June 5, 2025 - Epoch Times
06:34
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Justice is so difficult because the philosophers have this term stochastic, right? | |
| So medicine is stochastic. | |
| What does that mean? | |
| There's no guarantees. | |
| It's a kind of probabilistic thing. | |
| So let's say you're a carpenter and I ask you to build a bookshelf and you produce a bad bookshelf, right? | |
| If you're actually a carpenter, you can produce a good bookshelf 100% of the time. | |
| If you're a really good heart surgeon, You might be able to help people with their heart conditions that are surgically treatable 40% of the time, 50% of the time. | |
| Law is like this because it makes mistakes. | |
| Not only that, let's say that my brother is murdered, God forbid, and they catch the perpetrator, and the perpetrator is sentenced to 30 years in jail or something like this. | |
| Nobody's happy. | |
| Because I can never bring my loved one back. | |
| It's the best the law can do. | |
| And I think that we've forgotten that. | |
| I mean, when we talk about justice, all we can do is find approximations that will get us closer to what perfect justice would look like. | |
| And that is turned into a weapon sometimes against the law. | |
| Because it's very easy to take pot shots at it and say, Well, why did this happen? | |
| Why did that happen? | |
| But, darn it, it's the best thing we've got. | |
| I mean, what is the alternative? | |
| Hatfields and McCoys? | |
| Or just the Führer Principe, which is the Führer Principle. | |
| Hitler is the law. | |
| Well, that obviously has problems. | |
| We have a very great tradition, which is under attack. | |
| I'm talking about the Western tradition. | |
| And it's under attack for many quarters. | |
| And I kind of would like to know what the alternative is. | |
| I think people are quick to judge the tradition. | |
| If you have a discussion with people who have decided to embrace what Roger Scruton calls the culture of repudiation, they will be able endlessly to point out mistakes and flaws and injustices that have been committed by Western governments and individuals. | |
| But the fact is, I think we need to understand the tradition before we judge it. | |
| I think I said earlier this question of where we've been and where we're going is really fundamental. | |
| If we want to deal with the crises of our time, we have to understand where we are. | |
| We have to understand how we got to where we are. | |
| If we're going to have any chance to Find our way into the trackless future to figure out where we're going. | |
| And that means that the whole Western tradition has to be studied. | |
| Let's do that first. | |
| And I think that a lot of the things we're talking about are already there at the beginning of the tradition. | |
| So we've been discussing people who show courage or simply can't bring themselves to engage in injustice. | |
| Let alone evil. | |
| That goes back to the Bible. | |
| I mean, it does go back to Socrates as well. | |
| But it goes back to this notion that we're made in the image of God, that we're precious, that we need to be open to others, that we need to care about others. | |
| And then, of course, the law and the kind of abstract thinking, that goes back to the ancient Greek philosophers. | |
| So you've got Athens and Jerusalem. | |
| And what's interesting is, I think it's pretty good. | |
| And then later you have Rome, by the way, which is sort of the confluence of these two things because the Romans both embrace the philosophy of the Greeks and imitate the Greeks and copy their statues and learn Greek and develop grammar to study Greek and stuff like this. | |
| But they also ultimately embrace Christianity. | |
| But these two things are fundamentally important. | |
| And one way to look at what happens with totalitarianism is there's a kind of embrace of just the Athens part. | |
| And I should say, when I'm referring to Athens, I'm also referring to the Greek poets and so forth, but let's just take philosophy and the promise of reason. | |
| I think a fundamental point is that reason and inquiry and science are all wonderful human tools. | |
| Athens is only productive when it's aware of the alternative and when it's aware of the teachings of the Bible about humility and about how little we know and about there being an ultimate reality. | |
| So what happens if you just have pure reason, a belief in the power of reason? | |
| And incidentally, of course, what happens is That the fascists and the communists think that they can sort of take the biblical story of which promises an afterlife and immanentize it and produce it, Now the danger of that is that, well, if you're going to have a paradise on earth and it's going to be a political product. | |
| It's not organic. | |
| And this creates all kinds of crazy distortions. | |
| But what happens if you've got someone on the other side, biblically informed, who utterly rejects reason, who utterly rejects human reflection and investigation? | |
| You get religious extremism. | |
| So it's sort of like, pick your flavor if you separate these things. | |
| Would you like totalitarianism? | |
| Where people are immiserated because human beings think they can construct a happy society? | |
| Or would you like Islamism? | |
| Right? | |
| And I think that's our problem today, is that we need to get back. | |
| I mean, we were sort of going in this direction of government is going to have top-down solutions. | |
| We're going to tell you what to think. | |
| We're going to take care of you. | |
| We're going to give you your vocabulary. | |
| We're going to tell you how you can live. | |
| We're going to control everything. | |
| There's something above the political. | |
| There's something higher. | |
| There's a higher reality. | |
| It's moral. | |
| It's spiritual. |
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