Warriors & Kings ｜ Senator Josh Hawley ｜ EP 361 (I9FgvXkUknc)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=I9FgvXkUknc

And so part of our message to young people is, you know, learn to master yourself. That is to be capable of a kind of liberty, a profound kind of liberty that really has been, we’ve lost sight of in the modern world, but that is profoundly, profoundly transformative and also fulfilling. Hello, everyone. Today I’m speaking once again with Constitutional Lawyer, Missouri Senator and bestselling author, Josh Hawley. We discuss his new book, Manhood, exploring the structural significance of biblical tradition within people’s lives, how those enduring narratives elevate us above human defaults, such as tyranny and slavery, why self-mastery is the precondition for ordered liberty, why young men have lapsed in education, industry and reproduction, and what steps might be available to help, well, individuals and our society put itself back in something like habitable order. Looking forward to it. So I’ve been reading your book this morning, and it was sort of a strange experience, I would say, because strangely enough, or maybe not, it’s structured in a manner that’s almost identical to the book that I’m writing at the moment. How about that? Yeah, yeah. So I’m writing this book called We Who Wrestle with God, and I’m obviously animated by the same spirit, so to speak, that you are, because the books parallel each other quite remarkably. And so I’m hoping my book will be better, but we’ll see. I have no doubt. I have no doubt. Well, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. I have my doubts, but we’re aiming at the same thing. One of the things I’ve been trying to struggle with, too, is you list in your book a number of stories. You’re using biblical stories primarily, and then a number of attributes that you think constitute what might constitute or what might comprise the central aspect of masculinity. So one of the things I’ve been seeing in this, as I’ve been walking through the same process, is that the biblical corpus, which is a library, aggregates a set of illustrative stories and then uses those stories to describe a character to be emulated, and then makes the proposition that that character to be emulated is the manifestation of a single spirit. Right? And that spirit would be the unity in your conceptualization, when you bring this down to earth, so to speak, you talk about men being husbands, fathers, warriors, builders, priests, and kings. Right? Then you could imagine that there’s something behind that that makes it possible for all of that to become manifest. And that’s the monotheistic spirit that the biblical corpus is attempting to characterize. Right? And it looks to me, anthropologically, it looks to me like what’s happened, and I’m not going to speak religiously, but it looks to me like what’s happened is that people in their various tribal groups had dramatized patterns of adaptation, central patterns of adaptation, and then characterized those central patterns of adaptation with the attributes of something like a transcendent deity. And then as the tribes aggregated themselves, each of those visions of transcendent deity had to be integrated. That actually often necessitated war. There’s actual war between different tribes for what vision is going to be dominant, but there’s metaphysical battle too. You know, even Eliada, the Romanian historian of religions, talked about the universal battle between the gods in heaven, which was an attempt in the metaphysical realm, the pleroma is what Jung called it, for these concepts to go to war with one another and then arrange themselves in a hierarchy. And so anyways, it’s quite fascinating to see that the same underlying drive, there’s actually quite a few similarities in our experience. You know, you have Scandinavian ancestry, you had a child that had arthritis as well, and you seem to be wrestling with many of the same problems that have beset me forever. So that was kind of interesting to see that. I also read the Guardian article, Guardian review of your book, which was everything you’d expect and hope for from the Guardian. Yeah, hope for is there. I haven’t read it, so you’re one up on me there. Well, you can just imagine it. Oh, I’m sure. If they’re praising you, then you’ve done something wrong. That’s my usual motto. Yeah. Yeah, well, that’s the thing, you know, if there’s to some degree, if you’re not irritating the correct people, you’re doing something wrong. That’s something we could talk about too, because one of the dangers of the sort of enterprise we’re involved in is the possibility of, you know, increasing the degree of polarization, rather than offering a positive vision, which is what you’re trying to do. It’s a strange book for a politician to write. So let’s start with that. Why do you write this book? Tell everybody a little bit about the book and then tell me why you were motivated to write it. Well, I was motivated to write it because I’ve got two little boys at home. I’m a father of three and my two older are boys and I’ve got a baby girl who’s two years old. But really, Jordan, it was thinking about them. They’re 10 and 8, my boys. And my oldest is Elijah and my second is Blaze. And I write in the book about Blaze Pascal. So you begin to, though I don’t draw this out in the book, I don’t say it explicitly. If you read the book, you begin to get a sense of why my boys are named the way they’re named and why these ideas that I write about are so significant to me. They show up even in my kids’ names and lives. But thinking about my boys and their future is in me. So Elijah, what’s your other, sorry, the other boy’s name? Blaze for Blaze Pascal. Pascal, yeah, yeah. Yeah, who I write about in the book. But really, it was thinking of my boys and my obligation as a father to help them grow into the men that they’re capable of being that set me thinking about the book. And then in my work representing Missouri in the Senate, I get to meet so many men from around Missouri, from around the nation, frankly, and seeing their struggles, seeing the sense of alienation they’re dealing with, the sense of depression, the sense of lack of purpose. I have so many young men tell me that they feel like they don’t have any vision for their lives, that they feel that the media is against them as men, that their educational system is against them as men. So it was really trying to key off of that and offer a positive, affirmative vision for what men are for and why it’s good to be a man. Plus, this will provide you with full access to my new in-depth series on marriage, as well as guidance for creating a life vision and my series exploring the Book of Exodus. You’ll also find there the complete library of all my podcasts and lectures. I have a plethora of new content in development that will be coming soon exclusively on Daily Wire. Plus, voices of reason and resistance are few and far between these strange days. Click on the link below if you want to learn more. And thank you for watching and listening. So this idea, you covered a couple of things there. So that with your sons, for example, that you would like to encourage them to be the men that they’re capable of being. Now, I kind of wonder, I don’t know if this is a reasonable proposition or not, but it might be the maternal tendency is, I think, to value children for what they are. And the maternal tendency is to value children for what they could be. And then if you have that nicely balanced, and I mean, the man can value children for who they are as well, and a woman can encourage what they could be. But broadly speaking, the symbolic proclivity, the essential proclivity seems to be that. And I think that’s partly, perhaps, you tell me what you think about this. Women have to bear the responsibility for primary caregiving in early infancy, in particular. First year. And there isn’t a lot of, there’s an awful lot of taking care of immediate needs in that first year. Like the child’s immediate needs are paramount because the child is so utterly dependent, born early as our human infants are, and in a state of utter dependency. And then, of course, women have to wrestle with the difficulty of transforming from that state of hyper caregiving where needs are predominant, the needs of the moment are predominant, into facilitating the independence of the child. And that seems to me to be where the paternal, the patriarchal, the father is particularly paramount to encourage. Maybe that’s the primary paternal role is to encourage. So is that in keeping with the experience that you had as a father? Does that make sense to you? Is there anything you’d add to that? No, that has been my experience. And I can remember before I was a father, and I tell the story in the book, when I was a coach, I was a young man, I was 23 at the time, I was coaching a group of rowers, kids, a young high school team, a crew team, and this was in the UK, actually. And I remember I tell the story in the book, I had this moment where there was a scene, during one of our training sessions, where I saw one of the rowers encourage, take a leadership role with one of the younger ones. And in that split second, I saw like a flash what this kid, he’s probably a junior at the time, 17 years old, what he might be in the future. I saw maturity in him. I saw characteristics I had never seen before. And it struck me. It’s like, oh, wow, he could really become something. He could become a great leader, a strong leader. I saw a flash of the man he could be. And suddenly in seeing that, I realized my role, my job as a coach to him was to help encourage that and call it forth. And for me, Jordan, I tell that story because that is to me a parallel fatherhood. That helped me get ready for what I think fatherhood is, which is to see that in my kids, my boys and my girl, and to help call that forth, to help call forth what they could be, and to be willing to sacrifice myself and my interests in order to see them develop and grow. I was fortunate enough to conduct a seminar on Exodus in Miami. And one of the stories we evaluated in some depth was the story of the burning bush. In that story, which occurs in that episode, which occurs before Moses as a leader, he’s wandering along, minding his own business, intent on his own purposes, you might say, and something captures his interest and glitters and gleams. It’s a phenomenon. Phenomenon means it’s from the Greek phainisthai, and phainisthai means to shine forth. And so something grips his attention and makes itself manifest. And he turns off the path to investigate it. He decides to further investigate. And he does that of his own free choice. The story makes that quite clear. So something calls to him, but it’s him that decides to go investigate it. As he gets closer to it, he hears a voice, and it tells him that he’s starting to tread on sacred ground. And so he has to take off his shoes. What that seems to mean is that if something makes itself manifest to you and you pursue it deeply, you go deeper. And if you go deep enough, you enter sacred ground. And that’s by definition, right? Because what’s deep and what’s sacred, that’s the same thing. Technically, it’s the same idea. And everybody has a sense of depth compared to shallowness, let’s say. And so Moses doesn’t stop merely because he’s on sacred ground. He continues to investigate further. And at some point, as a consequence of his engagement, at least in part, it’s the voice of God itself that speaks to him. It speaks with the voice of being and becoming. God says something like, I am that I am, or I am what I will be, or I have been what I will become. It’s the voice of being and becoming and of eternity that speaks to him. And what that seems to mean is something like, if you pursue something that captures your interest with sufficient intensity, then the voice of being itself will make itself manifest to you. And that’s what happens when people take something seriously. And that’s when Moses becomes a leader, right? Because that’s when God tells him to go talk to the Pharaoh. And it’s not until that transformation occurs, and it’s very much akin to the story that you tell. Because it’s a minor story in some ways, right? That experience you had when you were coaching Roe. It’s a mundane story. It’s the sort of thing in some way that could happen to anyone. But you said it struck you, and it also shaped the way that you conceptualized fatherhood. And that you could see the potential in this young man. All that happened at the same time. Yes. Yes. All of it happened at the same time. And it was a significant moment. It was a mundane setting, I suppose, much like a bush in the wilderness, right? But it was a significant moment in that it really shaped my sense of, at the time, as a 23-year-old coaching a group of kids, what is it I’m supposed to be doing with these kids? And it just like a flash. I thought I’m supposed to be helping them not only become better athletes, of course, but to become the men that they might be. And there was a sense of sort of responsibility that came with that. Having seen who these kids might be, having seen what they might be, having