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Dec. 15, 2018 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:31:32
Sir Roger Scruton/Dr. Jordan B. Peterson: Apprehending the Transcendent
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Well, on behalf of Ralston College and the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism, it's an immense honour to introduce two of the foremost intellectuals of our age.
These thinkers, one a philosopher, the other a psychologist, are spiritual writers addressing the malaise of the soul in our culture.
John Stuart Mill, in his magnificent essay on Coleridge, wrote of Bentham, Jeremy Bentham, who above all others, men have been led to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, is it true?
And by Coleridge, what is the meaning?
With Coleridge, in contrast to the utility of Bentham, the very fact that any doctrine had been believed by thoughtful men and received by whole nations and generations of mankind was part of the problem to be solved, was one of the phenomena to be accounted for.
This, I think, is true of both Roger Scruton and Jordan Peterson.
And I'd like to mention just a couple of points of convergence.
One is an insistence on the importance of imagination as conversion to truth in opposition to a mere fantasy.
And an opposition to idolatry Ideology, as well as idolatry.
Especially the idolatrous ideology of the post-modern Foucault-derived consensus.
And an urgent return to questions about truth, beauty, and goodness.
And of course, part of this is linked to what both perceive as the perilous position of the modern university.
They both argue that Continuity of esteem needs to be regained in the humanities, and that the dominant strands of the humanities are leading to an impoverishment of the souls of students.
Narratives, both argue, are not just stories of power, but these narratives persist because of their truth.
So the importance for both Ralston College and indeed for the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism, of both of these thinkers, is their insistence upon the relationship between muthos and logos, between story and reason, the insistence upon a hierarchy of values, and their vision of education as conversion to truth.
This conversation will be moderated by the President of Ralston College, Stephen Blackwood.
Thank you, Doug.
Thank you, Douglas, for those inspiring and grounding words starting us off right in relation to the past that we wish to recover.
Let me start, I think, with a very straightforward but perhaps difficult question.
We're gathered around the theme, apprehending the transcendent, loosely to gather this conversation.
And I'd like to begin by asking each of you, what is the transcendent?
What does it mean for something to be transcendent?
Well, let me start.
I take a position which I attribute also to Kant, that we have a very clear negative understanding of it.
We, as it were, advance to the edge of our thinking in so many areas.
Knowing that although there's nothing further that we can say, that somehow the truth has nonetheless not run out.
And that negative view, I think, needs to be combined with a more positive view, which tells us that there are other ways, maybe not thinking, but some other way of crossing that boundary and, as it were, landing in the realm of the transcendent and knowing it from inside.
I think this is something that we understand very quickly in personal relations.
When I address you, I know that I'm addressing something which addresses me too.
But from a place where I could never be.
I couldn't look at myself from those eyes.
And I can't capture the thing that is looking at me from those eyes.
But nevertheless, there are leaps of the imagination which can put me in your point of view.
And from that point of view, I can come to understand exactly what I am.
But in a completely different way from simply the ordinary empirical knowledge that I have of myself.
And I think that sort of interpersonal understanding, I would say, we can adapt to all the other aspects of our world which are mysterious to us.
Music, for instance.
That's a beginning.
And I want to return to music a bit later.
Jordan?
Well, I think it's useful as an adjunct to that So, Sir Roger mentioned that the transcendent is what we bump up against when we realize our ignorance and so it's that which transcends our ignorance and that in itself makes it an implacable fact unless you believe that you have no ignorance in which case there's no point in furthering a discussion with you.
So the transcendent is the fact insofar as it's that which transcends our ignorance, but you can also think about it technically.
And I think we know enough about how the brain works now, not that we know much, so that useful things can be said about that.
You tend to represent the world in the simplest manner that you possibly can that works for what you're doing.
And so you don't actually see the world.
You see Sufficiently useful, low-resolution representations of the world.
And if they work, then that's fine.
There's no need to adjust them, and they're relatively easy to remember and to manipulate.
But now and then you have a misapprehension about someone, let's say, and you have a conversation with them, and the conversation goes sideways.
And what that means is that the thing that you thought you were conversing with is not the thing that you're conversing with.
And that manifests itself in error.
So, error is the place where the transcendent reveals itself.
And what is actually revealing itself is the reality that's outside and underneath your perceptions.
And so, what you see in the world, in some sense, is a set of animated cartoons.
And a lot of that is actually a consequence of you seeing nothing but your memory.
Because your brain is organized so that, instead of going through all of the difficulty of having to look at the thing in itself, You look at what you assume to be there, and if you can get away with that, so much the better.
But the thing in itself is always much richer than your apprehension of it, which is partly why you make mistakes, but also partly why you can continue to garner wisdom in the world.
There's always more there than meets the eye, and God only knows how much more there's there than meets the eye.
And you can show this even in the religious sense to some degree, because you could say that there's an element to the transcendent that instills people with a sense of religious significance.
You can do that by immediately, scientifically, by feeding people chemicals, for example, that disrupt the inhibition of perception by memory.
And then that puts them in a place where the transcendent tends to reveal itself, sometimes in overwhelming force.
So it's not some fiction that this exists.
What's transcendent is more real than the reality that you perceive.
Well, let's pick up on that because the ancients and the medievals had a clear sense that it wasn't the world that was changing, it was we ourselves as we make an ascent towards deeper truths, higher forms of the beautiful, as we ourselves become more self-conscious.
