Searching for God within Oxford and Cambridge ｜ James Orr & Nigel Biggar ｜ EP 194 (RsmSBJMSRQk)

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

Hello everyone. I’m pleased to have two of the UK’s finest scholars here with me today, Dr. James Orr and Dr. Nigel Bigger. Dr. Orr is university lecturer in philosophy of religion at Cambridge. He’s director of Trinity Forum Oxford and Trinity Forum Cambridge and a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the Critic Magazine. Formerly McDonald postdoctoral fellow at Christchurch, Oxford, Dr. Orr holds a PhD in M.Phil in philosophy of religion from St. John’s College Cambridge and a double first in classics from Bellial College, Oxford. He’s the author of The Mind of God and the Works of Nature 2019 and co-editor of Neo- Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature. That’s 2022 at Routledge published out. Dr. Nigel Bigger is the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, where he also directs the McDonald Center for Theology, Ethics and Public Life. He’s also an Anglican priest and his professorial chair at Oxford is tied to a cantonry in Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford. He holds a BA from Oxford, a master’s in Christian studies from Regent College Vancouver and an M.A. and PhD in Christian theology and ethics from the University of Chicago. Before his current post, he occupied chairs in theology at the University of Leeds and at Trinity College Dublin. Among his many books are the recent What’s Wrong with Rights, Oxford 2020, Between Kin and Cosmopolis, An Ethic of the Nation, 2014, and In Defense of War, Oxford, 2013, as well as Behaving in Public, How to Do Christian Ethics, 2011. Provocative titles. Well, thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today. James, why did you want to have this discussion? Well, my first reason for wanting to have a discussion with you and together with Nigel is that I felt that you were developing a voice and a kind of acuity in the public square on questions of religion, of meaning, of transcendence, and those are the kinds of questions that drew me first to the academy out of the law, but the kinds of questions that I think have never been more urgent or more salient to individuals in the West, to society in the West, and so I thought this is an extraordinary opportunity to talk with you a little bit about your views on religion and to hear Nigel’s too. Of course, we’ve talked a few, we’ve had many conversations over the years and Nigel’s been a great mentor to me and I had a few happy years with him in Oxford, but yeah, this is an amazing platform that you’ve carved out for yourself and I’m really looking forward to the conversation. So what makes you think it’s so urgent and salient now? Well, I think that questions of identity, questions of belonging, questions of significance, both as those are kind of answers to them are kind of positively expressed but also negatively expressed, the sort of sense of crisis in the West at the kind of level of individuals, but also try to work out where it is we’re going as a society, particularly now that we’ve slipped a lot of our moorings that used to anchor us in, as it were, a stable normative universe. We told certain stories about where we’d come from, where we’re going, that broadly speaking, we’re not believed by everybody, but broadly speaking gave us the kinds of parameters, the kinds of guardrails, the kind of coordination mechanisms, even the kinds of stigmas that helped us to pursue the common good together for all of our different disagreements. Okay, so you offered an implicit description of identity there, essentially, and that’s quite interesting because so much of the current political discourse centers on a theory of identity, but it’s not a theory of identity that’s based on identification with a central set of stories, and that’s something that’s very, very different. And you also mentioned in some sense a collective view of the future. That’s right, yes. I mean, so I think the fact that we’re all talking about identity now in a way that we simply weren’t before is not a sign that we all know what it means, but actually a sign that there’s a kind of dislocation. Identitas in Latin doesn’t mean anything at all, it just means, it means sameness, and I think you don’t really start talking about something until it starts to disappear. I think it’s Hegel who says at one point that the the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, by which he meant, this is in the introduction to the philosophy of right, by which he meant, well, lots of disagreement about exactly what he meant, but it seems to be the case that it was philosophy only starts to take a proper appraisal, a proper diagnosis of what’s happened after it’s happened, and really the point where it’s too late to do much about it. Right, the question doesn’t arise when everyone is in implicit agreement. I think that’s right. I mean, this is the old David Foster Wallace commencement address joke of the goldfish going for a walk one morning in the goldfish bowl, and another goldfish turns to him and says, how’s the water? And the goldfish says, what’s water? Well, we’re now saying, what’s your identity? Even 25 years ago, that would have been, in a sense, a meaningless question. What are you talking about? What is identity? I had a student the other day who came to me and said, I want to look at identity in Augustine. And I said, well, what do you want to do that for? And he said, well, everybody’s talking about it. The university’s talking about it. The culture’s talking about it. I thought I could go and read the Confessions and the Dei Trinitate and the City of God and try and work out what Augustine has to say about identity. And I had to tell him that Augustine would have been mystified if you’d asked him what he meant by identity. It meant something technical and really rather trivial and empty. But so these are new ideas, but they’re very dominant ideas and they’re ideas that we don’t really have the answer to, but we’re happy to project onto the canon, to project back into the past. It reminds me of Nietzsche’s statement about the question of morality. He said that, well, when you’re embedded in a culture that has a single morality, the question is what’s right and wrong within that structure. But then when you’re subjected to the onslaught of many moralities, the question of what is morality per se starts to arise. And so the questions get deeper. And maybe that’s a consequence of the intense cultural intermingling that characterizes the world now. And that’s very rich. And it’s enriched all of us, but it’s also deeply unsettling. And it raises questions. And of course, technological transformation does the same, not least when it involves reproductive technology, let’s say, and changes the relationship between the sexes. I’m going to switch to Dr. Vigor and ask him the same. Could I just make comment on this business of identity, Jordan? Because I do think certainly in some cases, identity is hooked into some kind of grand narrative. I mean, I guess I think of human beings as we live our little lives and we often need a bigger story to identify with, to give ourselves a significance that by ourselves we just don’t have. Now, that may not be the case everywhere, but I’m thinking particularly of nationalism. I’m Scottish-born. I identify as British because I’m both English and Scottish. I oppose Scottish separation from the UK. But when Scots people say, I’m Scots, I have a Scottish identity, I want to say, well, okay, that’s fine. But can you give an account of it? And it seems to me that one can hold identities to account in this sense that when I claim an identity, I’m identifying myself with something. So when I say I’m Scottish or British, I have in my mind a certain set of stories, a certain set of heroes, a certain set of values that I claim as my own and identify with. And it seems to me that insofar as the stories and the heroes and the values have moral content, that they are morally accountable and can be morally criticized. So identity is not a kind of, that’s not bedrock. Okay. So that raises another question as far as I’m concerned or couple is, first of all, you know, we might not identify with who we are. We might identify with who we would like to be or what the ideal is. And when you talk about, you know, our finite mortality and our longing for something greater, I would think of that as part of a prime of the religious impulse, essentially, that guides us to toward the ideal that we’re attempting to manifest. And so there has to be something beyond us that we identify with. And then I would wonder if it’s not abstractly beyond, let’s say, in the form of a religious notion, then it gets truncated into something like nationalism or something political that then gets inflated in significance to divine status because the proper target of identification is lacking. What do you think of that? Yeah, I think that’s the danger, isn’t it? That the grand narratives we identify with, we divinize them, we give them an absolute status. And nationalism at its worst does that, of course. So the nation becomes God. And the fact that Ernst Cronon talked about, or was it Fichte, I think, talked about the nation being immortal, but the member of the nation, of course, is not. But you gain a kind of vicarious immortality by belonging to the nation, which always continues, which actually it doesn’t, but never mind. But there is a religiosity to that. But I don’t think that all identities have to absolutize themselves in that way. So I identify as British, I’m American, American. I could have lived and worked in North America all my life. I chose not to because I felt commitment to this country. Does that mean that I think that the UK is eternal and absolute? Not at all. I mean, it didn’t exist before 1707. It may not exist if Scotland separates. But you have a place for the relationship with the absolute in your life. And so it’s conceivable that the nation didn’t have to expand for you to fill that gap. I mean, I know in Quebec, there is a very interesting poll. You know, Quebec was the last Western country in some sense to undergo the transformation from deep religiosity, almost feudal religiosity to secular status. That didn’t happen until the 1950s. And then Quebec abandoned Catholicism at a rate that was just absolutely staggering. But the Gallup organization indicated that if you were a lapsed Catholic, you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist. Right, right. Piece of information I was looking for for years. Just on that. I mean, I’ve noticed and there’s no proof here yet, but I’ve noticed that the rise of Scottish nationalism is correlated with the precipitated decline in membership of the Church of Scotland. Now, so I’m wondering, is there a kind of transference here from Presbyterian religion into Scottish nationalism? I suspect there is. That reminds me of another central Nietzschean idea, which was that a couple of ideas was that as a consequence of the death of God, which is of course something that Nietzsche decried, he thought it was a murderous act that we would become prone to either nihilism or a form of radical communitarianism. He identified that with essentially with communism, or at least with the spirit of communism at that point. And then I would say that the rise of fascism, these are in my interpretation, these are fundamentally replacement religions, except that they have pathologies associated with them that a genuine religion and we can talk about what that might be. At some point, it was one of the questions you guys proposed. They have pathologies that genuine religions in some sense manage to skirt. Do you think that that’s a viable hypothesis? I mean, it’s sort of predicated on the idea that we do have a deep religious instinct that’s associated with the necessity for us to adopt an identity. Yeah, so when people desert mainstream conventional religion, the religious instinct gets displaced. And so in the case of Nazism, most obviously, you get quasi-religious rituals. Yes, which the fascists were particularly good at. And those were non-verbal, so they were harder to critique. Yeah, but they created a sense of the transcendent. So yes, I think that is a applause of all hypothesis. The question of what kind of religion resists that is an interesting one. I guess religion has always had a problem with degenerating into idolatry. That’s to say, the identification of something human, a piece of sculpture, a temple, a nation. Concrete. As divine. And that, of course, is a form of religion that monotheism, be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, has been against because God is God, and God is transcendent, and God is barely understandable by human beings. And there’s an insistence on that. I mean, part of the insistence, well, the present-day insistence in Islam of not making images is, I believe, it’s a variant of the same doctrine that you see in the Old Testament against making idols. And I think it’s an attempt when it’s working properly to protect the concretization of the absolute. And that is this psychological barrier against idolatry, which I think ideology is a form of, and I suspect, although don’t know, that it’s etymologically related as well. And so, you know, you posited right at the beginning, Nigel, that we’re destined in some sense to search for something beyond ourselves, that that’s part of our actual nature. I guess I would wonder, too, if that, you know, Piaget, the developmental psychologist, posited the existence of a messianic stage in late adolescent development. And he didn’t believe everyone hit that stage of cognitive development, but that many people did, and that that was the point at which radical enculturation should take place. But it was, it involved the turning outward to broader world concerns and the desire to join a cause. And maybe you can see that really intensely between the ages of 17 and 25, something like that. And then so university students are primed for that. And then they’re offered ideology now, I think, instead of, well, instead of what it is that we’re trying to lay out, what the alternative to that might be. So. So I wanted to ask you guys, James, did you have something to say about all that? Well, I mean, other than that, to say that, you know, this, there’s sort of obviously good, good nationalism and bad nationalism. And often the distinction is made between patriotism and nationalism. And Nigel’s written very well about