seen their potential, I was obligated to help call that forth. And I think as a father, that’s absolutely what we do as fathers. And that’s the responsibility we have as fathers. Well, you know, it’s interesting. One of the things that has been a phenomenon that’s been continual in the lectures that I’ve been doing around the world is the proclivity of the audience to fall absolutely silent. When I discuss the relationship between responsibility and meaning, and I’m suggesting to the people that I’m talking to that one of the things that you need in life is a meaning that will sustain you through suffering. That’s almost like a definition of a deep meaning, right? It’ll sustain you through suffering. And I offer the possibility that the place you find that is in responsibility. And this is something conservatives have been bad at. They’re bad at it because they hector and lecture young people about what they should do as if it’s a kind of detached morality. You should be good because being good is the right thing. It’s like an abstract call to duty. And there’s something in that. I don’t want to be cynical about that, but that’s not the core issue. The core issue, I think, is the fact that in that adoption of responsibility, you find the deepest meaning. And that’s really true on the mentoring front. My graduate supervisor, for example, his name is Robert Peel. He’s still alive. I still work with him. And I went to his fest shrift, which was a celebration of his academic career when he retired. And he had about 40 people there. They were students mostly that he had mentored. And it was an extremely positive event. And the reason for that was because Bob was a very, very good mentor. He gave credit where credit was due. He tried to develop people and he didn’t take he distributed his ideas widely and was generous with them. And he taught people how to be independent and how to conduct themselves as independent researchers. And he helped them develop their lives and their careers as scientists and academics and clinicians. And he was really good at it. And he really liked doing it. That’s the crucial issue here. It’s that there’s a meaningfulness in mentorship that justifies the sacrifice. Because you might say, well, why bother developing other people? And part of the answer to that, this isn’t just a hedonistic answer, is that, well, there isn’t anything that’s more delightful and meaningful to do than that. As far as I can tell. I mean, maybe my relationship with my wife in some ways would triumph over that. And some of the intellectual interests that I’ve pursued. But other than that, that pleasure in aiding the best in other people to come forward. I don’t think there is a deeper pleasure than that. No, I agree with you. I don’t think there is either. And just to your point about the power of responsibility and why it’s sure we want to call people to duty. Yeah, of course. But the power of responsibility, it is the most transformative thing in your life. I believe that’s been my experience and my observation. If you want to exercise influence in life. I think every man wants to be influential and wants to leave a legacy. And I’ve become convinced over the years that if you want to have influence, if you want to leave a legacy, take on responsibility and pour into other people. I mean, you talk about transforming yourself, yes, but also transforming the lives of others and ultimately transforming the world around you. That is done through shouldering responsibility and sacrifice, living in a sacrificial way that empowers and enables others. It’s the ultimate legacy. And I think there’s something in it for men that they want to hear. They want to be called to that. Yeah. Well, that sacrificial element is extremely interesting. And this, I suppose, brings us back to the biblical motifs that proper work is sacrifice. And that’s a definition again, is that if you’re working, what you’re doing is sacrificing. And you might say, well, what do you mean sacrificing? And the answer is, well, you’re sacrificing the hedonistic whims of the moment for the medium to long term. That’s literally what you’re doing. Well, you could say, and you can think about that in two ways. I think this is very useful. It’s number one, like if you just do what you want right now all the time, one of the problems with that is you’re going to get yourself in trouble. And everyone knows that. This is why two-year-olds can’t really live on their own because they’re whim predicated and they will do what they want to do right bloody well now with no thought whatsoever for the iterating consequences of that into the future. And so because people are self-conscious and can see the future, we have to bind our actions in the present in relationship to our future selves. So you have to act now so you don’t hurt you tomorrow and you next week and you next month and you in a year and five years and 10 years and maybe even when you retire. And that’s actually a community, right? It’s a community of potential selves that extends across time. And I don’t think there’s any difference between that and serving the community as a whole. I think that’s the same ethos. And so the sacrifice would be joint. It’s this you sacrifice the whims of the moment. So that’s delayed gratification and maybe a definition of maturity. You sacrifice that because it’s a better medium to long term contract or covenant with yourself. But at the same time, that applies to everyone else because there’s no difference between me serving who I’m going to be when I’m 75 and me serving other people. And so that that ethos unites. And then the payoff for that is that I think the payoff for that emotionally is the sense of meaning and purpose that suffuses that enterprise. And that’s not exactly a hedonic. It’s not a hedonic pleasure, right? It’s not infantile satiation. It’s a deeper and more comprehensive. It’s a deeper and more comprehensive mode of experience. And it’s worth sacrificing for. And it’s real. Yes. And there’s a connection here, I think, also with liberty and freedom. And this is something that I talk about in the book, you know, that in order to experience true liberty, self-discipline, self-mastery, and yeah, self-sacrifice is necessary. Of course, this is a tradition that goes all the way back to the Greeks and the Romans. It’s certainly there in the Bible that says as we learn to discipline our passions in the moment, as we learn to discipline our whims in the moment, as we learn to master ourselves, we become possible of a kind of liberty where we can see our true interests in the long term. We can see the interests of those around us who we serve. And we can become self-governors literally and then participate in self-government. And I think that the modern left and probably the modern right has completely lost sight of that whole tradition. And so part of our message to young people is, you know, learn to master yourself. That is to be capable of a kind of liberty, a profound kind of liberty that really has been, we’ve lost sight of in the modern world, but that is profoundly, profoundly transformative and also fulfilling. Yeah, well, you know, most young men understand this at least in principle because most young men are interested at least to some degree in games and sports. And if it’s not physical sports, at least it’s video games. And the thing about video games and games in general is that they are ordered, they’re forms of ordered liberty. They’re not chaotic because they have rules. And if you’re going to be good at the game, first of all, if you’re not good at the game, or if you’re not interested in the game, then why the hell play it? So if you’re going to play the game, it’s because you want to be good at it and you want to play it. And so you’ve already bought in. And if you’re going to do that, then you have to follow, you have to abide by the rules. And hopefully you can do that skillfully. And that scales. It’s not just true of games per se. It should be true of your life. You know, when God makes himself manifest to Moses and calls him to be a leader, what he tells him to tell the Pharaoh is something very specific. He says, tell the Pharaoh to let my people go so that they may worship me. Now, the civil rights leaders almost always stress the first part of that statement, but they don’t pull in the second part. And that’s a big mistake because the second part speaks of ordered liberty. And disordered liberty, that’s the desert. Right? That’s where the Israelites end up after they flee the tyranny. It’s a chaotic realm. They can go anywhere and do anything. There’s no up or down. There’s no direction. There’s no leadership. And that’s so terrible that they start to pine for the tyranny. Right? Well, they also start to worship false idols, which is definitely a story for our time. But they also start to pine for that tyranny. And you’re making the case, and you make it repeatedly in the book, that self-mastery is the precondition for ordered liberty. And if the conservatives, and you are doing this in your book, if the conservatives could get the notion that the deepest meaning in life is to be found in the mastery of that ordered liberty, then they have a message they can tell to young men in particular. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So now you’re writing a book here that’s not primarily political. No. And yet you’re operating in the political realm. And so how do you experience the tension between those two? And how do you believe that we could bridge the gap between the motivational, let’s say, and the narrative, the sacred, fundamentally, and the political? And how do you manage to do that in your own life? Or do you? And how do you fall short? Good. Great question. I think that one of the reasons I wrote the book, and you’re right, it’s really not a political book at all. But my conviction is that we have in our culture, and particularly on the left, but also some on the right, we’ve lost sense of and we’ve lost touch with our most foundational moral intuitions and moral foundations. And that’s why I go back to the Bible and the book. And I make the case early on that the biblical tradition is in many ways the foundational story and narrative of the entire Western tradition, certainly the American tradition. So I think that we live in a world, and this is true for young men in particular, where there’s no story, there’s no narrative. What is it that it means to be a man? There’s no narrative there. What is it that I’m supposed to do with my life? There’s no narrative. So I think we’ve got to go back to and recover those narratives. And that’s why I try to recover some of the symbolism of Genesis. What is it a man is called to do? It’s called to make the wilderness into a garden, right? To expand that garden. God makes a garden, the rest of the world is wilderness. What’s Adam there in the garden to do? He’s there to expand the garden into the wilderness. There’s something profound there about what it means to be a man. And you talk about a high calling, because really what God does in Genesis is he gives his work to Adam. He says, all right, I’ve created the world. Now, I’ve created a garden in the midst of the wilderness. Now, Adam, you follow my example. You take this garden, you expand it. You use your responsibility. You use your authority. You use your strength. And you expand it into all the world. And my conviction is men need to hear that story. The same is true. The Bible is making a point with that, of course, that that is there’s an archetype there, an archetypal pattern of what it is men are supposed to do to expand the garden, to bring order from chaos, to make beauty where there’s chaos. And so I think telling those stories is critical then to recovering in our culture some sense of order and purpose and meaning. And then we’ve got to give in our politics. The key is how do we give that voice? How do we then cash that out into policy? And we talk about that if you want. I’ve got all kinds of ideas about that. But I think there’s tremendous value personally and culturally in recovering these foundational stories about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, and what we’re here to do. I like knowing exactly where my meat comes from. And with Moink, I know it’s coming from small family farms all across the country. Moink delivers grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb, pasture, pork and chicken, and sustainable wild-caught Alaskan salmon straight to your door. Moink lets you choose the meat delivered in every box. Select an existing box or create your own. Set your delivery cadence and enjoy delicious meat. 