https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PpZZXkLsUic
The National Socialist was a very largely technological regime. You know, nuclear war is the creation of technology. You know, the gene modifying technology, bio warfare. These are all things that are either there or almost there with the capacity to wreak unimaginable suffering on the entire planet because of the technology. That’s not to say the technology is bad. It is to say rather that it must take its place relative to a higher order series of conversations. And what I absolutely want to insist on is that those higher order conversations, they’re not mere intuitions. They’re not mere, you know, you know, speculative. Oh, we can just kind of consult the entrails of a goose or something. They’re also not mere expressions of the arbitrary desire for power because that’s not the central animating spirit. That isn’t why you built Ross. That isn’t why you’re trying to build Ralston College. It isn’t to fulfill your own desire for power. That’s not a good motivation. It’s not pleasing. It doesn’t last. It’s not enriching. It’s what people turn to when they’re bitter and cynical. Hello, everyone. I’m pleased to have with me today Dr. Stephen Blackwood, who’s the founding president of Ralston College, a newly founded university in Savannah, Georgia. Dr. Blackwood was one of the founders of St. George’s Youth Net, an educational mentoring program for inner city youth in the North End district of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was subsequently a teaching fellow in the foundation year program at the University of King’s College, which is one of Canada’s finest undergraduate institutions. Blackwood hosted and moderated a conversation between Sir Roger Scruton and I at Cambridge University in November of 2018 and moderated the debate, happiness, capitalism versus Marxism between Slavoj Zizek and I on April 19th, 2019. Dr. Blackwood lectures and specializes in the history of philosophy, especially Boethius. He also hosts the Ralston College podcast, which has featured guests, including Douglas Murray, the physicist Freeman Dyson, Andrew Doyle, the online satirist and author, and Theodore Delrimpel, who wrote Our Culture, What’s Left of It, among many other books. Oxford University Press published his book The Consolation of Boethius as Boethius as Poetic Liturgy in 2015. Welcome, Dr. Blackwood. Stephen, it’s really good to see you. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. Thanks for having me in, Jordan. It’s great to see you again. I think the last time we yeah, I think the last time we actually saw each other, I believe, was during the debate with Slavoj Zizek. Is that correct? That is right. I think that is right. Yeah. So it’s two years ago. So maybe I could ask you, first of all, about the inner city youth program in North End of Halifax. I don’t know that story, so that might be a nice place to start. Well, I. I grew up in Eastern Canada and a place that you would know, but perhaps not all of your listeners know, and Prince Edward Island and a sort of pastoral, quiet, sleepy, very rural place and a small family farm. In a huge, well, comparatively by historic standards, a huge fan by contemporary standards, rather, a huge family of seven younger brothers and two younger sisters. My parents, the milk cow, I don’t want to paint too idyllic a picture. Everyone knows family life and farm life is all kinds of kinds of ups and downs. But the point I’m trying to make is that I I had a very kind of intensely wonderful and rich and very actively busy childhood and. And it set me up in many respects for the discovery of philosophy when I went to college and I had the the immeasurable gift of meeting some teachers who just open worlds to me. I mean, you know what a teacher can do and be having had them yourself and having been one for so many people. And I really fell in love with with. Trying to think deeply about, you know, fundamental matters and not that I was particularly good at it by any means, but just that it was eye opening for me to see that things I had perhaps intuited in my childhood about the nature of things in some deep sense. We all have these intuitions, whether through nature or music or love or or or family life or whatever, that there was a sense of whatever, that there were ways of thinking about those those things. And I spent quite a long time with some wonderful teachers, particularly in the ancient Greek and Latin and then medieval tradition thinking about things and particularly about the nature of the human individual. What it is, really, what its its realization is. Anyway, I mentioned all that because when I came to the end of my master’s degree, I’d gone straight through, you know, doing a lot of, you know, thinking work in a wonderful community, it needs to be said. I just I had kind of in a way had my fill of of ideas. And I I had kind of tapped out. I’d gone as far as I could in the theoretical at that point. And I. I needed to reengage in that. Not I wouldn’t say the real world, but in the more, you know, the more the the the world of of of activity and action. And I had a dear friend and mentor of mine named Gary Thorne, who was the the priest at an inner city parish called St. George’s Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia. And he had been with others, including one of my sisters, had been working in the inner city, thinking about to which was, I should say, a very rough and highly dysfunctional place at North End of Halifax is that is or was and in some respects still is not least because of a absolutely catastrophic civic decision. There was a place in Halifax called Africville, a black community that though perhaps was not entirely up to contemporary standards in terms of technology and things, was a vibrant place. Duke Ellington had played there. It was a flourishing community. Anyway, the city wanted to build a new bridge and part of the foundations of the bridge they wanted to put in Africville. So at least it’s the story I’ve understood from my own reading about it. And they they they uprooted this entire very vibrant community out of the place that had been called Africville and resettled them in pretty dismal inner city housing in the North End. And that was not by any means, I think, the only factor, but a very significant moment in the devastation of a community. And when I was there in the late 90s into early 2000s, mid 90s to early 2000s, there were very many, you know, pretty. Pretty serious problems from drug and alcohol abuse to a prostitution, devastatingly broken families. And my friend, Gary Thorne, and others had been thinking about what modest, you know, one doesn’t think one can solve these really very serious problems, simply walk out and solve them. They’re they’re really hard. But what could the parish that is, say, this community do that might be meaningful? And so I was with a group of people involved in setting up a small, a very small this is a small community, but small youth mentoring and life skills program called St. George’s Youth Net. And the idea was to be a kind of network that would pick these help pick these children up when they fell and to give them. Well, our observation, Father Thorne’s observation had been over many years that that if you wait until someone has already fallen through the cracks, it’s in many respects. And this is a terrible thing to say, I know, but in many respects, too late. It is very hard to reach people. Not that it’s impossible. I believe in redemption. I believe in the whole possibility of things being turned around right down to the most, you know, tiniest fibers of my being. But the point is, is that it is very, very hard to do that with someone who’s 16 or 17 or 18 already fallen out of, you know, dropped out of school, you know, had a baby, whatever. So we thought about ways of. We thought about what we could do to to expand the horizons of these children and youth of all ages, you know, really, but starting with them as young as as as school age and working with them. And I won’t go on at length about this, but what I. Learned was a couple of things that are still really, really with me today. The first is that. Human, the realization of the individual has to come down at a very fundamental level to the individual, like no one else can live your life for you. You know, no one else can kind of come in and just do it for you. That that would that would that would that would deny all of the agency that is at the heart of human, you know, fulfillment and and and and and and the driving force of this is me, this meanness of life has to come from me. And in a way, I think that’s a standpoint that that at some loose level, you know, people would call the political right seems to understand that, you know, there has to be agencies fundamental. And yet that is a totally incomplete standpoint at the same time, because, you know, we don’t simply throw children out into the woods and say, you know, all right, come back when you’re fully formed, you know, writing books and playing the playing the flute and and and and and fully able to take on the complexities of life. What are the things that so striking to me is that it. As people have ability, one of the things they will. Throw all of themselves into is the raising of their children, and so damn well, they should. My wife and I have not been blessed with children, unfortunately, but I was as the eldest of a big family, and having observed in my friends and many others, you know, they will just give everything they can to carefully tend to this, to the development of each individual. And they’re not all the same, even in a single family, you can only have two children or three, and they can be very different as day and night. And yet they will give everything they can to these and so well, they should. But what this points to, I think, is a really fundamental question, which is, you know, what are the conditions, the external conditions for human realization and what we found with these beautiful, often, you know, children in very, very, very broken circumstances is that on the one hand, we had to have high expectations for them and their agency. We had to insist that they be there on time, that they that they that they treat others with respect, that they be attentive and to anything less was to betray their own dignity and potential, what they could become. And yet, on the other hand, we found that we had to move heaven and earth to make those opportunities possible for them. We would go around in the in the mornings and pick them up at their home because they didn’t have people who would get them there on time. And we would make various other kinds of, let’s say, accommodations to make things accessible for them. And and and and and lastly, I will simply say that, you know. It’s not enough just to keep people busy. You have to give them ways that open up their own understanding of themselves. And so we we took them wilderness camping. Many of these were kids who’d never been outside of inner city Halifax. We took them to to Cape Shed Necto, a beautiful park on the Bay of Fundy. And it was three days, you know, hiking through unbelievably beautiful terrain. And and and we we we’d had music programs and and our fine art programs. And and later on, they were teaching them Latin after I left. And the point is, is that. I don’t overestimate what good we did for anyone, but insofar as we did any good for them, I think it was in. In. In. In the in the it was in believing that helping them believe that they mattered, that they mattered at the highest plane of existence, that they were that they belonged to that highest plane of existence. It wasn’t just enough to learn technical skills or it is important as those are or to know that you needed to come on time to have a chance in life, but that. You were made the highest and best things there are were made for you. So anyway, I’ve gone on rather long, but that’s it was an important part of life. And I came to see things that are still well, interesting. It’s an interesting conclusion to draw from that kind of work, because the latter part of that in particular was spoken. Like a true believer in the humanities, and I suppose we can transition our conversation to that. I mean, the first thing I’d like to ask you, though, before we do that is you grew up in this rural community. You went off to college. What sparked your interest in philosophy? Were your parents educated? I mean, how did you come by the interests that you have? Well, I think it would be. So interesting when you think about childhood and what really is formative, you know, you don’t make a kid a philosopher by reading him Aristotle at six. My upbringing in my parents and my siblings were. Unbelievably important to my sense of the world, to my sense of what a human individual is, to my sense of what’s good, to my sense of the possibilities of redemption and so on and so forth. So I would say in a very deep