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April 13, 2021 - Epoch Times
38:11
Roots of the ‘Civilizational Crisis’ Facing the West—Dr Stephen Blackwood | American Thought Leaders
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We are facing civic alienation, inner-city violence, the devastation of our inherited intellectual and spiritual culture.
Behind the unprecedented prosperity we enjoy in the modern era, there's also a cultural sickness.
Our culture cannot survive if our universities fail at their most fundamental task.
What is at the core of the ideology that has taken root in universities in America and beyond?
This view that there is no truth but only power has really poisoned our whole cultural and institutional life.
Today I sit down with Dr.
Stephen Blackwood, president of Ralston College, a newly launched institution of higher education located in Savannah, Georgia.
The bedrock of humanistic inquiry is really the question of how can we live a meaningful life?
What is justice?
What is truth?
What is beauty?
What does it mean to be a human being?
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Dr.
Stephen Blackwood, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thanks so much for having me.
So Stephen, you are the president of Ralston College, this absolutely fascinating new institution that's forming before my eyes, at least.
I've been seeing it develop over years.
We're going to talk a bit about this.
Before we jump into Ralston, however, I want to understand how you see this current cultural moment that we're in here in America and, frankly, beyond that as well.
Well, let's approach that in two ways anyway.
The first is to say, of course, as Steven Pinker has, I think, very eloquently shown in one of his recent books, Things are in many respects going very well.
If you look at mortality rates, generally speaking, if you look at peacefulness around the world, if you look at lifespan, if you look at various forms of technologies, you know, we're doing extremely well as a human society from any number of different metrics.
So I think it's important not to catastrophize in light of the glories of modern science and the many things that we all have the It's an immense gift of living in relation to at this time in history that most of our forebears did not.
On the other hand, I think it is clearly the case that we're living through an extraordinary, I think, civilizational crisis.
We are facing civic alienation, inner-city violence, the devastation of our inherited intellectual and spiritual culture.
We're looking at a pretty widespread Failure of our educational system at every level.
I think perhaps the best way at getting at this is through what has become the shorthand of the meaning crisis.
I mean, what does it mean to be a human being?
And are human beings able to live lives of depth and beauty and meaning at the individual and communal level?
If you zoom out to a sort of distant level and you look at the big picture and then you zoom back in and you look at the micro, I think from both of those levels of analyses we're facing some very, very serious problems.
So, you know, there's a...
What some people describe as woke ideology that basically says it has answers to some of these questions and is prevalent in the academy and institutions of higher learning and even below.
You've come out as a bit of a critic of this, but does this actually offer any solutions to these types of crises that you're describing right now?
So I would first say that I think that we need to make absolutely clear that we, corporately, and myself certainly as an individual, absolutely am the ally of anyone and everyone who is concerned with questions of justice, of the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, you know, people at the bottom.
I mean, what are we as a human culture if we're not concerned about those people?
I mean, really.
So I think we just need to absolutely put down as a shared principle or value justice, caring for the least of these as the Bible has it.
The second thing is that there is absolutely, I think, also no question that there is a kind of unhinged side of some of the more Extreme forms of ideological activism.
And those are suffocating of fundamental human liberties.
Those denigrate human dignity.
Those oppress human beings at the level at which we most importantly need to live, which is our own thinking, our conversations with others, our ability to understand and process and engage with the world and other human beings.
This sort of culture of shame and censorship is...
I think a very profound threat to the very most basic elements of living a free and full human life.
So Stephen, could you break down for me what woke ideology actually is, or however you choose to describe it and call it, what is this ideology that is so profoundly threatening Western civilization right now?
What we really need to get at is not the label, but the idea.
Insofar as that what the term woke delineates is an increasingly high-handed and oppressive desire to remake the world in a coercive manner, according to very reductive perceptions of history, very reductive perceptions of the present, without A willingness to discuss or debate or go back and forth about how we might do so.
What are the principles?
When people start saying things like, you know, we're done talking.
I mean, you've, I'm afraid you've gone off the deep end of, of, into crazy.
Because Talking and understanding things together is the only means we have to meaningfully make incremental changes to the world we live in.