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And let me say, it’s the best bacon you’ll ever taste. I re-upped my subscription because I ran out too fast. Moinkbox.com slash jbp. That’s moinkbox.com slash jbp. So I want to go in two directions with that. So the first direction we might say is there’s only three situations that we can find ourselves in. We can find ourselves united psychologically and socially by an overarching narrative. Or we can let that narrative fragment, which means that we’ll be tribal once again, both socially and psychologically. And the cost of that fragmented tribalism is anxiety and hopelessness and social conflict. That’s the chaotic state of nature, anxiety, hopelessness, and social conflict. Okay, now if you see that, and I think the evidence for that, by the way, is incontrovertible. If you see that, a question arises, which is, well, what might the central unifying narrative be? Now, what’s happened on the left is the central unifying narrative, although the left is often claimed there isn’t one, what they’ve replaced it with, at least implicitly and often explicitly, is a narrative of power. And this is something you touch on in your book too with regards to the ideas of toxic masculinity. And so the accusation is that all social relationships are structured as a consequence of domination and oppression and victimization. And that’s true for marriage, and it’s true for family, traditional family, and it’s true for economic organizations and political organizations. It’s all about power. And so if you accept that, you can see very quickly why the narrative of toxic masculinity might have arisen and been accepted. Because if you believe, and maybe you believe this because you’ve never had any experience with a good man even once in your life. This is often the case, you know, like I talked to Naomi Wolf recently, who’s been a very powerful voice on the leftist front. And you know, she had some bloody brutal experiences with men. She was raped when she was 11, and that didn’t help. And then when she went to university, instead of being mentored, she was hit upon. And in a way that, you know, was reminiscent of what happened to her when she was early. So then she didn’t get mentored. And her whole conception of masculinity, which I believe is rather fragmented, is predicated on her genuine experience of being exploited and hurt. And then we get a cycle, right? You can see a cycle developing there. And so your claim is that the narrative that’s running through the biblical corpus is a good unifying narrative. It’s the right unifying narrative. Now, I just talked with Stephen Fry a couple of days ago. And Stephen is very interested in mythology. And although he’s, I say he likes to shake his fist at God and he has his reasons. And he isn’t convinced at all that there’s a reason that the biblical narrative code per se should be set up as primary. Like, I happen to disagree with him because I think it should be. But it isn’t obvious to me why it should be. You know, and I’ve done a fair bit of delving into mythologies and so forth from all over the world and found lots of useful information in them. So how would you justify, how do you think it’s reasonable to justify your assumption that, you know, it’s back to the Bible to use an old evangelical phrase? Why do you think that makes sense? Why do you think it’s not just like an extension of patriarchal neocolonialism or something of that sort? Two answers. The first one is historical and the more surface answer. And that is for American history, just as a purely historical matter, no text has been more influential. No set of ideas has been more profound in shaping our system of government, our basic moral intuitions than the Bible and the biblical tradition. So in a sense, the first answer is it’s our tradition. Our most fundamental moral intuitions are grounded in that tradition. And I go further. I’d say that’s actually true of the entire Western tradition. You know, Leo Strauss, as you know, had this great saying that it was the interplay of Athens and Jerusalem that really forms the West. And there’s something to that. I’m not a Straussian, but there’s something to that. But the biblical tradition, the Jerusalem tradition is so foundational as a historical cultural matter, number one. Number two, I would say as a Christian, a practicing Christian myself, I think that its power derives from the fact that it’s fundamentally true. I mean, that there’s a reason why the stories of the Bible, both the Old Testament and the Christian New Testament are so profoundly effective and transformative in different cultures over time and certainly in ours, I would argue. And that’s because they touch on something. They’re true. In fact, I would argue they are the truth, capital T. So, you know, whether you accept that second claim or not, I certainly think that the cultural element, it’s just hard to deny that American culture is organized around and derives its, you know, what Charles Taylor would have called the moral sources, right? The moral sources of our culture. The Bible is the moral source. So those would be my arguments. Okay. So let’s take each of those in turn. Let’s start with the historical argument. And so one of the things that strikes me as problematic, let’s say, with projects like the 1619 Project or the leftist insistence in the United States that America, per se, was founded on, let’s say, slavery and oppression. The reason it really bothers me is because I think it’s an anti-truth. I don’t think it’s just a lie because a lie is sort of like a deviation from the truth. But an anti-truth is something that’s exactly the opposite of what’s true. And this is how I look at it. So the first question might be, well, is slavery a universal human proclivity or not? And the answer to me, to that, as far as I can tell, and I’ve done some research into the topic, is yes. It’s the default mode of operation for human cultures has been slavery. And that might be a consequence of our proclivity to engage in war because my suspicions are that the institution of slavery arose as a consequence of capturing enemy combatants, deciding not to kill them, which would be the simple thing to do, and then utilizing them, and also feeling justified in doing that because, well, after all, they were trying to kill you, or there was a reason you were at war. And so we could say, well, slavery is the default condition for social organization. So then what emerges out of that is a kind of miracle. And the miracle to me is that any society ever decided that that was a bad idea. And as far as I can tell, the society that decided that most particularly and explicitly was Great Britain, and that was particularly Wilberforce. And he was an evangelical Christian. And the reason that he opposed slavery, 100% the reason that he opposed slavery, was because he was steeped in the biblical tradition. And so, and then the Brits fought slavery on the high seas for 175 years, and basically eradicated it as at least a morally acceptable enterprise. And the American tradition comes out of that tradition. And even if the US, like other cultures, is contaminated by the desire for power, it’s the anti-slavery ethos that’s actually central to the entire project. And so when the radical types are making the claim that Western culture is essentially slaveholding in its essence, as far as I can tell, they are opposing the only strain of culture, which also wasn’t Western, by the way, because it’s not like the Bible is a Western book, exactly. It’s not European. It’s an import. And so they’re opposing the only strain of thought that’s ever existed that made both a powerful implicit and explicit anti-slavery case. And so that seems to be entirely counterproductive if they actually care about slavery. And then one more twist on that, historically speaking. Well, I don’t think that it’s debatable. The Enlightenment types, like Stephen Pinker would debate this, I think, but I think he’s wrong. I think all the societies in the world that are free and productive and generous, and those would be the societies that people would flee to if they had their choice. All of those are offshoots of the biblical tradition, every single one of them. And I can’t see that as chance. And I also think the same thing about literacy is that without the biblical tradition, it was the biblical tradition and the invention of the printing press that brought literacy to the world. And it needed both of those. The Chinese had the printing press, but they didn’t have that evangelical fervor to elect, to bring everyone up to the pinnacle of self-governance and self-realization. The bloody Brits, they wanted to do that even to their colonies, you know. And Wilberforce talked a lot about that, too, is that it was the obligation of the Brits, as the colonial administrators say, to inculcate in the people who they had colonized the spirit of independence and freedom that would enable them to be self-governing citizens. And I also think that the British Empire managed that to a great degree. You know, there’s plenty of terrible mess and catastrophe along the way, but the US and Canada are both, and Australia and New Zealand, these are great countries. And you can say the same about many of the other Commonwealth countries, including India. They’re beneficiaries of that tradition, and it’s English, but it’s also more deeply biblical. So I think you can make an extremely strong historical case for this. I don’t know what the contrary case would be. It’s got to be the Enlightenment idea, right? That it was the Enlightenment that produced. Now, let’s talk about that, because you talk about the French revolutionaries. Okay, so do you want to just outline that part of your book and your thoughts on the French rational revolutionaries? Yeah, absolutely. But first, can I disagree with you by restating Wilberforce’s argument, because I think you’ve made a profound point there. Wilberforce’s argument from the Bible, from the biblical tradition, was, I think, twofold. Number one, it is the idea in the Old Testament, and you mentioned it when you talked about Moses. God says to Moses, tell Pharaoh, let my people go wise so that they can worship me. There is an equality there that is implied. There’s only one king, right? I mean, the message of the Old Testament is there’s one God, only one sovereign. Everyone else serves him, but because of that, everyone else is equal. You don’t have this hierarchy of gods, and therefore, hierarchy of humans in the Old Testament. God eventually does give the Israelites a king, but that is a concession to them. And of course, in the Old Testament, God says, they’ve rejected me from being king. They want a king over themselves, and he warns them about the king. He says, you’re not going to like this king. The king’s going to oppress you. The king’s not going to treat you as equals. So you have the Old Testament tradition, which is very strongly, God is sovereign, and he calls all humans are equal before him, number one. Number two is the Christian tradition, which, of course, extends that. And the Christian tradition is that in Christ, there is no slave or free. Paul says that explicitly. There is St. Paul. There is no male or female. There is no Jew nor Gentile. All are equal in Christ, and the Spirit of God is poured out on all people. Those are profoundly revolutionary ideas. Revolutionary ideas. And Wilberforce got that and extended that, applied it, if you like, in his own time. But to your point about why the tradition of the Bible is a revolutionary tradition everywhere it goes, every culture it touches, whether we’re talking about ancient Rome or Britain or America, it always cuts against what I think you correctly identified as the natural human tendency to organize culture around the elite who have the power and everybody else who are basically slaves. And the biblical tradition cuts against that everywhere it’s applied. So there’s something very powerful and profound about that. Now, the French Revolution, here’s what I’d say about that. That’s the Tower of Babel. That’s the Tower of Babel proclivity, by the way. Yes, correct. That’s the erection of Babylon as a profane alternative to proper sovereignty and the proper sovereignty. Part of what the Bible is attempting to do is actually to define what constitutes the proper sovereign. And it isn’t the king. It’s not the earthly ruler. It’s something transcendent and eternal. And that would be the principle of sovereignty itself. It’s something like that, whatever that happens to be. And you’re trying to outline that in your book. Yes. Can I just ask you, actually, on this point, because this is an interesting point with ancient mythology and the contrast with the Bible, and this is your area much more than mine, but in the Bible, we don’t have a hierarchy of gods. We have one god. We don’t have a myth in which the gods order themselves. You’ve got one god who’s in charge. All the other gods or servants are slaves to him. And then that replicates itself in the human realm. You see in the other mythologies, you have the hierarchy of the gods, and then that hierarchy replicates itself among the humans. And so it’s natural, in a sense, to think of, oh, well, if there’s a hierarchy of gods and there’s one lead god or several, and then there are slave gods, if you like, the same thing would be true on human cultures. The Bible, different picture altogether. No, there’s one god. The humans are not his slaves. He never treats them as slaves. He treats them as partners who are called in to cooperate with him and, in some sense, called into his divine life with them. Very different picture. And I just wonder, back to the idea of why is the