So it's not the world that's changing, but us.
I wonder if you could say...
How you understand the nature of that ascent, that movement, and what brings it about?
I would be a bit wary of the metaphor of ascent.
You know, I think in Plato it's quite clear what he meant.
He wanted us to actually to transcend our earthly perceptions and our earthly way of seeing things and look on the world from a God's eye perspective.
And this could be done if we enter the world of the pure forms and so on, leave empirical reality behind.
I think actually, insofar as the experience of the transcendent, as I understand it, is available to us modern people, it's not that way that we get it.
Perhaps Jordan might be right that there are these drug-induced experiences where things open up to us because old barriers are suddenly swept away.
But in my own case, it is The concentration on the empirical reality which at a certain point flips from mere sensory understanding to a vision in that of its communicating something to me.
And I think this is what literature and Art and music do at their best.
They re-describe reality so that it is actually communicating something to you.
It's not just there as an inert object before you.
That sense of the transcendence is like discovering yourself in a mirror, seeing in the world as a whole that thing in you that you could never identify in words, you know, the subject which is looking at it.
And it's not a mystery, but it's something that you can't then explain.
And it's the difference between a good writer and a bad writer, of course, is that a good writer will describe something in such a way that the thing described has the soul of the reader in it.
So that might be a distinction in part between the thing and the meaningful thing, right?
And that's a very mysterious phenomenon.
In fact, in some sense, the essence of phenomenon, because that means to shine forth.
You know, as we're surrounded by empirical facts, they're everywhere.
There's more of them than we can possibly count.
But some of them do emerge and manifest themselves as that conjunction between the factual and the meaningful.
And then that's what's gripping.
And if you're fortunate, to me that's also partly what leads us onward, maybe in something approximating the ascent that you described, is that the set of facts manifests itself as implicitly meaningful.
And that means in some sense that there is a call to you that isn't from within you.
I mean, I don't know how else to put it exactly because you walk into a bookstore and a book will reveal itself to you.
Or you have a conversation and part of the conversation will trigger something in you.
Or you're reading a scientific paper and much of it's dull and then all of a sudden there's something that sparks outward that's like a portal into the transcendent.
And that is a place where the fact and the meaning converge.
And that's a phenomenon we don't understand very well.
It has something to do with its Convergence with the narrative that drives us, whatever that happens to be.
I think that's a good way of putting it.
Actually, it connects with the general problem of what the humanities are in the university.
I've always assumed that in some way or another, if you're teaching literature or musicology or history of art or anything, You are opening young people to those moments when the world ceases to be a mere accumulation of facts and, as it were, addresses you.
And that requires literary criticism, it requires opening yourself to experience in a way that It requires a serious education of a special kind, and I think that if we thought of the humanities as directed towards that, we can see why they might be one way to fill the moral void that grows so easily in people's lives.
So Jung had this idea, which I really love.
It's a very sophisticated idea.
It's his idea of how the self, first of all.
So the self, for Jung, Christ was a symbol of the self.
So the logos was a symbol of the self.
So that's sort of, what would you say?
It's the divine essence of humanity.
And the image of that is a symbol of the self.
And for Jung, the self was the totality of the individual across time and space.
So it's whatever you are As a transcendent object.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
And then you can imagine that that transcendent object also has to interact with you and the world moment by moment.
And his belief was that those times when that space of meaning opened up, so there was that convergence between the fact and the gripping of the fact, was the manifestation of the self which is this transcendent object in the specific moment of time and space and therefore a call forward to move towards revealing that totality as much as it can be revealed and so it would be partly and that would be partly revealed by then following a meaningful pathway And
it would be the case that if you're engaged in the teaching of humanities and literature, that you are trying to engage exactly that part of the person.
It's to pull them into the story and have that open up to them.
And then that's a portal.
It's not words on paper.
It's a portal to their further development towards the manifestation of this higher and more transcendent mode of being.
It's like the Hindu idea of the transition from samsara to Brahman, isn't it?
That you suddenly pass through a barrier that can't actually be described because you can only know it when you're on the other side of it.
But when you're on the other side of it, you're looking back.
At the thing that you've left and seeing it, as it were, for the first time and knowing what it means.
I guess that connects a little bit with what Douglass was saying about Coleridge, that Coleridge was an advocate of a form of education, a form of knowledge which shows the meaning of things as opposed to the mere facts accumulated by Bentham and people like that.
Both of you have done quite deep dives into 20th century totalitarian ideologies.
Both of you have been very trenchant critics of the ideology, the various forms of nihilism in our own culture.
But I think all of us tire of A kind of negativity that has come to be very prevalent in our culture.
Not simply the nihilism, but then we can criticize the nihilism.
We ought to criticize it.
Both of you have been brilliant critics of it.
But what I take to be at work in the work that both of you do Is not fundamentally criticism, but a turn towards something positive, a recovery of a sense of the transcendent.
I'd like to have a turn for a moment to what does that recovery look like?
Where do we start?
Well, if we're thinking intellectually, the world of scholarship and education that we both belong to has turned, as you say, in this negative direction, always preferring debunking explanations of everything, reducing them to the lowest motive, that it's not truth but power that we pursue and all that Foucauldian nonsense.
And I think the only response to that is to come up with bunking explanations, so to speak.