This idea that, I don't know, the United States is sort of somehow systemically beyond repair, when we start talking about things like the First Amendment and the constitutional protections on freedom of speech, for example, that is about as close to the bedrock as you can possibly come For the protection of minorities.
And so the idea that somehow the Constitution itself is irredeemably flawed, that's a position that's, in my view, simply incoherent.
And not only incoherent, but extremely dangerous, because it actually mistakes, as a problem, one of the most fundamental pillars of both a free society at large And of our ability to tackle the very problems of injustice or oppression that are currently at stake.
I think one of the great crises our civilization is currently facing is the increasingly widespread idea that somehow freedom of thought or speech are bad things.
I mean, if we just want to make this very concrete, imagine you're about to cross the street, but you've got your headphones in, and you're a bit distracted, and there's a huge truck coming that you don't see.
You're about to step in front of it, and someone says, Jan!
Jan!
And they get your attention.
They say, Jan!
And they stop you before you walk into traffic.
I mean, they are helping you see something about the world that you did not see.
Now, is that a bad thing?
No, I mean, they've saved your life by helping share their insight into the world that you did not have.
And I know that's a simple example, but I really think that illustrates the fundamental principle of why freedom of speech matters.
Speech is the fundamental means we have to share what we think we understand about the world with each other.
And so, the suppression of free speech It results in the alienation of us from our most critical capacity to engage the world both individually and together.
The second thing that I would say about this is that I think behind a great deal of the currently widespread, very dominating ideological perspectives is the idea that there is no truth but only power.
And I think that that, widely speaking, closes the whole horizon of what a human being can become.
You know, once you close that down and you say, no, there is just the battle of the will to power, one against everyone and everyone against each other, you know, life gets pretty damn grim.
It's essentially kind of nihilism.
There is no sort of independent realm of truth or beauty or goodness or anything that we as human beings have access to innately, like by our own nature, that we are built, as it were,
to be able to understand and comprehend and grapple with the complexity, the depth, the difficulty The hardness and indeed the beauty of the world and of, you might say, of reality more broadly construed.
This idea that there is no truth but power, the nihilism behind it, it emanates into all of the institutions and the forms of life and culture through which we understand ourselves.
So if you look at, you know, I think one of the great examples is architecture.
I mean, if what you are faced with is just a big damn concrete wall, that's what you are, right?
There is no such thing as beauty.
There is no horizon through which you can understand yourself, through proportion and symmetry, through the balance of forms, through the way in which these relate to each other.
And somehow, you know, if you're looking at a great building, it could be a cathedral or a neoclassical building, as you come to see those forms, You come to see yourself in those forms.
Somehow you can live.
In the harmony that those are visually describing to you.
And the same thing is true of a piece of music.
You know, what happens when you're listening to, you know, my late friend Roger Scruton, in a conversation we had, he said that the greatest piece of music or work of art for him was box mass in B minor.
And, you know, what is happening in that piece of music, you know, from the statement of the first theme until you listen to it at the end?
Again, as it resurfaces and recapitulates.
You know, as it were, it's an unfolding of this and taking on of the enormous complexity and difficulty, the suffering, the pain.
It's somehow that work of art is encountering those things, is taking them into itself so that when that theme appears at the end, it's not like at the beginning.
It's expanded and taken on the sadness.
The sadness is even, you know, as it were, become beautiful.
I mean, that's what art does.
And when You deploy the idea that there is no truth but only power.
Through all of our cultural and civic and political institutions, through family life, what you end up with is like a human being in a cage.
You're looking at a dark horizon.
You're blinded.
And that's why I come back to architecture, because if all you have are ugly buildings everywhere, I mean, at some level, that ugliness is what you are.
Why should the town hall be beautiful, even if you never go in it?
It's because when you walk by it, somehow it's yours.
Somehow it's what your life is.
Why does it matter that students be given beautiful poems to memorize?
Well, you don't know when that poem is going to be important to them in their lives.
Are dying or faced with someone dying or suffering or in a stressful or difficult or anxious environment?
What line of poetry may come to help them understand and figure that out?
You can look at this in terms of family life.
You know, the fundamental necessity that human beings have relatively stable And loving environments because that is the bedrock that allows them then to build lives themselves that are stable and harmonious and functional.