biblical tradition, why does it tend to produce equality, self-government, liberty? These other traditions don’t. Maybe that’s part of it. Maybe it’s this fundamental difference in how they picture the universe. So anyway, that’s more of a question of thought. Well, it’s also not just the New Testament that stresses that too, because one of the miraculous elements of the earliest biblical writings in Genesis 1 is the insistence, this is a very strange insistence, that first of all, whatever God is, is equivalent to the spirit that calls the habitable order that is good out of chaos and potential, which is, I think, what you’re doing when you’re mentoring, for example, it’s an example of that, but that that spirit characterizes men and women alike and equally. And this is another thing, you know, I’ve talked to feminists who say, well, you know, the Old Testament in particular is a patriarchal document. And I think you’re completely out of your mind. It’s so anti-patriarchal that it really is a kind of miracle, because the notion that there was a fundamental equality between men and women, and that that was grounded in equal access or equal characterization by the divine, there isn’t a more radical claim than that on the gender or sex front. And the notion in the New Testament that each person is a locus of divinity and intrinsic worth is a reflection of that initial statement. And that’s established, it’s like the fifth thing that happens in the biblical corpus. It’s a fundamental proclamation and maybe the most, you know, what’s the proclamation? Human beings are created in two forms. And that’s something that, of course, we’re questioning like Matt at the moment to our great chagrin, because it might be the most fundamental perceptual axiom, you know, the distinction between the sexes. And the second one is that men and women alike are created in the image of God. And, you know, that’s quite, that’s a ridiculously radical proposition. And it is, I do think it is the right, it is the essence of the Christian stance against slavery in particular. Now, we’re going to talk about the French revolutionaries as well. They’re Tower of Babel types, by the way. They are totally Tower of Babel types. Yeah. So, I mean, their approaches are fundamentally atheistic one. It is to root out the biblical influence, really any religious influence, and to set up in its stead human reason, they said. But as you pointed out, what it really becomes is the rule of the powerful. So once you take out the biblical insistence on the equality of all people, once you take out the powerful biblical message that every person is called to work with God, every person is called to advance God’s purposes, every person can have God’s spirit within them, right? I mean, this is the teaching of the New Testament. You come to Christ, he pours his spirit out on you. It doesn’t matter if you’re man, woman, Jew, Gentile, slave free. Once you take all of that away, and it becomes about, oh, well, you know, we’re going to worship human reason. Well, according to whom, right? Who defines that? Who’s in control of the narrative? And to what end? Exactly. To what end? Exactly. Well, yeah, yeah, well, the it’s been interesting to me to watch what’s happened with the with the four horsemen of the, the four atheist horsemen over the last few years, and Hitchens died. So he’s obviously off the table, but it’s interesting to consider what’s happened to both Dawkins and, and Harris. So Harris, and I say that with all due respect, I like both those men. And I think that I actually think they’re honest men. And I think they’re trying to strive upward. I think they’re both wrestling with God in their own way. And I mean that, like, seriously, with all due respect, Dawkins is a real scientist. And I think Harris is a real moral actor. Now, one of the things that’s happened to Sam is that he’s kind of left the rational arena altogether. Like he’s pursuing meditation. That’s his fundamental goal. And so Sam has created for himself a sort of, what would you say, a disembodied Buddhist deity. And I think the reason that Sam leaves his deity inarticulate is because if he made it articulate, he would criticize it to death with his rationality. And so he leaves, he has an ineffable God, and he’s now he’s decided to devote his life to that. And so that’s interesting, you know, and Harris was motivated. I talked to Sam a lot. Harris was motivated fundamentally by the problem of evil. And he wanted to ground morality in something unshakable. And he thought the only thing unshakable was objective truth. But it turns out that grounding morality and objective truth actually isn’t possible for all sorts of technical reasons. And I write about that a little bit in this new book. And so Sam turned to Buddhism. And then with Dawkins, like, I think Dawkins has seen, and I know I’m speaking for him, but I believe this to be true in good faith, that the rationalist humanists that he thought would replace the superstitious biblical religious types turned out to be whim governed tyrants. Right. And so that rationality, that unmoored rationality, it seems to degenerate in two ways very rapidly. It degenerates into something like power claim that’s driven by worship of the intellect. Right. And Marx is a great example of that because he was so intellectually arrogant. And that characterizes universities like Madden. It’s part of the spirit that raises the Tower of Babel, you know, because that’s associated with Luciferian presumption. And so that worship of the intellect produces a Luciferian Tower of Babel. And that’s happening all around us, like, at an absolutely mad rate. But the other thing it seems to produce is a kind of disintegration of narrative into hedonism. You know, and hedonism is a kind of polytheism, right? It’s just, you just worship whatever whim happens to seize you at the moment. And so you get a Luciferian presumption on the one hand that produces endless Towers of Babel. Or you get a degeneration into kind of mindless hedonism. And our culture at the moment is, well, it’s toying real hard with both. It’s like we got the worst of 1984 and Brave New World at the same time. And so the alternative to that is, I think what the biblical corpus does is lay out the alternative to that. That’s what it’s striving to do. You know, so, all right, so back to the French Revolutionary types. So how do you read what happened in France? You said it was elevation of rationality to the highest place, for example. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, rationality is, yeah, with a capital R, which is really just, then it begs the question again, what’s the substance of that? Here’s my thesis. If you look historically and also sort of philosophically, what the French Revolution and maybe the Enlightenment writ large, and those are separate things, I realize, but just mushing them together for a second. What they really do is they try and take the moral content of the biblical tradition and then separate it from the biblical God and biblical obligation, I think. And so what they’re really doing is living on borrowed time, right? I mean, so they’re really, they’re trying to separate out these fundamental moral precepts and they’re trying to ground them in something else. And it just doesn’t work. I mean, we’ve had centuries of experiment with it, right? I mean, we’ve seen it. It doesn’t work. I mean, what the French Revolution quickly ends up with, of course, historically is they’re all killing one another because it becomes purely a power play. Yeah. I mean, it’s who has the power. The Enlightenment type, so I’ll make their argument for them. And this is the sort of argument that Pinker would make is, no, you’re wrong about that, Senator Hawley, because we didn’t really see any progress towards the states of being that characterize the modern state till we established the scientific method. And it was the Enlightenment types that drove that. And it was the divorce of science from the religious underpinnings that allowed that to occur, that escape from, say, biblical superstition and other forms of superstition allowed for that clarity of mind. But here’s what I think is the problem with that. You can tell me what you think. And I think you can see this reflected in the all-out assault on the scientific front by the leftist, rationalist, radicals who are inheritors of the French Revolutionary tradition. It’s like they’re not just going to plow their way through the religious tradition. They’re going to take science out at the same time, because I think true scientists operate according to religious presuppositions, and they don’t recognize them. And I think this is just as true of someone like Dawkins as anyone else. So let me lay out the presuppositions, and you tell me if you can see any holes in this. Okay, so the first presupposition is that there is a logos in the cosmos, right? Is that there’s an order in reality itself. Okay, because otherwise, why bother investigating it if it’s not? And then that order is comprehensible to the human spirit. Right? So not only is there an order, but we can understand the order. Now, these are axioms, right? You don’t start the pursuit without accepting these axioms. Okay, the next axiom is, if we understood the logos, that understanding would be individually and universally beneficial. It would make you a better person, and communicating what you discovered would make society better. So not only is there a logos in the cosmos, and not only is that logos apprehensible, but fundamentally, that logos is good in that its expanded understanding will be of universal benefit. Now, not only are those religious presuppositions, because they cannot be established on scientific ground, they have to be accepted before the enterprise begins. They’re also specifically Judeo-Christian, right? And then there’s a third, fourth element, religious element, which is, in order to be a scientist, you have to conduct yourself in an ethical manner, which is that you have to allow your investigations into the intrinsic logos of the world to reshape your own tyrannical presuppositions, right? You have to take your hypotheses, and you have to throw it against the world. And if it doesn’t withstand the contest, then you have to be willing to abandon it. And that’s also, as far as I can tell, that’s also a religious praxis, fundamentally. And so, the scientific endeavor that the Enlightenment types claim is the precondition for modern flourishing is actually inextricably embedded in the biblical tradition. And I think that also explains why science emerged in Europe and nowhere else. Yes, I think you’re right. I agree with that. And I think that if you play that out, if you look at the Enlightenment tradition and what it becomes in the 20th century, in the late 20th century, when we get to critical theory, when we get to the postmodernists, and you’re hinting at this, is they reject the scientific enterprise, as you’ve been describing it almost completely, their position then becomes there is no objective truth, there are only points of view. There is no place of neutrality to stand in the universe. There are only situated persons with situated points of view. There’s no such thing as any universal anything. And so, all we can do is describe our own experiences, and that’s best done on the basis of power relationships, right? So, the Enlightenment attempt- Well, it’s only done on the base, it’s not even best, it’s that there’s no alternative. That’s the most nihilistic claim of the radical postmodernist types is that not only is it a power game, it can’t be anything other than a power game. And all claims to the contrary are just subtler expressions of a power game. God, it’s a brutal doctrine. It is, it is. And my argument would be that is not the Enlightenment getting off track, as it were, that is where the Enlightenment leads you. Once you say that the only standard for any truth, the only standard for any reality is going to be this Cartesian idea that only what we as humans can hold our own minds, can affirm ourselves, can verify ourselves, only what we can control. I really think that the Cartesian Enlightenment attempt to define truth apart from the biblical tradition or any religious grounding is an attempt to control it, to say, if we control the knowledge, then it’s real. And as it turns out, you can’t. And so, that’s why- It’s also, and I found this out when I was investigating the Tower of Babel story and its association with Luciferian presumption. So, it’s the descendants of Cain who turn to building cities. And it’s the descendants of Cain who first build weapons of war. And also, Babylon in particular is founded by Ham, and Ham is the son of Noah who laughs at his own father’s nakedness. Right. So, that’s all tangled up in the story of the Tower of Babel. Now, what seems to happen, and I see this with modern Luciferian intellects. You see this on the engineering front often. I have a lot of respect for engineers, but they tend to presume that the proper way forward is a technological way, is that the way you deal with the fundamental existential concerns of life is through technological mastery. And now, it’s obvious