this, but it’s often overlooked. I mean, I think that a lot of the problems today, certainly as we’ve been part of the debate in the UK in the last few years, has been this question of the, are you a citizen of anywhere or are you a citizen of somewhere? And a lot of the deep divides in our society flow from that basic distinction, the distinction that the sociologist David Goodhart drew a few years ago. And a lot of the differences that we are having, apparently a lot more trivial flow, are really downstream of that basic distinction. So there’s an idea that Marche Elliott had about the continual disappearance of God, because he looked at Nietzsche’s pronouncement and said, well, God has vanished into the stratosphere of abstraction many times throughout history. This isn’t a one time only. The danger of an abstract God that can’t be represented is that he becomes so detached from human affairs that it’s as if he’s not there. And so the Catholic Church maybe produces saints as intermediaries and priests to sort of link the absolute to the proximal. But I wonder too, is what happened with Brexit in the UK? I mean, I thought of that in some sense as a Tower of Babel phenomenon is that people felt that their representation in Europe was so abstract that they were no longer connected to their land, to their town, to their community. And so the distance between them and the central authority became too great. And there was a longing for return to something like the concrete, which I had some sympathy for. But it begs a question too, is like, maybe there’s a rank order of identity. And so you are a patriot to your land, but that’s nested under an affiliation to something that’s absolute, that isn’t associated with nationalism. I talked with Stephen Fry a little bit, for example, about the utility of having a monarch. It’s sort of analogous to that, is that the monarch is an abstract figure, but exists. And you can have affiliation to her, like the prime minister does, and still be in charge of the state. And it’s like there’s a hierarchy of identities and the hierarchy has to be structured properly, or the parts start to contain the whole in a way that’s pathological. Yes, I was just thinking as you were speaking that certainly the way a lot of the arguments for thinking of one’s love of country as a form of piety in the tradition of moral theology start from the most intimate and the most immediate. So it’s love of parent, your biological parents. You didn’t choose your parents, it’s as it were you’re thrown into this relationship with them, but it’s the most intimate relationship there is. And similarly, the thought is that you owe your loyalty, your loves, your affections to your community, and so on and so on in ever expanding concentric circles. But I think both Aquinas and somebody very different, somebody like David Hume later on in the 18th century, stress that there’s, as it were, a kind of, there are diminishing returns as the concentric circles move outward. And there’s certainly a limit, and it’s not, as it were, maybe not an ideal limit, but it’s simply a function of our finitude and our fragility and in the Christian tradition our fallenness, that we can’t, as it were, love every single human, we can’t love humanity in the abstract, and nor can we love every single human being with the same sort of intensity. So that might be a more positive way of thinking about why we ought to owe what Augustine calls our common objects of love, or we treat our common objects of love as broadly proximate, but organized by the horizon of a kind of transcendent orientation towards the source of love, which of course in the Christian tradition is God himself. Jordan, I fully agree with you that we inhabit kind of a range of identities, some more local, some more regional, national, global, and then religious, and each thing we identify with gives a certain meaning to our lives and a certain significance. Just wondering, in terms of your encounter with younger people, at what point does religious identification begin to gain traction? Well, I think there’s a variety of answers to that. One is that one pathway in is the diagnosis that the desire for deep meaning and also deep responsibility is there and valid and in everyone. And to be encouraged and recognized. So there’s that. And then there’s a serious discussion about, I would say, about love and truth and the pragmatic utility of both, and both as expressions of faith. Because you can’t say, well, there’s evidence that love, in the broadest sense, is the most effective manner in which to orient yourself in the world. You could make a counter case that it’s power, for example, and you can’t prove that speaking the truth is for the best. And partly that’s because people get into trouble for speaking the truth all the time. But you can say you can stake your life on those two things and see what happens. And that there’s an adventure in that and that appeal to adventure that that’s really attractive to you, especially to young men, but to young people in general. And then there’s one other element, which is part of it has to be the removal of rational objections. It’s like when I did in my biblical lecture series, I said I was going to stay psychological about it, except when I had to become metaphysical because of my limitations of my knowledge. And so I was trying to make sense of it. It’s like, how can you have a relationship with this book that makes sense so that you’re not just trying to make sense of it? So that you’re not that you’re not crucifying your reason, but using it alongside of you. And so that it’s not mere, let’s say superstitious foolishness with regards to your axiomatic presuppositions of the form that the rational atheists criticize. So, well, let’s say so effectively. So I said, well, I brought reverence to the to Genesis. I said this book’s been around a long time and there’s possible there’s the possibility that there’s something in it that I that I don’t understand that’s appealed to people across history. And let’s approach it from that perspective and see what we can make of it. And that that seems to have proved extremely popular, like sort of unbelievably popular. And so, so when you mentioned this desire for a deep desire, in a sense, for a sense for for a sense of being responsible, yeah, for serious and the truth, both of those connect to me, as it were, something that is given an objective to which we are accountable. It reminds me of what your compatriot Charles Taylor once wrote in his best shortest book and grab to say the ethics of authenticity. He said, reflecting on authenticity as being the kind of universal popular value we all recognize, he said, authenticity only makes sense when there’s a wider given horizon that gives it significance. So choice only significance within a context that gives it significance. Otherwise, choices, Caprice, it’s whimsy. It doesn’t matter at all. And so I suppose they, I mean, seeing this through Christian eyes, as I do, what we have here is a recognition of the need for, if you like, a given moral order within which we are, you know, we have freedom and the freedom is what makes us responsible and and makes our decisions and choices really heavy with significance. But there is there is something that is given and we didn’t create it. And a large part, not the only part, a large part of the affirmation of of the being one God is that there is not just a physical coherence to created reality, but also a moral coherence. So that one God, OK, so a couple of things I want to talk about there. So, you know, if I look at authenticity from the psychoanalytic or the psychological perspective, you talk about Carl Rogers and the humanists. Now Rogers, who I admire greatly and who taught me a lot about listening, technically, he was a humanist, but he was a Christian seminarian to begin with and a wannabe missionary. And so his his psychology of human possibility is secularized Christianity right to the core. Now it’s his talk about authenticity. So he thought if you wanted to be a good therapist, that you had to be integrated. And so he talked to he’s making a case for something like this hierarchical identity that we just discussed. So imagine your identity is probably properly structured hierarchically with the utmost at the top where it’s supposed to be and with everything in its proper place, that constitutes you in the broadest sense. And then you speak in some sense from the center of that. And so there’s a kind of alignment that goes along with truthful speaking that’s that represents that authenticity. And I think that’s equivalent to well, it’s equivalent to Trinitarian phenomena in my estimation. You know, when there’s this emphasis in the gospels on the possibility of the spirit of God inhabiting a group or an individual, especially in terms of their relationship with one another, their dialogical relationship with one another. And there’s really something to that. Like, it’s not it. And it seems to be, you can enter that space when you’re authentic in the psychological sense. But it also means that the words that you’re using spring up from the depths from the integrated depths. And that is associated with being possessed by the ideal at that moment, if something like that. And you can call that forth out of people, right? If you’re engaging in a serious and honest dialogue with them and you trust and you want the best from them, then they step up and then you can have that kind of conversation. And it’s ennobling for everyone and everyone experiences it that way. Can I just suggest that, I mean, we’re using the word authenticity, but as listening to Nigel and listening to you now, Jordan, it seems to me that you’ve actually expressed two very different and opposing sides of how one understands authenticity. So Nigel offered the idea that authenticity, as it were, requires presupposes or requires an author with a capital A, shall we say, some sort of given objective framework that we don’t script our own narrative. We have to, as it were, deal with the world as it’s given. You have elaborated beautifully and I’m not saying that the two can’t be brought together. I think this could be a very interesting next phase of the conversation. You in drawing on Rogers and talking about the secularization of the sense of authenticity and the sort of the currents of pneumatology and the spirit in the New Testament at the beginning of Acts, are taking a more, shall we say, self-scripting, self-authoring idea, account of authenticity. And this goes right back, I suppose, in the 20th century. So I have some ideas about how those might be mediated. I mean, I don’t think you’re not speaking with your own voice when you’re authentic in some sense, because your proximal concerns are not relevant. All you’re trying to do is to state what you believe to be the case at that moment and an honest response to the surrounding. It isn’t agenda driven, except at the highest levels of that hierarchy. So the agenda might be love and truth, right? But it isn’t anything proximal. It’s not like, so for example, if I was trying to argue against you and defeat you, that’s philo-Nikea, which I just learned. The love of victory, if I was possessed by the spirit of the love of victory and was attempting to defeat you, then I wouldn’t be speaking in a fully authentic voice. It might be a more authentic voice than being cowardly, but it’s not as authentic as one that would be inspired by the highest possible motivations. And my sense has been that it’s something like truth nested inside love that constitutes that highest level of ethical striving. And so that speaks from within you, perhaps. And it’s strange that that would also be associated with authenticity, because in some sense, it’s not you. It is because, I mean, your definition of authenticity, which really, in a sense, it’s you expressing your grasp of the truth. But it’s not just you expressing yourself, whatever that means. I mean, the common understanding of authenticity is self-expression. Whenever someone says that, I think, well, you know, how do we know yourself is worth expressing? How do I know myself is worth expressing? But your way of putting it ties authenticity to my grasp of the truth. So there is something apart from me, which I’m relating to, which gives it a kind of objectivity and seriousness and lack of caprice. So, OK, so a couple of things off that. I mean, this insistence by the radical left on lived experience and its validity, well, it might be a stumbling towards something like that. OK. Right. OK. Well, then the next thing, so let’s leave. I’ll put that up. But then the next thing I’m thinking about is I’ve really been struck constantly by some of Jung’s descriptions of Christ as a member of the Trinity, because Jung makes much of John’s sense of Christ, the logos that’s there across time, which I read something as something like the creative consciousness that’s involved in the bringing to awareness of being something like that. So it’s maybe identical to consciousness itself, at least in its higher stages. It’s very abstract. But then there’s Christ, the carpenter who lived in a particular time and place, which is kind of a mystery because everyone asks, like in the movie Jesus Christ Superstar, you know, why that time and that place? And the answer is, well, it has to be some bounded time and place. And so if we’re if if what Christ is, is a representative in some sense of what a human being is, is that there’s a divine aspect to us, which is this creative consciousness that’s very abstract, but it’s also localized intensely, you know, in a historic in an arbitrary throne, to use the existential phrase, historical context. And then each of us is unique in that manner. But there’s something universal about each of us, too, that enables us to reach out to each other. And also gives each of our individual lives a larger significance that otherwise they just wouldn’t have at all. Well, yes. And the significant, you know, one of my students once asked me a brilliant question is like, well, if the if all stories have the archetypal structure, why not just tell the same archetype over and over? And I thought, you know, wasn’t that so interesting? Because what you want is you want old wine and new skin, so to speak, right? You want you want the universal story particularized. And then I thought, well, that’s exactly what Jung said about the figure of Christ is it’s the universal story particularized. And both of those, like both the particularization and the