way, my earlier childhood opened me up to be able to then later think about things in a more abstract or philosophical register. But philosophy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I mean, it’s not for no reason that Plato and Aristotle are after Homer and the the things that you can only really think about things that you already in some sense into it, you don’t just sort of abstractly go off and discover things that. The deepest thinking is about you have to already have them in some form. You know, you have a sense of well, you could take anything you can take. The difficulty of life or the the beauty of a sonnet or the beauty of nature or the the the the the horribleness of suffering. And it’s very hard to think about these things in the abstract. You never suffered and never seen suffering. Of course, most human beings at some point do in pretty serious ways. But the point is, is that. One of the things I think we absolutely need to think about very seriously as a society and as parents and as educators so on and so forth are what are the deep forms, the deep things that form that shape an individual in such a way as to open up that horizon later in life? And I know you’ve done a lot of work on early childhood development and reflected at length on things like play in Piaget and others. You know. Everything in its own time, in a way that is right for the stage of development. But what I’m saying is that I had some very deeply formative encounters with things that I think are of a very. And I think these are not exclusive to me. They’re they’re they’re universal human realities. But I had the privilege of encountering some of them in my youth in a way that then when I went to college, I went to this place called King’s College. Founded in 1789 by loyalists who went north from New York at the time of the American Revolution, from an earlier. University in New York called King’s College, which at the time of the revolution was renamed or after just after then renamed Columbia. But the loyalists went to a more northern colony at that time. Of course, this is all pre Canada and they set up King’s College and King’s had been failing in after it relocated to Halifax in the early 70s. And teachers of mine founded a place called the program called the Foundation Year Program, and it was really my son took that as well. Oh, that’s right. I know. Yeah. So tell us about that. Well, it is really just a crash course introduction to principally Western history of Western culture, not exclusively Western, but going back to to in fact to very, very back from Mesopotamia up through the ancient Greeks, the Medieval, the Renaissance. The Age of Enlightenment and the contemporary world. And you simply read and think and hear lectures about and discuss books. And that was a kind of introduction to those things. And then I realized that the teachers who had set up that program were in the classics department at Dalhousie University, some magnificent teachers, and I spent then spent the next three years doing the bachelor’s and classics and then masters there. But that classics department, I should add, was particularly strong in the the philosophical, let’s say the the big ideas that were moving in that period. Not that learning languages and things didn’t matter, but they were particularly strong in those careful readings of text that really can change your life if you attend to them. So I in my early days of my undergraduate degree, I. Encountered people who were reading these texts and. Saying things about them that enabled me to understand the things that I had perhaps intuited when I was younger in a more self-conscious, rationally universal frame, which is, of course, philosophy is so I’ve been thinking, well, you’ve been talking about something that I’ve been writing about and I’ve been working about on this for a long time, so I’m a behavioral psychologist. And so behavior psychologists are eminently practical. We tend to break things down to the smallest applicable unit of action. Right. So if you’re trying to help someone move somewhere better, well, you want to figure out what better is. But then you want to decompose that into into actions that are likely to be undertaken. And those might be very, very small actions. And I’ve been thinking about the question of the meaning of life and the first. Objection, I suppose, arose that arose in my mind was an objection to the question itself, because there might not be a meaning in life. There are places where people derive meaning and and. You can list them, and it’s useful practically if people are thinking about how to organize their life, if they’re unhappy and they want to know how things might be better. My observation and obviously not only mine is that people generally need to have a career or a job to keep the wolf from the door, but also to engage them productively with others, which is a primary source of meaning for conscientious people and for creative people alike. You need to be you need to pursue your education to to flesh out your intellectual capacity. You have to take care of your health, physical and mental. You you need an intimate relationship. You need a family. You need friends. You need intelligent use of your leisure time. You have to regulate your your susceptibility to the temptations that might lead you astray. Drugs and alcohol and perhaps pornography and those sorts of things. But then there is a core to all of that around which these more practical endeavors arrange themselves. And that’s something like attention to the spiritual or the philosophical domain or the religious domain. I think you can in some sense put all those together. And that might be, well, it might be that the attempt to answer explicitly or at least to address the question of, well, what is all of that practical life in service of? And you said, for example, that when you were working with the inner city kids in Halifax, you were trying to help them realize that they were meant for the higher things and vice versa. And someone might ask, well, what’s the why bother with that when you can just bother with the skills? And it seems to me that the answer is something like, well, we all have to make decisions about how we’re going to behave in life and how we’re going to act ethically. And if you help people understand their relationship to what’s ultimately noble, then you can help them fortify their their resolution to do good in the world instead of to do harm. It’s it’s it’s it seems to me to be I mean, I think we’re always deciding with every decision that we make whether we’re going to do good or do harm by action or by inaction and whether we should do good or harm or nothing at all, I think depends to some degree on who we think we are and what we’re capable of. And it seems to me that the humanities, when they’re properly taught, are the study of who we could be, each of us as individuals. And we need to know that because otherwise we’ll be much less than we are. And that’s not a that’s not a trivial problem. It’s a cataclysmic problem. And I also think that people pine away in the absence of that. I mean, you sent some questions that we could cover. And one of them was. Well, you said topics that might be relevant include our historic, cultural, spiritual, civilizational crisis. What is at its root, for example, their idea that there is no truth, but only power and the vast longing hunger of our moment. You said, I think the woke phenomenon is at least in many cases an index of that hunger, although it miserably fails to satisfy this intrinsically human desire for transcendent purpose. And so to me, the universities are a key element in the conversation across the generations about just exactly what a human being is. And that’s something that it’s not some abstract philosophical. It’s not merely some abstract philosophical concern. It’s it’s the central issue that determines how you make all the decisions in your life. So I just I just think that’s completely right. I’ll say two. Things just quickly, the first is that my my father is a medical doctor and he worked in the ER for many, many years and had seen many people die, and he has remarked to me that no one on their death bed looks back and says, gosh, I wish I’d spent more time at the office or I wish I’d accumulated more riches for myself. And so I I really do think you’re right to say that there is nothing more important than how we understand ourselves. I mean, your human life can’t be lived for some other end. I mean, you can you can do all kinds of things for certain ends. You mean you might work hard to get a qualification in order to get a job, in order to make money, in order to provide a home for your family. But at a certain point, it stops and it stops. It’s not for something else. It’s for the lives of these people that I am living, my life and for the lives of the people that I am seeking to live in relation to. There’s not those are then not for something else. And. So the the point is that. Our self understanding, I mean, you can you can regardless even you can even look at this, I think, Jordan, from a from an evolutionary standpoint, I mean. Human beings are evolved as creatures that are self conscious, they are self understanding, they have self self regard, and this is you may think that all of the ways in which they regard themselves or the things in relation to which they understand themselves, whether it’s truth or beauty or or purpose, you may say all those things are just, you know, constructs of the will to power, which, of course, is what, you know, the dominant nihilism would have us believe. But but but at which I do not accept, at which I think we can show to be wrong very clearly, rationally, philosophically. However, even if you think they are constructs, you still do not escape the fact that. Human beings are evolved in this way, such that they’re how they understand themselves is absolutely fundamental to their nature, like that is what we are as an as an evolved species. And so any culture that does not enable human beings to. Understand themselves in a way that they find to be richly meaningful, and I’m not saying meaning is just a construct, but if it does not do that at the end of the day, it has failed. It’s fundamental test. Yes. Yeah. OK, so now let’s look after this power idea and be OK. So you you seem to agree with something that I’ve also concluded that what’s at the root of our current cultural malaise is this idea that human social institutions and then also by implication, primary individual motivation, that human institutions are predicated on power. And so the more I’ve thought about that, the more wrong it seems to me to be. And I’ve also been thinking about truth and lies some more. And, you know, there are those lies that you tell when you just skirt the truth a bit. So there may be the ones that are most easy to get away with and often most effective, but not always, but often most effective because maybe they work the best. You take a truth and you bend it a little bit and that’s still lie. But then there are and there are statements that are antithetical to the truth. There there are anti truth lies. And I think that the idea that human social institutions, especially the functional social institutions of the West, that they’re predicated on the drive to power. I think that’s an anti truth. I don’t. And so so let’s see if we can take that apart a little bit. I mean, the first question might be, well, what exactly is the definition of power? Who’s making these claims and what’s the definition of the power of power and why are they making the claims? So let’s start with who’s making the claim that that our social institutions are predicated on power. Well, it does seem to me to be a claim that comes pretty fundamentally out of the Academy. I mean, one of my constant refrains is that the Academy, the university, that is, is upstream of absolutely everything else, you know, culture, policy, politics, art and architecture, family life, you know, media, just go down on through the list. And I think that these narratives or frameworks are proceeding fundamentally out of certain. Forms of really 19th and 20th century philosophical critiques, many of which were important and even necessary and illuminating in their their in their original form, but which have been made into very reductive, totalizing forms of seeing the world. And so is it reasonable? Do you think to I’ve talked about postmodern neo Marxism and, of course, people who are critical of the way I think point out that postmodernism hypothetically is predicated on the idea that all grand narratives are to be questioned, which you would assume would include the grand Marxist narrative, which presumes that the most appropriate way to view human history and human social institutions is by pausing the existence of an oppressor class economically and a subordinate class economically, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And so that’s the