all of the pathology that characterizes the world can be laid at the feet of Institutions and particularly capitalist institutions, but it still seems to me to be it’s a strange phenomenon It’s strange and it’s and it’s obviously Ignorant, but I think that there’s something else that really is is going on here The the Marxists of today are arguing many of them are arguing that what they’re really wanting is greater shared material prosperity I don’t think that that’s actually what’s capturing the minds of people right now I think what’s actually capturing the minds of people was the spiritual promise of Marxism the idea that Marx lays out Even in the Communist Manifesto when he is talking about the transformation of man I mean his initial argument is that markets warp people that people Become meaner and cruder and ruder and more terrible because of markets because they are self-interested in that the markets emphasize self-interest as opposed to altruism and therefore if you got rid of markets then you could exist in greater peace and Prosperity and plenty because human beings themselves would transform so it’s not that the system itself would create greater material prosperity It’s that in the initial run it probably would create more Privation it’s that in the long run human beings would be transformed in their souls by all of this and then they would feel greater Bonds to the people around them. That was the spiritual promise of Marxism I think that that’s I at root what a lot of people in the West are resonating for okay So so that’s that’s a hope for something like a well, it’s almost like a religious redemption And it’s a strange thing too I mean, you know I’m preparing for this debate that I’m going to have with Slavoj Zizek on April 19th and I’ve been trying to think it through and one of the things that’s really struck me is that Not only are the solutions that Marxist Marxism offers Error ridden to say the least given the historical evidence and and I just don’t see how anybody can deny that although people certainly do But that the problem that the Marxists originally identified seems to actually to be vanishing I mean as you already pointed out There’s been an unparalleled increase in material prosperity among Not only among the rich which you could complain about if you were concerned about inequality but among the poorest people in the world like we have Absolutely Privacy based on UN standards by 50% between the year 2000 and 2012 And the cynics say that’s because we set the standard for material privation too low, which is 3.80 a day or $7.60 a day You see exactly the same thing happening and you see rapid increases in Economic growth in sub-saharan Africa like you know 7% growth rates which are more or typically characteristic say of China or India and and and that’s manifested in unbelievably positive statistical evidence such as that suggesting that now the Child mortality rate in Africa is the same as it was in Europe in 1952 And so the Marxists original complaint was that you know the rich were going to get richer and the poor were going to get poorer and that that would that could be late at the feet of capitalism just like the fact of hierarchy itself could be late at the feet of capitalism and a It’s clear that capitalism although it does produce hierarchical inequality Just like every other system that we know of it also produces wealth and that wealth is actually being very effectively distributed to the people You know perhaps not primarily to the people who most need it But to the people who most need it in ways that are truly mattering and so to me the entire the entire structure of Marxism is is it’s it’s Anachronistic the problem is no longer appropriately formulated and the solution tends to be deadly if counterproductive if not deadly, so it’s it’s Maybe here here’s something. I’ve been thinking about too. You can tell me what you think about this you know Some of it still has to do with the innate human emotional response to inequality you know when you walk down the street, and you see a ruined alcoholic schizophrenic Who’s obviously suffering in 50 different dimensions? It’s very difficult to feel positive about the state of humanity in the world, and it’s very easy for a reflexive Compassion to take over and say well wouldn’t it be something if we could just retool society so that none of that was necessary It must be someone’s fault it must be something that we’re not doing right and you know there’s some truth in that because of course our systems could be better than they are and And it seems to me to be that unreflexive compassion that drives whatever residual attractiveness that Marxism still has apart also from the darker possibility Which is that it really does appeal to the jealousy? That’s characteristic of people in the envy and which manifests itself as hatred for hierarchy on the basis that some people are doing better than me You know so right I think there’s also there’s also a failure on the part of advocates of the free market to point out that free markets are good for what they are good for meaning that the Two things that are important to recognize about free markets one Free markets are there to create a generalized level of cheaper goods and better products at cheaper prices more widely available That’s what markets do and they do it brilliantly well that doesn’t mean that that that markets are there to take care of the person who? Is unable to work? I mean that’s not something that markets are there to do It’s something I talk about in the book the need for a social fabric if you want a free market You also have to have a social fabric that helps pick people up now People on the left have said that government should be the ersatz social fabric the government should pick those people up and in large Scale cases, maybe that needs to be the case But usually it was religious communities and informal social fabrics that actually filled those those gaps Beyond that there is a second problem And that is I hear a lot of populace on both left and right make the statement that we just need to Make markets work for us and all I can think when I hear that is you have fundamentally you have fundamentally misunderstood What a market is so Marxism is a set of values and then a system of? Economics crafted atop the set of values the set of values as you said before is that equality should trump prosperity that equality should trump freedom That equality should trump everything so if equality trumps everything then the only way to make everyone equal is to turn them into in Indistinguishable widgets controlled from above until we create an economic system to do that There are principles that undergird free markets free markets are not a human construction Free markets are a recognition that you are an individual human being in control of your own labor That simple understanding means that you cannot support any other form of a market they can support some form of Redistributionism at the local level you can try and urge people to be more moral by giving to their fellow man But markets themselves are a recognition of a basic truth that Marxism rejects Which is that freedom and individualism ought to trump and indeed need to trump the the need for equality? So the freedom versus equality battle is very much alive in our time and because we have such freedom people tend toward equality I think when you when you have we should talk about a little bit about equality too because there’s two important There’s two important modes of equality that are that that have to be segregated and discussed separately Because people tend to confuse Equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, right? I think