Try to put back into the subject matter one's own inherent belief in it and to recognize that we're not around on this earth for very long.
And we do have an obligation to find the things that we love and not the things that we reject.
And that those things that we love, the best way towards them is to look at the things that other people have loved.
That's what a culture is.
It's the residue of all the things that people have thought worthwhile to preserve.
And teaching that will again reconnect us to what matters.
Well, and there's also ways of providing a pathway forward by making the Foucauldian arguments, let's say, about power more high resolution.
And one of the things that I do in my lectures, in my public lectures, that I think is rather comical is to take And poke fun, in some sense, about the idea of power as the fundamental foundation for the hierarchical structures of the West.
I think, well, you can think of the West as one large-scale, low-resolution, totalitarian tyranny, the tyranny of the patriarchy, or you can decompose that, which in some sense is to transcend the concept, and I think, well, I ask my audiences what they think about the tyranny of plumbers or the tyranny of massage therapists.
Well, because it's dead relevant.
It's like Let's say you need a plumber and you do need a plumber everyone agrees that you need a plumber and because there's hell to pay otherwise and so and then the question is well how is it that you go about selecting a plumber and the answer isn't that there are roving bands of tyrannical plumbers that go door to door telling housewives that if they don't Use their services,
the service of the most tyrannical plumber, that there'll be mafia-like consequences.
What happens instead is that you look for the plumber who is most able, in your estimation and in his reputation as distributed through the community, for being able to fix pipes and run a business and engage in an honest transaction with you.
And that's competence.
That's not power.
You see, and what I see as most corrosive about the postmodern types, especially those who've derived themselves from Foucault, let's say, is that the idea that every hierarchy, or the hierarchy as such, is predicated on power is actually an assault on the idea of competence itself.
And that, in turn, is an assault on the idea that there are real problems that can actually be solved.
Well then, if you dispense with all that, and it's only power, There's no real problems to be solved, and there's no noble ways of solving them, even in as concrete a manner as a good plumber would solve them, which is not a trivial thing.
And so then you deprive people of that.
Of that sense of purpose in their life, even at the high resolution levels.
You know, I've insisted in my lectures that, you know, if you're the sort of person who runs a small diner, that it's incumbent on you to run the highest quality small diner that you possibly can.
Because what you're doing there is not merely providing people with basic nutrition.
There's way more to the space than meets the eye.
And your noble What would you say?
Acceptance of your limited responsibility is also simultaneously a way to transcend that.
That can be a place where the neighborhood meets.
That can be a place where tired people revivify themselves before they go off to do their difficult work.
That can be a place where you can mentor your employees and help them develop their life.
Like it's a rich, it's an unbelievably rich microcosm.
And to take on the care and And tending of that microcosm as a responsibility is also a great pathway to meaning and a necessary and meaning is something that's, well, not epiphenomenal and not dispensable but absolutely central to human thriving in the psychological and practical sense.
Yeah, but we do have to try and understand why it is that there is such a charm in the Foucauldian position.
Why is it that people want to believe that all the best things, what we think of the best things in human relations, are simply disguised forms of manipulation?
You know, that the whole feminist view of the relation between men and women, for instance, which is founded on this deep myth That men are exercising power as a gender, to use the fashionable word, over women, and that all study of this is just a way of revealing that power and the capillaries through which it flows.
You know, I think there's a will to believe this and why is one of the big questions that I think we have to try to understand.
Is it that when people lose some kind of transcendental religious faith that they automatically fall into this great pit of resentment of the Nietzschean kind to try and find the oppressor in every relationship?
Or are there truths that they are exploring as well?
Are there forms of power or forms of human relation that look like power from one aspect but perhaps also look like tenderness and dependence from another aspect and that they just are emphasizing one half of it or something like that?
I think there are real questions as to how it is that our culture has got into this position.
Yeah, well that's the question below the claim of power and so I mean I've thought about that to some degree and here's three possibilities.
I mean one is the accusation that all there is is power is the justification for use of power.
Of course.
So that's that's handy if that's what you want to use.
So then Then there's another problem, and that goes along with the failure, the willful failure to distinguish competence from tyranny and power, let's say, because we might think of power as unearned authority, something like that, because we need a definition of power.
And I think that there's a resentment at work there that's very, very deep.
I think it's deep in the biblical sense, which is that there is a proclivity for Those who do not manifest what they could manifest in the world and thereby fail to watch the success of those who do manifest what they could manifest in the world and succeed and become embittered by that,
tremendously embittered, and then to label that as power and then to attempt to destroy it because it's simpler to do that than to do the radical internal retooling that would be required to set things straight internally.
I'm sure that's right.
That's one explanation of why people are always tempted by the zero-sum vision of relations.
His benefit is my cost sort of thing.
I wanted to pick up on the very widespread view that things are zero-sum, which is of course the language of power.
What's the antidote to that?
How does one overturn the ideology of power?
How does one transcend that with a non-zero-sum truth or approach to life?
I personally would say that the first thing to recognize is that there are positive sum games.
That's what the real theory of the market tells us.
That there are whole realms of human transactions where both parties gain from their shared engagement.
And that won't drive away the real source of this difficulty.
It has something to do with what Jordan was referring to, that people's resentment at the success of others when they cannot match it, or cannot easily match it.
Or will not match it.
Or will not match it.
Which is even worse.
Yes, exactly.
And because of the labor of reconceiving your own position, In such that you actually have to do something about it.