What I'm trying to get here at Jan is that I think in the most fundamental way this view that there is no truth but only power has emanated through and infected and really poisoned in extraordinarily debilitating ways throughout our whole cultural and institutional life.
And I think that what we're seeing in our culture largely, you can look at this through our inner cities, you can look at this through the rancor of our political life, you can look at this through the meaning crisis we've just described, through the opioid and suicide, and so on and so forth.
That's where those ideas lead, is to a closing down of the horizon of what a human being thinks that he or she can become.
You just reminded me of a quote that you have on your website that I noticed and I took down.
It's by Iris Murdoch.
You know, we live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion.
The great task in life is to find reality.
Well, I mean, this is where, you know, if I can be a little playful with this, the whole idea of being woke, if we want to give that a positive connotation, you might say it's about waking up.
One of the most beautiful and perennial metaphors of what education is or what coming to consciousness or to see things more fully I mean, we can go back to Plato's Republic and this beautiful image that Plato gives us, this allegory of the cave.
It's one of the examples that Plato gives in The Republic.
He says that you can describe the movement of human life or of the ascent towards knowledge as a movement from being in darkness to light.
And the example he gives us is, he says, imagine there are people who are imprisoned in a cave.
And there's a puppeteer behind them, and there's light projected.
And what they're seeing is the reflection, the shadows of this real thing.
They're seeing the reflections or shadows of it on the wall.
And they think that's the real thing.
And what he says is that the movement of discovery, of human thinking, of human life and reflection richly conceived, is to move from the shadow to the real thing.
This is a beautiful metaphor.
And I think that we all, in some intuitive sense, know that it's true, that we all know that we've had facile or incorrect or downright wrong ideas.
We were insufficiently aware of the complexity of something, or we had those moments where we, you know, those kind of moments of when you go, ah, I just didn't see that before.
And sometimes that happens quickly, and sometimes that happens more often more slowly.
And in some sense, This is the journey that all human beings are always on.
We're all just trying to make sense of things and helping each other make sense of things and to move from the shadows to the real, from the ephemeral, the fleeting, to the true, to the abiding, to the bedrock.
So why Ralston?
Why is this important now?
Well, there are many ways of approaching a discussion of the landscape of higher education One can cut the deck of problems in any number of different ways.
One can talk about the student loan crisis, the nearly two trillion dollars in student loans currently backed by federal government loans.
By the way, many of which were for degrees that were not finished, for degrees that weren't worth the paper they were working on, for degrees that people should never have undertaken in the first place.
So it's not as though that's backed by serious assets.
It's two trillion dollars in Often wasted money, which are furthermore burdens that are now being carried in many cases by people who have the least resources to carry them.
So it's a very, very big problem.
So there's of course cost, the runaway costs, there's the bureaucratization of the university, the huge growth in administration, which is a kind of albatross that no serious institution could ever carry and function healthily.
There is of course the The vocationalization of the university, the idea that the university should be principally a place where people go to get jobs.
Well, you know, I am very keen on people having jobs.
In fact, I'm so keen on it, I think that the university should not be a necessary part of the pathway.
And for most of history, we're not part of the pathway.
In fact, universities were never designed to be places of job training.
And it turns out they're actually quite bad at it.
If you look at the numbers, compare a university with, say, a true technical college or a true vocational college where you go to, say, become a welder or somewhere you go just to learn how to, you know, I don't know, do graphic design on a computer or something like that.
They're extremely bad at it.
So you've got the vocational problem.
And then, of course, You have, perhaps most predominantly right now, this matter of widespread ideological corruption, where you have, especially in the humanities, a kind of suffocating groupthink that is largely derived from ideas and theories over the past I think I'm going to
go.
Facile, dangerous, and frankly wrong interpretive frames on all of the rest of our institutions.
I'm not a catastrophist.
I'm not trying to absolutize this.
I think there are all kinds of wonderful things happening in various institutions.
I am not by any means saying that we should tear it all down.
I think that would be pure nihilism to say that.
And yet at the same time, I think we have to frankly admit that there are very widespread structural systemic problems extending throughout most departments at most institutions and that there is no longer at most universities a genuine culture of free inquiry.