that it’s perfectly reasonable to be a free market champion Or at least an appreciator of the utility of free markets and to be strongly in favor of equality of opportunity Which means that you try to remove from the market system any impediments to people? manifesting those talents that would make them effective and competent players in the productive market itself On the basis of the fact that that’s counterproductive for everyone the individuals but also for everyone who could be benefiting from their talent Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And I think that’s inherent in the idea of markets. It’s why when people use terms like crony capitalism I always think there’s no such thing. There’s there’s corporate there. There’s corporate corporatism, which is a better description of it crony capitalism is a self-refuting proposition capitalism and free markets are based on exactly what you’re talking about because again the fundamental principle is I own my own labor which means that If you impede my ability to alienate that labor you are now interfering with my labor so free markets are predicated on an idea of equality and rights and the idea of Every human being made and this is why I say there’s a Judeo-Christian heritage to free markets Every human being made in the in the image of God which I think is the single most important sense written in the history of Humanity when you abandon the we tend to think that these things naturally occur This is where you get into the enlightenment argument Enlightenment argument is that you can just reason your way to these things. Well, you can reason your way to these things There are also a lot of other things you can reason your way to including communism and fascism The question is where what are your starting points? What what are the actual fundamental assumptions that you make about human beings and the nature of the world? that you then apply reason to to arrive at something great and This is why I’m not a fan of the the enlightenment view that just if we start tabula rasa We can come up with exactly the system that we’ve built today I don’t think that that’s either historically accurate or philosophically accurate because We see that human beings reach a wide variety of conclusions based on different premises Well, it’s also the case that it assumes that reason in fact in some sense can be complete in including its ability to generate its own Comprehensive axioms which can also be justified on rational grounds and it’s not obvious to me that that’s the case I think that’s why the founders of the Declaration of Independence Were forced to say we find these truths to be self-evident Right you have to have a starting point and this is something that I do believe that people like Steven Pinker who I have a great amount of admiration for are Make an error in their overvaluation of the Enlightenment and and their devaluation of the historical What the vast historical epochs that produced the works of imagination? That produced the axioms on which the Enlightenment could originally emerge and and you and I seem to agree I think very Precisely on especially that phrase that you just used. I mean, I think there’s two statements in the in Genesis that are of equivalent importance actually One of them maybe there’s three one of them is that? What God used to create? order out of potential and chaos was something approximating a process that was characterized by truth and courage and So there’s a there’s an idea there and which is why I think God continually repeats after he creates day after day That the creation was good And so the idea is that if you face the potential of the world Which is I think something that human beings do with their consciousness I think that’s what consciousness is for if you face the world with truth and courage Then what you generate out of that field of possibilities is in fact good Even though the price you may pay a price for the truth in the short term it’s an act of faith even in some sense which reflects that axiomatic presupposition that there’s nothing that’s going to improve the world more than Fourth right confrontation with the structure of reality and an attempt to abide by the truth And then you have that second statement, which is a miraculous statement. I believe it’s hard to see it as anything else That both men and women are made in the image of God We’ve already had God established as the creator and the creator who creates in a certain ethical manner and then that power or ability or Virtue or privilege or responsibility is transferred to human beings and it’s transferred to men and women and I also find that actually quite stunning, you know because There’s no shortage of post-modern Feminist criticism of the Judeo-Christian tradition claiming that it’s fundamentally oppressive and patriarchal and yet right at the beginning You have this incredible statement which which seems to fly in the face of its of the anachronistic nature of the document stating that it’s not just men that are made in the image of God it’s men and women and that’s And that’s it isn’t obvious to me how that conclusion was reached so long ago Yeah, that’s that’s exactly right And it’s also important to note that historically speaking if you look at surrounding documents documents from Mesopotamia Typically the the actual language that was used the image of God language is actually not unique to the Bible that exists in other cultures But it was always the king who was made in the image of God, right? So the people who are most powerful who are made in the extension of that to all human beings is a unique moment in Philosophical history and as you say the idea that God has created an orderly universe and that we have the capacity to act out within That universe and to see God from behind so to speak that we can’t necessarily see his face But we can see sort of the general outline of what he is intending and then Another verse from Genesis that that I think is deeply important from the Cain and Abel story The verse where God says to Cain Tim shell that you have the ability to do better than this right? He says, you know, I why didn’t you accept my sacrifice and God says well, it’s in your control You know go out and do something about it And then of course Cain rejects that and it’s that story is so deep And I think it really is the story of what’s happening right now people. Yeah Yeah, exactly you have God’s reaction to Cain is that I rejected you because you could do better Right and that’s actually a kind of compliment even though, you know If you’re not offering up the proper sacrifices and things aren’t working out for you It might not be the kind of compliment that you want to hear but it is a testament to the potential of the human spirit And so you’re making the case in your book And this is the this is an what would you call an injunction an encouragement to the Enlightenment types to look to their? Axioms and to think hard about how it could be that the idea of Individual democratic freedom for example and all of the wonderful explicit political ideas that came out of the Enlightenment could have possibly Emerged and I do agree that you have to have that initial conception of the individual as sovereign and and that that sovereignty has to be associated with something akin to recognition of Divinity at least in so far as what’s regarded as divine is regarded as the highest of all possible values And then it is absolutely Surprising as you pointed out that not only is the idea of the image of God extended to men and women but that it is not explicitly not the domain of Kings who in fact might be more at risk for abandoning their actions as Avatars of God so to speak