universality, it’s the intersection of those two that produces the meaning. And it also produces, I guess you say meaning, I would say human dignity. Because on the one hand, there is individuality. No one quite grasps the truth or speaks the truth in my time and place like me. So in a sense, everyone is a unique prophet and has a unique responsibility. But we are commonly subject to a universal order, universal obligations, universal calling, which which endows our little lives with a larger significance. I mean, this this oscillation that you’ve been describing so beautifully between the universal and the concrete, the general and the particular, you touched on it earlier, Jordan, when you were talking about the iconoclasm of Judaism and Islam relative to the shocking acceptance and indeed embracing a particularity in the form of the second person of the Trinity incarnate as a human being. And so the sort of shocking Christian claim is that God leaves his authenticating signature on the not just on the processes of history, but on this particular carpenter in first century Palestine. This is what gets Hegel and others just so excited that it seems to be this final synthesis where everything can, as it were, come to a resting point. But it’s also, as Nigel says, it also underwrites the dignity and as it were, the value, the intrinsic value of human beings and others have written about the- Well, that’s another major question, you know, and this is something I think the new atheists don’t take into account at all because they have this enlightenment orientation and they attribute the idea of human rights. It’s like their historical sense is truncated at 400 years ago and that’s really odd because so many of them are biologists, you know, and they should be thinking across the millennia. Now that can be a problem for religious thinkers too because it isn’t obvious that the worldview of the Bible is a 13 billion year old cosmos. But, you know, I don’t believe that our notion of rights is an enlightenment product. I think the enlightenment articulated an implicit Judeo-Christian view of man and expressed it brilliantly in many political documents, but that the roots of that explicit construction were mythological and ritual and centuries or millennia or were far past that old. And I actually don’t think that’s debatable. I think the idea that, you know, that the dignity of the human being and the rights of man emerged in the Renaissance, let’s say in the Enlightenment and out of nothing is a completely absurd proposition. It’s much more reasonable historically to look at the narrative precursors to that idea. No, I agree entirely with that. I mean, it has been established that the notion of natural human rights can be found in the 13th century in the medieval period and Larry Seidentop recently wrote a book called The Origins of Individuality where he locates the notion of the value of the human individual in a biblical Christian narrative. I mean, the kind of archetype of the individual is the prophet, the one who, when respond to the call of God, is called out from the mass of people. And indeed, poor old Jeremiah is called out to speak against his people alone. And it’s the relationship between the individual and the call of God that it says creates the individual and draws them out of the mass. Right. Well, and you see that so often in the Genesis stories. I mean, Abraham’s a classic example of that too. I mean, he’s a failure to begin with. I mean, he’s like 80 years old and still living in his dad’s tent. And then he’s called by God. And so this lowly guy who’s a non-starter is called by God. And all that happens to him for the first section of the story is one bloody awful catastrophe after another. And you think, well, do you believe these stories? Well, here’s the question is what’s not to believe about that? It’s like, there you are, you’re a dismal failure and you’re not living up to your potential. And then some you’re inspired by something that forces you outside of your proximal self and makes you feel guilty and ashamed if you don’t manifest it and enthusiastic, which means it possessed by God. If you do manifest it and then you do. And then like it’s one catastrophe after another. It’s like, who doesn’t believe that? How is that not life? I mean, it seems like there are at least sort of three possibilities. There’s a kind of the enlightenment creationist account of dignity just coming out of ex nihilo coming out of nowhere with the with Kant and others that says which gives a kind of universalist basis to rights and a kind of cosmopolitanism that is based on pure rationality and nothing else. And we don’t believe the city stories anymore. Okay, so then there’s here’s a here’s something that’s interesting, James. So let’s say that’s true. Well, then why not postmodern critique that rationality out of existence? If there’s nothing behind it that is more fundamental than a mere proximal European rational construction? Why can’t we just blow it away? First of all, attribute it to the West, which I think is a big mistake, because I don’t believe that’s true. But then also just replace it with another rational construction. If there’s nothing transcendent about it, nothing deeper. Well, I think a quick answer to that is to say we didn’t need to wait for the postmodernist. We simply needed to wait for the 1790s and the reign of terror that was orchestrated, of course, by devotees of the cult, literally devotees of the cult of reason that was set up in in Notre Dame, proclaiming liberty, equality and fraternity, even as the bloods and the heads were running in the streets. Right. And in the cathedral, as you point out, which is so symbolically relevant. Indeed, indeed. So the question that then is that, you know, we now can’t take seriously the Kantian claims of to universal reason, and we can’t really take seriously that. And I think the postmodernists would have some have this force to what they have to say that deracinated reason that tears us away from any kind of locality, any kind of the sort of messy contingency of human development and human upbringing. I mean, it’s not an accident, as some people like to point out that Kant never had children and never went further than 10 miles of of Königsberg and yet had this this this this extraordinary impact. I think it was the German poet Heine who said that Kant was far, far more deadly than Robespierre, because whereas Robespierre simply decapitated a king, Kant decapitated God. That is to say, it would be helpful, I think, for the audience for you to talk a little bit about Kant, because they’re not going to be familiar in that way. So I mean, just a kind of a 90 second digest of Kant 1724 to 1804, known as the kind of the sage of Königsberg, which is Kaliningrad, now Prussia. Broadly speaking, he has had an enormous impact, a subterranean influence these days, I think, because he’s just so darn difficult to read. German is really only just becoming a philosophical language. A lot of his early writings are in Latin, but the explosion occurs in 1781 with the critique of pure reason. And what’s so fascinating about that is that it’s a critique that of reason, that is to say, critique of reasons, tendency always to overreach itself beyond what could possibly be given in sense experience. And so he’s got the metaphysicians and the rationalists, Leibniz and decap and so on in his sites there. Is that like Milton’s warning about the dominance of Satan just out of curiosity? Because I always saw Milton, Satan is always trying to transcend God. Yes. And he’s the light bringer, right, in the spirit of rationality in some real sense. Yes. Yes. Well, there are some who would characterize Kant’s impact like that, certainly. But in that period, 1781 to 1790, he’s just, as it were, it’s the critical philosophy. He starts to get more interested in 1793 with the notion of evil. And suddenly evil comes back in, something that was inexplicable within the terms of the critical philosophy. He suddenly realizes that there’s something that can’t be reasoned. And it’s interestingly not, it’s not the good, which is tended to occupy Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas. It’s evil. And perhaps he was affected by reports of what was going on in Paris in the early 1790s, who knows. But his impact is enormous. When we talk about the turn to the self in the Enlightenment period, there are many important figures. But I think Kant is the paradigm. He’s the archetype. He’s the point of no return. There are very few philosophers in the history of philosophy, where, which is it where you can describe with the adjective pre and post. There’s Socrates, everyone who comes before Socrates is a pre-Socratic, even though there was some very fine philosophers before Socrates. And similarly, we talk about pre-Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. So his impact is enormous in terms of this turn to the self, the primacy of reason, confidence in cosmopolitanism, and a certain very coherent account of the role of subjectivity in aesthetics and a account of the moral life and ethics, just obligation, not the good, that is entirely sealed in to the sphere of practical reason, ethical reason. And he then wheels God back in. Okay. So you started this, or at least to some degree, with a discussion of what happened in Notre Dame Cathedral with the elevation of reason. And so, and I thought about Milton at that point. And so is this, is it reasonable to point to Kant and say, Kant is the philosopher who in the West and the enlightenment figure who elevated reason to the position that God once occupied? I think that’s a fair summary of how a lot of people will would interpret Kant’s impact. Some would take a positive view of that. Yeah. It’s the birth of secularism. We don’t, and it’s not so much an antipathy to religion and to God. There’s also a sense of hope and optimism. Well, and warranted. I mean, look what happened when everybody became able to think. I mean, our technological mastery is part and parcel of that process. It’s not all negative, but it’s still a matter of getting everything in its proper place. I mean, I read Milton as warning, as a warning that when reason is elevated to the highest place, that hell follows quickly behind. And I think about that, for example, there’s nothing more rational than Marxism. All the axioms are wrong, but all the logic that flows from the axioms is perfectly rational, perfectly logical. And I mean, that’s why Solzhenitsyn was able to make the case that what happened under Stalin was true communism. It was the axioms playing themselves out. They were arrayed logically. And so rationality, I’ve been talking to some cognitive scientists recently too, you know, and they’re interested in artificial intelligence and the development of independent thinking machines. And the people who are really working hard on that are very, very interested in the idea of embodiment because they’re not convinced that intelligent systems, abstract systems even can exist in the absence of embodiment, that embodiment is tied to. And so there’s an element of embodiment that’s sort of something like the proximal concerns that you were talking about, that seems necessary for proper cognitive operations to take place. So one of the interesting things about Kant, and I think he’s onto something here, is that one of the things that haunted him was the idea that what can be given in sense experience and our understanding of what was then a fully Newtonian physical universe didn’t fit in, couldn’t accommodate what really mattered. Rationality, the soul, freedom and God. And this worried him. He was trying to develop a way of understanding and making room for these notions. And I think with AI and cognitive science and so on, I mean, my worry is always, well, first of all, I want to ask the cognitive scientists, have you cracked the mind-body problem? That is to say, do you think- They’re trying hard. They’re trying hard. They’re trying hard. And in a sophisticated way, you know, as far as I can see. Well, but the question of the mind-body problem is whether or not a complete science, the most sophisticated science that it was possible to generate, could fathom the mysteries of consciousness. That is to say, could purely physical causal processes generate reason, intelligence and consciousness? Yeah. Well, I think the answer to that is yes. But when that happens, our notion of matter will be radically transformed, right? Because that, it sort of assumes that we understand matter and we don’t understand consciousness. It’s like, no, we don’t understand either. And when we understand both, both will be radically different. Well, it’s certainly the case that in Anglo-American philosophy, what was unthinkable is now a live option in the philosophy of mind. And that is this doctrine of panpsychism, the idea that the concrete material universe somehow exhibits mind-like or conscious properties. And that’s- Okay. Okay. So I’m going to make a segue from that. So I had been playing with some ideas here recently that if you guys don’t mind, I’d like to run by you a bit. And I’ve been thinking about what people might mean when they talk about God. And I want to tell you how I got to this point first. So there’s this idea that’s coming out of this postmodern and Marxist critique of the West, that the primary organizing principle of West, of first of all, that social institutions in the West are structured according to Western axioms. That’s the first one. And the second one is that they’re structured according to the arbitrary expression of power. And we’ll start with the second one. I think that is antithetical to the truth. And the reason I think that is because when I’ve met men of goodwill who are successful in functional organizations, they’re creative and productive and honest and generous and kind and mentors, and they might deviate from that when their desire for power overtakes them. But that’s a deviation from the genuine spirit. And so then I was thinking, I had this vision at one point, and it was an ancestral vision. It gave me some insight into ancestor worship. And I had this vision of all these men that had had an influence on me in my life. I could see them all. And it was like the positive elements of them were the same. And then that sort of extended back into history a bit. I was thinking about historical figures and this spirit shining through. And I thought, well, the spirit that shines through the ancestral figures, that’s equivalent to the Old Testament