There is an increasingly dark atmosphere of fear, shame and censorship.
Our culture cannot survive if our universities fail at their most fundamental task.
The most powerful remedy is the one that works in every other field, and that is to create superior alternatives.
And that is what Ralston College intends to do.
We're not fundamentally critics.
We're not fundamentally against anything.
We are simply looking to be what the university and what all universities are meant to be.
Places of free inquiry, places where young people and people of all ages can come to discover the riches of art and intellect from past cultures and civilizations, places in which they can wrestle with the most difficult and fundamental human questions, places where, above all, they can acquire the tools and the forms Of self-reflection that will enable them to lead meaningful, full and free lives.
So just in a few words, what would you say are the core principles of this new institution?
You know, the amazing thing is that they're actually not different than what the core principles are supposed to be of the vast number of other institutions that higher education are supposed to be living by.
That is to say, an absolute commitment to freedom of thought, an absolute commitment to The free speech that allows us to convey and share our thoughts with each other.
Now, of course, at any institution of human beings, you need to cultivate a culture in which people engage with each other courteously and with respect and in a manner that is befitting of free and intelligent human beings.
I mean, I think that should go without saying.
But what we are seeing very widely in universities is that the universities are no longer the place that most people turn when they're looking for answers to the defining and perennial questions of human life.
The bedrock of humanistic inquiry It's really the question of how can we live a meaningful life?
What does it mean to be a human being?
What is justice?
What is truth?
What is beauty?
What is redemption?
Forgiveness?
Virtue?
These are the questions that are in some sense at the very bedrock of the life that every human being is a self-reflective agent.
I mean, who amongst us is not engaged in a relationship in which we wonder, you know, what is the best way to live?
Or how can we best love other people?
Or fulfill our responsibilities?
Or live with dignity?
Or do things that matter?
You know, how do we deal with loss or suffering or sickness?
I mean, these are questions that all human beings at all times and places have to ask.
And the humanities are essentially this amazing beacon That we can turn to, to help illuminate our own lives.
And we're facing, I think, a historic mismatch, which is that the universities, which are supposed to be the keepers of the sacred flame, the keepers of this beacon, have, you know, I think by and large, again, I'm not a catastrophist, but are by and large no longer the place that most people turn for answers to those questions.
So what does, what will one find at Ralston College then?
What one will find above all is a place in which to ask the defining questions of human life without censorship or shame in a community that values freedom of thought and friendship.
And what Ralston College exists for is to The goal is to help young people, and not even just young people, but anyone anywhere who wishes to participate in our courses, our short courses online, our non-degree in-person events for weekends and seminars here and there.
The defining and fundamental purpose is to enable people to live reflective, free and meaningful lives.
The fact is that we need intellectual tools to do that.
Why read Shakespeare?
Why read Plato?
Why listen to Bach?
We do this because these works of art and intellect open up the horizon of our own self-understanding.
You know, I was looking at your Ralston website recently, kind of being, you know, amazed, for example, at the Masters of Arts program that you're going to be offering something that I would love to jump into for an intensive year.
I noticed that Jordan Peterson is one of the visiting professors, I guess, at the college.
I can't help but thinking, again, in light of what you were talking about, Jordan Peterson has been writing extensively about helping people actualize themselves in some of the ways that you're just describing.
We've recently seen him attacked in a very prolific way in a cartoon, his ideas portrayed as those of the Red Skull with Captain America fighting against this ideology.
What do you make of this?
This is an absolutely slanderous account or portrayal that is incompatible with even the most cursory reading of anything this man has ever written, with any of the lectures he has ever given, or with the things that those who engage with him in a serious way say or do.
And so what I first want to say is that I think this is a sign of how utterly perverse and dishonest Many in, or at least some, at the highest levels of our institutions and media have become.
The second thing I would say is that there's one moment in there in which, at least of what I've seen, there's one moment in there in which it goes something like, you know, he teaches people that inside they're great.
And I actually just couldn't believe when I saw that.
I mean, the idea that you would sneer At the idea that someone who's trying to give people a deep belief in themselves, that that's somehow something to laugh at?
I mean, when you have the millions of depressed and disenfranchised and vulnerable and dispossessed people in our world today?