then those who are in privation You know you see that consistently in the Old Testament Where the Kings are being taken to task constantly by prophets who do appear to speak more in the language of God let’s say and then you see it also in the New Testament with the with the insistence that the wealthy and powerful have impediments to Proper ethical action that those who are less materially fortunate might not face Yeah, and that that thematic is present obviously in the Old Testament. There’s actually a passage where it’s talking about the sacrifices I believe it’s in the book of Leviticus where it talks about bringing Accidental sin sacrifices and it talks about the common man It says if you shall sin then you bring the sacrifice and then it says With regard to the prince the Nasi it says with regard to the prince the Hebrew word is Kaash here It says when you will sin so the assumption is that if you have great power the chances of your sinning are going to be greater Because you are going to conceive of yourself as higher than others And this is going to lead you down a pretty dark path The point with regard to the Enlightenment is that we actually have some counter evidence of the Enlightenment being Awesome all the way through if it is predicated solely on reason and not on a historic Understanding of these principles and that is the French Enlightenment I mean this was one of my key points when I was looking at Pinker’s book Enlightenment now But again you and I agree on this I have great enlightenment for Pinker I took a class with him when I was at Harvard Law School He did a joint class with Alan Dershowitz that was kind of fun but Pinker goes a 450 page book about the Enlightenment and he never mentions the French Revolution ones and I thought I don’t know how that’s historically possible to do the Enlightenment was not just David Hume and Adam Smith and the American Founding Fathers the Enlightenment also was Rousseau and Voltaire and Robespierre and it was the and it was the German progressive Enlightenment that had a real dark side and It’s human reason can lead you to a lot of different very bad places the the metaphor that I like to use with regard to Western civilization is that Western civilization is a suspension bridge and then I won and it’s over a river of as you would say chaos and on the one end of the bridge the Big pole is these fundamental assumptions you have to make about the nature of the world that I don’t believe could be arrived at other Than through some form of divine revelation. This would be the Judeo-Christian tradition and those principles are things like we have free choice That’s an assumption you have to make and is not implicit in scientific materialism The idea that history has a progressive nature that you can improve the world around you again That is not a that that is reliant on an assumption You have to make the idea that human beings are held to a morality that they themselves do not Subjectively create out of emotional me and that is something that you have to make an assumption about the thing the idea of objective truth Itself is something you have to make an assumption about and that’s an assumption that I think can be made most specifically But the idea that there is a mind outside of us that creates that objective truth and stands behind an ordered universe But all of those are assumptions from Judeo-Christian values. I think there’s evidence for much of this You know, what are the things that I’ve been discussing with my audiences is like, you know It depends obviously on what you’re willing to take as evidence But it isn’t obvious to me at all That you can establish a functional relationship with yourself unless you hold yourself responsible for your actions and you regard yourself as a Free agent in at least in some regards like obviously we’re not omniscient omni omnipresent and Omnipotent that’s clearly the case. We’re subject to stringent limitations and there are situations in which our actions devolve into Determinism that’s obvious neurophysiologically. It has to be the way the world works Is that once you execute a decision there comes to a point where that decision is? Manifested in something approximating a deterministic manner I think the evidence for that is overwhelming but that doesn’t mean that when you’re looking out into the future and you’re contemplating the many paths that you could take that What you do to make your decisions then is deterministic in a simple in a simple manner I think if that was the case, there’d be no need for consciousness at all And then I look at how people react to themselves as we hold ourselves responsible despite our own Inclination for the sins that we manifest for the manners in which we wander off the path people wake up at four in the morning and they berate themselves for the actions they took that they knew they shouldn’t and the Inaction that they manifested when they knew they should have acted and if we were masters in our own house without that central moral compass There’d be no reason at all for us to wake up and torture ourselves to death with our moral Inequity and if you have a friend or a family member and you insist upon treating them as if they’re a Deterministic agent with no effect on the future and no responsibility for their choices It’s actually impossible to have a relationship with them You can’t even have a relationship with a two or three year old if you insist upon Infantilizing them in that manner and not attributing to them the choice that enables valid punishment Let’s say on the one hand you’ve done something wrong and you need to be held accountable for it But also valid accomplishment on the other which is that you’ve done something that you didn’t have to do that was voluntary that’s deserving of Approbation and Reinforcement and we act that out and and then the next level of evidence seems to be that if you found your polity on Propositions other than that that the sovereignty of the individual and the responsibility of the individual The whole thing goes sideways so rapidly that it’s almost indescribable and it doesn’t just go sideways It goes sideways and down and so like I don’t know exactly What to make of that as a proof, you know It’s a strange sort of proof for the proof being that while there doesn’t seem to be any reasonable way for human beings to organize their social interactions at any level of social organization without Accepting those initial I would say to be a Christian assumptions This is right and then this is where the the main debate happens between me and Sam Harris because Sam will Reason himself to those assumptions and away from those assumptions and to those assumptions in a way He’ll use those assumptions in building other assumptions And I’ve said to him before I feel like you’re using bricks from a house that you just torn tore down So you can’t really do that This is why I say on the one hand you have to have those Judeo-Christian assumptions and those by the way undergird even the very concept Of reason because the idea of reason is that you are using a willful process of thought in order to convince someone else Predicated on the notion that the other person’s opinion is valuable and they shouldn’t just club them over the head and take their stuff I mean the reason it has the value of reason has implicit moral biases and those moral biases You can’t reason your way to as I said to Sam evolutionary biology perspective There’s no reason for reason other than if you think that maybe you can convince unless especially in a world of non-mass communication What is the reason for reason right in a world that pre-exists mass communication? What is the reason that you need reason