God. That’s the animating spirit of civilization. Now, I’m not making a metaphysical claim here. I’m not. I’m saying that, you know, we already talked about the fact that when we’re in a deep conversation, there’s something the same about us that’s operating. And I would say it like a biologist like E. W. Wilson would agree with that. We wouldn’t be able to communicate with one another if we were talking about something that was fundamentally human, because we wouldn’t understand our axiomatic presuppositions. So we have to be speaking from the particular to the universal in order for us to communicate. So the question is, what’s the nature of the spirit that inhabits you when you’re doing that? And then I think of it as this benevolent spirit that operates through history. It’s responsible for the golden thread of philosophical conversation down the ages. And that would include the spirit that wrote and arranged the Bible, operating in different human beings. And that’s a nod to the notion of its divine inspiration. And so I was thinking, these aren’t attributes of God that the atheists consider, because they reduce it to a set of relatively absurd axiomatic presuppositions. But there are experiential elements to this. And so I think we exist within a hierarchy of values and that that that selects our attention because you pay attention to what you value. And there’s a unifying tendency in that hierarchy of values, because it has to be unified, because otherwise you exist in contradiction with yourself and everyone else. So there’s a tendency towards unity. So that’s part of this paternal spirit. I think there, Mercheh Eliad made much of the war of gods in mythologies. It’s a very, very common theme. And what happens is the gods war and one god comes out as superior. He’s the dominant god. And I thought, well, that’s associated with the moving together of tribes. Each tribe has its own narrative and it’s represented by a set of deities. And when the tribes unite in conflict and cooperation, their religious stories fight in abstract space. And there’s this proclivity across time for that to organize itself into something like a unity that that’s the origin of monotheism. And that’s the spirit of God as well. And then I thought, I won’t go through all these attributes, but because I could bring them up one at a time. But then another one is I was thinking about this common trope in American sports movies. And I’m pointing to them for a particular reason. When you’re engaged in a sport, you’re trying to hit a target. And if you do it well, then everyone celebrates you. And that’s the opposite of homartia. That’s the opposite of missing the mark. And so there’s this collective celebration of the tendency of excellence in cooperation and competition to hit the mark. And everybody celebrates. That’s worship. Everyone worships that they don’t even notice it. That’s the same spirit. And then there’s this movie theme and the Americans are very good at mythologizing this sort of thing. So you imagine that the victorious quarterback is carried out of the stadium on the shoulders of his teammates, supported by his school and the town in triumph. And the cheerleaders are waiting for him. And you think, well, why would men elect one of their members to be the most attractive? And the answer to that is because that’s how you see the path. It’s something like that. And that’s a manifestation of the same spirit. That’s not power. And so this thing that we re and then I’ll close with this. One of the things that really hit me when I was doing my Genesis lectures was the realization that the word Israel meant those who struggle with God. And I think that’s a way better definition of belief, true belief than reliance on an axiomatic set of explicit presuppositions. It’s like this is something you contend with, right? It’s like, what’s the ideal? Is there an ideal? If there is an ideal of what nature is it? Is it a personality? How does it manifest itself across time? We don’t know the answers to this, but we can definitely wrestle with the we wrestle with the we wrestle with that. And that’s the right pathway, I think, is the wrestling rather than the dogmatic insistence that a particular story. Well, that’s a lot. John, can I can I wind you back to you earlier impassioned statement that you’re not making a metaphysical metaphysical claim here? Because it seems to me that the phenomenon pushes in a metaphysical direction in this sense that you’re talking about all these people who have shaped you for the good. And in a sense, it is if they’ve been animated by a kind of spirit, a benevolent spirit. Well, if you’re going to, as it were, remain strictly secular, secularist or naturalist, in a sense, the spirit is simply a product of these people. But the I suggest that the lived experience, if you like, or the phenomenon of the spirit as experienced by these people is not that they possess it, rather than it possesses them. Absolutely. It obliges them. So in a sense, the phenomenon pushes toward something that is metaphysical. Well, OK, so let OK, so let me add another wrinkle to this that’s related to something that James that James said. Well, we talked about consciousness per se. Right. And this is where the metaphysical starts to become interesting is that this spirit that calls and impels and judges as well and is in part the voice of conscience and all of that. I can’t distinguish it from the active action of consciousness per se. And we don’t understand the metaphysical status of consciousness. Now, one of the things I’ve been thinking, for example, I wanted to talk to Richard Dawkins about this, and I’m afraid he’d slash me into ribbons. So I’m somewhat hesitant to do it. But, you know, Darwin talked about natural selection a lot, but he also talked about sexual selection a lot. And until recently, last 30 years or so, biologists tend to concentrate on more natural selection. But, you know, women are hypergamous in the extreme. They mate up and across hierarchies of competence or power, I think competence fundamentally. And that means that our whole evolutionary history was shaped by the selection of consciousness. And so like the mechanism that generates random variation and allows for the menu from which the selection is made, that might be random, but the selection process is bloody well not random. And it looks to me like men’s consciousness elevates men to positions of status and women’s consciousness selects those men. And they’re not selected on the basis of power. That’s not true. That’s not even true of chimpanzees, by the way. And they’re more violent and much more primitive than we are. So like that deep ethic that we’re talking about, that doesn’t run itself out. Even it’s certainly not only Western. It doesn’t even look like it’s only human. And Franz de Waal, who I’m going to be talking to at some point on this podcast, has made very much of that, you know, that there’s this natural ethic that you see emerging in chimpanzee behavior in their in their hierarchical behavior within troops. So he said the tyrannical chimps get torn to shreds by their subordinates who band together. You can dominate the group with power, but it’s very unstable. Well, if I could just chip in here, I mean, well, it’s obviously the case that there are behavioral patterns that can be described as certainly altruistic and that we, as it were, can describe as ethical. And it’s certainly the case, Jordan, that you can, you can, as it were, theorize that what’s going on in, say, sexual selection is the operation of consciousness. But don’t forget that somebody like Dawkins is going to say that there simply is no such thing. There is no such thing as consciousness. If by consciousness, you understand some element of reality, some ontological ingredient of reality that is somehow not fully reducible to underlying neurological states. I read Dennett’s book on consciousness, which was aptly criticized as consciousness explained away. It’s by no means the best book I read on consciousness because I don’t think it wrestles with because the ontological significance of consciousness is equivalent to the ontological significance of being because the mystery, the mystery question is how is there anything without awareness of it? And good luck, good luck solving that issue. And even if it is reducible to the material, my answer to that is, well, that’ll just make material transcendent in a way that we don’t understand. So you can’t say you have omniscient knowledge of the structure of matter and consciousness is reducible to that. It’s like, no, you don’t. You don’t know anything about matter at the fundamental quantum level, let’s say. It’s so mysterious and peculiar. Absolutely. But what we can at least say, and this is a very Kantian thought, that it’s a condition of the possibility of any successful empirical or scientific inquiry into the way the world is, that we are a subject, that we exercise our consciousness, we exercise our reason, and we exercise the laws of thought. So I agree with you. I think the problem with the new atheists is not so much their atheism, it’s their a priori commitment to the doctrine of metaphysical naturalism, which is roughly the idea that all truths are scientific truths or reducible to scientific truths. And it’s a non-starter. The far more interesting golden thread that you talked about earlier, sometimes known as the perennial philosophy, is the thought that being, capital B being, is the fundamental metaphysical question. And once you start approaching deep philosophical problems in that way, then you do start to see a remarkable convergence between Abrahamic monotheism, Vedanta, and the Upanishads, the question of whether Brahman and Atman are one, that is to say, being and mind and the self are one. We see it, those sorts of questions are also not particular to religious systems. So think of somebody like Heidegger, you know, Heidegger is supposed to have spawned the kind of the great atheistic tendencies in 20th century existentialist and phenomenological philosophy. He says, the fundamental question is, why is there something rather than nothing? Why being? Absolutely. Yeah. So, okay, so there’s the metaphysical, so part of what this hinges on is the metaphysical status of consciousness. And you can make a case that that’s equivalent to this question is, well, what, I mean, David Chalmers, who’s maybe the most well-known cognitive scientist studying consciousness, you know, he has one set of the hard question, you know, the hard question about consciousness. But for me, the hard question is the question of being itself, because I can’t distinguish between being and awareness. You can think, well, there’s an objective world without subjectivity. It’s like, well, try to think that through and see how far you get. You just run into problem after problem with it. And I mean, there’s technical problems at the level of physics as well, but there’s certainly metaphysical problems. And so then the question is, well, what is the cosmological significance of consciousness? And that’s a central question, right? Maybe that’s the central question. And when I look at the inside of a Christian cathedral and I see the logos spread out against the sky, because that’s what the dome is, it’s affiliated with the sun, there’s this proposition that consciousness is what engenders reality itself and that we partake in that. And let’s say we abandon that notion. It’s like, okay, well, then do you have any dignity as an individual? And then we get into the postmodern question as well. Are you there as an individual at all? Are you just, this is part of the identity issue, are you just one of your immutable physiological characteristics, right? Your sex, your gender, your race, that’s matter, man. And there’s no individual soul there. Well, why can’t I just reduce you to that? What are you going to use as an argument? Well, just a very quick thought, if I may, I don’t want to keep butting in too much, but a very good line for Dawkins and others to remember, and you should remind him of it if he comes on your podcast, is that metaphysics always buries its undertakers. That is to say, every time there’s an attempt to say we can all of that mumbo jumbo that was being talked about by those clever philosophers or those stupid religionists, that’s all gone now. That’s a warning sign. It’s a sign that there’s actually total confusion and all sorts of kind of fragmentation and the quest for meaning and the quest for the answer to the question of the meaning of Is that the abandonment of the perennial philosophy? It’s an attempt certainly to reject it. And I mean, if you look in, say, Vedantic systems, you look in Indian philosophy, there were materialists. There was a school of materialism, but it was a relatively small and short lived belief system. You see materialism in the Greco-Roman world. You see it in Democritus. Democritus is atomism. You see it in Epicurus, of course, but it is a minority report. It’s a strange superstition in ancient thought. Just to take it apart a bit, James, because you mentioned earlier that among, I think it was cognitive scientists that you were discussing, that discussion of panpsychism has become non-heretical because there’s a notion that there’s a mystery in matter. See, it isn’t materialism exactly that’s the fault. Perhaps it’s deterministic clockwork materialism that’s essentially Newtonian. And we know that’s not right. I mean, it’s proximally right, but beyond that, it’s not right. Matter is very deep mystery. And I can’t see how you can get rid of the problem of consciousness by positing a materialist substrate when there’s no way that you can get rid of the metaphysics of matter. Very quickly, I mean, you mentioned David Chalmers, as you say, and this brilliant young philosopher who in 1994 published his PhD thesis, The Contra’s Mind, which brought back onto the table what he called the hard problem of consciousness. And he parsed that in different ways, that there’s something absolutely irreducible about qualitative experience. But the problem that then opens up that then I think leads him towards taking panpsychism very, very seriously, this is just really in the last 10 years, I think, is the idea, well, okay, we’ve got consciousness. It’s a hard problem. We just can’t get rid of it. And yet we can’t get rid of matter either. We can’t get rid of the truths of the physical sciences. But we can’t work out how on earth these fit together. They couldn’t be laws of nature. They couldn’t be psychoanalytic or