I mean, I would consider my life a success if, you know, on my tombstone it were written that he made a few people think that they mattered.
Well, Jordan Peterson has done that for millions of people.
And the idea that we would somehow sneer and slander at that which is surely one of the highest and most beautiful things that one human being can do for another, this is evil, frankly.
The third thing I would say is about those who Give these unhinged, they're not even critiques, they're just blatant slanders, blatant radical misrepresentations, is that what I would challenge them to do is go through a comment thread on one of Peterson's videos.
For example, go through with a comment thread of For example, of the video that his daughter Michaela made after he was coming out of this very difficult year, one of the first things that was posted.
You would think that, you know, if what Jordan Peterson, if the advice, if the ideas that he shared with people had proven to be destructive or unhelpful to make them, that this would be the moment people would say, This man is a fraud.
These ideas have led me down the wrong path.
But in fact what you get are thousands and thousands of comments of immense gratitude and love and care for this man to whom people feel, many people feel, indebted for having either saved their lives or helped pull them back from the brink of the cliffs they were facing.
By and large, what this man does is give people Tools with which to live more self-reflective, more responsible, more thoughtful, and more meaningful lives.
And I simply can't imagine any worldview, any philosophical position, any political position, any idea of what the human being is that any of us would seriously embrace if it doesn't believe in that.
Stephen, when we were speaking offline, we were exchanging some emails, and I noticed that in the footer of your email, you were encouraging people to take a look at your book about the Roman statesman Boethius, who I have to confess, I didn't really even know about until I read your email.
And as I tried to understand who he was, I realized, how could I possibly have not known Who this man was and what a profound impact he's had on the world.
And the fascinating thing here is that it actually kind of speaks to exactly, in my opinion, this whole cultural moment that we're in today as well.
I'm wondering if you could just kind of briefly give us the story.
I think you told me you spent 20 years of your life looking at the question of his work and his profound meditations.
Boethius was a late Roman politician, philosopher, poet, musician, statesman.
He was a man of astounding talent and was really born right around the time that we Right around 475, around what we regard as the fall of the Roman Empire.
So he's just at the twilight of the end of what had been a pretty continuous development from Greek to Roman culture of 1,000 to 1,500 years.
And this is really, of course, he didn't know this, but this is really at the end of the Roman Empire.
He was born into a patrician family.
He was educated to a very high level, was fluent in ancient Greek.
But what he saw was that the intellectual superstructure of the Roman Empire was being lost.
The Romans had always been highly dependent on the ideas and ideals of the ancient Greeks.
And they had always had access to that, actually, because Greek was pretty freely spoken throughout most of the Roman Empire.
Widely, but above all was the language in which many of the aristocrats or leaders, for lack of to put it simply, of Rome were the language they spoke and were educated in.
So you didn't have to translate everything because you could just go and read it in Greek.
But ancient Greek was being lost, and Boethius saw this, and he saw the cultural crisis it was going to create if they didn't have access to the ideas and ideals on which that culture and political entity fundamentally was grounded.
And so he said upon the task of translating many of these works from Greek into Latin, Boethius goes on to be right to reach the very heights of power and wealth in ancient Rome.
He was the Magister Ophiciorum.
He was a consul.
His sons were made consuls.
I just want to paint a picture of a man who just had it all, from wealth and prestige and fame and education and family and security, and then disaster strikes.
Boethius is accused of treason by the King Theodoric, and he is thrown in prison.
And after a year, he is brutally tortured and executed.
And that, in some sense, is the end of Boethius.
Except it's not the end.
While he was in prison, he wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy.
It's one of the most beautifully textured, moving works of literature that I've ever encountered, in which a woman named philosophy is a kind of a personification of wisdom itself, comes to console a man, a prisoner, who's been bereft of everything that he had.
He's, you might say, In the situation that Boethius himself is in.
And this book is this beautiful restoration of his own self-possession through song and poetry, through argument and rhetoric.
It reminds him.
It recollects him.
It reminds him that he has a self.
That is independent of these terrible circumstances.
It brings him back inside himself so he can regain his self-possession.
That's the purpose of the book.
It's a work of consolation.