Wouldn’t force be more effective for most of human history It was it was significantly more effective than reason certainly it’s certainly what the radicals on the left would argue even now I mean and the idea of reason seems to be predicated and that would go along with the idea of free speech Which I think is also equally Grounded in these underlying axioms is that you know each of us as sovereign individuals have a valid mode of existence About and there’s something unique about that valid mode of existence and it’s also something that can be communicated and that part of the reason for rational discussion is that the ability to share that unique and valuable element of private experience with someone else is Salutary, but it’s also so you tell it salutary in a manner that allows for the mutual spiritual Transformation of both of the people that are involved in the discussion and it seems to me that you can’t If you’re pro reason you’ve already bought that argument exactly this is exactly right and so faith and reason to this Extend are not intentioned faith undergirds reason because you have to make us fundamental assumptions even to get to reason and this is why I think that one of the things that has happened and it’s really unfortunate I discussed it in the last chapters of the book is That when you take away the assumptions that undergird reason reason itself collapses in it’s not that reason The stains appear on top of the structure once the structure falls reason falls with it too and we return to our sort of tribal Naturalistic roots that there are quite dangerous This is why I say that you need Jerusalem on one end of the bridge the other end of that suspension bridge is reason meaning that We can’t be theocrats. We can’t look at fundamentalist religious texts and take them as As complete literal as completely literal and then hope to develop as a civilization on the basis of that complete literalism So you have to look to which of these commandments for example in the Torah are directed toward human eternal human nature So I would suggest that Commandments that are directed toward reigning in certain appetites are directed toward God’s understanding of human nature that certain Injunctions with regards to how we behave in the ten commandments These are predicated on a on an understanding of human nature that is truly profound and worthwhile preserving it’s also worth noting that the story of Western civilization is the expansion of These principles out from the tribal and toward a broader range of humanity And that’s why the book is not just an argument. Here’s how I interpret the Bible and here’s why that’s right It’s it’s an argument that historical development was necessary after the Bible So it is not just that the Bible solves all your problems It’s that God understands even from a religious perspective in Judaism and I think in Christianity too that we are going to apply human reason To these texts that’s from a religious perspective from a non-religious perspective The point I’m making is that you have to take these fundamental assumptions whether you like them or not That are religiously rooted and then apply your reason to Develop from the fundamental assumptions that we have already stated and then that tension is what allows the suspension bridge to Continue to function that doesn’t mean that it is always equally solid throughout time It isn’t because the tension sometimes waivers sometimes reason takes dominance sometimes Judeo-christian values or your Judaic biblical literalism takes dominance And if you bottom line is you collapse reason you end up with theocracy you collapse Judeo-christian values You end up with nihilism is sort of the basic argument. Okay, okay so so so, you know one of the things that that Sam is afraid of and you know, there’s some validity in this fear and I think he tends to apply this more to is to the state of Islamic fundamentalism But the same argument can be made with the other religious traditions you know Evangelical Christianity for example, and maybe Orthodox Judaism who knows that the danger is that we’ll take these revealed truths which differ and that Holding them as absolute revealed truths will make us parochial tribal and the consequence of that will be all sorts of catastrophe and horror Right, and you know one of the things I learned when I was studying the Old Testament this was very interesting a Jewish friend of mine Norman Doidge sort of clued me into this because one of the things he told me was that Christians Who emphasized the New Testament tend to? Parody the Old Testament God to a somewhat unfair degree Casting him as much more tyrannical in some sense the god of wrath. Yeah justice versus mercy. Yep, right exactly Exactly. And so I took that seriously and especially when I was reading the Abrahamic stories and you know, you see you see throughout the earliest writings the idea that in some bizarre sense God can be bargained with right and and and so You see that even in the Cain and Abel story because Cain actually faces God with his complaints and says well You know, here’s how I look at the world and God excoriates him because he believes that he’s looking at the world Improperly and I think for good reason but there is the implication that you could have a conversation with God and Hypothetically learn something and but then it that transforms even more When you see the that the stories that follow so Abraham directly intercedes with God on on In favor of Sodom, right right because and and he makes a pretty What would you say extreme case for redeeming Sodom which seems to have degenerated into quite the Quite the state of hell Trying to entice God into not being more destructive than necessary if there’s any goodness to be found and he actually does that Successfully and so that’s very interesting. So even though God is absolute in his judgment in some fundamental sense there is this capacity for dialogue which seems to be an analogy to the idea that reason and revelation can coexist and and and Bulls to each other in some sort of upward development Well, this is exactly right and then the idea of natural law which the seeds are there in the Judaic value system I think natural laws more fully fleshed out in sort of Greek teleological sense when they talk about the idea that the Aristotle Plato when they talk about the idea that you can look at the world around you and discover the purposes of the world around you Simply by using reason well in the in the Judaic sense There’s the idea that God abides by the moral code that he himself created and you can ask him questions about it In fact, the very name Israel is in in Hebrew. It’s Israel Israel literally means struggle with God. Yes That was the other thing I was going to bring up the direct thing I was going to bring up is that that there is this and that’s a remarkable. That’s a remarkable Story that it’s it’s it’s Jacob. I always get Jacob and Joseph can feel Yeah, it’s Jacob Exactly exactly on the other side of the river so he hasn’t crossed back to his homeland, right? He hasn’t returned home after his hero’s journey He sent his wife and his children and his belongings ahead to try to make peace with the brother that he’s seriously betrayed and And he’s had his adventures and maybe he’s learned his lessons But then he’s on the bank river and he’s visited by an angel who appears to be God and he wrestles with him all night And he comes out damaged right which is an indication that this is sort of like the the Egyptian idea when Horus encounters Seth and has his eye torn out that there’s some high probability of damage that if you encounter the divine even even in some positive sense but he wrestles with him all