psychological laws. The laws of thought are fundamentally different from the laws of nature. So how do we fit these two together? And panpsychism at that point, though it might seem crazy to the person on the street, suddenly starts to seem quite an attractive account of the nature of ultimate reality. And I suppose just to just as a quick footnote to that, once you’re there, materialism, Dawkinsian materialism is Dickensian and long gone. And the dialogue between the perennial philosophy and pan anglophone philosophy of panpsychists is back on. So elaborate on that. That’s what stopped me exactly, because now I’m trying to figure out, well, there’s this, we should define panpsychism again for the audience. But then, OK, so what sort of dialogue does that open up as far as you’re concerned? Well, my view is that panpsychists, it’s early days. And at least in its modern contemporary iteration, I think you can say that Aristotle, if you read the day Anima, Aristotle’s treatise on the soul, there’s soul all over the place. The plants have a nutritive soul, animals have a perceptual soul, and human animals have both of those and a rational soul. So as it were, all of organic life is minded. If you move to the basic framework of Abrahamic monotheism, then look, it follows very naturally that if you’ve got an axiomatic commitment to mind at the bottom of the universe, as it were, the creator is a minded being, is ideal, is not material, and everything, all of reality distinct from God is created and including, as it were, space-time, then the idea that it’s, that the universe as we discover it, as we come upon it, is shot through with mind, is legible to the minded inquiry that happens when cognitive scientists are trying to unravel the mystery of the brain. It’s suddenly you’ve got an isomorphism there between consciousness. Does that mean that there’s this insistence in the Judeo-Christian tradition that God is outside of the material world and outside of time and space? And what that does in some sense is deaden material, it deadens matter, and then when God disappears we’re left with dead matter. So where’s the dialogue between the advocates of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the panpsychists? Well, there’s only one time that Aquinas ever loses his cool in about 10 million words that he wrote, but one is with this poor guy called David Adinon who dared to suggest that God might be a material being, to which Aquinas said, queer est idiotus, which is simply stupid. So the idea that the creator could be somehow bound up with his creation was a simple logical impossibility within Abrahamic monotheism. Is there any difference between the mind-body problem and the God, the spirit, and the material world problem? Are they the same problem on two different planes? Jordan, that’s an extremely acute question and it’s one that has puzzled me for a long time or at least attracted me. I think you’re absolutely right to say that there are all sorts of interesting structural, metaphysical, and theoretical parallels between understanding and fathoming the God-world relation and, as it were, the mind-world relationship, the human mind. Or the soul-world relationship, right? Because it could be that we’re the contact point between God outside of time and space and the material world, but then that does beg the question, the panpsychism question, which is a very interesting one. That’s precisely the claim of Christology. I don’t know if I’ll have a lot to say to this discussion, but just two points. Jordan, a moment ago you talked about in the Judeo-Christian vision God is other and absent and matter is deadened. Of course, that’s not quite true, is it? Because in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the spirit of God is present in the world and also you have the incarnation. Even if one doesn’t want to be stupid as Aquinas thought and say that God is material, doesn’t want to say that, certainly it’s not true to say that God and the material world are divorced. They’re not. I wouldn’t say that. I’m thinking about it I’m trying to think about it with regards to the idea of this animating spirit. Let’s say that part of, see one of the things I’ve thought is that at minimum what Christianity is, is a thousands of years long discussion about what constitutes the human ideal. It’s a purely psychological viewpoint. Now I understand the metaphysical implications, and I don’t want to dispense with them, but it’s best to start with what’s simple. There’s this discussion of what constitutes the ideal and we’re exploring it and discussing it. We explore and discuss it in all sorts of interesting ways because it’s not merely rational. Bach writes this soul-inspiring music and that makes us feel a particular way and that’s a hint as to the nature of the ideal. Then there’s these great cathedrals that are built all across Europe and they’re awe-inspiring masterpieces of stone and light, right? So opposites conjoined and they bring the primeval forest into the city and they provide colour and the music is set in there. Then there’s the invocation of the ancestors and the dogmatic formulations that Christianity consists of that go back centuries as well and all of that. That’s all part of this exploration and to me it’s the exploration of that central animating spirit. When we’re debating the postmodernists who say everything is power, this is the sort of thing that needs to be pointed out as a rejoinder. It’s like, no it’s not. We’re doing our best to manifest this ideal that we’re discussing. We’re flawed and fragmented and ignorant. For example, you asked me earlier, Nigel, what sort of things I had to discuss in order to make people attracted, say, to a discussion of Genesis. What it is, is that I try to get the wheat from the text and in the chaff I think a lot of that’s my ignorance. It’s not necessarily chaff but I’ll leave it be because I don’t have the intellectual wherewithal to make sense of it so I just leave it be without despising it. Because I can’t understand it, doesn’t mean there isn’t something to it. Now, you know, we’re still stuck because we have problems like, well, the idea of the resurrection, you know, which is obviously a very big problem in a very fundamental sense and I leave that be except to say that I have seen, you know, in my studies of mythology that there are stories of dying and resurrecting gods throughout history and the idea of Christ seems to be of that type, although it’s not only that, but it’s something I can’t touch and that’s a problem, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t this investigation that we’re all undertaking, including us in this conversation, of what constitutes the ideal and how we could manifest it if we could only understand it. And I think that’s unbelievably compelling to people and it’s not only compelling, they die without it. Because we can’t live with only knowledge of our limitations. We have to be moving towards an ideal. Well, I mean, just a quick thought there. I mean, certainly within the Christian tradition, the claim is that God’s decision to become incarnate is not accidental. He chose this particular human being, not just because he had to choose some human being in order to become a human being, but he chose a human being and, as it were, exhibited the qualities that he wanted to, as it were, disseminate as a kind of moral exemplar that were profoundly counter-cultural to the values and the exemplars of the time. So you think of the weakness of Christ in some contexts, the sort of the, obviously, the sense of self-sacrifice, the radical openness to those on the margins, the poor in particular, the ceremonially unclean, and of course, to women. And so it’s as if this is completely subverting the kind of the sort of power narrative that dominated first century Palestine, particularly in the form of the sort of the Roman legions and the Roman Imperium. And so I think that’s a quick thought. Could I say something very quickly on the resurrection and dying and rising gods? Please do. I mean, I’m not a specialist in the sort of the history of the kind of mythology, but I think that a lot of those myths are, in the first instance, effectively myths and understood as myths by devotees of the various mystery cults of the period. So there are certain claims made about, is it Osiris and Natus and others, and there’s some evidence that they were kind of fertility gods. But if I think if you dig deep into the stories, they’re very, very different from the kind of narrative, rather shocking narrative that you have in the Gospels that stress the physicality of the resurrection. Yeah, well, there isn’t the union. Like, if you look at the story, the story of Osiris is one that’s really fascinated me. Because, so the Egyptians, this goes back to our discussion about rationality, so that Egyptians were trying to understand what the most fundamental principle of sovereignty, they were trying to understand the fundamental principle of sovereignty. So that would be something they were trying to understand in opposition to the presumption that it was merely power. So let’s say you were the Pharaoh. Well, what justified your existence as the Pharaoh? And the answer was you were the reincarnation of the union of Osiris and Horus. And so then the question is, what were those things? Well, Horus isn’t, Horus is more like Christ, more like the individual. Osiris is the father, and Osiris is the state. In fact, the provinces of Egypt regarded as parts of Osiris’ body. So it’s the body of the state, like the body of laws. That’s another way of thinking about it. And Osiris was willfully blind, archaic, anachronistic. And what he was particularly willfully blind to were the machinations of evil. And that’s why he died, because his evil brother overthrew him. And so that’s a cautionary story about the consequence of the blindness of the state. Now, he’s reanimated by Horus. And Horus isn’t logic or rationality. Horus is the eye. And the eye pays attention. And so there’s something different. There’s something very radically different between attention and rationality. Like attention is allowing things in in some sense, right? It’s opening yourself up to the world. And Horus is the falcon who can see everywhere. Falcons have extremely acute vision. And he journeys to the underworld where an Osiris is down there dead and reanimates him. So Horus is the hero who rescues the dying father from the underworld. And so that’s part of the rebirth, the rebirth resurrection story there. It says, what is the resurrecting principle? And the resurrecting principle is live attention acting on dogmatic certainty. It’s something like that. It’s a theory of consciousness in some sense. It is. I mean, of course, there are lots of different versions of the story of Osiris. I think the most popular one has it that he’s ripped into 14 pieces and his sister Isis tries to sort of put him back together. But you’re right. It does end with him in the underworld, in this sort of shady, shadowy, semi-conscious realm. He’s divinized and this generates all sorts of fascinating mystery cults thereafter. And what’s interesting is that you can do that sort of mythological psychoanalytic analysis quite easily. The stories lend themselves to that kind of analysis. Whereas I think what you’re getting with the early Christian attempts to grapple with this extraordinary and actually offensive scandalous claim, as Paul talks, scandal to the Jews and craziness, Moria, madness to the Greeks, is not that at all. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to come along and throw off the Roman yoke, not to sort of die in this horribly ignominious way. And then suddenly coming back, this was not what Second Temple Judaism was expecting. There’s some evidence that there would be a resurrection at the end of time. But the idea that God would be incarnate and, as it were, would emerge and, as I said earlier, leave his authenticating signature through this very dramatic and, as it were, plainly historical event was simply not part of their expectations at all. So I was just saying, I think there are clear differences between the two. And I think a lot of the temptation to see parallels really comes from, it’s Fraser, really. It’s Sir James Fraser in the late 19th century. And that gets picked up by some French scholars, I think. But I think the parallels, those stories are absolutely fascinating. The actual parallels with the New Testament don’t really stand up to scrutiny. That’s just my view. Gordon, can I take us back a little bit? You talked again about the importance for people, particularly young people, of this pursuit of the ideal. And way back, you mentioned Pierre Ge and his theory of development and the stage of development you call the Messianic stage. And I’m thinking about lots of contemporary young people who are party to the crusade for social justice over gender, anti-racist, anti-colonial. And on the one hand, I want to applaud them. I want to say, yep, you have invested yourself in the cause of justice, and that’s a worthy investment. And then I observe, now, as in my own time when I was an undergraduate, the adolescent Messianic crusade is, of course, it’s absolutist, it’s intolerant, it’s convinced of its own rightness, it’s intolerant of those who object impatient with them. Nowadays, it’s social justice. In the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate, it was Marxism. But what’s changed, I think, is that it’s not just adolescents who are invested in this social justice crusade. It seems as if— They’re the minions. It’s what? They’re the minions. Yeah. So who are they? Who’s driving it? And also, as a Christian looking on this— It’s us. It’s us. It’s our failure to have conversations like this that’s driving it. Really? Because, well, I think so. If we were offering a sufficiently attractive alternative, then it wouldn’t be so powerful. Because otherwise, we have to point to someone, and it just doesn’t seem that useful to me. That’s interesting. To give us some credit, let’s say, speaking broadly, this is a hard problem. It’s not like the answer is so obvious, but I think it’s best to take it on as a failure of the academy. Because the kind of conversation we’re having now is not the kind of conversation you’d have in a university classroom as a role. Yes, and it’s certainly not the kind of conversation that I was allowed to have at Cambridge, let’s say. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So as a consequence of what we’ve been talking about. Let me ask you a question, guys. This is part of this spirit idea. I’ve been thinking about, is power the central organizing tendency? Does that imply that power is the central ambition of human beings? Then I thought, well, let’s think about the people that I know and admire. Okay, so then I think maybe about my graduate student mentor, Robert Peel. I didn’t really even know anyone in graduate school. When I went to graduate school, I didn’t know what it was about at all. He took me under his wing, I would say, and treated me as, I wouldn’t say as an equal, but as someone who had valid things to say, always had time for me. And he allowed his administrative acumen and his wide range of resources to unite with my ability to generate creative ideas. And we collaborated and it was great. And I never felt like I was in an exploitative power relationship. I felt that he was a mentor and that, and then that really got me to think, because all the people that I admire, I think one of the things that I found that’s so characteristic about them is that they love the opportunity to find people who are talented and worthy, let’s say, and provide them with opportunities and education and advantages and a pathway to further realization. And then I thought, I don’t think there is a more fundamental pleasure than that. And that’s part of that animating spirit. And that’s not power. It’s like, it’s the delight in, and I tried to specify it technically, it’s the delight you take when the best in you can serve the best in someone else. But my response to that, Jordan, is when postmodernists talk about power, they always talk about it cynically. It’s oppressive power. It’s unjust power. And I want to say, there’s nothing wrong with power. And in a sense, you can describe the influence of this man on you was an exercise of a certain power, a certain authority. Authority, for sure. We need to get past the notion that power or even hierarchy are of themselves wicked things, when they can be, but they needn’t be. And my reaction to the postmodernist view is it’s implausibly cynical. It doesn’t apply everywhere. It’s unbelievably cynical. I can’t see how you could possibly generate a more cynical theory about what constitutes the animating spirit of civilization than it’s the arbitrary expression of power. We all want power. Nothing wrong with that. But the trick is to use it well. Everyone wants power. No one likes to be powerless. And why should we? But we need the right kinds of power for the right kinds of reasons. Well, but when you speak about power in that sense, you want to be free, at least to some degree, of the arbitrary expression of power on the part of other people. We need to differentiate what power means. It means authority. It means competence. It means a wider range of knowledge. It means wider access to resources. It means wisdom. It means competent and productive generosity. And those are much more powerful forces than the arbitrary expression of power. And it’s only people who are failures morally that default to the use of power to structure their social relations. I haven’t seen this argument put forth in a particularly coherent way. It’s like, what are you saying? It’s arbitrary power. Arbitrary power is actually a weak force in comparison to these other modes of social organization. And somehow we’ve been taken aback in the academy. We haven’t been able to make, we’re guilty. I think we’re guilty. And that’s part of it. And so the question is then, well, what are we guilty about? And why is that undermining our moral authority? Yeah. Yeah. There’s that old Latin tag, abusus non tollit usum, that abuse does not invalidate use. And that just seems very obvious that there are no power free zones. And be wary of the person who claims that they are setting up a power free anarchy. They are often the most tyrannical and power hungry kinds of people. And I certainly, I try with my first year undergraduates, we work through Plato’s Republic. And one of the ways traditionally it’s understood, of course it is, a dialogue about justice, but it’s about also the proper dispersal and arrangement of power. And you get this power hungry guy at the beginning of the dialogue, Thrasymachus, who is clearly only interested in brute strength. And that is the only account of justice he will give as it were, the power of the fist. And so I try to say that in fact, this is the kind of idea of power that is animating figures like Foucault. But I try to also underline that this does not eradicate the proper use of power. And I make this sort of slightly kind of give the slightly silly example of going to the dentist. When I’m at the dentist and I’m in the dentist chair, I do not accuse my dentist of oppressing my molars. There is an appropriate asymmetry in the relationship between me and my dentist. And that’s just because it’s voluntary. Right. And that’s a huge part of it. They might be involuntary too. So one of the ironies I think is when we’re starting to talk about the university or we’re starting to talk about more sort of hard left authoritarian ideas of the market and of the state, you are paradoxically getting antidotes to the abuse of power that are in fact extremely constrictive mechanisms. So I mean, this is a critique that comes up again and again, but whether we’re talking about the markets in the way that Hayek talks about, or whether we’re talking about the English common law, or whether we’re talking about the free pursuit of truth in a thriving vibrant intellectual culture, this cannot be imposed from the top. There must be what Hayek talks about, it’s mechanisms of spontaneous order. Piaget makes the same case. And so do the biologists who study the emergence of morality from games. It’s the same idea. I mean, Panksepp, Joach Panksepp showed that if you, rats will strive to, juvenile rats strive to play, they’ll work to rough and tumble play, which you’d think would be an expression of power. But, and if you pair a rat with another rat that’s 10% bigger, the 10% bigger rat will pin the smaller rat. And so you watch that once and you think, power. But then you repair them repeatedly. And the next time they meet, the little rat asks the big rat to play. And there’s ways they do that. They kind of look like the way dogs invite to play. And then the big rat will deign to play. But if he doesn’t let the little rat win one third of the time across repeated playabouts, the little rat won’t play. And that’s like, that’s rats, you know, and now they have complex social hierarchies, but that’s like, that’s a major league finding, right? Because even rat hierarchies, and they’re not known for their moral nature, rats, you know, there’s more of this element of play. And play is actually a specific mammalian circuit. And, you know, in a conversation like this, there’s plenty of play too. And that’s one of the things that makes it extremely. And so that animating spirit is also the spirit of play. And play is the manner in which we experiment with manifestations of the ideal. That’s what play is. Right. And the point is that it’s organic, it’s, as it were, it’s spirit driven, it’s not rationalized, it’s not imposed, as it were, from the top down. There’s a kind of organized chaos, as it were, chaos permitted within certain parameters. And I think that’s what any good driving university ought to aim to be, as it were. Sorry, that’s what a walled garden is. Exactly that. It’s the bordering of a zone where chaos can manifest itself creatively. Right. Right. Well, then another way of thinking, saying it would be that the walls of the university, and the walls of any thriving intellectual culture should be the walls of a walled garden. As it were, that the chaos, as it were, has parameters, but there should be complete freedom for the people who the university is entrusted with research and teaching to test and to pursue their ideas. Some of them may be disastrously wrong. Others will end up being brilliantly right. And they will, over time, be a kind of, precisely through this freedom, precisely because it’s implausible to suppose that any, to guess that three or four brilliant academics will have all the answers to all the questions, that there’s a kind of, a sort of spirit of intellectual inquiry that animates that seemingly quite chaotic process, but it’s what yields extraordinary- I think that is true. I mean, I’ve had a vision of the proper father within a family as he who sets the parameters within which play can occur. So when children develop, their play is unbelievably important. I mean, that’s how they structure themselves and their social relations. And so if they’re deprived of play, Panks have demonstrated this too, rats that are deprived of play, their prefrontal cortices don’t mature properly, and you can use attention deficit disorder drugs like Ritalin to combat that behaviorally. And then if you let them play, they have a burst of play, and their brains develop. And so the proper paternal spirit sets boundaries, which wall out too much chaos and allow playful endeavor to manifest itself within that walled enclosure. And that’s part of this animating spirit as well. That’s not power. And it has this spontaneity and this capacity for spontaneity, generation of spontaneous order that you described. Yeah. Yeah. And look, I think that’s also where belief systems can help, that is, but belief systems that are not too prescriptive. And so what we’re looking for are certain norms, guardrails, coordinating that help to animate these coordinating mechanisms that are not too prescriptive. So this- okay, I want to talk to both of you about this then. So, you know, if you look at how people describe their religious belief now, they’re not going to church and they’re not admirers of dogma, but they describe themselves in the majority as spiritual. So there’s this spirit dogma paradox. Now the problem, and you see this even in people like Sam Harris, because he’s technically atheistic, but he’s very interested in spiritual pursuits. He doesn’t want to concretize that. And maybe that’s because it would then become prone to rational critique and he doesn’t want to lose it. Right. But the thing is, is that you need dogma. Like Osiris and Horus, they’re part and parcel of the same thing. And you can’t move ahead without axiomatic presuppositions. The issue is they have to be, it seems to me, and maybe this has to do with the Christian idea that you’re supposed to look for the evil within. You know, you’re destined to operate with a set of axiomatic presuppositions. You can’t help it. You can’t make a move forward without it, but you should be cognizant at the same time that in many ways that you don’t understand that you’re radically wrong. And the play then is something like an exploration of that. Yes, absolutely. I don’t know if Nigel wanted to add any thoughts on that, but yes, I think that’s absolutely right. I mean, I think it was Chesterton who once said that the only alternative to the doctrine of original sin is the doctrine of original perfection. It’s a kind of, what do we have a tendency towards? Tendency towards the good that has been corrupted towards the bad. So I think there is a sense that certainly within most established religions that there’s a kind of, generally speaking, an account of human nature that has a story to tell about what the evil within us is and what that tendency is. And I think that injects, even in the kind of worst chapters in the history of institutional religion, a certain humility, a certain healthy pessimism in the possibilities of human being, a kind of an estimation that there’s going to be fragility, there’s going to be a lot of mistakes. And this is very, very different from the kind of dewy-eyed, optimistic account of human nature that we get that we get from the enlightenment, that all that needs to be done is to clear away superstition. And then we can look forward to, as it were, the sunlit uplands of a perfect utopia where everyone is kind and nice to each other. Well, the graveyards and the concentration camps of the 20th century have certainly undercut that hope. So yes, I mean, this idea of fragility and that sense that society somehow needs those sorts of guardrails, those sorts of parameters that will anticipate mistakes and human frailty is crucial. Governments struggle to deliver that. All right. Well, let me ask Nigel a question here that comes out of this discussion. Nigel, you talked earlier about the idea that a religious belief in some sense could be an inoculation against idolatry and ideology. And so I want to ask you a bit more about that, but with a twist on this idea about evil, because one of the things that I don’t like about the claim of oppressive patriarchy is that it identifies evil externally in the social world. It’s that malevolence exists. So that’s kind of an original sin variant, the idea that there is in fact malevolence and evil. Well, where is it? Well, it’s in society and then it’s in this patriarchal spirit. It’s like, well, that’s really dangerous as far as I’m concerned, because, well, if it’s someone else and they’re evil, then all the restraints are lifted. And we’ve seen that many, many times in the 20th century. And there’s a Christian, the Christian idea, I believe, and I don’t think it’s limited to Christianity, but it’s very well developed in Christianity, is that the best place to search for evil is within. And you’re likely to find plenty of it as well. And it’ll keep you occupied if you want something to do. And so is that part of an inoculation? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, just going back to your earlier comments about postmodernism, it struck me when postmodernists say that everything around us is about power and the abuse of power. Ironically, it gives the postmodernists license to abuse power in the treatment of other people. So, for example, because I’m white, privileged, and God help me, in Oxford, nothing I say about, let’s say, colonialism is taken seriously, because, of course, it’s only a rationalization of my social or political interests. And so my critics never take what I say seriously, don’t listen to what I say, constantly misrepresent what I say, constantly do me injustices. But it’s justified because they’re in the right and I’m clearly motivated by unjust power. Ironically, of course, they are abusing power themselves, but they don’t see it. So it’s often struck me that one feature of, for want of a more scientific term, the social justice crusade is that it is a kind of Christian heresy, heresy being a kind of unbalanced form of Christianity. Because on the one hand, the social justice warrior has certainly got the bit about the moral ire of the Old Testament prophets, they got that bit. And hypothetical concern for the dispossessed. And indeed, absolutely, absolutely. So that’s all right. But what they lack is a Christian sense of compassion for weak, feeble humanity, which we all are, we’re all crooked. And this sense that the line between good and evil runs right down the middle of every one of us. So therefore, no Christian can regard someone who’s done wrong as simply subhuman or of another kind than themselves, because we’re all sinners. And it’s that sense of universal common sin that generates the obligation of compassion, even for the longer. So does that mean, does that mean technically then that you judge someone’s character by how they treat their enemies? That’s a fundamental Christian claim. Because I do believe very frequently that people who say the central animating spirit of civilization is power, is a confession and a desire, both at the same time. That’s interesting. Yeah. I really believe that. And in any case, so the issue of the enemy. So there’s a couple of thoughts that are jumbled together in my mind. So I was thinking, one of the things I tried to figure out for a very long time was why the snake in the Garden of Eden was associated with Satan. It’s a very, very weird thing. And it’s outside the domain of rationality. It’s an intuitive leap of unbelievable magnitude. When I think I figured it out, it just about flattened me. So there’s an idea that the snake is the enemy of mankind, and that’s a biological reality. Serpent, the devouring serpent is the enemy of mammals. We could say that. It’s a very old idea. So then the question is, well, we have an enemy that we have to contend with. Right. That’s an adaptive question. We have it. What is the enemy? Well, it’s a snake. Well, it’s a snake in the garden. And that means that no matter how well you build the walls and how carefully you aggregate the territory, there’s still that possibility of malevolence. And so then the question is, well, what’s the malevolence? Well, it’s the snake. Well, maybe it’s the existence of snakes. But then then it gets psychologized. It’s like, well, it’s the snake in your soul. You know, it could be the snake in your enemy. But then even more sophisticated, it’s not. No, the ultimate enemy is the snake in your soul. And you see that right away in Genesis with the story of Cain and Abel, because Cain is possessed by the enemy, the adversary. Right. It’s an analogy of the story. It’s an analog of the relationship between Christ and Satan, more concretized. But it’s so sophisticated. Right. Because one of the things that humanity has to figure out is what’s our enemy? What can destroy us? It’s like, well, the snake, that’s natural world and predation. It’s, well, what about that in other people? Well, yes, what about that? We can demonize the enemy in no time. But if we’re really sophisticated, we think, no, no, no. The most fundamental adversary is the one within. And then that also offers the opportunity of something like a romantic adventure, because you can tell young people to overthrow the oppressive patriarchal tyrant. Or you could say, no, you should seriously contend with the evil within. That’s a far more difficult endeavor and a far more noble endeavor. And it seems to me that that’s something a religiously inspired humanities would make that a central issue. And that’s part of the building of character. So your point about the snake is well taken. On the one hand, it is a kind of objectification of evil, because the evil lies in the snake. Right. But your point is well taken. The snake is in the garden. No one explained how it got there. It’s just there. It’s on the inside, not the outside. So here’s a question to you. That all makes sense. And what that means is that no human enemy can ever be entirely the enemy, because the enemy is also us. And so that’s a restraint on the way which we treat those who are trying to lecture to my students about Nazism, particularly the concentration camp situation, that the best way to understand that is as a perpetrator, not a victim. Oh, yeah. But okay. Yes. Do your students use students get this because they just as warriors don’t seem to get it? They’re never taught it. They’re never taught it. They don’t take this. You know, like I took the idea that there was something to learn from Nazism and what happened in the communist state seriously. It’s like the idea there’s an idea that’s promulgated, promoted in particular by Jewish people, and rightly so, that we should never forget what happened in Nazi Germany. But then I think, well, what do you mean, forget? You mean, remember? Well, what do you mean, remember? You mean, understand? Well, what does it mean to understand? That’s easy. You’re the perpetrator. So you have to think, well, would you have been a Nazi concentration camp guard? It’s possible that the answer is no. But it’s also possible that the answer is yes, because they were people. And there isn’t, there isn’t that much evidence. The evidence that they were all psychopathic. That’s, that’s pretty slim. There, there were certainly psychopaths among them. And so that’s a terrifying thing to contend with. It’s like, you aren’t the victim. You’re aren’t the victim. You weren’t the hero who rescued the Jews. Or maybe you’re all of those, you know, and fair enough, we could investigate all those possibilities. But perpetrator, that’s right up there, man. And then you could see, well, the social justice warriors are insisting upon that in some sense, too. Because they say, well, look at the evil. It’s like, fair enough, you know, who can, who can dispute that? But, but it’s the locale. It’s because they’re not the responsibility isn’t within it becomes too easily pathologized. That’s what it looks like to me. And it and it takes away the adventure. I mean, this is one of the things that I’ve been trying to talk to Christian professors. I don’t mean professors, technically, but about the fact that this the adventure that’s part and parcel of this ethical process is not sold enough to young people because they would buy it if it was it was as romantically portrayed as the opportunity to participate in the self righteous riot. I think you’re both onto something very, very important that that the as soon as we start to project to sin and culpability onto systems and structures, right and away from from individual agency, things start to go very, very badly wrong. I know that there’s a I think they believe there’s a tradition in Ignatian Catholic spirituality. It’s called the contemplative Loki, where you are supposed to this is a counter reformation idea where you’re supposed to read the Gospels very, very carefully and you’re supposed to imagine yourself there. And one common theme is that you’re supposed to imagine yourself at the at the foot of the cross, not, as it were, as a friend or as a follower of Christ, but as part of the mob. Much more likely statistically, right. And I seem to remember that in the filming of the Passion of the Christ in 2004, Mel Gibson, the hands that you see hammering the nails of Christ of the actor playing Christ Jim Cavazile into the cross were Mel Gibson’s. And so his point was that you that sin is not other people. And sin, by the way, is not a syndrome. Worst sin is assumption that it’s other people. Right. And I think increasingly now the idea that it’s that it can be outsourced not just to systems and structures, but to pathologies or therapeutic conditions. And so the idea is that that sin is, as I said just now, that it’s not so much we don’t believe in sin anymore, so much as syndromes, which is profoundly disempowering. That is to say you’re because you’re medicalizing, you’re you’re pathologizing, you’re wrongdoing. And as soon as you’ve done that, you are not able to address it or overcome it. You’re not able to, as it were, develop those habits of responsibility that you write about so well and that I think is part of the reason that young people are so sort of drawn to your ideas. It is something that overcomes us. When I tell people, tell young people to clean up the room, it isn’t because I think the room is trivial. I think it’s because the room is way more important than they think it is. And they can discover that. And it’s part of this localization of ignorance and malevolence. And I think it is part of central Christian thought that it’s more difficult to rule yourself than to rule the city and that the prime place for motivation about the sins of the world is to start with yourself. And I can’t see how that, if it isn’t yourself, then it’s something else, right? Then it’s something else. Well then it’s the natural world and resentment will rise from that or it’s the place your forefathers built. So now let’s talk about this idea that this movement is a heretical brand of Christianity or an offshoot of Christianity a bit. It’s one of the questions you guys had forwarded to me. So what are the similarities? We talked about a couple of them. What are the differences? We talked about a couple of them too, I guess. Is there anything else there to flesh out? No, so on the one hand, the similarity is the passion for justice and concern for the marginalized and the poor. That’s all good. But there is this notion that the problem lies elsewhere, a complete sense of self-righteousness, and therefore a complete lack of forgiveness or compassion for those whom you think are wrong. I mean, just going forward to the point you made, I mean, you said, Jordan, that when you impress this on your students, that the source of evil may lie inside them and that it’s possible that they might through weakness have been a camp guard, not a liberator. They’re scared by this notion, and I can understand why. Or through delight in cruelty. It’s not mere weakness. It’s like, don’t be thinking this might not appeal in a very remarkable way to the darkest parts of your nature. And that’s a terrible thing to investigate. So fear can be paralyzing. So how do you move them beyond that point? And I was thinking— Well, part of it is I tell them, or make it implicit too, that you cannot understand your possibility for good until you understand your possibility for evil, because you don’t take yourself seriously enough. It’s like, well, you’re kind of an 18-year-old ne’er-do-well, or maybe you’re a 40-year-old ne’er-do-well. What does it matter? You’re just a collection of dust in some speck-like place in the outer cosmos anyways. It’s like, no, no, you look at what you’re withholding and what you’re inflicting. And unless you’re going to say that pain itself is irrelevant, how can you say that your sins are trivial? And if they’re not, well, then you’re not trivial. You’re certainly not trivial as a perpetrator. So then the question is, how non-trivial could you be as a savior instead of a perpetrator? And so that lights a spark. It’s like, well—and all these kids, they’re looking, who could I be? Well, I say you could be a perpetrator, but you could be the opposite of that. Whatever. We could start with perpetrator, and we could flesh out the opposite. And they’re on board with that. And no wonder, because, like, of course, right? It’s certainly consistent, Jordan, with some very influential accounts of how the Holocaust could possibly have happened, leaving to one side this difficult neurologic debate about the uniqueness of the shower and so on. I think, is it Christopher Browning or Richard Browning, that extraordinary book? Christopher. Yeah, where he studies that police battalion involved at one of the—I think one of the Einsatzgruppen, and just the staggering normality of the people involved in that, conscripted, they were not die-hard ideologues, die-hard believers. They weren’t brainwashed. They even objected. They weren’t punished when they objected. Yeah, quite extraordinary. It is. It is. It’s a deadly book. It’s a terrifying book. It’s incredible. I always thought Hannah around had it backwards. It’s not the evil of banality. It’s not the banality of evil. It’s the evil of banality. It’s the evil of banality. Yes. And I think that’s a lovely thing to tell undergraduates, too. It’s like, your life is banal. Well, that isn’t who you are. That isn’t who you should be. It’s like, the only thing that can justify this suffering is a great adventure. It’s, well, what’s the greatest adventure? It’s ethical endeavor. And you have to be able to say that without cliché. And you say, well, you struggle with the adversary within. You want an adventure. And see what happens if you tell the truth, because you don’t know what’s going to happen if you tell the truth. Because you’re agenda-free, right? It’s like you’re not trying to manipulate the world to deliver, in the Heideggerian sense, of delivering standing resources. You’re not an exploiter. You’re an explorer. And these kids, they come into the university with a veneer of cynicism. And it’s this deep, because they’re only 18. They’re 19. There’s no cynicism there at all. And then that cynicism is fed. And they get more cynical and angry, because, well, they came to the place of wisdom and were turned away with more cynicism. Now, I was going to tell you guys, I talked to Yeonmi Park. And I posted this video the other day. And she’s a defector from North Korea. And we went through her story. And she wrote this book called In Order to Live, which is a harrowing book. Although I don’t think it’s as harrowing to read as it is harrowing to talk to her. But in any case, her book ends in 2016. So I asked her, what did she do after 2016? And she went through high school and university in South Korea, high school and all the primary school in one year, locked herself in a room, basically, and went through it all in one year, and then went to a South Korean university. And they’re hard, South Korean universities. And then after she wrote her book, which was inspired, by the way, by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, was very interesting. She went to Columbia to take humanities degree. And I thought, well, what a remarkable story. This girl escapes from starvation and famine and cruelty and totalitarianism in North Korea. Slavery in China makes her way to New York and goes to Columbia University. She said it was the dream of her father that she’d be educated. And I said, how was it? She said it was a total waste of time and money. And I said, it shocked me. It really shocked me