There is something lazy about the zero-sum vision, but it's not a vision that successful people have.
It's not a vision that they have at any level of reality.
You can actually combat that to some degree by making it high resolution again, by making examples.
Because very few people actually Believe, once they observe, that all the relationships they've had with other people have been zero-sum.
Now, you might get some very disadvantaged people, and these people do exist, who've been taken advantage by virtually everyone they've ever encountered in their whole life.
Like, that does happen.
But most of the time, all you have to do is remind people.
It's like, well, think of someone that you loved.
Even briefly, think of a friend that you've had.
It's like, well, you've successfully negotiated with that friend to do things together, because otherwise it's not a friendship.
And it has to be successful negotiation, which means your friend has to be happy with what you were doing, and you have to be happy.
And so, and then wasn't it the case that you were both happier doing that than either of you would have been doing something else alone?
And isn't that evidence in your own action and your life for the existence of non-zero-sum games?
And they're dependent on successful negotiation.
We can both have more than we would otherwise have if we can come to a consensus about what we'll both pursue.
And it's very few people, when you make it personal like that and high resolution, again, it's very few people who are willing to pursue their ideology of a zero-sum reality so far down that they'll actually use that to characterize their most intimate relationships.
Now, I would say that someone who does that by temperament is literally psychopathic.
Because the psychopathic view of the world is absolutely that it's a zero-sum game.
Yes, I think that's right.
But of course we have a whole body of literature about sexuality which is trying to establish that, that sexuality is the exercise of power of one person over another.
You get it already in Sartre's Being and Nothingness, where he almost It's almost by logic that serious sexual desire for him ends up as sadomasochism, because you cannot extract from the other that gift of his freedom, which is what you're looking for, because his freedom is his and not to be obtained by you.
And therefore you can only do this by sort of tearing at his flesh, getting him to confess in the extremes of agony that he can't do it.
You know, this kind of thing, you know, that's a very perverted vision of what sexual relations are, but you get that image used by Simone de Beauvoir and all kinds of feminists to, essentially, to delegitimize the idea that there is such a thing as love for the other sex.
Well, I think it also masks a more fundamental problem that's really a biological problem.
Like, it's a misapprehension of a genuine problem.
But part of what sex does is temporarily subordinate the individual to nature and the species.
And so there is a domination there.
And if a woman decides to have a child, then she is going to undergo a series of extraordinarily radical transformations, and she's also going to end up in a situation where, in all likelihood, Something else becomes fundamentally more important than her and there so there is a there's a some it might be voluntary subjugation but there's a subjugation to nature and and that's built into the fabric of existence and I think it's very easy not to want to grapple with that because it's such a profound problem and then to
to make that a secondary consequence of something like unbalanced power relationships between the genders.
But of course Our traditional religion offers you salves for this, the rite of passage which joins man to woman, the rite of passage which makes birth an experience of the whole community and death likewise.
And the sense also in these great events one is Occupying a position in a moral space that has been occupied by generations before one, and so on.
This normalizing of these huge transitions, I think, is something that we've always depended upon religion to provide.
It's the sacralizing of it.
Yes, and having taken that away or ignored it or tried to live without, exactly, without the idea of a sacrament, we're actually at a loss when these great transitions occur.
Well, it is because it is the case, in fact, that to engage in the integration of sexuality with your individual life is a series of sacrifices.
So, for example, if you get married, that's a sacrifice because it's a sacrifice of all other people.
And so it's a sacrifice of that possibility.
And then to have a child is the sacrifice of all the things that you could have done otherwise than having that child.
But to, as you pointed out, to make that part of a broader tradition, to say that, well, that is a sacrifice and there is a loss that goes along with that, but what you gain as a consequence is of immeasurable significance in contrast to the loss.
And one of the things that's really struck me in this lecture tour that I've been doing, I've been in about a hundred cities and one of the things that I've been talking to people about is meaning and I suppose it's meaning in relationship to the transcendent and the necessity of meaning as an antidote to suffering and to malevolence and the hypothesis is something like well meaning is to be found in responsibility and this is a it's a revelation to people because they haven't conceptualized it that way before it's like meaning isn't It
isn't happiness.
It isn't self-esteem.
It isn't momentary pleasure.
It isn't any of that.
It's the bearing of a sacrificial burden.
And that that actually works to enrich and ennoble your life in ways that make the tragic element of it tolerable.
And to keep you from bitterness.
And so these things that are put forward as subjugation, like the subjugation of woman to the catastrophe of birth, let's say, or even the indignity of patriarchal union, is all of a sudden something that you can take on as an aspirational goal rather than something that's a mere imposition on your moment-to-moment freedom.
It's a relief to people to hear that and to know it.
Of course.
I agree with that.
But there is also the sense that In the world in which we live, where obviously people have been detached to a great extent from any continuous religious tradition, there still is a sense of loss.
They know that they're missing something, but don't know quite how to identify it.
And that's one reason for them thinking that it's been taken away, something's been stolen from them.
And they look around at the people who are at ease in the world and successful and seem to be on good terms with themselves and think of them as the ones who've done the stealing.
And that is a dangerous attitude and I think surely that is part of what erupts in all these Strange academic disciplines like gender studies, which simply have as their goal the undermining of the existing order without anything positive to put in its place.
I don't know.