fundamental analytic lens through which Marxists approach the world that those who have have because they’ve taken from those who have not. And the implication there is the fundamental animating principle of our social structures is exploitation for the benefit of the few. And then, of course, this is my view. Anyways, when Marxism became untenable ethically as an explicit philosophy in the late 1960s as a consequence of the revelation of the absolute catastrophe that the Maoists and the Stalinists had made of China and the Soviet Union, respectively, that postmodernism transformed Marxism into something that was more palatable on the surface, but that proclaimed that, well, it wasn’t exactly economics that was exploitation that was at the root of things. It was just exploitation in general. It was the manifestation of the power drive, let’s say, that keeps people who are in positions of power above the rest and who have at their disposal the means of compelling those people to do what they would not do otherwise against their will. That’s an expression of power as well. I mean, do you think do you think there’s something like my wrong in that formulation? I mean, I’ve tried to understand this. I’m not trying to be, what would you say, biased or blinkered about it? It’s just that’s the way it looks. It looks like that to me. I mean, people like Derrida and Foucault, they were Marxists to begin with. And so and isn’t it the case that the notion that our social relations are structured as a consequence of the expression of arbitrary power? Isn’t that merely a transformation of that initial Marxist presumption? Or am I am I barking up the wrong tree here? Well, I would say a few things. The first is that I am very far from a scholar of these complicated intellectual movements from the late 18th through the century through to the present. But in my reading, certainly in the main, there’s there’s. In the main, I think you are right about Marx. And again, I’m not a philosopher of Marx, but if you read, for example, the the introduction to his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, you know, he outlines very, very clearly this this dynamic of focusing all of the force of one part of society against another as an essential kind of material dialectic. And that does seem to me to be fundamentally what is that is that is the logic of the power alone revolution. I think that is fundamentally what we’re facing in the well, that leads to a war of all against all, of course. But it certainly leads to to identity politics, warfare and the reductions of an individual to wherever they can be usefully mobilized in a battle of one part of against another. But I would also say about about Marx. And again, I just think, as you know, when you get into studying complicated things, you always feel you must endlessly qualify what you don’t know. There’s a huge amount I don’t know about Marx, but I also know that he says that religion does not make man, man makes religion. And at some very fundamental level, there appears to be whether in Marx or proceeding out of his interpreters, a wholesale negation or rejection of the idea that there is any abiding metaphysical or transcendent reality. Well, he and Marx also points out very clearly that and this is a key element of Marxist thought that social structures structure individuals, individual consciousness, and it’s not that individual consciousness structures social structures. So it’s the group. Imposing its nature on the individual rather than the group being led by the individual, and that’s a profoundly anti-enlightenment and I would say anti-Judeo-Christian proposition. And so and that’s certainly something. And then you said something else that was interesting. You know, you said you’re not a scholar of these movements and neither am I. And that’s actually a problem, right? Because we’re trying to address this parents of a culture war that seems to be manifesting itself first in the universities and then everywhere else. And it’s an amorphous thing. It’s hard to get a grip on. And it’s easy to be wrong, but we’re forced to contend with it regardless and to sketch out its outlines. I’ve been trying to do that as fairly as I possibly can. I mean, part of this proposition seems to be the the the insistence, the radical insistence that the enlightenment insistence on the individual as the primary unit of analysis is to be discarded in favor of a group centered analysis and that the only reason that that individual, the idea of the transcendent individual manifest itself was because it served the interests of those who have arbitrary power to maintain it. Although the logical connection there isn’t clear because it isn’t obvious to me how it served the particular power interests of that group and how it wouldn’t serve the power interests of other groups equally as well. It seems to be a fundamental flaw in the logic. But in. I’ve been thinking about my own experience with social institutions and and and my knowledge of how people develop as well as how children develop. And the first thing or part of that is that all the developmental literature suggests that the use of aggression, which is what you’d expect to be developed. If power was the fundamental organizing principle of social institutions, you’d expect that aggressive children would do better than non-aggressive children and you’d expect that children would be socialized by their their their superordinates, their adults, their teachers, their parents to manifest aggression in the service of power. And that doesn’t seem to be the case developmentally, the children who preferentially use aggression, self-centered aggression in particular, tend to be alienated and unhappy. And in in a dismal minority and friendless, and then they don’t do well in life at all. And the developmental course is from more aggression at the very early stages of life to less aggression as adulthood inculcates itself. And so we actually become more civilized as we become more integrated in our social institutions rather than less. And so why do you think the and then I think about my relationships with. No, I think about two things, people I have admired, who’ve been successful in social institutions and then my experience as a apprentice, let’s say, within social institutions and first of all, the people I admire and who’ve been successful are not by any stretch of the imagination notable for their manipulation of arbitrary power. Quite the contrary, the the people that I’ve met who are particularly admirable have done everything they possibly can in their positions of authority and competence to open the door to advancement to people around them, to facilitate their cooperation, to work with them genuinely in a in a manner that. Increases the probability that both of them will succeed, and they’ve also taken extreme pleasure in the development of their subordinates, so to speak. And then I thought, well, doesn’t how is it that our culture has got so bloody warped that we don’t notice that, you know, you talked about the importance of family in your upbringing and you speak of your family with great, with great affection? I mean, why don’t we believe that the central patriarchal spirit is properly constituted as benevolent father rather than as tyrannical power mad, you know, exploiter? Because I don’t see that people who are tyrannical power mad exploiters actually do that well in our social institutions. And it also seems to me that it’s a primary pleasure to open the door to people who have ability, but less opportunity. Like, it’s really it’s a fundamental motivational pleasure for that to occur. And I think it’s integrally related with the pleasure that people take in fatherhood. Yeah, and I think, well, I think that’s completely right. And it needs I think it needs to be said, well, a couple of things. The first is that the this rich view of the individual as having as really mattering, as as being connected intrinsically to the reality itself. You know, fast, fast, fast, is one phrase that the French give us, you know, face to face with God. But you see this in the ancient Greeks. You see this all throughout the the the well, you see this developing in all sorts of ways throughout the institutions and philosophical artistic movements of Western culture. I’m not saying not in other cultures, just that this is where this is the tradition I know and at some level a scholar of. But the the the point I want to make twofold. First, that these ideas of the of the individual way predate the Enlightenment and in many respects, the Enlightenment itself is, though responsible for many of our clarifications around these things, has also left us with many problems that that we’re, I think, going to have to face. Or we’re finished, really, fundamentally, and but the second thing I want to say is that it’s not that thinking about power is not important. I mean, there is there are very few things in the entire record of human beings thinking about what it means to be a human being, which is essentially what the humanities are. Right. I mean, it’s just the record of other people thinking about human experience throughout time, whether it’s art or philosophy or or or theology or logic or architecture. I mean, these are these are the record of the ways in which people have grappled with what the human being is. That’s all the humanities are fundamentally. But at the heart of that, and there are a few things more that occupy more bandwidth in that whole long arc of reflection than how one restrains the. Individuals own solipsism, it’s the individual’s own will to power, the individual’s own closed loop of the self against everything else. Which which it turns out in this rich tradition of reflection is an extremely bad thing for the individual to do because it’s because the individual that it’s short sighted and it actually runs. See, this is the problem with pausing that the drive to power is the central animating animating principle and to make a fundamental critique that might be expressed in such terms as systemic racism, let’s say. I mean, that the drive to power and deceit, perhaps in in the service of power, is best viewed as an aberration to the central tendency, a powerful aberration and certainly the source of all the fundamental corruption of the central tendency. But it’s not to be confused with the central tendency itself, which is more like properly construed. And I think that this is perhaps the central message of the Old Testament properly construed as something like a benevolent father. I mean, the Greeks had their metaphysical reality, too. I spoke with an author this week and a professor of classics at Boston University. The author is Brian Morasky, who wrote a book called The Immortality Key. And he was talking about the Eleusinian mysteries and the Greek, the saturation of Greek culture in this in this underlying metaphysical religious reality that was manifested in the Eleusinian mysteries and and in the Dionysian tradition as well. We talked a little bit about the transformation of the Dionysian into the Christian as a consequence of the union of Greek society and Jewish society. Out of that comes Christianity and this new conception of man as as akin to divinity in some sense or a recreation of that idea. In I’m fumbling for words here, but I’m trying to get a picture of this central animating spirit, because what we’re pushing out of the universities is the idea that we’re fundamentally motivated by group centered tyranny. And I don’t believe that to be the case. I don’t think that that’s what good people are motivated by. And I don’t think that bad people are particularly successful in our social institutions. I think that’s an unbelievable. I think that’s an unbelievably cynical, cynical and dangerous way of looking at history, and it’s also a way of looking at history that demolishes your own motivation, because if the central animating tendency of our social institutions is the expression of tyrannical power, then that’s the defining characteristic of your own ambition. But if your own ambition is to develop yourself as a noble being who has a broad purview and who finds fundamental pleasure in serving the higher good, well, that’s a whole different story. And the story is the critical thing here. And that’s what the universities are supposed to be transmitting, is that central story. And if we’re wrong about this, we’re going to tear things down. Yeah. Well, I think don’t think we need to say we’re going to. I think in many respects we have already. Very you are going to critique the Enlightenment. Well, I think we have already very deeply deconstructed many of the forms of life and culture that actually mediate the individual’s agency and deeper realization. And we were saying a minute ago that that that if you look at things simply from the standpoint of power and you analyze individuals by that, I mean, the paradox is that if you tend only to your own power, you are a disaster. You