night and then defeats God apparently in some sense and and Is allowed to move forward with his adventure and then he’s given this new name and The name really struck me when I started thinking about it because what it does imply I think this is such a positive message and and and I don’t know how to reconcile it precisely with the Jewish claim of Choseness as a people because my reading of the of that particular text seemed to imply that The chosen people are precisely those who do in fact wrestle with God And so that they take these ethical questions seriously. They’re not Accepting them without question and without thought because there’s no wrestling them, right? but the real morality comes in the in the struggle between the revelation and and And and and the freedom for thought and choice I mean I think it’s a beautiful idea and one of the things that’s fascinating about that is if you read the rest of the book of Genesis every time in Genesis somebody’s name is changed because there are several name changes right Abraham becomes Abraham Sarai becomes Sarah there are several points at which there are angels who come and basically change the name or God changes somebody’s name That’s their name going forward when Jacob is returned Israel He is not called Israel consistently from there to the end of to his death He’s the names are used at different times. So sometimes he’s Israel and sometimes he’s Jacob So the idea there is that sometimes he is the best version of himself the version of self who struggles with morality who struggles with God who tries to come up with proper solutions and sometimes he’s still the old Jacob the old Jacob who ran away from Esau And who served seven years unjustly under Laban and and all the rest of it So it’s really fascinating one of my favorite tell mutic stories This has been deeply embedded in Judaic tradition for a long time the idea of struggling with God and struggling with the dictates of morality because Part of Jewish tradition is of course the idea of the oral tradition the idea that we were given a written document on Sinai But then there was an oral tradition that was also passed along to Moses. That was the interpretation of the written tradition Which in some ways may be a backfill justification But I think that there’s a fundamental truth to it. There’s there’s a segment that I quote in the book from the Talmud It’s a really amazing story where it’s it’s part of these sort of apocryphal stories What they call the agata in in Talmudic in Talmudic parlance there’s there’s a story where there’s a rabbi who is in an argument with a bunch of other rabbis about a particular point of halacha about of Jewish law and This rabbi is arguing with these other rabbis and the other rabbis vote one way and he votes the other way so he loses And the rabbi who loses says listen, I know I’m right Not only do I know I’m right if I’m right let the walls of this the walls of this the synagogue Close in around us the walls start to lean in and then the the rabbi say you know what that’s not evidence That doesn’t show that you’re right. It just shows that the walls are closing it He says well, you know if I’m right then let the river outside start to flow backwards So the river starts to flow backwards and the rabbis insights is still not evidence We’re not gonna take that he says well if I’m right let there be a bot call let there be the voice of God literally come down from heaven and say that I’m right and sure enough a voice from heaven comes down and says that he’s right and the and the other members of the Parliament the other members of the sign of Hedren they say to him You know what? None of that counts because God gave us a rule and the rule is that we have majority rule in this body right here And so our interpretation is correct and yours is wrong. It doesn’t matter what miracles you bring to to Show that your side is right and the conclusion of the story is that God says one of the angels asked God about it and God says my children have defeated me and the idea is that God is happy about This God wants us to use our reason to take those fundamental principles that he gave us and then develop those across time That’s how you get development See it you know, I would also introduce it. I would also interpret this to some degree from a psychological perspective, you know because And this this might be Far-fetched Speculation, but I don’t think that it precisely is I mean I do believe that our cognitive structures our cognitive function are Embedded in narrative not that seems to be a right hemisphere function and that the right hemisphere is the source of intuitive revelation now whatever Metaphysical implications that have I that has I I have no idea. I also know that you know many religious experiences seem to be characterized by Preferential activity in the right hemisphere. So there’s something very strange going on in the right hemisphere and then we have a left hemisphere that’s argumentative and parliamentary and logical and Obviously in order for us to make our way in the world We have to have a continual dialogue between the intuitive axioms that are offered to us spontaneously in our imagination by the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere who does a critical analysis and tries to lay that out in some logical and Let’s say logical and algorithmic manner but the left can collapse into a kind of unthinking tyranny as a consequence of that and the right without that corrective can What would you say stray too far down imaginative paths and no longer be applicable to the to the fundamental? day-to-day problems of the world so we need that balance and and it is a strange thing that we have these two hemispheres which implies that we need two ways of looking at the world and I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to look at the relationship between that and then necessity for something like the revelation of intuition and the corrective power of rationality But you can’t dispense with the intuition It seems to do something like ground you in the world and to provide you with your fundamental axioms And I think that’s right And by the way that seems to me how enormous amount of scientific discovery takes place as you people have a flash of intuition And then it’s a question of them. That’s how you come up with the hypothesis, right? They often backfill to you know, like right scientific journal Outlines how you came to your hypothesis through a process of rational deduction Step by step, right? But that isn’t what happens What happens is you have a hunch of some sort and often I’ve seen this especially with intuitive scientists They have a hunch that actually sounds Irrational when they first first put it forward and sometimes it takes the months or even years to backfill that intuition With the rationality that’s necessary to communicate its integrity to other scientists And so the the narrative that’s written in the scientific document is actually a kind of well, it’s a kind of formal I wouldn’t call it a deception. It’s a formalization But it’s also predicated on the assumption that it’s linear rational thinking that leads to these intuitive hypotheses and sometimes that’s the case especially if it’s incremental change But those major leaps forward are like the introduction of new alternative axioms and then they have to be tested by rationality Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s also the story of history that you have these intuitive leaps And yeah, there’s a history to those intuitive leaps and you do have to have both you’d have to understand the history of those intuitive Leaps and you also have to understand when an intuitive leap has actually taken