Those academic studies recruit people all the time from this fund of isolation, this fund of the sense of loss without an ability to identify the thing that's been lost.
That's the cult-like element of them, because they do, I would say to some degree, prey on people whose interpersonal relationships have been irreparably damaged.
I have a hypothesis about the feminist end of the post-modern radical leftist movement, and this isn't something I've talked about much in public, but here goes.
This should get me in lots of trouble.
So, and there's a variety of things that are tangled together here.
So, we don't know how female biology would manifest itself politically.
Male biology does.
Female biology is going to.
And that's because female political activity on the largest possible scale is a relatively new phenomenon.
So, and it isn't obviously the case that men and women's views of the world are going to dovetail precisely.
So here's a hypothesis.
You tell me what you think about this.
So, one thing that a woman really wants to know about a man, or perhaps you might say, one thing that femininity wants to know about masculinity, is that it's not a predatory tyrant.
Okay, so, and here's why.
I mean, first of all, there's fragility in feminine sexuality, to a greater degree than there is in male sexuality, because women bear a higher price for sexual misadventure, let's say.
And are perhaps more prone to exploitation by force.
But more than that, part of being a woman is having the possibility of bringing something extraordinarily fragile and vulnerable and valuable into the world.
And the first concern might be, are you a predator?
Fundamentally, are you a predator?
And so, what I see happening in the feminist disciplines, like gender studies, is the politicization of that accusation.
And the accusation is, prove to me that you're not a predator.
Like, in the fundamental element of your masculinity.
Not only historically, but now.
Because the cost of you being a predator is too high.
Now, I feel that that's an inappropriate...
I think that's what's driving the demolition of the idea of presumption of innocence, for example.
We'll start with presumption of guilt and prove to me that you're innocent.
And I think the problem with that isn't that there are no predatory men, because there are plenty of predatory men.
The problem is that the courageous way to deal with the problem of the predator is to offer a hand in courageous trust and to invite forward a partner from the monster.
That's the mythological manner in which this is supposed to be undertaken.
A courageous part of the woman's journey, let's say, is to face the monstrosity of a man and to invite out of that something more noble to emerge.
And there's courage in that and genuine risk.
And I think that that's foregone in the accusation process, and then the other element of that seems to me to be that, well, if you are a predator, And you're irredeemable in your predatory nature, then the best thing to do is to render you harmless.
And if we're going to obscure the relationship between competence and power, and assume that all of your striving upward is merely a manifestation of power, then what we'll do is weaken you as much as possible so that harmlessness can replace virtue.
And I see all of that driving these resentful disciplines and their ideology.
So the aim is the emasculation of the man Yeah, that's the evil queen.
Yeah.
Yeah, because we have the evil king, right?
That's the tyrannical patriarchy.
Well, the evil queen is lurking somewhere.
Yes.
So...
The problem is...
A lot of this is true, but our society does not seem to have the capacity to put that to one side and celebrate the normal.
The fact that most men and most women are not like that.
And that there is a...
A natural desire and need of the sexes to love each other, to be united, and to create children, and so on.
And that the old stability that was built upon this has gone.
So, I mean, nobody in the intellectual world wants to celebrate that.
So, I had this interview a month ago or so with a woman from GQ, and she was...
Fully on board the predatory male train, let's say.
And, you know, when people like that interview me, they start talking about the patriarchy, and I say, well, I don't believe in the patriarchy.
I don't buy that conceptual structure.
What's so interesting, and this has happened more and more over the years as they've developed, is first of all, The person that I would be talking to had some idea that it was hypothetically possible to reject the idea of the patriarchy.
But now, when I say I don't believe in it, that idea is meant with stunned disbelief.
It's like, what do you mean you don't believe in the tyrannical patriot?
Everyone knows that's true.
And I think, well, so here's your hypothesis.
So this is the hypothesis, is that throughout history, The fundamental relationship between man and woman is one of parasitism and exploitation.
That's it.
And that's the case, I guess, until 1960 and the publication of the Feminine Mystique or something like that.
But that's the entire course of human history.
When it seems to me that the appropriate story is that Men and women labored mightily under their terrible constraints for uncounted centuries, cooperating together by and large to build some modicum of security and freedom and stability so that they could raise children and have a somewhat harmonious and productive life.
And all of a sudden it's become not only questionable to put forth that as a proposition, but somehow tyrannical In essence, just for positing it as a reality.
But that's partly because, isn't it, because of this peculiar view that underlying all this, there's a kind of social structure that this is being created.
The distinction between men and women doesn't have its basis in nature.
Its basis is in the institutions that we have created.
And since we created them, we can change them.
There's been a sort of a kind of Almost hysterical invasion of everything by the idea of human choice.
If there is a structure to the relation between men and women, then we ought to be able to change it.
And of course, it might mean that I have to change my sex in order to conform to the way things are, but that also has become a choice.
Well, and is not the very...
Very constant focus on division, whether between man and woman, or between left and right, or between this race and that race, or any other way in which we might divide people according to groups.
Isn't that very polarized, that fractured polarization?
a sign of a loss of a common human culture, of a universal plane in which we all are as human beings.
And so if that is so, I suppose what I take to be so very urgent in our time, and I wonder, it might be difficult to find anyone who at least when you go down to a high enough level it might be difficult to find anyone who at least when you go down to a high enough level of resolution, as
That we must recover that sense of ourselves as entities that participate in a universal and transcendent plane.