are a disaster as a human being. You are a disaster in relation to others. You end up wildly unhappy and unfulfilled. I mean, that is just that is the right path downward on every level. It’s not like you can be an individually successful psychopath exploiting everyone and end up hedonically advantaged without suffering. That isn’t how it works. I’ve never seen that happen. It I don’t believe it’s possible. And so I can’t understand why we’ve bought the idea that power is the central is the central animating principle. Like, what the hell? And why have it there’s an envy in it. There’s an envy in it that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s it’s related in some sense to this. You know, I’ve noticed that in the universities, whenever I worked with business people, for example, a lot of my peers would become upset with me. And I always wondered why that was, because my sense was, well, there was just as many good people and bad people in business, let’s say, as there were good people and bad people in academia. And it was just completely foolish to draw an arbitrary line. But it had something to do with envy. And I was talking to Paul Rossi, you know, the New York teacher who got nailed for first standing up against the importation of critical race theory, let’s say, into the private schools in New York. And he talked about the attraction that the postmodern theory had for him when he was an undergraduate. He he wanted to be a writer, but he didn’t really have the talent as far as he was concerned. And along came the postmodern critics who are tearing literature apart. And they appealed to his resentment and his envy because they were tearing apart, you know, an ideal he couldn’t reach. And so it was very much remiss to me, for me, of the story of Kane, you know, who who became resentful and bitter because his sacrifices weren’t accepted by God. It’s a fundamental story of human beings, really. So there’s this envy that’s driving us to to misinterpret our institutions and to be careless with them, and the universities seem to be leading the pack. I would say more than leading, certainly, yes, certainly leading, racing onwards. I think that one of the terrible ironies of this this standpoint is that it becomes guilty of the very things that it it it accuses and others. And so it it it it violates our institutional life. It violates a whole relation to the past. It violates the individual. That is to say, when you drink the kool aid of there being only power all the way down, you are in a grim world. And what is I think so tragically perverse about the dismissal of our whole inherited past with all of its complexity and beauty and difficulty is that the tradition itself of all of humanistic learning has many of the very tools we need to confront the problems that the those concerned with those those who are concerned with the abuse of power are concerned about. And so the the and I think revolutions often work work in this way is that the first thing they need to do is alienate the entire record of the past from the present, because that’s the basis upon which you bring in the brave new world through your own manipulation of power and system and so on and so forth. So I don’t I mean, I think there are a number of things going on. It’s always very tempting. I mean, the siren song of power is is is is there’s a kind of drug like character to to that. But I think, Jordan, we need to ask, you know, why is it that these reductive, inadequate, artificially a historical, irrational, utterly low grade kinds of analysis have become so dominant. And I think if we can’t answer that question, it is difficult to transcend their hold on those who ascribe to them. Well, you said that the woke phenomena is an index of the vast longing slash hunger of our moment. I mean, the the other thing, one of the other things that Rossi said that was quite interesting was that when the. The new doctrines entered the private school that he was teaching, he was initially highly supportive of them because they came in flying, let’s say, the anti-racist flag and like who isn’t happy about anti-racism. And so if you take it at face value, well, then you get to put yourself on the side of the heroes that are fighting against those who oppress people on the basis of arbitrary characteristics like their race. And so that certainly accounts for some of the attraction on the positive side. I mean, the negative side is, well, the the opportunity to tear things down for the sake of tearing them down in the name of some higher moral virtue that just covers the real motivation, which is to tear things down because you’re envious. But, you know, to give the devil his due. Well, there’s something to be said for working, identifying with a movement that purports to be serving the interests of the poor and the dispossessed and and those who are prejudiced against and and to take to task those who are perpetrators of such things. And so I see that as part of a religious impulse to do the good. But it’s so incomplete and it’s so it’s so dangerous in its incompleteness because, well, partly because it provides it, say, a too convenient enemy and partly because it does dispense with the richness of the past and. Well, and then it brings with it in its in its in its wake, let’s say all sorts of ideas that are entirely counterproductive. I mean, it contains within it a fundamental critique of the idea of free market economies, for example, which to me is just a disaster, it just from a computational perspective, we can’t do with central planning what the market can do with computation because it’s distributed and it relies on the choices of everyone. It’s a much more effective computational system. But we seem to have done a pretty bad job of defending it. Well, I think it’s it’s it. That’s a very, very good statement of the problem. Why is that so? I mean, it’s. Well, let’s say a few things. The first is that I do think the whole woke thing, which, you know, for whatever minutes, for whatever, whether that what that even what that word even means is, I think, is it is a good question to dig into fairly carefully, but I think it is an index of a search for meaning in a deep sense, at least for many. Of course, there are many people who just cynically take things up. They know it’s a power move. It’s a power political move. They know what they’re doing full well. It’s it’s it’s wrong. It’s reductive. It destroys people’s lives. We know that’s what’s at work. There are always people who will do this. But in in a much larger sense, I don’t think that’s an adequate analysis. I think that at a larger level, it is an index for a search for meaning. And we, I think, need to to remember Aristotle’s fundamental insight into the human psyche, which is that, you know, one is only ever moved by some kind of a perceived good. That’s why for Dante, you know, you go down to the bottom of hell. It’s just an allegory for him about this life, not a vision of the afterlife. You know, things are frozen. There’s no movement at all because the good of intellect or even any perceived good, however limitedly or obscurely perceived, is gone. It’s just frozen. And so whenever there’s any action at all, it’s because there’s some kind of a perceived good at work, even if that is completely misperceived. I’m saying it’s a perceived good. We never do anything at all. You don’t go up to make yourself a sandwich or go get the mail or say hello to anyone without some kind of a perceived good. And and so the second thing I would say is that I think we need to think of times when there is a significant therefore we need to think about times when there is a significant amount of momentum behind something. It could be national socialism in the in the 20s and 30s in Germany. It could be the movement to Scottish independence in our own day. It could be the so-called woke movement. Black Lives Matter, whatever, whatever, whatever lens we want to look at this from. We need to really honestly ask ourselves the question, what is moving in this? And I think it’s clearly the case that from the from what I understand about the formation of the complicated historical movements that led to the Second World War, that there was in Germany, at least I would be very surprised to learn this is not the case, a vulnerability to. And. A. An ideological standpoint that gave a defining collective purpose, and that seems to me to indicate a lack of that not being done in a better way. You could say the same thing, I suspect, about Scottish independence. Is it really that Scottish independence or is it that? Well, you know, if you were in Canada, in Quebec, and you were a lapsed Catholic, a French lapsed Catholic, you were four times as likely to be a separatist during the separatist uprising, say in the 1980s and 1990s in Canada or 1960s through the 1990s. The Gallup poll indicated that. And so, you know, Quebec was the last place in Western Europe in some sense that, so to speak, where Catholicism. Dissolved, and that didn’t happen until the late 1950s, and it was instantly replaced by a radical nationalism, which really, I mean, I watched it from the outside. I was in Quebec for much of that. It was impenetrable. You could see that it was a displaced religious doctrine. The state had taken the place of Christ. That’s the simplest way of putting it. Well, that’s a great. That’s a great. That’s a great historical example. I mean, I think that at a minimum, what many people perceive in these these sort of so-called woke movements is at least some. Incipient or inchoate vision of justice, that the least of these among us matters, the different among us matters. Now, of course, I think that the standpoint that is through which these things are viewed is completely tragic and unfulfillable, unable to fulfill the very ends that it seems to bring about. But what but the conservatives and free market lovers and all these people are very often lament the fact they say, why is it that this we call it the left, call it whatever you want, seems to beat us on the moral argument every time, despite the fact that we know that that that our systems and the ideas that we espouse historically have been shown to be superior to the very values that the so-called left is beating us at. And I think that this does raise the fact that it. You know. I’ve been reading two piece, wonderful coffee, people book, and I had a wonderful conversation with him recently about how much better everything is getting in terms. In absolute terms. And these are this is a wonderful. It’s a very important book. These are wonderful achievements. We should all rejoice and absolutely face them and be glad for them and the things that they will make possible, but it is also very interesting to note what is not in to be. I mean, there there is there’s no talk about beauty. There’s no talk about architecture. There’s no talk about cultural achievement. There’s no talk about. Let’s put it this way. There is no talk about many of the things that are most fundamental to the meaning in human life, and that’s not to degrade or denigrate the achievements that are being spoken about there, but it is rather to say that that that if your metric for human flourishing is do we have enough to eat and are we not getting rained on and you go through these lists of kind of fundamentally material things, all of which are fundamentally important and not only because they’re material, because there’s also a spiritual dimension to those things for human beings. But the point I’m making is that you see the same thing in Steven Pinker’s work like the blank slate. If I’m sure I hope I’ve got this right, because I’ve read a couple of Pinker’s books, but one of the things so he thinks very much like Toopey thinks and he wrote the better angels of our nature, if I remember correctly as well, showing that human aggression has decreased substantially over the last number of centuries. But the all of the qualities of humanity that you describe are sort of they’re parsed off near the end of the book into a single chapter as if they’re just secondary side effects of some more profound rationality, let’s say. And it’s the rationality that’s concentrating on material well-being. And I don’t have anything against material well-being and the elimination of privation, but there is. And it’s interesting that you make that comment about Toopey’s work is that the spiritual dimension, it’s like the list of what should be attended to to have a meaningful life that I listed at the beginning of our talk at the end, I kept that off with some attention to be paid for the spiritual or moral or religious element of life to bring everything together. And that narrow focus on material well-being, necessary though it is, does seem to lack to it. There’s something in it that’s missing. That’s absolutely fundamental that if it’s missing, undermines the whole project or appears to. Well, I think the bottom line is that there there there is no deep human