place. I think you make that argument about revelation I think frankly you can make that argument maybe about the Enlightenment that there are some intuitive leaps going on But those intuitive leaps have a history and don’t exist in the absence of the backstory so the intuitive leap and the enlightenment at large part at least politically seemed to me to be the the full articulation of the idea that the human being made in the image of God had intrinsic worth that transcended that which was being Allowed under the feudal system you see that first I would say in the transformation of Renaissance art because what you see is the divine figures for example Mary and Christ To take a single example or to take two particular examples Start to remove themselves from their iconic representation and become genuine individuals and so that’s a that’s a bringing down of the divine to earth, but it’s also an Elevation of the individual right is that these were real people they were like us and at the same time you see this Spread of the idea that well each individual is sovereign and worthwhile And I do think it’s out of that that comes eventually the powerful anti-slavery movies movements and the demand for Universal Suffrage yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean and this is the part where I become rather portrayed when people suggest that the the evils of Western civilization are unique while the goods are universal This is this is the part of the argument I’ve never understood from people who are highly critical of Western civilization they point out correctly that Western civilization has been responsible for an immense amount of evil there. There’s tremendous racism endemic in Western civilization There’s there’s religious persecution obviously there’s genocide against you know my extended family Mean this sort of stuff was part of Western civilization it is but here’s what makes Western civilization different All of those things exist in virtually every other culture throughout the vast span of time The good stuff is the part that we don’t have a really good explanation for the good stuff is the part where we have to say Okay, what drove all the good stuff to happen because any for that matter because I’m unlikely well like one of the things I can’t understand This is a real mystery to me man, and I can’t explain it except And maybe this is an intuitive idea Because I haven’t laid it out as well as I might have but one of the things I cannot understand Is how any countries escaped absolute corruption? Because most of the countries in the world are absolutely corrupt the police are corrupt the politicians are corrupt the unions are corrupt the corporations are corrupt The currency is corrupt the day-to-day interactions between people are corrupt and and in the really corrupt countries the interactions between Family members are corrupt, you know, so you get situations like well East Germany Which is a bit anachronistic now where you know one out of three people were government informers It’s like and corruption is easy man. It’s and it’s it’s it’s the Hobbesian way of the world But then there’s a handful of countries and I would include Japan and South Korea among those that where Corruption isn’t the fundamental rule where trust is the fundamental rule, right? I can’t see how that could have manifested itself except within the confines of a religious belief system that insisted above all on the enactment of a higher moral ethic right something outside of politics something outside of self-interest It’s a weak argument because I still don’t understand it I don’t I don’t see how a country can make that transition from fundamental corruption to honesty It’s it’s an absolute miracle as far as I’m concerned and a number of countries have managed that and they are Almost all are either West Western countries or highly westernized countries Yeah, I mean I think that’s exactly right and it’s also when you examine different places on earth What you see is that the social fabric is going to decide the character of the country and this is why when people Start saying well, we should apply Nordic solutions in the United States and say well Is our culture the same as the Nordic culture because maybe that solution is not going to work I mean the the sort of one-size-fits-all Attempt in terms of political policy to just apply things randomly everywhere and then assume they will go exactly the same It’s obviously untrue most famously in sort of the the classical neoconservative foreign policy conception that you could plop democracy down in the middle of the Gaza Strip and suddenly then Suddenly everybody would be in favor of free markets and and peace with your neighbors and this sort of Institutions tend to be successful when people are when people teach their kids the right things Well, that’s also part of the reason that I made the argument constantly to Harris and other atheists that I’ve talked to that They’re Judeo-Christian whether they know it or not Right and the reason for that is that all of their embodied actions presuppose the Judeo-Christian ethic the only thing that isn’t Religious about them is their articulated post-enlightenment Rational representation of the world and I do think you see that in Harris quite frequently because he does believe in evil He doesn’t believe in good he believes that the proper way of proceeding in the world is to move from evil towards good and I can’t You know, I’ve had exactly the same conversation with Sam and he it was It’s been a bizarre conversation it even on the notion of objective truth. So Sam, it’s kind of weird So you and Sam and I I would say that I’m as a religious person more closely aligned with Sam’s vision of what objective truth Is then your sort of American pragmatist purse version of what objective truth is and with that said I don’t know where Sam is getting his version, right? I’m getting my version from the idea that God created an objective truth that the mind of man can ferret out from time to time and Sam’s version is What like I just don’t understand how evolutionary biology results in anything remotely approaching the idea that an objective truth is possible I see evolutionarily beneficial stuff happening right that if you if you come up with an idea that makes your species more likely to Predominate then you hold by that but that doesn’t make it objectively true. It makes it objectively useful, which is a different thing I also don’t see how it’s a straightforward matter to get from reliance on evolutionary Biology say as your fundamental way of orienting yourself with regards to reality in the world and something like the primacy of rationality and the ability to extract out from that rationality something Approximating a universal morality. I can’t see those these three things fitting together at all This is right and even Sam’s moral standard which is generalized human flourishing. There’s a lot of play in those joints I mean, I’ve asked him several times I was he’s on my Sunday special and I asked him to define human flourishing and I was pointing out to him that The vast majority of human beings disagree on the very nature of what that term constitutes If you if you talk to religious people about what human flourishing constitutes They’re not going to tell you about all of the nice stuff they have in their house They’re gonna tell you about their ability to teach the religious precepts to their kids if you’re talking about human Flourishing on an evolutionary level and presumably that would assume us having more kids rather than fewer kids and in developed countries We have fewer kids rather than more kids. So what exactly is the standard for human flourishing? Other