It's called the Consolation of Philosophy.
And I... I want to relay that it really works.
I once was with a friend of mine who had received a terrible cancer diagnosis, a diagnosis from which she later died.
I didn't know what to do.
We were together having a coffee in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we were just down the street from the Harvard bookstore called The Coop.
And I didn't know what to do, but I thought maybe this work by Boethius, maybe the consolation will mean something to her.
And so I bought a copy of the book and just gave it to her.
You know, she wrote to me two weeks later saying that words had never meant as much to her as they did in reading this book.
And so the point is it works.
It actually has the power to help people understand themselves amidst great suffering and pain, to regain or reclaim their selfhood.
But what happens is that Boethius is himself, as I mentioned, he's brutally tortured and executed We actually don't even know how the book made it out.
There's very little record of the work for a couple of hundred years.
A couple of hundred years.
I mean, just think about that on the scale in which we're talking.
And yet, after that, it becomes one of the most copied works One of the most widely read works of Western culture for a thousand years.
I mean, we measure people on the bestseller list in the New York Times by weeks usually, and it's a lot to be there for, you know, 15 weeks or 20 weeks.
I'm talking about a thousand years.
It plays a significant role along with these other works that he had written that were these translations of Greek into Latin of the knowledge and wisdom of the ancient world of transmitting that.
It's like seeds that were cast forth into future centuries so they could grow What you see, of course, in the history of Europe is the Carolingian.
By the way, Boethius is translated by King Alfred.
It's one of the first works of the classical world translated into English.
In fact, it's the first use of the word freedom is in Alfred's translation of Boethius.
The point is that these works are like seeds that were passed along, transmitted.
And enabled to grow again in future centuries.
And you have the Carolingian Renaissance that leads to the flowering of the Middle Ages.
You think about the Gothic cathedrals and Dante and this amazing cultural flowering that took place.
But then that leads to a Renaissance and then early modern and modern Europe all the way up to the present day.
And so the point is that Boethius, and he's not alone, there are other figures, plays a pivotal role in transmitting the ideas and ideals that lead to the whole unfolding and flowering of Western civilization.
And one of the reasons I find this story so moving is because, you know, Boethius thought that he was helping restore the foundations of ancient Rome.
He didn't know that Rome was already essentially over, soon to be over.
So what he thought he was doing was not what he was doing.
But what he did was absolutely of fundamental importance.
To opening up the possibilities for a rich human culture for those who came after him.
It's a beautiful but also difficult reminder that the future is not up to us.
We don't know what's going to happen, what will become of our efforts or our work.
It's only up to us to do the work that we are called to do.
The big picture is not in our hands.
But if we do the things that we can do, We can hope that they will preserve and maintain and open up yet unknown possibilities for those who come after us.
And indeed, we can hope that we don't need to wait even that long.
It's incredible how many ways this story kind of impacts about our whole discussion up to now.
I find that incredibly fascinating.
I also find some meaning in that.
Any final thoughts before we finish up?
There is no metric by which a human culture can be judged, other than whether human beings are able to live meaningful lives within it.
And I think by that standard, in very significant ways, we are failing.
But I don't think that we should end on a negative note, because What I see, and in the many, many young people, and indeed not so young, that we hear from all throughout this country and indeed from around the world, is the beautifully awakening hunger for a more adequate alternative.
And what I think the great work of our time is not to deconstruct, but to build.
Not to tear down or to alienate, but to recover forms of living Fully and freely together.
And I think what that depends on above all is our educating young people and truly giving them, not indoctrinating, but helping them open up themselves and the world such that they can build and rebuild.
That which we have allowed to fall into disrepair.
And so as dark as sometimes seem, I mean, there's all kinds of reasons we can chronicle for reasons to be depressed or sad or alarmed about the state of our culture.
And I think we actually all have quite a vivid sense of that.
But we should not give up hope.
To give up hope is already to surrender to the claims of the very nihilism we need to transcend.
The only antidote to the widespread nihilism is to recover, to re-apprehend the realities that nihilism denies.
Truth, beauty, goodness, forgiveness.
I think the stakes are very high, but there is, as there always is, great reason for hope.
Stephen Blackwood, such a pleasure to have you on.
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