That we have a common culture that I see myself in the other, as you were saying earlier, Roger.
And I'd like to have both of your thoughts on what Strategies or means for that recovery?
And perhaps we can focus particularly on the questions that we started with, with art, music.
You've written extensively in architecture, of course, Roger, and you've thought long and hard about the humanities, Jordan.
What is the character of a recovery?
How do we bring that about?
Well, if I may begin, I think that there are, well first of all you have to identify those aspects of the human condition that move of their own accord towards reconciliation, you know, rather than conflict and division of the sort that you were referring to.
And we are very familiar with them.
It's not just love, which of course is something which is a very complex thing and can't be just conjured from the skies, but there are other aspects of our condition that we can Educate through, first of all, through studying examples, and then through imitation, and then through self-discipline.
Obviously, forgiveness is one of these things.
And the habit of putting yourself in another person's perspective, looking at yourself from outside, and wondering whether you are, as so seen, acceptable to yourself.
All those, you know, of course again, religion, the Christian religion at least, was built upon that kind of intellectual discipline, the discipline of seeing your neighbour as yourself and seeing yourself therefore as a mere neighbour.
I suspect that we have to revive those basic moral disciplines for the use of people who don't have the overarching faith, the belief in the transcendental judgment to which we will be all called, But who nevertheless have to be shown that we do live our lives as an object of judgment nevertheless.
And here are some guides.
Just read Anna Karenina, for example.
I know it takes a long time for Facebook-addicted youth to read Anna Karenina, but there's still hope, you know?
And they're likely to listen to it if it becomes an audiobook.
So, well, because maybe more people can listen than can read.
I mean, so let's think about literature for a bit.
Now, if you read something like a Dostoevsky novel, or Anna Karenina, You're not really reading the account of a single person's life.
What you're reading is, it's like the author has taken a variety of lives and amalgamated them and unified them into something that's like a compilation of lives.
So it's like life writ large.
So that's what fiction is.
It's more true than reality.
Because just like a mathematical abstraction can be more real than the thing that it represents in some sense, The fiction is, it's like a portrait.
If you sit for a portrait, you'll sit and the artist will paint you and then you'll sit again and then you'll sit again and then you'll sit again and so the portrait is actually a composite of you and so it's got a richness sometimes that a photograph can't match and a fictional character is actually a composite of many people and so the opportunity to read a great work of fiction is the opportunity to place yourself In the perspective,
not of merely another person, like you do in normal discourse in a mundane setting, but to place yourself in the perspective of a compiled character.
So I've experienced that extraordinarily powerfully with Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, to put myself in the position of this student Who was nihilistic and who had every reason to commit murder.
And it's an unbelievably intense novel because everybody in the novel is hyper real.
And we think of fiction as falsity or as untruth.
And it's not.
It's abstraction.
And abstraction isn't untruth.
It's more than truth, often.
And so, the humanities can help us walk through the souls of others.
And because we can imitate, and it's one of our primary remarkable miraculous abilities, we can imitate the compiled characters that we encounter in literature and mythology and religion.
And that does help flesh us out and ennoble us.
And we can...
I just wrote the foreword to Solzhenitsyn's 50th anniversary version of the Gulag Archipelago, the abridged version, and I ran across his fervent wish that people could learn from what he communicated, all the horror and suffering, to put themselves in the position of both the perpetrator and the accused simultaneously, and to decide that that's not the road to walk down.
And so, The advantage of placing yourself in the position of other people is that if they're good people then you can be like them and if they're not good people then you can avoid that pathway and then you don't have to learn that through the agony of direct personal experience in the short span of your life.
There's nothing greater than you can do for people than to introduce them into those patterned stories so that they can gain from the catastrophes of the past.
No, I agree with that, but of course in fiction one's also concerned to identify, if you're writing fiction, identify with a character in order to understand that character because it's not as though You can't actually grasp a character from the outside.
You have to be able to see through his eyes what the world is in which he is.
And that is, I think, an exercise of the imagination which I value greatly.
And you don't necessarily come to a conclusion that therefore I don't want to be like that.
It might be just enough to say, now I see that that's a possible human being, and your knowledge of the possibilities is amplified, and your sense, your ability to position yourself in those possibilities also, I think.
Right, so that's a matter of differentiation as well as direction.
Yes.
And I think sometimes in my more dire moments that this opposition to cultural appropriation So the idea that I'm not allowed anymore to imagine myself, say, fictionally as a woman, or as a character from another ethnicity, or even to play the role,
that role as an actor, I think that it's part of the assault on the idea of The individual and the non-zero-sum game because it precludes the possibility that I can take on the role of another in an understanding manner and actually facilitate a dialogue.
And that undermines the claim, I would say, that everything is only a secondary consequence of power.
Because if I can actually bridge that gap Well then, I'm not isolated in my group or my ethnicity or whatever it is.
I can become partly you and we can communicate.
And I would say because of that, literature and art is a great threat to ideology, especially of the group identity kind.
And of course, they're perfectly aware of that, which is why the radicals on that side of the equation are doing everything they can to...
I had a reporter from the New York Times who wrote a rather scurrilous piece about me.
She had done a literature degree at Columbia.
A bright woman.
And she told me in all honesty and in apparent transparency that she had no idea, this is how deep this has become saturated into our culture, she had no idea until she had graduated from Colombia.