because we just had a talk about the ennobling possibility of literature, let’s say, with regard to Orwell. And I said, it was the only time in the whole conversation that I actually saw her cynical, which is really something to say, given what she’d been through. I said, that can’t be right. That can’t be right. Like, surely there was one professor, there was one course that led you down the road of the perennial philosophy, let’s say, or that held up that golden thread. And she thought, she said, when I took a human biology course, I learned about evolution, but it got politically correct near the end. And that was it. She didn’t, she couldn’t say one thing about it. And so, well, if that’s what young people are receiving when they go to an august institution like that, it’s no bloody wonder their cynicism is redoubled, especially when that’s what’s taught to them. We’re all power mad oppressors and despoilers of the planet and, and then avatars of our group power. It’s like, how could you come out of that anyway, but entirely dispirited and also angry? Well, I’ve got to say, just speaking, just speaking in defense of my, my own students, or at least the system as I, as I’ve experienced it, my students have been, you know, quite, quite extraordinary and very, very promising. And they seem to have not, not really picked up any of these, these kind of ideological pathologies. But I think we, at the same time, do have to sit back and look at the problem more widely. And Nigel and I have spoken about this an awful lot in the last few years through his experiences in Oxford and similar experiences here in, here in Cambridge, that, that there does seem to be a crisis of the university in the West, a sense of, you might call it an identity crisis, a sense that we can’t any longer answer the question, what are universities for? There’s one traditional way of thinking about that. And that is to say, roughly speaking, that for the pursuit of truth and, and goodness and beauty, and it’s going to be chaotic and messy. But then there are competing visions as to what the university is for. We can certainly talk about the perennial philosophy. I mean, that just seems to me to be self-evident, is we’re, we’re having a conversation down the generations about the nature of humanity and its ideal. And that’s what the university is there to foster. So the humanities are at the core. And then it branches out into science and, and, and, and, and, and the professions, but that’s the heart. And the heart is this discussion of the perennial philosophy. And, and it does, I can’t understand really why that case isn’t made more explicitly and also in some sense, somewhat self-evident. I mean, I presume that, that, that I can’t understand why we’re so weak in the face of this criticism. It’s like, what the hell’s wrong with us? Is it we don’t, is it because we’re called to be explicit about things that, that we don’t know how to be explicit about? You know, we’re taken aback by the critique in some sense. I think part of the problem, Jordan, might be just a structural one, that the university is no longer a university, but much more a multiversity. And that we are, as it were, increasingly fragmented, sometimes for very good reasons, into increasingly specialized silos. Often, even within the same overarching discipline. I mean, one of the things I love working, one of the reasons I love working in a divinity faculty is that it does, as it were, have a single, roughly speaking anyway, a single organizing horizon. And so that I can have colleagues who are sociologists or anthropologists, they work in Eastern religions, I’m a philosopher, but they’re theologians, historians, textual specialists, and so on. Roughly speaking, we’re part of a single, a single ecosystem, but that is not, not the case elsewhere. And so there’s a kind of fragmentation that makes it very, very difficult to have the sorts of conversations that we’ve been having. It’s a tower of babble. Right? Everybody’s speaking different languages. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perspectives. Yeah, yeah. And what happens after that? That’s after that’s the flood. It’s not been my experience among my humanities colleagues that what they think they’re about are the kinds of deep existential questions that the perennial philosophy raises. I think a lot of them have lost sight of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. And I think that’s part of the problem. I mean, certainly when I studied history in the 1970s, most of it was, was mind boring. It was soul destroying. It was really tedious because, because apart from the few courses where actually moral questions were raised, or even religious ones, it wasn’t really clear what the point of this stuff was. I mean, if I can say so, Nigel, I think we have a special responsibility as theologians or those who work within theology to, which used to be, of course, the queen of the sciences. The idea being that it was a discipline, not so much a discipline, but a kind of ecosystem of different disciplines that did at least have some story to tell about how all the different avenues of human inquiry could fit together and what place they might have. Now, even if that’s completely wrong, it, as it were, what it would, what would be required to displace that integrated system would be a rival integrated system that was at least comparable in terms of explanatory power and capacity to accommodate all these different, different approaches. Well, so in some sense, your claim, I think, is that, you know, if that unitary principle is lacking, and we talked about the unitary principle as the spirit that engenders the perennial philosophy, if that unitary spirit is fragmented and lacking, then something corrupt comes in to fill the void, or something partial, or something limping and crippled in some sense, right? A pathologized religion. And then that, of course, leads to the question, well, how do you know when a religion is pathologized and when it’s not? But we got there to some degree there today, we say, well, part of the hallmark of a religion that’s got its act together in some sense is that it locates evil within rather than without. And that’s an interesting proposition and seems at least worthy of consideration. And that’s important because it generates humility and therefore generates a certain restraint in the way you treat other people you disagree with. If you don’t have that, you can’t have a liberal space. You have people shouting at each other. So I think that’s really, really important. I mean, maybe part of it too is the Socratic insistence upon ignorance. It’s like, I’m fundamentally ignorant and prone to malevolence. Fix me, right? It’s something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And who would argue with that? Well, Socrates might argue with it. I mean, Socrates, he does think that knowledge is key, that ignorance is the awareness of our epistemic finitude is crucial. He thinks malevolence and wrongdoing is just a failure of knowledge. So that, as it were, moral failure is a kind of cognitive failure, or it’s an epistemic failure. And I mean, Aristotle can’t handle that at all. He thinks that there’s actually something deep within us that leads us to go wrong. But yes, I mean, that Socratic idea, the Socratic principle of dialectical diversity, that is to say, of kind of fruitful friction between two or more positions. I mean, I think that that model, which is at the heart of the Oxford and Cambridge model, that is to say, broadly, we do have lectures and we do have seminars of graduate students, but that sort of the idea of a tutor in a room, a supervisor with one, two, possibly three students, and as it were modeling that kind of dialogical collaborative inquiry into the truth is, you know, that’s what we’re doing right now, hopefully. Right. And like I said, it’s very difficult to overstate the audience hunger for that. It’s especially when it’s working. I mean, people are drawn to it and pleased, very pleased that it’s happening. And there’s public demand for I mean, when I talk, you know this, when I talk to Harris in Dublin in London, we had like eight thousand and ten thousand people and it was a good faith conversation, you know, and when we asked the audience if they wanted to switch to Q&A or continue the dialog, they were overwhelmingly in support of continuing the dialog. And we’ve underestimated that we’ve underestimated public intelligence, partly because of technological shortcoming, I think, is that there is a hunger for this and it’s being fed by ideologies. If it isn’t fed properly, it’s fed by ideologies. And I don’t know what to make of the ignorance versus malevolence idea, you know, I mean, it’s a little a column A and a little a column B because I do see the delight. Like, let me tell you a quick story. So you tell me if you think this is ignorance or malevolence. So when I debated Slavoj Zizek, I did a 15 minute critique of the Communist Manifesto and there were a lot of radical leftists in the audience and they’d come to hear Zizek, you know, take me apart, although that isn’t what happened in the discussion. We just had a discussion and I mentioned at one point that the Communist Manifesto was an incitement to bloody violence and mayhem. And like a fifth of the audience laughed and cheered. And it was that that Freudian revelation of unconscious motivation. You know, they’re all individuals in the crowd, so they’re masked. They can manifest their darkest motivations without fear of revelation. And it just stopped me cold for about 10 seconds. And I thought, yeah, yeah, no kidding. It’s like we’ll go dance in the streets when things are burning. And is that towards some higher good or is it just, it’s about time those bastards got what they deserved. And it isn’t obvious to me that that’s a manifestation of the striving for higher good. I mean, it’s complicated, right? Because if you identify evil, in some sense, you have an obligation to deal with it. But then if you don’t identify the evil that’s within and you externalize it, your motives are suspect right away because it’s just too convenient. And you might say, well, that’s ignorance. And I do think that’s part of it. But the convenience factor is it can’t be overlooked. Like, first of all, your moral obligation is only to persecute those who are evil. So that lifts a huge weight off your shoulders. And then you get to do anything terrible you want because you’ve identified the adversary himself and it’s not you. And if that’s ignorance, it’s so deep that it transforms itself at that point into a kind of willfully blind malevolence. That’s how it looks to me. Certainly, that’s true. I mean, I’ve been reading more and more of René Girard recently and the way he describes these sort of crowd pathologies and the way that a kind of a mob can, as it were, lose its mind through mimetic desire, through simply imitating what they take the rest of the crowd to be doing. I find it to be- They’re imitating a central animating spirit too, right? I mean, they’re imitating something that you might think of as technically satanic. And that animates the entire crowd. And it’s very difficult to explain something like Nazi Germany without going down that pathway. Yeah. Yes. I think that’s certainly right. And I think the problem in the modern context is that technology and social media in particular, of course, has kind of catalyzed that mania, that more malevolent spirit in the crowd. And it’s escalated that the possibilities of ostracism and kind of digital star chambers and cancel culture and so on and so forth. And it’s something that we’re going to- As it were, the genie’s out of the bottle and it’s very, very difficult to work out how one can come up with a clear diagnosis and a clear prescription for how we get- Well, I’ll tell you something that’s pretty interesting is when I have a conversation like this and it goes well, and then thousands of people comment, the comments are unbelievably positive. And so it’s possible for that conversation to be de-pathologized in the presence of the appropriate conversation. If you look at that conversation with Yonmi Park, that the comments are so unbelievably positive that it’s difficult to- They’re as positive in a shocking way as Twitter mob comments can be shocking in a negative way. And so then it’s up to people who can engage in an intense dialogue at the edge of what we know to do so, and I think increasingly to do so publicly because the technology affords us that possibility. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it’s not all bad. And it can offer forms of belonging, even though it’s only virtual belonging, that can really satisfy an urge for community and a sense that atomization, the atomization that we’ve seen over the last few decades can be overcome. Yeah. And I think a lot of- It affords the possibility, too, of these dialogical investigations that might have been isolated to Cambridge and Oxford to become part of the public dialogue. Wouldn’t that be something at all? I’m pretty sure both sides would benefit from that sort of exchange. And another ground of hope is, my consistent experience has been that the noisy, shouty, illiberal people are a minority. There’s a much larger majority of people who are uncertain and intimidated, but in the right circumstances could be liberated and would welcome this kind of honest, rational give and take, or reason kind of exchange. So I think that that’s a ground for hope, too. Whatever the disadvantages that the disinhibiting effects of social media are. Well, maybe we could get fortunate and continue this conversation at some point at Cambridge or Oxford with some other people. That would be really good if we could manage it as far as I’m concerned. And once we can travel again, and once I can travel, I’d really like that. Thank you very much for agreeing to participate in this, and it’s really good to see both of you again. And hopefully we’ll, at the right time, do this again, and maybe with some other people, too. So if you guys can think of some other people that would be good contributors to this, we could open it up a bit, and that would be, if you think it’s worthwhile, that would be good as far as I’m concerned. Absolutely. But let’s work on the siege rather than the flesh over here sooner or later. That would be great. Yeah, I’d like that a lot. I’d like that a lot. Good. Thank you for having us, Jordan. Well done. Thank you very much for the conversation. I really appreciate it. I have too. Bye-bye.