the case, and you make the case for this in your book, that human productivity, including tool building productivity, is admirable. But the question is, do we worship the tools, or do we worship the ethos that utilizes the tools? And are those separable? And I think the way the enlightenment types went wrong is that they didn’t understand that there was an ethos that made objective science possible, and that that ethos was encapsulated in a narrative, not in science itself. And that technologists are making the same problem. It’s like, well, we can just solve this with technology. It’s like, well, if evil people control the tools, then the tools will be used for evil purposes. Right. And so, I read this great book once called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by a man named Richard Landis, and he analyzed Japan in particular, because he thought Japan was a very interesting case history. The Japanese have a very disciplined culture, and after World War II, it was a westernized culture. And Japan is very, very wealthy, but Japan has no natural resources. So then you might say, well, what’s the basis of Japanese wealth? And the answer is something like, well, it’s an ethos. The Japanese are very disciplined, and the fundamental transaction between two Japanese is honest. Like, I think you could say that there isn’t any other natural resource except air, maybe, you know, the air we breathe. The only natural resource is trust, and trust is predicated on, like, you can’t trust productively unless people are honest. And if people are honest and trustworthy, then they can cooperate in a manner that makes abundance not only possible, but inevitable. And that means that the technology has to be embedded in an ethos, and that ethos has to facilitate trust. And so the way that you make a society rich isn’t as a consequence of them being blessed with natural resources, say, or even with technological prowess. It’s that all of that’s embedded in an ethos, and that ethos is the one that enables people to cooperate and compete productively and generously. And that’s the ethos that seems to be laid out in the biblical corpus. And though that’s the case you’re making in your book. I agree. And you could just ask yourself, Jordan, I mean, you think about our technological advances, you think about AI now, but why is it, I mean, if you look at science alone, my contention would be science alone is at a loss to explain why those who are not the most intelligent, however you define it, why those who are not the strongest, however you define that, why they should not be privileged in some way. In other words, if you look at what’s the natural world where that is true, right, and this is Darwin, natural selection, and you had the social Darwinists of the last century who we rightly despise and condemn now, but they would have said, that’s just science. We’re just applying to the human realm what we’ve observed in the natural scientific realm. And why should it be that those who have the AI technology that can displace thousands of workers, why should they not be the ones who have most power in society? I don’t know that science can explain that to us. Well, there’s a rationality there. Like, I think the rational stance is that if I can take what you have, then why shouldn’t I? Yes. Like, why isn’t that a rational stance? In fact, the Romans would have thought that was a rational stance. Absolutely. And the Greeks would have thought that was a rational stance. And I would say it’s partly because it does have its own self-evidence. If you’re weak and despicable and I can just take what you have and there’s nothing you can do to stop me, why isn’t it the case that your own contemptible weakness isn’t evidence that I should be allowed to do whatever I want with you? That is not irrational. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s not wrong. And so now I would dispute, you know, I would dispute to some degree, if you don’t mind momentarily, the social Darwin, our Darwinist argument, you know, because I talked a lot to Franz de Waal, the primatologist, and you know, de Waal has shown quite clearly that among chimpanzees who do have quite a patriarchal social structure and who are extraordinarily powerful physically and brutal beyond belief, like they hunt colobus monkeys, those things weigh 38 pounds and they eat them when they’re alive. Right? There’s no pity in chimps. And so the chimps will tear each other apart and they do that in their chimp war. But de Waal has shown very clearly in his analysis of the chimps that he’s studied over the last 20 years that the biggest roughest, toughest social Darwin triumph male is very, very likely to meet an unbelievably violent end and to rule very briefly over a very unstable and malfunctioning community. He showed that the stable alpha males, sometimes they’re the smallest male in the troop. They’re the most reciprocal individuals in the entire troop, male or female. They do the best at tracking social relationships and engaging in essentially reciprocal altruism. And so that’s the basis for a stable polity, even among chimpanzees. So it’s another bit of evidence, but this time from the scientific side, that power, it doesn’t look like in a biological community or in many biological communities that it’s power and dominance per se that are associated with, let’s say, biological success, reproductive success. So, you know, there are situations, baboons are more violent, but even then it’s by no means as simple as the most powerful male is the one who propagates his genes forward. And it’s certainly not the case in complex social organizations. Not true with rats, for example. Yes. Well, it may be just on the social Darwinist point that we could say the social Darwinists were crude scientists. You know, they didn’t make their argument as they might have. They didn’t understand the science. But I would still press the point, Jordan, that even then, even in these other species that we observe, do we observe these species sacrificing their lives for one another? Do we observe them carrying on the kind of moral interactions that we say, that’s praiseworthy? You know, where a stranger will give his life for someone else, where they will put themselves in danger in order to protect people they don’t really even know. We look at those things and say that’s praiseworthy. You see the rudiments of it, you know, just like you see the rudiments of language. You can see it starting to emerge even from the bottom up. So, you see it among rats, for example. So, I’ll tell you a very quick story. You may have heard me tell it before, but Joach Panksepp established this with rats and it’s a killer observation. I think it was Nobel Prize-worthy. So, if you pair two male juvenile rats together, if one of them has a 10% weight advantage, he can beat the other one in a wrestling bout and rats like to wrestle. And it’s easy if you watch rats wrestle once to assume that it’s a form of dominance and that the big rat wins, the big powerful rat wins. 10% weight advantage will do it. And so, you could imagine that’s a scientific observation. You pair two juveniles together, they wrestle, the big rat pins the small rat, the big rat is now dominant, he’s the victor, and that, you know, has implications for his potential reproductive success in the future. But Panksepp, this is such a crucial move. He realized that rats lived in social organizations and that they didn’t play once. They played repeatedly. And someone you play repeatedly with is a friend, right? Because otherwise they won’t play with you repeatedly. So, what Panksepp showed was that if you take the rats, again, if you put them together again, the little rat who lost has to ask the big rat to play. That’s now his role. So, he has to do the play invitation, you know, that mammals engage in. Then the big rat will play. And playing isn’t aggression. Like, almost all mammals can distinguish between play aggression and genuine aggression. They are not the same thing at all. And you know that if you have a dog or a child, for that matter, if you have any sense at all, you can tell the difference. It’s like the definition of sense that you can tell the difference between play and aggression. Anyways, if the rats are paired together repeatedly and the big rat doesn’t let the little rat win, at least 40 percent of the time might be 30. Some significant proportion of the time, the little rat will stop playing. And so, you have an emergent ethos of reciprocal play that’s a consequence of repeated matchings, right? And that’s the same idea in some sense that you have to play with your future self and that you have to play with other people. This is the optimistic union of the scientific enterprise, let’s say, and the moral enterprise is that there might be an implicit ethos in complex social organizations that’s a consequence of what would you call the necessary constraints that emerge if you have to repeatedly interact with someone, right? You have to treat them like, well, what? Maybe you have to treat them like they’re of fundamental worth. And animals can do that to some degree, like the chimps. Chimps have decades-long friendships, you know, and they will go out of their way for each other. They’re not that good at sharing food. Like, there’s limits, you know, like serious limits. But you can see the glimmerings even among our non-human cousins, let’s say. You can see glimmerings of a deeper ethos. Yes, yes. And that makes sense. And I suppose that the way that the biblical tradition might capture that is something like natural law. You might say that there’s a natural order to the universe and you see it. You see glimmerings, to use your word, you see glimmerings in other species and so on. But my point is that I think I still hold to is that it is difficult to derive from merely observations of biology or science alone a moral code of the kind that we live by and say is praiseworthy. And my point in that is, is that this is where I think there’s a certain arrogance to the enlightenment tradition that we’ll ground it all on science. We’ll do away with religion, particularly biblical religion. We’ll get rid of all of that. We’ll ground it all on science and then we’ll all be better. You know, I think the 20th century, and no one has written about this more than you, the 20th century, I think, is in many ways a refutation of that, where did we do better in this century of science and technology? I don’t think that we did. I don’t think we did. No, and you know, the atheist types that I debated with, one of those questions that always annoyed them was, well, you know, was, were Marx and Stalin and Mao humanists? Well, no, no, you know, they don’t count. It’s like, well, I think they count. They actually count. And it’s not like communism wasn’t rational. You accept a few axioms like to each according to his need, from each according to his ability, which sounds self-evident and rational. You accept that and the whole bloody nightmare emerges and Solzhenitsyn did a very good job of delineating that. Like the communist catastrophe was not an aberration from an ideal. It was the manifestation of the implicit nature of the ideal. It was the genuine article, which is why it did the same thing wherever it was implemented. You know, that isn’t real communism. It’s like, yeah, freed. So after the 20th experiment, we can pretty much establish that, you know, and I think the presumption on the scientific side might not be something that’s pathologically embedded within science itself, because science itself properly conducted is really an exercise in continual humility. I think where the scientists go wrong often is they say, well, we know enough right now as scientists, which means our theories, to be able to say what constitutes appropriate morality. And that’s, you know, in a kind of bi-theat sense, that’s what the social Darwinists did. And it was premature closure in the scientific enterprise instead of being, instead of staying grounded in ignorance. Yes. And I think there’s a reason also that you made this point a minute ago, I think, that science, as we know, it emerges out of societies grounded in the biblical tradition because of the fundamental presuppositions that the world is an orderly place, that we can in fact discover some of the order of that world and it will be good for us. I mean, those are very biblical notions. You contrast that with the ancient Epicurean physics, right? What were Epicurus physics? I mean, a scientific turn of mind Epicurus had, but he thought that the world was composed of atoms, right? He got that right. He was the first one to see that, that we know of, but he thought it was a fundamentally random place, a fundamentally, the atoms moved in fundamentally random ways. Therefore the universe was fundamentally random. Now, when we come to the modern scientific world and the birth of modern science in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, it doesn’t take the Epicurean foundation as its premise. No, no, no. It takes the, then you made this point, it takes the biblical foundation. Then actually, no, there’s order in the world and we can discover that and we can use