That there was any other way of reading a work of literature except through the postmodern lens.
And the postmodern lens is, well, who are the groups that are being represented, and what power games are at play, and who benefits?
And, I mean, I don't know if, because she turned out to be quite a strange person, but, so I have no idea if that was a ploy on her part, or whether that was like a naive What would you call?
Confession.
But it's increasingly the case that that is how literature is taught.
In my home province of Ontario, the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario wants to start teaching literature from a postmodern critical perspective in elementary school.
To demolish it.
Well, there we are.
I mean, I'm in favour of cultural appropriation.
I mean, I'm a product of it.
I appropriated the idea of the English gentleman and I've tried and made myself be it.
I know it's a failure.
That's part of doing it well.
Yeah, yeah.
But I've understood the world from the inside in another way.
But I just wrote a book of stories which was just reviewed by somebody who says, you know, these stories make cultural appropriation into a virtue.
So I felt good about that.
They begin with an inside view of the psyche of an Arab terrorist who has a legacy of vengeance and who is a failure.
Whose loss I try to make real in the feelings of the reader as he reads it.
And then the subsequent stories show the same kind of loss in completely different people.
I wanted to bring up that book of stories actually, Souls in Twilight by Sir Roger Scruton.
It's a series of five short stories, each of which are portraits of a character at a certain moment in time.
I think it's safe to say, Roger, that they're all tragic stories in a sense.
What I found so moving about those stories is that these are individuals in states of dislocation, anchorless.
Seeking depth, meaning, truth, stability, and yet in their confusion, in their darkness, willing against that very thing that they seek, or you might say violating or transgressing that sacred thing that they're longing for.
That's not what's beautiful about the book.
What's beautiful is that in the reading, the reader, her or himself, comes to a sense of what that longing is for positively.
A sense of the stability of love or of What I want to ask, following up on this, is that that seems to me a profoundly redemptive vision that you have in those beautiful stories, Roger, that it's showing the persistence of the beautiful and of the good.
Even in its absence, that I can read that story and have a perception of what positively I am looking for.
And just to refer to something that you say in one of your books, Jordan, that even through an experience of evil, one can develop an apprehension of what the good is.
I'm wondering if you could each say something about that Either there is a reality to these transcendent things, or there is not.
It's either just a construct, goodness or beauty and truth, or they have a transcendent and sovereign, persistent reality.
And I'm wondering if you can each say something about the persistence or sovereignty of these things, even amidst our darkness and suffering.
Well, I would say that in tragedy, when tragedy is really effective, there is a redemption offered through suffering.
We encounter the possibility in tragedy that a human being can, through the most noble motives, also bring down upon himself destruction.
This destruction is no different from the destruction it's going to afflict all of us in the end anyway, but here is somebody who has faced it down in some way, that his nobility of nature and his ability to go out towards others in a condition of love and reconciliation has not been taken away from him.
And the spectacle of that is all the more intense because nevertheless, you know, death intervenes and takes him away as it will take you and me away but without having had the chance to reveal our nobility or even to acquire it.
You know, so I think that for that reason it's very important that In literature, noble characters are seen in a condition of loss sometimes, and their redemption comes because even though they've lost what we all must in the end lose, there is that in them which is struggling towards reconciliation with their own condition and with others.
It's the sense that they are living As another, and not as a self.
I think it's a crucial thing that we see.
The Gulag Archipelago is often viewed as an endless documentation of the horrors of the Soviet enterprise, but it was an investigation.
It was an experiment in literary investigation.
And that isn't what the book is about.
The book is about Solzhenitsyn's observations of people in those terrible situations who did not contribute to the terror and who transcended it.
And the unbelievably powerful impact observing that had on him and the personal transformation he underwent as a consequence of observing those people And the decision he made because of seeing them in their ultimately tragic circumstances transcend that to transform his life from the bottom up and to write this great book and to reveal the utter catastrophe of that entire ideological movement and so You do see the light most
clearly when it's superimposed against the darkest possible background.
And great literature, which pulls people way down into the depths in this compiled fictional manner, then it also does at the same time highlight what's the opposite of that.
In my reading of your work, both of you...
There's an implicitly theological character here, and we can't speak about the transcendent in a certain sense without being theological.
Why is it that the lights just can't be completely shut out?
If evil and darkness were the sovereign principles, as we say metaphysically, the lights could just be completely blackened.
And yet that's not what we see.
And I'm wondering if you would each comment on what you take to be what might be a theological articulation of the facts on the ground.
If the facts are that you can't shut the lights right out, that they're still there, what's going on there?
I totally agree with what Jordan said about the Gulag Archipelago.
And that goes back to Dostoevsky's From the House of the Dead.
You know, his account of being in a tsarist, a much milder kind of imprisonment, but nevertheless, it was full of...
Almost a vacation home.
Yeah, in comparison.
No, I agree.
But nevertheless, he described these characters for whom everything had been taken away.
But he also notes that in each of them I can find the spark of God.
Something which Janáček repeated when he made this into that wonderful libretto for his opera.
And Janáček tried to show in music how these derelict characters will suddenly shine with that light from another source.
It doesn't come just from what they are in those circumstances, but from something higher.
I would say one is always obliged to use metaphors when we get to this point, but it is true that you can find in someone, even in the most deprived and desolate, That on which you can blow to cause the spark once again to light up inside him.