realization for any individual outside of understanding her or himself in relation to higher order principles, truths, realities. And that’s just what human beings that’s what human beings are. So that is not to denigrate the necessity of improvement in all these areas that Toopey so brilliantly chronicles. I don’t betray myself as somehow anti-to be. I’m a huge fan of this. I’m a huge fan of the inclusive institutions that they describe as necessary to human human flourishing. But I think it needs to be said that in the most developed places, so-called developed places of the world, skepticism about those inclusive institutions is higher than anywhere else, or at least arguably so. I think it needs to be said that. There’s there’s there’s nothing in the book about the very disturbing trends of rising suicide, of of rising dopamine addiction, of porn addiction in young and young men, of course, especially these are. And I think it needs to be said that many of these things that appear to be a very fundamental malaise of contemporary life are also related to technology. And one of the paradoxes, I think that I love to ask you about Jordan relative to your own work on the individual and human individual realization is that if on the one hand, human beings are becoming increasingly liberated from the demands of material necessity, I mean, the amount of time it took to they they bring up brilliantly to create light, for example, was an immense amount of work or to save up enough calories to make it through a winter. All of these just this the bone grindingly hard aspect of human existence for for millennia, then we are very rapidly in the last two centuries. Now, almost every human being in the planet, not everyone, but the vast majority are living at standards of living that were inconceivable by anyone just a few centuries ago. So these are these are these are these are amazing achievements. But it also needs to be said that insofar as if on the one hand, the individual is being liberated from these those bone crushing realities. At the same time, it does appear to be a. Key aspect of modern life, that individuals are finding themselves less disconnected, more alienated and. That the very technology in some respects that liberates them also appears to homogenize in a kind of globally reductive way, such that, you know, as human life is lived on the ground, the frame in which it’s actually lived and in which meaning is derived, that that has become more distant, harder to access and that we have far fewer of the tools we might have once had to make sense of that all important sphere. I’ve talked to Bjorn Lomborg and to Matt Ridley and to Marion Toopy and to other people who are deeply concerned about continuing to make absolute privation, let’s say a thing of the past and and to many people as well who are hoping to ameliorate relative privation, which is more the concern of the left, as you already pointed out, and all of these people are also aware. And Stephen Fry, for that matter, you know, Stephen has allied himself to some degree with the four horsemen of the atheist world and is a dramatist. And so understands, at least in his bones, the necessity of this underlying poetic, dramatic, religious, humanistic matrix out of which rationality has emerged and in which rationality must remain embedded. I mean, what looks like to me is that and I see this dawning realization among people like Richard Dawkins as well, at least by proxy, talking to people who know him and watching what’s happened to him with the humanists, for example, who attacked him, is that this insistence on pure rationality and pure enlightenment rationality doesn’t address the fundamental religious impulse and the hope was among the four horsemen of the atheist world. Let’s say that once we dispensed with this irrational superstition, we’d all become materialist rationalists of the intellectual caliber of Stephen Pinker. But that isn’t what’s happening. I don’t believe that that can be the case. What happens instead is that all sorts of things that religion should be separated from. The higher life, the spiritual life, the religious life. All of that falls down a level or two. And and pure politics becomes contaminated with the religious impulse and then it becomes totalizing and that looks like a catastrophe. And so it seems to me that we need to pull up the spiritual domain again to parse it off as a separate field of of. What endeavor, study, hope to give the to give it its due and that the that’s the role, at least in part, that the university should be playing. Instead, they’re tearing things down. Yeah, I think it needs to be said. I mean, these these these these these technology is an amazing tool. That’s what it is. It is a tool. It does not have a moral value in itself. You know, it’s it’s it’s and it’s it’s it. There’s no question that it largely well, it is it is morally in. What is the word I’m looking for? It doesn’t have a moral determination intrinsic to itself. But but so that is to say, even from the standpoint of the this kind of narrow instrumental rationalism, you still are putting this in service of something that you think right, right, that you think is good, you know, it’s good to feed people. But, you know, you have to ask you have to ask yourself, you know, why do we think peace is better than war or why is it that that forgiveness is better than vengeance or that that unity is better than disunity or that beauty is better than ugliness? This is a point that I know we both are very keen about. Maybe we can talk about beauty in a minute. But the point I’m making is that it’s twofold. So that’s that’s relevant to that central animating spirit of of mankind, let’s say, because that central animating spirit accepts all those propositions that you just laid out as given to that beauty is preferable to ugliness, that unity is preferable to disunity, that that life more abundant is preferable to privation. And that’s all part of our our central ethic, and that’s part of the central ethic of our properly functioning institutions as well. And it’s part of the central ethic that enables us to communicate about what’s good and what’s evil. And it’s part of the central ethic that allows our consciences to torment us when we deviate from that path. And that’s not merely a matter of aberration from a central power drive. Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a real question, you know, the. You know, the West, the world at large could very easily become a technological order set over a moral vacuum. And this is not to denigrate the technology, but actually it’ll destroy itself. Right. Well, look, I mean, it’s very easy to point that out. I mean, you know, we can get the National Socialist was it was a very largely technological regime. You know, nuclear war is the creation of technology. You know, the gene modifying technology, bio warfare. These are all things that are either there or almost there with the capacity to to wreak unimaginable suffering on the entire planet because of the technology. That’s not to say the technology is bad. It is to say rather that it must take its place relative to a higher order series of conversations. And what I absolutely want to insist on is that those higher order conversations, they’re not mere intuitions, they’re not mere, you know, you know, speculative, oh, we can just kind of consult the entrails of a goose or something. They’re also not mere expressions of the arbitrary desire for power because that’s essential animating spirit. That isn’t why you built that isn’t why you’re trying to build Ralston College. It isn’t to fulfill your own desire for power. That’s not a good motivation. It’s not pleasing. It doesn’t last. It’s not enriching. It’s what people turn to when they’re bitter and cynical and feel that there’s nothing left but the exploitation of others for momentary pleasure. It can’t you can’t be more cynical than that. And so we also have to ask ourselves, why the hell did we get so cynical about ourselves? It doesn’t I mean, gosh, that is such a good question. Do you remember in that in that debate with Zizek? There is a piece that we’re going to clip out. And but it’s part of something I already clipped out of a 15 minute piece of that debate. I talked about. The Communist Manifesto as a call to bloody violent revolution and a significant proportion of the audience who were obviously pro-Marxist and had come to hear Zizek hopefully defend their hero cheered and laughed when I talked about bloody violent revolution. And, you know, it’s also the case that. Once you make the prop, look, I’ve been trying to understand, for example, when the left goes too far, you know, where’s the cutoff line? It’s very difficult to draw. But the problem with the insistence that power structures everything is that as soon as you insist upon that, you justify you can’t help but justify your own use of power and then that for me as a psychoanalytic thinker, let’s say, then that makes me suspicious that perhaps that’s the motivation for the entire bloody argument. It’s like, well, everything’s about power. So it’s perfectly fine for me to express power in whatever way I see fit, especially if I’m serving the oppressed or I’m serving some higher moral order. But really, what I’m trying to do is to find a justification for my expression of naked power. And you can see the enjoyment in the crowd when that phrase about bloody violent revolution popped out. It’s like, yes, yes, it’s really that’s what you want. And who is it exactly here that’s animated by the desire for power? And so, I mean, is the is the driving force behind the insistence that all our social institutions are based on power, the desire to justify power as a political weapon? That is indubitably a significant part of the attraction, though I think it takes its strength fundamentally morally from the the perception that this mode of analysis can help us redress suffering. You insist. Yeah, you insisted earlier. And I was speaking with someone else who made the same case. Very recently, I can’t remember who it was, but it’ll come to me that there’s no impulse to action without a drive toward the good. But I’m not so sure about that. I think that people can become hurt enough and bitter enough and resentful enough so that they are driven by the desire to make things worse, that there isn’t a good. Oh, certainly. But that’s I mean, I know, absolutely. But I mean, there is there’s a there’s a however misperceived there’s some end in the activity. I’m not saying it’s a good move. Just be like because I thought about Hitler in this regard, too. It’s like there’s this old psychoanalytic dictum that Jung, I believe, formulated. I haven’t been able to find exactly where he he stated it, unfortunately. But the gist of it is that if you don’t understand the motivation for something, you look at the outcome and you infer the motivation. And so then I look at Hitler and he committed suicide in a bunker after berating Germany for failing to live up to his noble ideal, left the entire country in flames, left the entire continent in ruins in this massive conflagration. He was always interested in the worship of fire. I mean, and so, you know, one interpretation would be that Hitler was attempting to produce, you know, a new world order. Another would be that he was aiming at committing suicide in the midst of Europe in flames. And that was the outcome. And I’m kind of likely to attribute that motivation. You know, you can think about it as a warped attempt to to pursue the good, you know, in the form of, let’s say, an extreme nationalism and the binding of a tribe. But to me, it’s more shaking his fist at God in the sky and saying, you know, here’s here’s my revenge on the world you created. And I don’t see a good I don’t see any drive to good in that except peripherally. Oh, sure. Sure. I’m not I’m not saying I’m certainly not saying that these things are actually good. What I’m saying is I know you’re not yet. Yeah. That the action that the action, however perverse, perceives, even if it’s just the the perception of the furtherance of the self-sone will to power. You know, there’s what I’m saying is it’s moved by a perception of an end. And that end may be completely cataclysmic. I’m not I’m not not frankly, that’s why the whole work of education, the whole work of of education, of of parenting, of of our social institutions aims at. We hope. Enlightening or helping the individual to better perceive what is really good, good. And and so, you know, let me ask you about that. So I’ve been thinking psychologically again about Christianity. And I know that Christianity is an extension of other metaphysical forms of thought. But that predated. But it looked to me like and some of those were derived from Mesopotamia and some of them were derived from Greece and some of them were derived from Judaism and other sources. But they all seem to me to be part of the conversation that human beings have been having