than sort of what Sam likes and then I mean, I think part of the way that he Circumvents that problem is that is by pointing out that it might be possible for us to agree on what constitutes Unnecessary human suffering and to work for the opposite of that like it makes it kind of right We agree on cruelty. I think The funny thing is to it’s not sure we even agree on that is the truth I’m not sure that we exactly agree on that either because it’s not like there’s been any shortage of High cruelty warrior cultures in the past. I mean that was certainly the case with Rome Right or or cruelty on behalf of a greater good, right? You could easily make the case for cruelty on behalf of human flourishing I mean Hitler did it’s it’s an evil case. That’s the whole point, right? That’s the that was the case of communism that you break a few eggs to make an omelet That is the higher human flourishing is the is the interest of the majority. Yes, it’s not that’s not rational I mean one of the things I really liked about Solzhenitsyn spoke to good like archipelago was that you know He makes this he makes an anti-enlightenment case in a very powerful manner because he says well look here’s four or five axioms or six or seven axioms they’re derived directly from Marxism and If you accept those and then you act rationally as a consequence of your excess those Axioms and of course the Marxists would claim that those axioms were derived by rational means that all you get is something Approximating all hell breaking loose and so what’s to be the case is that there is a necessary set of underlying axioms And I do believe they’re coded properly in the Judeo-Christian ethic That if you then act upon rationally you get something approximating whatever progress we’ve managed to make and Progress is substantive. Yep, totally agree. And and this is effectively the case that I’m making in the book I think that the big difference we have right now in civilization is a difference that was first Articulated I think beautifully by GK Chesterton in in his sort of contrast between left and right his his his analogy And it’s a beautiful metaphor is that you’re walking through a forest and you come across a wall It’s just this old archaic wall old stone wall You don’t know why it’s there if you’re on the left your first instinct is I don’t know why this wall is here Probably actually tear this wall out because why is the wall here? I don’t know the person on the right the kind of conservative or traditional person the traditionally minded person their first instinct is I Don’t know why this wall is here I’m gonna go try and find out why the wall is here and then maybe I’ll think about tearing it out Mm-hmm, and that’s and that’s the case. I’m making I think with regard to what our civilization There are foundational things in our civilization that maybe it’s possible to remove that particular Jenga block and everything stands But I’m not gonna pretend that just because I don’t understand The reason for this particular revelatory principle that the revelatory principle isn’t important and undergirding and therefore reason and put there by people Who are just as smart as I was there’s a certain arrogance to to people who are living now that they were much smarter than people Who came before no? It’s just that you’re standing on those people’s shoulders so you can see a little bit further The truth is that they were probably seven foot you’re probably a four-footer Yeah, well, it’s definitely the case that my intellectual attitude changed quite substantially when I decided that I was going to risk taking The religious text that I was studying with some degree of seriousness Like and I came to that through Solzhenitsyn and Jung I would say fundamentally because they made a strong case for things Let’s say they made a strong case that there were three suppositions encoded in those narratives in a dreamlike manner same way that Piaget did that we couldn’t do without and that we should we should be very careful in dispensing with them in that a Arrogant rational manner so that you you treat you start by treating the text with a certain amount of reverence and You with a certain amount of ignorance, right? It’s it’s there’s something here that you don’t understand and You should probably assume that it’s worthwhile because it’s being being kept rather than to leap to the Proposition that you and your ignorance can clearly see why it’s unnecessary Yeah, and I think that the greatest impact the saddest part of this is that the greatest impact in terms of throwing away The the stories of our heritage basically is that that impact is generally not going to be felt in the urban centers with People who go to Sam’s lectures or listen to his podcast those people have a a worldview that they have shaped by listening to stuff like Sam’s or or or Stephen Pinker’s or Richard Dawkins and That worldview while I think it may not be fully coherent it coheres for them but the problem is that you apply that to people whose main draw to to Morality is not going to come from listening to these particular sources the people who get their social fabric from churches in the middle Of the country in the United States the people who have built a social fabric along with their neighbors because they have a commonly oriented goal And then you take that away from them, and you offer them go find your own purpose good luck with that Yes, I’m not gonna do that’s right. They’re not going to turn into fully fledged humanistic positively thinking enlightenment types merely as a consequence of abandoning the religious superstitions is exactly that the that the enlightenment types, I think Are naive about It’s easier to tear down than to build up is is sort of the way that I put it to Sam yes You can tear apart my religious tradition, and you can probably do so in an entertaining way I mean you do obviously and then how are you gonna build what exactly are you building? Yeah, and and I can do the same thing to your worldview, but then what am I building the question is going to be? What are the foundational that’s it? We’re not we’re not standing. We’re not standing at that We’re not standing on the first floor of the building we are standing on the top floor of a building You can’t go at the bottom floor to jackhammers and then expect that the top story is just gonna stay there It’s it that’s not how this works. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly it so Alright alright well look um I promised that I’d let you be at 115 and it’s 125 and so I don’t want to take up any more of your time I’m very pleased that your book is doing well I I hope that it does accomplish what you set out to accomplish with it is to Make the case that it’s much more appropriate for us in the modern world to continue to to consider the enlightenment First of all in its faults as well as its virtues It’s a very important issue, but also to continue to consider it as a Continuation of a process that started thousands of years before and it can’t be just casually dismissed on The presupposition that the enlightenment was drawn out of a hat by a magician you know 400 years ago with no developmental precursor I think that’s an it’s you know the other thing that’s remarkable to me about that is that the people so many of the people Who are enlightenment types like Pinker and Hitchens and Harris are also evolutionary? Biologists and Jesus they should know better man. It’s like Even people like friends to wall you know who’s been studying chimpanzee behavior has shown very clearly the evolutionary origins of a rather profound proto-morality so even if you’re not Looking at this from the perspective of divine revelation whatever that might