that to our good and that would be a good thing. And by the way, I agree with all of that, but it has to be grounded in that larger ethic, I think. Yeah. Well, you know, one of the things the postmodernists got right, and they really did get this right, was that our enterprises, our interpretive enterprise and the enterprise that governs our actions is embedded in a narrative tradition. The postmodernist got that right. Now, what they got wrong was that the right narrative is either fragmented, so there’s no meta-narrative, or it’s one of power. And that’s where they made their alignment with the Marxists for their own devious reasons and produced a kind of hyper-Marxism where it’s not just economic exploitation that characterizes economic history, but exploitation of all types across all binary axes for all social relationships. So it isn’t that what we have on the woke side is Marxism precisely, or even neo-Marxism, it’s hyper-Marxism. Right? It’s Marxism raised to an exponent so that every human relationship becomes nothing but a manifestation of power. And that’s a meta-narrative too, right? But it’s certainly not a uniting narrative, it’s a tyrannical meta-narrative. And it’s also incorrect, it doesn’t work for chimpanzees. And psychopaths, by the way, use nothing but power. And psychopaths, despite what people think, tend to be very unsuccessful, partly because other people catch on and hem them in very rapidly. That’s why you have the wandering psychopath as a kind of narrative trope, the guy who’s hitched a ride from one place to another, the drifter, the drifting loner. Well, he’s drifting because people figure out what he’s up to and then they won’t have anything to do with him, so he has to go find a new population to exploit. And online, this is something for legislators to consider, I really believe this. I think that all the restraints off the psychopathic narcissist types, all of the restraints have been lifted online, all of them. And in fact, their behaviour is facilitated rather than inhibited. And if it’s the case that the parasitical and predatory psychopathic narcissist types are a permanent existential threat, which I think is the case biologically and historically, we’ve disinhibited them with our technology. That’s a very bad idea. You know, when you talk a little bit in your book about pornography, you know, this is a cool thing. The other thing I found out when I was investigating this Tower of Babel story, so Babel is associated with Babylon, and Babylon is associated with Luciferian intellectual presumption and a kind of technocratic worship, but it’s also associated with the horror of Babylon. Right. And so there’s an idea, it’s a very interesting idea, that the worship of the intellect, the raising of the technological spirit to the highest place, the attempt to build edifices that compete on the spiritual side with what’s properly transcendent, also disinhibit feminine sexuality and pathologize it. And 25%, it’s about 25 to 35% of internet traffic is pornographic. You detailed out your understanding of what pornography is doing on the masculine front, so maybe we could delve into that momentarily. Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you just look at the data on this, Jordan, I mean, the consumption of pornography, of course, is as you would expect, given its availability everywhere, is just off the charts. You know, I mean, one researcher quipped, and it’s absolutely true, that a young man today can see more naked women in five minutes than his, or heck, probably 90 seconds, than his grandfather could in a lifetime. You know, I mean, so that’s, technology has made that available. And as you might expect, I mean, given the dopamine effects here, the more porn men watch, especially young men, the more porn they want to watch, and then you ask, well, what happens over time? And what the data, there’s an increasing body of data on this. And what it shows is, is that you spend more time on screens, you spend less time in real human relationships. So massive porn consumption tends to inhibit dating, it tends to inhibit healthy self-image. For men, it tends to inhibit confidence, actually. It’s just the reverse of what the porn industry, I think, would sell, right? They would sell that, hey, you know, this is a sign of matismo. I mean, this is a sign of you’re a real man. It’s actually, porn consumption, particularly at scale, makes men more timid, more passive, yes, less confident, and then ultimately impotent. Well, it’s also, yeah, and you know, that might be true psychologically, as well as physiologically, because another thing you document in your book, and I’ll just read some stats here that I think are dead relevant. In 2015, so that’s eight years ago. So these are outdated stats already. And it’s worse now. One quarter of men of working age have no job whatsoever, and have done no work at all within the last 12 months. So that’s 25%. So that’s cataclysmic. In 1970, two thirds of men made more than their fathers. In 2014, it was 40%. Men are acquiring 70% of all Ds and Fs given in grade school. Only 20% are proficient in writing by grade eight, 24% reading. Men aren’t trying. They’re now less than 40% of college students. So between 2015 and 2022, men were 70% of the 1.5 million person drop in college enrollment, and that was replaced primarily by screen time, video games, and porn. Suicide increases up 25% between 2000 and 2017, and drug overdose up 250%. And the majority of babies, by the way, now are born in fatherless homes. And so there’s a weird entanglement there too, because one of the, I believe this to be the case, is that one of the motivating factors that drive men out into the workplace is the possibility of attaining genuine status in the workplace as a consequence of competent endeavor. And that does make them more attractive to women. Now maybe being more attractive to women is, I don’t know what percentage it is of male motivation on the work front. It might be 50%. You know, like I noticed, for example, I used to work with high-end lawyers, both male and female, and the males were always competing to see what their bonus was going to be at the end of the year. And it wasn’t because they wanted the money. I mean, they wanted the money, you know, but they already had lots of money. They could always do, already do what they wanted on the monetary front. It was a contest, and they wanted to be on top. And we know that the biggest predictor of male attractiveness to females is socioeconomic status. It’s correlated with male reproductive success, access to women, let’s say at about 0.7, 0.6, 0.7, which is a walloping correlation. You don’t see like that in anywhere else in the social sciences. So then you think if you deprive men of their fundamental sexual impulse, you deprive them of the necessity of sexual pursuit. Maybe you emasculate themself, you emasculate them almost completely on the practical front as well. We have no idea, right? But it’s certainly possible. It’s certainly possible. It’s certainly possible. And the growing body of research would suggest that there absolutely is a correlation there. I mean, and you also- Yeah, well, and you add to that the other factors you detail out in the book. So the overt demoralization of young men, right? So their play preferences are stymied in elementary school. They’re taught nonstop from the time they enter school that the entire masculine enterprise is oppressively patriarchal and evil in its essence, derived as it is from power. Even the American Psychological Association apparently agrees with that now, their idiot report on so-called toxic masculinity. And then if the boys do escape that, which they don’t, then you have the bloody environmentalist planet-worshipping Gaia sacrifices saying, well, you know, if you do have any ambition, all you’re doing is using it to rape the planet to all our eventual demise. It’s no bloody wonder the boys drop out if that’s the story that’s being told them. Yes, exactly. And that is the story. And it’s interesting, Jordan, when you put all that together, you’ve got the modern left who force feeds this to young men. But then when they get older, to come back to screens and porn, the left also tells them, though, spend your time on screens and porn. That’s fine. In fact, anytime you mention porn, I’ve noticed the left absolutely melts down. If you criticize even slightly porn consumption, the left has a fit and says that’s moralistic, it’s puritanical. And I think the message to men really is when you take it in the aggregate, you’re terrible, your ambition is toxic, your assertiveness makes the world a worse place. So be passive, go sit in front of a screen, consume some stuff, entertain some stuff and be androgynous. That’s the message that they send to men. And it is debilitating in every respect. Yeah, well, I think the conservative type should take that accusation of moralistic and puritanical as a compliment under today’s conditions and stop being defensive about it. It’s like, you mean moralistic and puritanical in comparison to your absolutely whim-ridden, narrow, self-centered, self-satisfied, hedonistic, moralizing apocalypse? Like, you mean puritanical in relationship to that? Yeah, I think if that’s what puritanical means, I’ll go with puritans, thank you very much. Because what the hell do you have to offer? Yeah, it’s really unbelievably destructively pathetic. And this is also why I think the left, the radicals in particular, don’t have a moral leg to stand on, you know, because I think, and this is especially true for people like Foucault. Foucault was really, really smart. Like his book, The Order of Things, is a real work of genius, especially the first half. He needed an editor in the second half, but the first half is quite brilliant. He was super smart. But as far as I can tell, reading Foucault, every single thing he put his intellect to was an attempt to justify his essential perversion, his desire to utilize his sexual behavior in whatever manner he saw fit, regardless of the cost to anyone, children or other men, because he was notoriously promiscuous after he knew he had AIDS. You know, and that was just one of his many sins. I see in Foucault the perfect example of someone who subordinated his intellect, which he was very proud of, to nothing but the whims of his sexual drive. And that was his god. Priapus was Foucault’s god, kind of a satanic priapus. And I see that on the left. It’s like, well, why are you opposed to traditional masculinity? Well, it’s because it’s oppressive. It’s like, yeah, maybe. Maybe it’s because if you accepted the doctrines of discipline, you wouldn’t be able to gratify every goddamn whim that entered your mind the second it entered your mind. And then that’s the definition of self that’s emerged among the radicals. I am what I am, which is, by the way, what God says to Moses, I am what I am moment to moment. And why do you have no right to interfere with that? Because I want to be allowed to do whatever the hell I want to whoever I want at any given moment, like with no thought whatsoever, even for my own preservation. You know, and I think we see that celebrated. We see that ethos celebrated in Pride season. And it’s not fluke that it’s called Pride season. Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right about this. And this is why in the book, I talk about the sort of Epicurean spirit. And I mean by that everything you’ve just said, which is to make the self god and by self, it is the momentary whim because there’s really no self there. That’s right. There’s no self there. There’s no self there. It’s just whatever your whim or passion is your desire at this particular instant. And this is why I think that ideology is so disorienting to young people in particular, because as they’re trying to form their identity, what they get from modern culture, the tribunes of modern culture, the academia, entertainment, certainly the left, what you get from them is just gratify, just do what makes you happy. Just gratify yourself. Well, how do I choose my goals from my momentary whims? They have no answer to that. The left has no answer to that. And so you just choose the primary whim. Right. In the moment. Well, you know, this is also something where conservatives I think could take a page from the more thoughtful leftists because there’s an evil interspace there between the worst of capitalism and the worst of the woke ethos. Because if to the degree that capitalism drives a mindless consumerism, it can feed exactly that kind of narcissistic, self-aggrandizing ethos. And it certainly does that. That’s right. And so, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah. And so I don’t think- And this is where the right- Go ahead. Well, this is, I want to, yeah, we’re in heated agreement. I mean, this is where I think some elements of the right, they don’t have an alternative because what they basically present is a form of capitalistic consumerism. You know, their answer is, yeah, well, let’s just, you know, let’s consume more stuff. I mean, it is the right to be free is the right to choose. Right? I mean, you had Milton Friedman and God love him. There’s a lot to like in Milton Friedman, but his whole concept of liberty was it’s basically just personal choice at any time for anything. And, you know, and he’s situated that in the context of the market. You know, markets are the ultimate expression of freedom. Listen, I love free markets. But to your point, if all we’re saying is, as an alternative, just choose what you want, just choose what you want to do, take off all inhibitions, consume, consume, consume. There’s no substance to that either. And I think young people know that. Yeah. Well, and I do think that that’s a flaw. That’s a flaw of classical economics. And, you know, that’s actually been demonstrated on the scientific front with trading games. So, you know, there’s a famous trading game where you take two people and you say to one of them, their partners, now you say, okay, I’m going to give you $100.Andyouhavetoofferyourpartnersomefractionofthat.Andifyourpartnerrefuses,neitherofyougetanything.I{t}^{\prime }slike,whatareyougoingtooffer?Andsonowtheclassicaleconomicspresumptionisthatthepersonmakingtheoffer,wh{o}^{\prime }smaximizingtheirrationalself-interest,shouldoffertheirpartneradollarbecausethentheyget$99, right? The first person. And the classical economist also says, because the recipient is maximizing their rational self-interest, they should accept the bloody dollar because, well, you want nothing or do you want a dollar? But that isn’t how it plays out in the real world. Not at all. What happens is that cross-culturally, people offer something approximating 50%. And if they don’t, it’s rejected. And then you might say, well, that’s only true in Western countries because, you know, it doesn’t really matter to a Westerner one way or another, whether he gets $40,le{t}^{\prime }ssay,or$1. He’s willing to stand on principle. But if you tested that among poor people, they’d take the damn dollar. And the reverse is true, actually. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to tell someone to go to hell if they don’t give you a fair deal. And, you know, that’s reflective of this iterative ethos, is the reason that people insist upon being treated fairly in a trade is because life is not a trade. It’s a sequence of iterating trades. And the rules that govern the sequence of iterating trade aren’t the same as the rules that govern one trade, because you can screw someone if you trade with them once. And maybe you could even argue that you should. You know, I don’t think you should. But you could make that case. You know, if it’s you or me and in one off, why can’t I, why shouldn’t I just maximize my local advantage? The answer is I shouldn’t train myself to think that way. That’s the answer. But it’s another example. It’s the same thing with the rats, right, and the chimpanzees, is that if you have to iterate your interactions, a new ethos emerges. And so the classical economists on the free trade side, the free market side, they’re actually wrong in their presumption about what constitutes the ethic that’s properly associated with sophisticated long term trade. It’s not maximization of rational self-interest, certainly not in the short term. That’s wrong. And that’s just as wrong as the postmodern notion that power and governance everything. And when you put those two things together, you get something seriously toxic. You know, there’s nothing more toxic than woke capitalism. Exactly, which is what we have now. Yep, that’s exactly right. Or neoliberalism. I mean, Jordan, which is really basically the same thing. I mean, you’ve got, which is, I’m afraid to say for large segments of the right, the American right, I mean, they’re basically neoliberals. I mean, they believe in markets globally, no matter what, markets without any regard to what does it do to human relationships? What does it do to the family? What does it do to our sense of right and wrong? You know, it becomes this form of, frankly, a kind of elitism where you have the elites who win, those who win and profit the most from the global markets, and then you’ve got everybody else and we’re all just supposed to accept that. And I just think, ah, that’s not a good ethic. Well, that’s another tower of babble. Yeah, well, you know, even in games, you see this. So there’s two ethos that, I don’t know what the plural of ethos is actually, two ethoses that operate when you’re playing a game. And one is that you try to win the game. But the other is that you conduct yourself while you’re trying to win in a manner that makes other people want to play another game with you. Oh, yeah. Right, right. Which is what you tell people when you tell them to be good sports. That’s what you’re doing when you’re being a coach or a mentor, right? You’re saying, well, don’t subordinate the short-term game. Don’t subordinate the long-term game to the short-term game. You know, don’t be too triumphant when you win. Don’t be too upset when you lose a given game because you’re playing the long game. And there’s something in the narrow, even classic British liberalism that’s associated with the free market that reduces choice to whim and that reduces trade to local victory. And there’s something about that that isn’t, well, that isn’t kosher, so to speak. You know, and it’s interesting too, because the British liberals in particular, you can see that if in their original writings is that they may basically make a case that something like, well, if everyone is abiding by a deep religious ethic, then we can act as if people are autonomous individuals exercising their free choice. And they could take that if for granted at some point, because that ethos ruled. But when that degenerates, it isn’t obvious at all that that pure, untrammeled freedom of choice, it looks like it degenerates into something like consumerist whim. Yes. And you can see this with Adam Smith, I mean, which to your point, I think, is that if you look at his theory of capitalism, the wealth of nations, if you look at his theory of moral sentiments, which I think he actually wrote beforehand, you can see that it’s embedded in a particular social context, which is frankly very biblically informed. And when you divorce it from that context, you get something that I suspect he would not have approved of. He would have said, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not what I’m talking about. So I think that that’s where we are with much of the, I am not a laissez faire conservative. I never have been. And in my party, that’s heretical to say that you don’t believe in laissez faire, but I just, I am not, because I think that it does not capture these deeper intuitions that you’ve been talking about. And it does not preserve the most important things in life and in the nation. A nation is not a corporation. A nation is not premised on pursuit of profit. I have nothing against pursuit of profit in the business realm. That’s great, but that’s not what a nation is. A nation is held together by mutual bonds of belonging, a shared sense of purpose, and moral vision. That’s what a nation is. And we have to preserve that, tend that, and cultivate it. If we don’t, we end up where we are now, which is at Dagger’s Drawing. Well, and your sense of nation on the masculine side, you lay out in your chapters five through ten various roles that men can play, and then you decorate or illustrate each role with a traditional story, biblical story generally, and then with a set of personal stories, an attempt to extract out the moral. And that seems to be quite an effective way of communicating. And so, you could say a nation is also, if it’s going to survive, is an enterprise that inculcates a set of virtues in its men. And this has always been a problem anthropologically, right? It’s been well known in the anthropological literature. This is why so many cultures concentrate more on male initiation than on females, right? Nature initiates females. Nature initiates females. Culture has to initiate men. And so, men can go very, can ascend to the heights, but they can descend to the depths as well. And men who aren’t disciplined descend to the depths very rapidly. And that’s very bad for men, and it’s very bad for women, and it’s very bad for the nation. And so, the nation has to inculcate virtue. That’s part of its function. And you lay out some roles for men. You say, well, husband, that’s a role of responsibility and opportunity. And you do make a case that, well, the reason we get married is because all things considered, we think that it’s better to be with someone than not to be. You’re happier. You’re more productive. You’re more generous. You’re a better person. But you’re also more resilient in the face of catastrophe, if there’s not just one of you. Okay, so that seems reasonable. Father. Well, why bother? Well, partly because it’s your responsibility, let’s say, but partly because if you don’t bother, well, you’re missing out one of the great adventures of your life. There isn’t a better relationship that you can have than with your children, if you’re wise and careful. And to abandon your children, it’s so pathetic, this culture of random and careless impregnation. It’s so unbelievably pathetic that people who engage in it should just be shunned. It’s appalling. It’s terrible for the kids, but it’s terrible for the men too. They’re not men. You know, they’re psychopathic manipulators. And you know, the data on that’s quite clear. If you look at the dark tetrad types, so they’re psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian and sadistic. They prefer short-term mating strategies. Interesting. Right, right. So this isn’t hypothetical. It’s like if you take the worst people, they’re the ones who want to engage in exploitative sexual relationships. And it isn’t because they want to be free. It’s because they want to do exactly what they want to do to whoever they want to do it to right now. Right? And then they cloak that up in, well, you know, sexual freedom. It’s like, yeah, I know what you mean by sexual freedom. You mean exactly what you want when you want it. That’s what you mean. So, okay, so you’re the roles. Husband, father, warrior, right? That’s keeper and protector, let’s say builder, priest and king. And your vision in the book that you’re outlining is like the integration across all of those. So one of the things I’ve suggested to my audience of young men is that you’re going to be looking at some point in your life when the chips are down and the storms are rising, you’re going to be looking for something like a sustaining meaning. And if you don’t have it, God help you in those situations. And they’re definitely coming. In fact, you might be living chronically that way right now, right? Depressed, anxious, nihilistic, on the edge of suicide. Why? Because you haven’t adopted any meaningful responsibility. That’s the actual answer. You know, and conservatives have the option now, the opportunity to put that case forward. Say, look, the emptiness in your life isn’t because you don’t have enough rights. You have all the rights there are. You have more than you should. And isn’t because you lack consumerist options. You have Amazon and pornography, man. You can get whatever you want whenever you want it. And if that’s still not working, well, what are you missing? Well, maybe you’re missing the opposite of that. A little bit of restraint, a little bit of sacrifice, some responsibility. Yes. Yes, exactly. And I think this is the part about vision, calling young men, all men, but to have a sense of what is the vision that’s going to sustain you in those hard times. You know, in the book, I talk about some hard times in my life. I mean, I talk about losing my wife and I lost our first baby. We talk about that. I talk about losing my best friend when I was still a young man to suicide. And the point of that is- Jake. Yeah, correct. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, we were the same age, knew each other from the time we were 14. He was my, you know, my best friend, my best buddy in life. And a guy who had everything going for him. I lost a friend just like that. I had a friend just like that, you know, and he swallowed that toxic masculinity line, a little bit different than Jake. My friend, his name was Rob Dernan, my friend, he committed suicide when he was 40. He was tall, good looking, super smart guy, very charming, very witty, artistically talented, not particularly athletic. He tilted more to the engineering and aesthetic side of things. But he, right from an early age, you know, he believed that the masculine virtues were fundamentally destructive. He adopted a kind of nihilistic Buddhism and it just did him in. Like, I just watched him take himself apart for like 27 years. It was ugly. He wouldn’t even defend himself in fistfights in Alberta, you know, now and then. He lived in a town called High River and the Native kids used to pound on him because there was a fair bit of antagonism between the Native kids and the Caucasian kids, let’s say, in these northern Alberta towns. And the Native kids were rough, you know, they could be rough and they used to beat him up and he wouldn’t defend himself because he thought he was a patriarchal oppressor, like even when he was 13. You know, and there was some, you can understand that to some degree, there was some tension there for real reasons, real historical reasons. But his tack was self-abnegation, you know, and it just, something like that seemed to have happened to your friend Jake. Yeah, yeah. And I think that in those, to your point, in those moments when you encounter those crises of life, what is it that’s going to guide you? It’s not that stuff is available on Amazon. That’s not what’s going to get you out of bed in the morning. Something that’s going to get you out of bed in the morning is a sense of purpose and vision for your life. And if that, to go back to the most fundamental of the biblical vision, if that purpose is, boy, my life can actually transform the world. I can bring order from chaos. I can make a garden in the wilderness. What I do now can last in a meaningful way for who knows, eternity. That’s a powerful vision. You know, that’s something that’ll get you out of bed in the morning. And then when you add that to that, I’m a father, I’m a husband, people are depending on me. You know, I know my own life is, that is what has pulled me through times where it’s like, yeah, you know, things are tough right now. And I think this is what our modern culture in the left and the nihilistic left systematically denies to men. So, you know, we talked earlier about the biblical corpus in relationship to its historical validity, utility, right? The West being predicated on the biblical narrative. It makes sense that we have to understand it and assess it and perhaps return to its virtues in so far as they are virtues. But then there’s another issue here too that you pointed to, which is something like, well, the truth of the enterprise. So let’s say, well, is it true that men should become husbands, fathers, warriors, builders, priests and kings in that kind of biblical tradition? And the answer to that might be, well, what happens if they don’t? What’s the reality of the situation where men abandon themselves, let’s say, to chaos or become tyrannical and hyper-orderly? Well, then you get something indistinguishable from hell. You know, you get the failed state on the chaos side. Or you get the Tower of Babel on the other side. And that’s, there’s abdication of responsibility in the Tower of Babel too. You know, the Soviet men, people under totalitarianism, they don’t manifest their own destiny. They don’t tell the truth. They don’t take their place in the world. And the consequence of that is that you get hell real quick. And you might say, well, hell isn’t real. It’s like, you don’t know much about history if you don’t think hell is real. And you also don’t know much about history if you can’t see the connection between the abdication of individual responsibility and the generation of hell, and very quickly too. So, you know, when we’re talking about a reality that transcends the merely historical, we could point to the pragmatic. It’s like, well, what happens in the absence of virtue? Well, you don’t get freedom, you know, whim pursuing freedom. And even if you did, you wouldn’t want it. You know, one of the perverse things that has happened on the sexual front is that as we’ve increased the varieties of sexual gratification available, we’ve increased the number of people dramatically who have no sexual contact with other human beings at all. And I think it’s 30% now, I think it’s 30% of people in Japan under 30 are virgins. It’s something like that. It’s close to the same in South Korea. And there’s a tremendous number of people in the West, young people who’ve had zero sexual contact with an actual person in the last 18 months. So it’s so interesting, because you get that surfeit on the consumer side, and it produces a satiation that’s so complete that it demolishes the desire itself. Yes, yes. And the desire that manifests in a productive way, any real way, right? I mean, so you don’t go on a date, you don’t get married, you don’t have children, and then society doesn’t reproduce itself. I mean, it’s the ultimate sort of death spiral. But no, back to your point about what happens in the absence of these virtues, what happens if you don’t cultivate them and you see on a personal front, you watch your life fall apart. I mean, that’s what will happen as every man who’s gone down that path knows, right? And that’s why you talk to a man who’s been through a crisis in his life and has come out on the other side stronger. What he doesn’t say is, at least I’ve never heard a man say, oh, I just decided to completely give up. I decided to stop caring. I decided that I would stop trying to get better. No, that’s not what they say. What they say is, I found some purpose to live for. I decided to try and make something of my life. I decided to aim my life at something. Despite the catastrophe. Exactly right. Because catastrophe is going to come, as you say, right? That’s life. Catastrophe is going to come probably multiple times. And the question is, what’s going to compel us to live through that? And of course, if you are a Christian or a Jew and part of the biblical tradition, the hope that you have is not only can this catastrophe not be the end of me, but actually, it could redound to my benefit in some strange way because God will redeem it in some sense. Doesn’t mean I enjoy it, but it means that it’ll have some purpose. Well, I would say that the biblical corpus, if you just look at it anthropologically and psychologically, strip it of its metaphysical and religious pretensions. I’m not saying you should do that, but you can do that. I would say at least what it is, is a millennia long meditation on what spirit you invite to inhabit you so that you can maintain yourself and those around you through catastrophe. That’s the spirit that guides Noah, right? I mean, this is really how God is defined in the biblical corpus. God in the story of Noah is precisely the spirit that enables the wise to prepare for the storm and shepherd themselves and their family through it. You say, well, does God exist? It’s like, well, insofar as the spirit that enables a man to do that exists, God exists. And then you might say, well, what sort of reality is that? And the answer to that is, well, it’s the reality that drowns you unless you abide by it. Now, I don’t know if that’s real enough for you, but it’s an interesting definition of what constitutes real. I mean, what’s most real might be what’s there when the times are hardest, right? That’s how you define the reality of a friendship or a love affair. That’s a different concept than, you know, the material is what’s real. It’s like, no, what’s real is what sustains you through the worst catastrophe. And you might say, well, there’s nothing there. It’s like, well, that’s one perspective. Your catastrophe is going to be pretty damn grim if that’s your a priori attitude, that nihilism or maybe the hedonism that goes along with it. You’re not going to be very well protected when the storms rise. You know, and your book is a meditation on the idea that if you take up these responsibilities, husband, father, warrior, builder, priest, king, if you take up these responsibilities, you develop the sort of character or a relationship with the character that allows you to prevail when the storms rise, you know, and the seas threaten. Now, that seems right to me. That points to a truth in the biblical corpus, let’s say, that transcends the mere historical. Yes, I agree. I agree with all of that. And if I could just add to your point, but this time from the religious dimension, I would just say that what my reading of the biblical tradition is, it’s not that if you are a follower of God or a follower of Christ, that you will be saved out of catastrophe. That’s not what the tradition says at all. That’s not what the Bible says, I don’t think. I mean, I don’t read that anywhere there. What it says is, is that your life will have a meaning beyond what you can possibly imagine. What it says is you can be part of what God is doing in the world for eternity, right? So it’s not that you won’t have any hardships in life. Quite the contrary, Christ was crucified for heaven’s sake. There will be hardships for sure, but they will mean something and your life will mean something. And ultimately it will mean something for eternity. I mean, that is a purpose to live for. And this is why I found that I know that the problem of evil, of course, is a great perennial philosophical question. And I’m not diminishing that or demeaning it in any way. But I do think that there’s a certain presupposition there to that question, which is almost as if, well, if we encounter evil in the world, if we encounter hardship, then there must be something fundamental. Then there must be no God. I mean, because it’s almost as if we’re entitled not to have hardship or evil in our lives. That’s not a biblical presupposition at all. And of course, we know that’s not reality. No, well, that’s why in the story of Job, which is like the most blatant example of that perhaps, is God literally makes a bet with Satan to take Job out. And you think, well, what kind of God is that? It’s like, you wait, man, malevolent things are coming for you in your life. And if you don’t think that’s reflective of the structure of reality, you’re pretty damn naive. You better be ready. And you might think, well, you know, how can a cosmos that’s structured like that be justified? It’s like, well, that’s your problem, actually. Like, literally, that’s your problem. That’s the problem you have to solve in your life. And, you know, this pathway of responsibility, productive generosity, let’s say, honest, productive generosity, the biblical corpus suggests that that’s the best characterization of the spirit that will guide you forward. Yes. Yes. And if I could just add something to that, I think that what the Christian New Testament, in particular, would say to people who are confronting evil in the world is saying, oh, you know, this is terrible. There’s all of this evil and malevolence of the world. The Christian answer to that is, the biblical answer is, you are supposed to do something about it. God has called you to be part of the answer, right? So he has accomplished something on the cross with Christ. The salvation is available, the death and resurrection of Christ. But then how does that get actualized in the world? It is through followers of Christ, animated by his spirit, who then go out and proclaim that message, transform lives, transform the world. So my point in all of that is, it is a message that is aimed at hardship and difficulty. It says, when you encounter those things in your life, there can be profound meaning there. And in fact, you’re supposed to be part of the story of overcoming evil, part of the power of overcoming hardship and malevolence in the world and doing something about it. And I would just say that, you know, there’s a profound purpose in that, that I can say from personal experience, animates you and gives you a vision for your life. Yeah. Well, to all the men who are playing video games and conquering dragons and having a hell of a time doing that, you might think about what you’re doing is that the reason you find that so engaging when it’s abstract is because it’s the pattern for what should engage you in your life. And if you’re not engaged in your life, it’s because you haven’t picked a dragon of sufficient merit. And I mean that in the most, I mean that in the most, in the least literal sense, right? In some ways, because it’s a narrative trope, but I also mean it in the most real sense, is that if you haven’t found meaning in your life, it’s because you haven’t taken on a big enough burden. That’s a strange thing. It’s a strange thing that that’s true. But I think it is, it’s the closest to truth that we have. It is true. Yeah, it is true. All right, Senator Hawley, very nice to talk to you. I understand that in principle, we’re going to meet in Washington in a couple of weeks again. Yes, sir. I can’t wait. That’ll be good. That’ll be good. We can further our conversation. And for everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention to such matters. They’re worth taking to heart. They’re worth that in all possible ways. I’m going to talk to Josh Hawley for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side of things. I think we’ll talk, we’re going to talk in more personal terms. I want to know more about his thoughts about how to mediate between the political and the metaphysical, because that’s a constant battle for a politician who’s attempting to conduct himself by ethical standards. It’s a very, very tricky question, technically and practically. So I think that’s what we’ll delve into on the Daily Wire Plus side. So give us some thought to joining us there. And to the film crew here in Red Deer, Alberta, that’s where I’m at today. Thank you for your help. It went very smoothly. And to the Daily Wire Plus folks for facilitating this. That’s much appreciated. Senator Hawley, thank you very much for your book and also for talking today. And we’ll see you soon. See you soon. Thank you so much for having me. Hello everyone, I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on dailywireplus.com