amongst themselves for thousands of years about what the nature of the ideal human being is. And now I see these cathedrals, these works of art in architecture that took a tremendous amount of labor and produce a dome like structure that represents the sky and you see Christ as logos spread out on the sky as a transcendent force. And you ask yourself, well, what exactly is that signifying? And the answer is at least the proposition of a kind of ideal that’s associated with, let’s say, universal love and truth in speech. That’s the logos summed up in two phrases. And if there’s no metaphysical reality there at all, there’s still this imaginative enterprise that characterizes the entire human what imaginative effort, cultural effort to posit a transcendent ideal that we would live in relationship to. And I just don’t see that case being made very strongly. And I can’t really understand why, because isn’t it rather obvious that at least part of what Christianity has been is the attempt by thousands of people over thousands of years to specify the nature of an ideal? Certainly, I would say so. And I would say that the fact that these principles actually work is proof of their. Of the. Proof of their being true accounts of what the nature of the real is. Well, let’s let’s approach this from a couple of different angles, Jordan. The first is one of the things that I profoundly believe is that these young people seeking deeper answers and however much they may be flailing about, it’s not their fault that many, perhaps most of the institutions they will encounter will betray that which is deepest in them, will will will denigrate, will tell them, no, none of this thing, none of these things that you’re seeking are really real. I mean, I think I’ve been talking, thinking a lot over the years about architecture and what is going on in brutalist architecture, and it really does seem to me that in brutalist architecture to live in relation to brutalist architecture, it is as if you had a parent that said, you know, you’re nothing, you’re nothing. You’ll never amount to any. Of course, there are terrible people, terrible to say people, actually, there are people in these situations who live with with such dysfunctional lack of love and antagonism. This is the way that the home life that they that some people terribly have. But I’m using this as an example because I think what brutalist architecture does is it declares to the whole world and to you that you are there is no truth. There is no beauty. You are nothing except it. It’s just a concrete annihilating force. And and and and and you see this culture of repudiation. I mean, here in not here. You’re in Canada. I’m in the States and in Savannah now. But, you know, the Chateau Laurier, I think I misspoke recently called it the Frontenac, which is in Quebec, but in Ottawa, you know, the Chateau Laurier, there’s been a desire to expand this sort of beautiful sort of neo Gothic building. And it went through six rounds of approval to finally be to make a set of plans that would meet the local architectural or review board, whatever it was. And I thought, well, it can’t be that bad. You know, it’s gone through that. And I mean, this structure is abhorrent. It looks like a cross between a Verizon server farm and an American penitentiary. I mean, it is just it is a declaration that there that there is no higher order. You know, in Edinburgh, they’re tearing all those out. There is Edinburgh is an unbelievable, beautiful, beautiful city. The whole central mile of it, square mile, essentially is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it’s marred by random placements of 1970s brutalist architecture and they’re just horrible. It’s complete lack of regard for the architectural context. And they’re all being torn out and replaced. Thank God. So, well, this architectural idea. So back to the cathedral. You know, what’s really interesting about a cathedral with, let’s say, Christ as Pentecrator on the ceiling is spread against the ceiling is that it’s not the state that’s portrayed up there, right? It’s not a it’s not a map of the country. It’s not even a map of the world. It’s not a geographical locale or a political institution. It’s the transcendent individual. And, you know, it’s just not obvious to me. It seems obvious to me that that’s correct. That and that if it isn’t the transcendent individual, then it becomes the state. And as soon as the transcendent becomes the state, then we have a catastrophe. And I don’t see any difference between the insistence that our identity is predicated on our group membership. I don’t see any real difference between that and the insistence that we’re just handmaidens of the state. It’s a totalitarian insistence. And I think part of that, too, is maybe, you know, I learned from Jung that as soon as you posit an ideal, you also specify a judge. And the more the higher the ideal, the more severe the judgment because of your distance from the ideal. And so part of what we’re seeing, too, might be a rebellion against the awful requirements of that ideal. But that doesn’t justify that doesn’t justify the rebellion, because if it’s really the ideal, then if you don’t act it out, you fail to act it out at your peril. And then we need to have a serious conversation about the metaphysical, about the about the practical implications of the idea of this ideal. I mean, if if we’ve had this conversation about the transcendent individual as the ideal against which we should all be judged and to which we should that we should strive to emulate. Is there is there any relationship between that ideal and the structure of reality itself? Because that’s the that’s the. Hundred dollar question, so to speak. You know, we have a human ideal, and you could say merely psychologically, maybe even merely biologically, that that’s something we originated. That’s that’s part of our biological nature that’s expressed in this ideal. And it’s nothing more than that. But you could also say, well, perhaps it is something more than that. Perhaps it’s reflective of the structure of being itself. I mean, it depends on our position in the cosmos. You know, we are self conscious. We are that which reflects being itself or perhaps even makes it possible. It’s not that obvious what our role is. It might not be so trivial despite our mortality. Well, I would say that not only it is, as you say, but we can know it to be, as you say, I mean, this is what the whole history in some sense of of literature and philosophy and theology is about is a is a and I want to insist on this. It is a rational. Grappling with these questions, realities and indeed truths. I want to come back to something in a minute, but just on this topic, you know, one way into this is to reflect on the fact that reality is not zero sum, that, of course, we know this economically. You were talking, Jordan, a minute ago about, you know, free, you know, the voluntary exchange of of of regulated, that is to say, a contractually governed marketplace that that in this exchange, you know, it’s not zero sum. We all end up over time better. But you also see this naturally in the evolution of the diversity of species, of languages, of cultures. You’ve written beautifully about play as orienting the child in relation to a deepening reciprocity with others. We know this in terms of knowledge. I mean, you know, how can it be that in a conversation I can be wrong and be shown to be wrong and that be a net gain for me? I mean, you know, I the whole. The whole point of free dialogue is that we can learn from we can learn in our not knowing that the conversation is not zero sum, that even in the in our in our we know this in terms of forgiveness, that even our betrayals of beautiful things can become deepening engagements with what we have betrayed if we have the humility to see it. And so then, you know, I think, you know, that leads one to. You know what? You can go back and go to the level of subatomic particles in physics. The pleasure of talking with Freeman Dyson before he died. And, you know, Dyson will say very clearly that against the determinists, you know, some of the rational optimists are pretty religiously determinist in their in their worldview, you know, and they want to marshal modern science as as as saying that their determinism is what science teaches. But that Dyson, who was a subatomic physicist at the highest level, you know, expressly said the opposite. He said that the electron that you the essentially he says that the electron is free, that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, that at the very most detailed level of subatomic particles, things are not determinist. And the reason I want to go all the way down to that level is because you can go down to the lowest level of resolution. And then you can back up to that, to the higher level and see that. There is a non zero sum nature to what is real, and then you have to ask yourself, is it good to live in relation to? To what is true or should I live in a delusion? And we say, well, it’s better to live in relation to what’s true than to live in relation to a delusion. And and and then you say, well, what would it mean then for me? To live in relation to this, this positive sum, this essential reciprocity, which I think is really what the Christian view of the Trinity is about, this essential reciprocity, which is the bedrock of all reality. What would it mean to live in relations that what would it mean to to to remember that and, you know, one can approach that in any number of different ways. But certainly that is what what prayer is. That is what all spiritual exercises are. That’s what perhaps walking in nature can be. That’s what what any kind of meditative activity, intellectual or physical, is a recollecting of the self in the deepest way to what is most real. And I know you’ve written, for example, about about gratitude. And I love your words about gratitude because it’s an inversion of the burden. It’s not that it all comes down to us, but actually just the opposite, that we we place ourselves in the hands of the eternal. Reciprocity that gathers us up and puts us back together. And I think that this, frankly, is is a. Deeply rational standpoint that can be shown to be, despite my not making it very articulately here today, shown to be true in economics, in physics, in biology, in sociology, and certainly in all of the higher order spheres of human knowing. This is the nature of what of what we are and and what the world is. And this is where you’re right. Your image of the Panto Crator, you know, I think this comes back to this because because what. Fundamentally is going on there is that the logos is in us. You know, it’s actually in us. That’s why you talk about the divine significance of truth and speech that we are made to understand ourselves in relation to the whole, that is, an intrinsic human need and an intrinsic human ability. And and I think that this is where, you know, my life is about trying to in whatever small way I can open. If the nihilist darken the horizon and close off in the way the brutalist architecture does close off what we’re allowed to become and understand ourselves as then I think the work of our time is to open it back up. And and and and that is really what the humanities are fundamentally about. You can go back to one of the things I despise about the current structure of the academy is it acts as though these things are just for the few. But, you know, you think about Homer. I mean, Homer was the mode of educating the Greeks for a thousand years. The Pantheon was right there on the highest hill where everyone could see it, the same with Gothic architecture. You know, J.S. Bach, perhaps the greatest musician who ever lived, was a parish church musician. Anyone, I presume, could walk in the doors and listen to his to his to his to his contatters. I mean, Dickens, when Dickens wrote, I’ve heard recently people would line the docks to wait to see what was the next. You know, what was the next installment of Dickens? And so what what I think, you know, most fundamentally is that the antidote to the spiritual crisis, civilizational cultural crisis we’re living in is is is is is really fundamentally simple in at least it’s what we can state it as. And that is to to to open the horizon again, to turn the lights back on. And what that means is to turn them on so that individuals can better come to understand themselves in relation to these higher order realities in the image of which they are made and in relation to which their fundamental realization essentially depends. So we have so there’s critiques of, let’s say. Thought in relationship to the ideal, that Freudian critique of religious structure, that. It’s infantile. And perhaps that’s a consequence of the hypothesis of the divine afterlife that awaits us all. Freud regarded that as an infantile response to the reality of death. And then there’s the Marxist criticism that religion only serves power