be and that’s a great mystery You know because I think often divine revelation is the revelation of our true nature to ourselves And you know that might be metaphysically mediated God only knows but there’s a lengthy developmental history preceding the development of anything like Fundamental moral assumptions and the evolutionary biology seems to support that presupposition Powerfully and so that’s another Contradiction in the enlightenment viewpoint that I just don’t get it’s like well as far as you’re concerned as an evolutionary biologist Everything has a history that should be Marked off in the hundreds of millions or at least the tens of millions of years and yet this Radically important transformation in the manner in which human beings conducted themselves. Well, that was just something that emerged Out of nothing, right? It’s like it’s it’s it’s it’s so funny because it’s a it’s a Ex nihilo, I don’t think that’s a Yeah, yes ex nihilo argument. It’s like well we were ignorant feudalistic Christians squabbling among each other in this superstitious morass and all of a sudden out of nowhere in some sense Came this brilliant new way of looking at the world and I don’t see how that’s in keeping with that deeper view of history That’s necessary if you’re an evolutionary biologist Yeah, I obviously agree totally with that and I find it kind of hilarious a lot of the presuppositions that are made are Fundamentally at odds with a lot of the other presuppositions that are that are that undergird the system of thought you see you know I was talking to Pinker just recently really like two weeks ago and I Broached this topic, you know, he did agree by the way to have a three-way discussion with you and I Yeah, I mean I’d totally be interested in that I’ve talked to the CA people and we’re gonna try to set it up because I think I think that would be great and we could We could see what you see we’ll have an all right festival Now everybody’s all right Nazis like mad us in right to Jews and to Jews in a self-helping Canadian It would be see because one of the things that struck me so interestingly about Pinker the last time I talked to him was as Soon as I broached the argument that these enlightenment ideas were founded in something that looked like a Metaphysical religious narrative whatever its origins all he did was point to all the negative Examples of what religious structures have managed and right that seems to be to be such an unfair argument Because it’s an avoidance argument again. That’s also stuff that Non religious structures have created like that’s that’s the question is not why bad stuff happens in religious society The question is why good stuff at all that yes, that is the question especially given that it’s it’s inappropriate to conflate Religious structures with tribalism, correct, you know, especially because you can you can look I mean you might want to blame Human evil on the proclivity for us to gather together in groups under a religious hierarchy But then you’re stuck with the problem of chimpanzees who do exactly the same thing with the equivalent degree of brutality With no religious thinking whatsoever And so I think it’s perfectly reasonable to point out that religious thinking can become a variant of tribalism But it’s no more fair to to blame Human social conflict on religion than it is to blame the existence of hierarchy on capitalism The greatest tribalism that I’m seeing in today’s world has not only nothing to do with religion, but is actively anti-religion Are they the the greatest tribalism that I’m seeing right now whether you’re talking about the intersectional left that creates hierarchies of value based on your group membership or whether you’re talking about the white supremacist All right, which is militantly anti-christian and sees Christianity and Judaism by extension as as a weakness that that That’s pure tribalism white supremacy has nothing to do with overarching religious instinct In fact, it says that overarching religious instinct is quite bad One of the great anti tribal forces in human history has been the presence of religion is a point that Robert Putnam makes in bowling alone he presupposed that diversity was our strength as the as the nostrum goes and He then found that ethnic diversity in a vacuum doesn’t actually create strength. It creates the ethnic diversity What he said is the only two things you get with pure ethnic diversity are increased protest marches and increased television watching But if you have a common purpose if you have a common purpose a common reason for being together Then I think diversity and experiential diversity is our strength and it’s really great right that you go to a church and you see diverse group of people all of whom came from different places and they all care for Each other and they’re all taking care of each other and they all have different stories to tell and enriching stories to tell That’s how you build a society Striving to play the same axiomatic game exactly predicated on these underlying Revelatory truths the most important of which as you pointed out is the notion that Human beings are made in the image of God which which you know, it’s one of the things because I’m I’m You know, I tend never to take a religious view if I could take a scientific view I Never take a metaphysical view if I could take a reductionist view, you know It’s a form of mental hygiene in some sense, but there are statements There are biblical statements that are so unlikely that it’s very difficult for me to account for them Reductionistically or even biologically even though I’ve done my best to do so and That well the idea that you extract the best out of the chaos of potential with truth That’s one man because that is one daring metaphysical statement and that requires a tremendous amount of courage to even attempt and I do Believe that it’s true I’m not sure it’s not the most true thing that’s ever been written But then a close contender would be the one that you identified which is well men and women are made in the image of God It’s like who the hell would have thought that up. It’s such it’s such a it’s it’s it’s so crazily Irrational in a sense it flies in the face of everything that you see about human beings or virtually everything that you see about them Their hierarchical arrangement their relative weakness their mortality their flawed nature their sinful nature You know their their their innumerable inadequacies and then to say in spite of all that so long ago and At the beginning of this civilizing tradition that well, yeah, despite all that self-evident Pathology and radical individual difference in power and ability that each of us has a divine spark It’s like ha It isn’t it’s an amazing thought and it’s an inspiring thought and I hope that at the end of the day That’s that’s if we’re gonna take away one message from I think this conversation and in general if we’re gonna take one message out To the world the idea that you’re made in the image of God and so is everybody else if we build on that I think we can build something. You know, that’s it. That’s an excellent place to end Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate it Jordan It’s really good to talk to you Ben and good luck with your book And I hope it has the effect that you’re you’re hoping for I hope that we can that we can make a strong case especially with the enlightenment types and and even the atheists to some degree that I hope so too because I think that in The end we can all be on the same page But I think they’re gonna have to recognize the the value of tradition just as we respect the value of reason Right, right. Awesome. Thanks Jordan. Okay, man. You want to see ya see ya