and it’s the opiate of the masses. But there’s I it’s striking to me how poorly the alternative position has been defended, given its unbelievable power. I mean, look. We all seem to recognize within ourselves that we have moral culpability, as far as I can tell, because I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t tortured themselves to a tremendous degree as a consequence of their own perceived inadequacies in relationship to the ideal. I see that people take the deepest pleasure that’s possible in life in the facilitation of the development of others. I don’t believe that. I believe that’s wisdom to notice that, to say, well, it isn’t the service to my. Momentary desires for pleasure, even comfort, for that matter, where I’m going to find the deepest significance, life sustaining significance that keeps me away from nihilistic hell and the desire to destroy and hurt. It’s it’s going to be something like service to the greater good and primarily in the form of. Well, other people and their longest possible term interests in that we have not only a divine responsibility to do that, but a divine capacity to do that, that if not manifested. Our cripples us spiritually and physically for that matter. And. I mean, the ultimate significance of that remains unknowable, but I don’t see any logical flaws in that in that in that proposition. I mean, I looked at the manner in which the Mesopotamians built their savior, Marduk Marduk has eyes all the way around his head and he speaks magic words. The cosmos comes into being and disappears as a consequence of his utterances. And there’s this sense emerging in Mesopotamia as the consequence of the aggregation of all these cultures, that the highest order being is extraordinarily attentive, hence the all encircling eyes and is capable of the deepest and most profound speech. And that’s not a realization that’s in any means trivial. The Mesopotamians had wars between all of their representations of their gods. And what they elevated to the highest position was this all seeing truth speaking capacity that also went forward and confronted chaos and built the world as a consequence and the influence of that set of ideas or the derivation from the same set of ideas for the Jewish conception of Yahuwah is quite clear. And you see the same thing emerging in Greece with the building of a pantheon of gods and the proposition that something occupies the apex, something Apollonian or something of that nature. And then you see that revolution take place with the dawn of Christianity and the insistence that there’s something fundamental about consciousness and. Spoken. And what’s and the spoken truth that is constitutive of reality, and you ask yourself, well, do you believe that? And the answer is, well, you treat people like you believe that because you hold them responsible for the consequences of their utterances and you judge their character on the basis of what they say and you and on whether or not they act out what they say, and so we hold each other to these standards with everything that we do and we berate ourselves when we don’t live up to them. And I don’t understand how it is that we can be said not to believe it. Now, you know, there’s the dogmatic element, the hypothesis, for example, that Christ is literally the son of God. And my knowledge runs out very, very rapidly when speculating about such things. But I’m certainly certainly seems to me that Christianity has at least been a very long conversation about what the nature of the good is and that that’s spilled out into the humanities and underlies our culture and that that that has very little to do with the expression of power. It’s it’s the it’s not the right lens through which to view things. It’s devastating. It’s wrong. It’s cynical. And I think it appeals to envy and the desire to tear down. Well, I think I think that. The. Well, two things I would say just quite quickly, Jordan, the first is that, you know, we have immense resources in the in our own past and in the past of every culture, I mean, one of the things I love about your work is how syncretistic it is. You know, here you’ve moved in the last five minutes to move from Marduk to, you know, the Panto Crater to to the Greeks and good on you for doing it. I mean, that’s that’s I think I want to say that you say people have not been good at making the counter argument. Well. You’ve been very, very good at making the counter argument and the millions of people who have had their lives touched and ennobled and deepened by by taking seriously the things you point towards are proof of that. I. You know, I think relative to our spiritual cultural crisis, we should not pretend that we don’t have resources. I mean, it’s as if it’s as if, you know, the situation is, is if you were to give young people the challenge of building something beautiful and if you were to if you were to say, well, you’re absolutely not allowed to look at or have any knowledge of any previous building, well, the results are not going to be very good. But as soon as you say and you can go back to Palatio and Vitruvius and look at all these models and discover all of the things that they give you, I mean, the results will be amazing. And so I what I want to I want to drive towards a kind of optimism, not rooted in in kind of, you know, silly blindness about the depth of our problems, but rather in in the the the nature of what is most real and the whole treasure house of of tools. It’s like we have these spotlights from the from the past to help us understand ourselves and the the the the the world around us in philosophy and religion and literature and architecture and in art and painting and music. I mean, for God’s sakes, I mean, we’ve got we’ve got an unspeakable treasure house here and and the. It may be that as we dig into that, we see that we uncover ourselves more. And understand ourselves more adequately, you know, one one example, for example, I think one thing that is is I live in the in beautiful, very beautiful city in historic Savannah and I live on the edge of a just absolutely stunning civic space park called Forsyth Park. I hope you can come and see it someday. There’s a beautiful fountain in the middle of it. And it has these these these oak trees, these live oaks that were planted by people long dead. Now these oaks of one to two to even three hundred years old and. I not infrequently see young couples coming to stand in front of one of the biggest, the biggest oak inside the park proper to to get married. They stand there with the justice of the peace and exchange simple vows. And I think we have to ask ourselves what in the hell is going on there? And it seems to me. You know, very beautiful and in a way very simple, it’s that they wish that their vows. They are aspiring to be to each other in some way as the oak tree, as. Able to live up to the. The love that they are called to, and they want to instantiate that by that’s why they turn to the garden and the tree in the center. Yes, yes. And Adam and Eve. Yes, born. Yes, yes. But there’s a related point I would make, and that is that. That, you know, we’re not we are not starting fatherless in the regeneration. I mean, I absolutely know I’m the president. We have to if the father is nothing but a tyrant. Yes, well, that’s the thing. We can’t we got to stop thinking that way. The father isn’t a tyrant. Yes, yes. You know, what’s so sad? I mean, you know, I’ve been in enough cities with you to be have been very touched at the people coming up to you, and I know you almost invariably get emotional when you discuss what it means to you to have people come and thank you for your work and. What I am so struck by in in those experiences and in the people who come increasingly to us at Ralston College is I mean, we had a young man drive all the way from Utah without telling us in the hope of just meeting someone here. Had someone move to Savannah, a former military young man with all again without telling us, and the question is, what is going on there? You know, these young people who turn to us are not they are not animated by the culture wars fundamentally, they are already seeking out higher order realities. They want to give themselves to rebuilding things in a beautiful and fundamental way. And I think we need to remember we see we must absolutely not by the line that the revolutionaries want to force down our throats, which is that the whole past is wicked and terrible and there’s nothing there’s nothing of value there at all. Because once we do that, we have cut ourselves off from the very sources of the regeneration. It’s not that we return to the past. You can’t return to the past. But it’s like my image of trying to build beautiful buildings without any access to anything that’s ever been been built before. And so what I what I what I really think is a big problem is and this is in so called conservatism is, I think, deeply fraught with this problem is that. We subordinate ourselves to the current narratives, to the idea that there is no truth, but only power to the evisceration of our institutional life rather than take a contradistinctively positive standpoint, which, you know, if I can say to you, you know, this is what I think fundamentally is at work in your work is is is is opening up a way for individuals to more deeply understand themselves and the world around them in in transformatively beautiful and difficult ways. Why do you stress? Why do you stress architecture that that seems to have a particular meaning for you? Well, for me, it’s it’s it’s for a couple of reasons, but fundamentally, it’s as I choose architecture as the example, because I think it’s the most visible, it’s the most visible represent representation of what the ideas are. And I think the idea is I was the you see in university campuses like at the University of Toronto. The one side of it is Cathedral and the other side is brutalist factory. And that’s it’s like the university has transformed itself from Cathedral of Knowledge to brutalist factory of of classroom in Caucasian, and that’s that’s maybe not even so much reflected in the architecture as led by the architecture. Yes, it’s not that I think architecture is alone enough. I choose it early on for two reasons. The first is that I think it’s the clearest way into what the worldview is. I mean, I’m a philosopher and we can talk about nihilism and and the negation of of higher order goods and what those goods are. But, you know, that’s not the language that that most immediately rings with people. But if you show them a brutalist building, they get it. That’s what that those where those ideas lead. Whereas when you look at the great cathedrals or even just a well-balanced simple town hall, I mean, my my ancestors, like I grew up in Alberta and grew up there until I was eight years old as you did in Alberta. And, you know, my my Ukrainian ancestors, I mean, they lived in very, very humble homes in, I mean, many of them lived in essentially dirt shacks until they could build the next generation the next year. And they were extremely simple homes. And you can see recreations of of these these elementary forms of architecture. But they are beautiful. I mean, the idea that somehow, you know, that, you know, beauty is a rarefied thing that only those who are wealthy have access to. And that’s just completely wrong. The most one of the most beautiful buildings I ever saw was a day laborers cottage from the 17th century in in the Netherlands. And so the point I’m making is that is that. Architecture matters both because it’s a symbol of what the closing down of the horizon is and conversely a symbol of what opening up of the horizon looks like, I mean, you know, if you if you live in a place with a beautiful building, that building becomes a means of understanding yourself. In some sense, that building is yours and it elevates and opens you up. You know, the proportions of the building, the symmetry that becomes a way of your becoming proportioned or understanding yourself as within those now, I don’t think by any means architecture is sufficient, I think, in fact, it’s it’s even a subsidiary to higher order things. Whether it’s educational, religious, civic, political, familial. I mean, the turning on of the lights again, the opening up of the horizon needs to happen, in my view, at every level, in every domain of our of our of our culture. And architecture is just one example to help us understand both what the closed or open horizon is and an instance of a domain that is urgently in need, given our epidemic of ugliness, urgently in need of of being reopened again. What’s your vision for Ralston College, architecturally speaking? Well, we we are we’re living in one Ralston College in Savannah. And so far as we have and will have in person programs here, our endeavor is to to repurpose historic buildings in the historic core in order to make the this sublimely beautiful, historic downtown the campus rather than to to build a new. Now, if we, for example, were to have one hundred million dollars and build a new campus in some beautiful place, we would really simply, I think, want for that to be in coherent conversation with the history of collegiate architecture, but as I say, fundamentally, we we chose Savannah actually because it is a sublimely beautiful place and because the the natural and architectural beauty we think is a. Powerful analog to the discovery of the intellectual riches of the classroom, can I ask you where the project is in its current state of development? Certainly, you know, I would perhaps say just by introduction that, you know, our analysis and the need for founding new institutions is directly related to the things we’ve just been speaking about, the cultural spiritual crisis, the upstream influence of the university over everything else, the fact that it is the epicenter of at very best unhelpful, at worst, downright toxic forms of ideology that spread through anything and everything that is is catastrophically beset with high costs, low value and so on and so forth. But our analysis is simply that. The there is huge demand in young people for alternatives, people who are seeking alternatives to the indoctrination and activism and fraudulent low value of the academy. I mean, I think your own work has shown this about as clearly as anything else historically ever has, that it’s a mistake to concede the to be your new book, you write about the need for creative dynamism in relation to our institutions, and it seems to me we’re in a moment not only in which that is urgently necessary, but also eminently possible if we have only the courage to to to do it. So what I would say is a few things. The first is that Rawson College has has really four fundamental commitments, first to seek the truth with courage, second to apprehend beauty in all of its forms, third to the freedom of speech and thought that are the conditions of those pursuits, and finally to the the friendship or even fellowship that is the context for all of these pursuits. And, you know, what’s become clear to us, Jordan, over the the years is it’s been a long runway. It’s not easy getting a college going, you know, anyone who thinks that you need to go off and fight in a war in order to undertake something really hard of value can call me up and we’ll have a talk about other things, other projects that would be very, very difficult to bring into the world, but necessary and beautiful. What’s become clear to us in these these years of development, which we’re sort of at the end of as we we now are launching our first programs and first degree is that Rawson College has a double vocation, both on the one hand to be a reinvention of the academy, a place for in-person degrees, a new model for the university that can, we hope, be pretty radically disruptive, not just because we’re going to change everything, but we hope that it will lead to many other people doing new and different and more beautiful and more adequate and perhaps cheaper and faster, but above all, just more important and higher value things in the space of higher education. So on the one hand, to be a reinvention of the the academy, a reinvention and a revival of the academy. But and on that side, we’ve received our degree granting powers from the state of Georgia. We expect to launch our first degree this autumn. In what? In what? This first degree will be a master’s in the humanities. So it will be a pretty intensive boot camp in thinking about the big ideas, tracing them and their development through history, which we think is important both as a revival of those forms of life and thought and culture, but also because we think they are the as it were, the key to opening up the depths of the self for the students themselves. You know, it’s not that every human if I can’t play the piano, it’s not that every you talk about resentment earlier, you know, it’s not that every human being should have to play the piano like Martha Argery or Glenn Gould from your your your current town of Toronto. Ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of human individuals couldn’t play the piano that way. But because Glenn Gould could and did, we can all hear the music. And in some level, I think. What the the the the high end of the academy is about is about playing the music so we can all hear it. And and and so on the one hand, it’s the reinvention of the academy in in a degree form. But on the other hand, the second side of this double vocation is to be a kind of platform of humanistic inquiry for anyone anywhere who which is wishes to engage with the riches of the humanistic tradition, who wishes to seek the truth with courage, who who is who is who wishes to ask the fundamental human questions that that that that every human being must face about truth and beauty and forgiveness and love and suffering. It I put a reading list online of 100 books. It’s it’s at Jordan B Peterson dot com under books for those who might be interested in people are buying those books like Mad and reading them. And it does really seem to me that. You know, if you can open up access to people, to these great ideas and provide them with a pathway that there’s all sorts of people who are more than willing to tread down that pathway as rapidly as possible. And so, you know, I I’d be interested at as we progress in this conversation at some other point to know in more detail what it is that you’re planning, but I would like to ask right now, I mean, how do you envision opening up the humanities to a broader range of people? What are you going to do that’s different or what are you hoping to do that’s different? Well, well, you know, listen, in one sense, it’s it’s gosh, you know, we have to confront the fact that the universities have in many respects. I’m not a catastrophist. I mean, you know, there are many wonderful people teaching in many institutions around the world. It’s not like it’s just all bad all the time everywhere. But I think and I clarify things because I don’t want to be perceived as a catastrophist. While I say that the universities have by and large fundamentally forgotten, if not betrayed their fundamental value proposition. Well, what’s happened to enrollment in the humanities over the last 20 years? My understanding is that it’s plummeted. Yes, of course, it’s dropping from everything I I read. But, you know, I think we can look at this at a higher level of resolution or a higher level of if we zoom out a bit, I think. We can say that when people, the average person anywhere in the world, when they are looking to make sense of their lives, whether it’s suffering or loss or cancer or or or or joy or sorrow or whatever, that. The place they do not look for answers to those questions is to the university by and large. And I think this tells us we’re living in a historic moment in which the institutions that are meant to have those questions at their heart are no longer tending to them in any fundamentally visible way, and so that you think that’s true. With the church as well. Definitely. I mean, again, with exceptions here and there and so forth. But I think the at least in my experience, I can’t speak for other religious traditions, I think that in many respects, not again, not as a catastrophist, but in many respects, the the various denominations of the Christian religion have lost their way in a way that is similar to the humanities having lost their way. And what I want to just really insist upon is that, of course, Jordan, you know that there are certain kinds of intellectual activity or or intellectual domains, let’s say, string theory or you know, the the the highest and hardest questions in philosophy that are not fundamentally very easily accessible to to anyone unless they have gone through years of apprenticeship to be able to encounter those questions. However, the vast amount of humanistic inquiry of art and music and literature and architecture and so on and so forth throughout virtually every humanistic domain are. Not only accessible to, but are made for the enjoyment and illumination of human beings. Everywhere and anywhere, and you know, I had a very moving experience with someone who’s quite close to me and my extended family, who never really finished high school and who is very intelligent. Person, I hasten to to add not that intelligence should be any kind of marker of value as a human being, it is not, but we were in London and we were my wife and I were suggesting we go to Shakespeare’s Globe and spend some go watch a Shakespearean play. And this person in my extended family was who’s very, very dear to me, was quite insecure about about going and she really sort of said, you know, no, you know, I won’t understand anything. You know, I’ll go off and walk around and you all go and enjoy Shakespeare’s. You know, her view was Shakespeare’s not for me. But we insisted and she came along and it was a play I had never seen before. And here I had my PhD and whatever. And by the intermission, I am not exaggerating to say she knew far more about what was happening in the play than I did. And what I want to insist, Jordan, is that, you know, the great high water marks of the humanities, whether it’s Bach or Matisse or the Gothic cathedrals or Homer or just go on and down through the list of all of it, they are made for everyone. And the so the question is, you know, how do you open them up? Well, I mean, damn it, we’re going to do everything we can to open them up, however we can. I mean, you’re one of our great examples of how you open things up. I mean, you you you you think about them, you try and share them in a medium that seems right for a certain audience. And you can’t you can’t do everything to everyone all the time. I mean, there are some things that you can do in the Internet and some things you can’t do in the Internet, some things you can do in person in a weekend, some things take a whole year. But the point is, is that by and large, the Internet gives us the opportunity and modern travel gives us the opportunity of gathering people either virtually or in person, totally extra territorially to the to the university. Why should the university have to be the place that these things are? These things are that are encountered. I mean, most of your work, though I know you were formed and shaped in the university, the vast amount of your work that has reached large audiences is not taking place in the university. And so I think that or that’s where the university has moved. Yes. Truly conceived, the university is as a community of those who pursue the truth. Yes. It’s like Israel is those who struggle with God and the university is those who struggle with the truth. Yes, exactly. So, you know, I would say that we think that there is enormous opportunity. We have a partnership now with a global online learning platform called Future Learn, which grew out of the Open University in the United Kingdom with, I think, its 15 million users in 200 countries. Our first courses will go up on Future Learn open access available to anyone anywhere with an Internet connection. There’s no credit. There’s no you’re not getting a degree. We’re just trying to share these things as widely as we can. The first course will be Tony Daniels, aka Theodore Dalrymple, who I know some of whose books are on your reading list on Johnson’s Rassilus, which is going to be a wonderful course. Andrew Doyle is doing a course on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and so on and so forth. We’d love to have have you join this initiative at some point, if you’re able and interested. The point is, is that. We we live in actually very exciting times from the standpoint of the sharing of information freely at low cost through the Internet. And that’s not that we should be Internet ideologues as if everything meaningful in life can be done on the Internet. It cannot be. But we should at the same time, as you have very beautifully and courageously shown, embrace the possibilities that it does, in fact, offer us. And, you know, our. Deepest hope is that we can, if I can use a scriptural metaphor, you know, break the alabaster box and take the greatest, most beautiful minds we can find and to have them share the things that they know and understand for anyone who is seeking to ask those questions, to encounter those truths, to look at those beautiful things and to understand understand themselves more truly and love others more fully. I mean, it’s in a way a very simple endeavor, but we, I think, have to insist that that we ought not to be captive to the closed horizon that would tell us, you know, it’s too late, it’s not possible. The very hunger, the deafening hunger around us is a sign that that at a minimum we can try to give what we can to those who seek it. That’s a really good place to stop. Thanks very much for talking with me today, Stephen, and best of luck with your initiative, and thank you very much for the conversation. Thank you, Jordan, for having me.