And that is as far as we get to meeting God, but there is no reason to think that we need to get any further.
In my view, that's what everybody saw in Maximilian Kolbe when he offered himself in Auschwitz as a sacrifice and why he was canonized.
Suddenly you see that there is something else in all of us which in Circumstances, however severe and deprived, will shine with a different light and make those circumstances worthwhile because they produced that light.
It could be, in some sense, the mercy of God that keeps him hidden from us.
Because if you imagine that your sacred duty is to Blow on those embers that you described, even among people who are in desolate straits, then every time you fail to take that opportunity, then you tilt things badly towards what they shouldn't be tilted towards.
And it could be that the revelation of your inadequacy in the face of that Moral duty, which would be in some sense equivalent to an encounter with God, would be enough to tear you into pieces.
And so maybe you get glimpses of that now and then, because that's all you in your current depraved moral state could stand of seeing of the face of God.
And I think there's something to that.
That's what...
Simone Weil says things to that effect, I think.
Yes, I often heard, in the old communist days when I used to travel around Eastern Europe and meet people who were in really dire straits, they said similar things, you know, that God would reveal himself, but in these circumstances the revelation would be something too strong for what I could bear.
That's a beautiful image you've given us, Roger, of blowing on the embers within, blowing on the embers of transcendence.
I'd like to ask you both about the forms of culture and institutional life that produce that blowing on the embers in the individual.
It seems to me both of you have a very deep sense of the dignity of the human individual, of the individual's Connection to the transcendent, the grounding fact of our existence.
What would be the forms of culture that we would say to be necessary or most inclined to foster in the individual that blowing of the flame?
I think the most accessible form for most people is music.
And music to me is the most representational form of art because I think that the world is made out of patterns and we perceive some patterns as objects but fundamentally it's patterns and what you want is all the patterns of the world to interact harmoniously in something where every element is related intelligibly to every other element and I think that when your life is in harmony that you can feel that and when you're dancing to beautiful music you're acting that out The music is
the music of the spheres and you're participating in the patterning of your being in accordance with that structure and that gives you an intimation of transcendence and it's not criticisable.
That's the thing that's so lovely about it.
Even as our society has become more cynical and more self-destructive and more deconstructionist, the power of music has in fact grown because it speaks to that eternal harmony and the reality of that eternal harmony in a way that mere intellect cannot deny.
And I mean, I was always amused.
I went to this show, The Ramones, A punk band from New York.
It was the loudest concert I'd ever heard by a good factor of ten.
My ears rang for like three days afterwards and there were all these like nihilistic punk rockers all crammed into this theater and below me there was a mosh pit and it was like ants on a frying pan.
They were just smashing into each other and Throwing people around up above them, and it was quite rough, and they were all having this beautifully transcendent musical experience which belied all of their nihilism.
And they absolutely thrived on it.
It was like, and even the lyrics were harsh and nihilistic, but it didn't matter, because the music, even in its rough form, was something that united them in the sense of this, like, patterned beauty, and brought them together.
And so, exposure to music, that's...
People die without music.
It's like, music is everything.
I mean, it's not everything, but...
I beg to disagree about the beauty of this particular experience.
I think actually dancing is an extremely important phenomenon, partly because traditionally, dancing was dancing with someone.
The with has been taken out of dancing.
The head bashing and so on that goes on with heavy metal and the right is dancing against.
The withness of the dance is something we see it in Scottish reels and things like that where the whole community is dancing in an orderly way, recognizing their need for law and order and taking pleasure in it.
I find that very near to a transcendent experience.
I feel a kind of narcissism has crept into the dance through recent forms of dance music, but that's my old Giza attitude.
Or is...
Or is it simply to say that the principle itself is sovereign?
If one thinks about the logic, for example, of Dante's Inferno, which has ever more degraded forms of knowing and loving, The mechanism,
you might say the nature of the soul, is the same at the top of paradise as it is at the bottom of inferno, but it has these infinite gradations of wholeness.
And so I don't think we have to say that the mosh pit is equivalent as a work of art to Beethoven or Palestrina or Janáček, but rather that perhaps what's going on in that is nonetheless a longing for the pattern and the recognition of the other that you say.
Yes, but your original question was how do we coax people back into a life which is based on the recognition of the other rather than the gratification of the self, because that's essentially what we're talking about, I think, today at least.
And I would say Teaching people how to help others.
The role of the teacher is a very dignified one, but it is only so if the teacher actually thinks that he is helping The pupil to a body of knowledge that he has access to and that sense of helping other people is a very rare thing and it's made more rare by the welfare state and the ready availability of subsidies for subsidized life without
leaning on any particular person.
I think relations of dependence are actually very positive if they're accepted on both sides.
I think it's something that we don't teach.
The Boy Scouts movement and all that, they used to teach young people these things, teach people how to go out and help Those who needed them and how to make those little day-to-day sacrifices and eventually, through the process of imitation and imagination, a character grows based on that.
I feel that there isn't any obstacle to this.
It's a very simple form of education.
All of us can do it and all of us who have children do do it.
I'm sure Jordan does it with his children the same as I with mine.
Of course, you know, you're always disappointed.
They always go away into their corner with their wretched little iPhones and so on, but nevertheless...
Some of it rubs off and you know that in the long run they will be capable not just of finding love but also of offering forgiveness and working for reconciliation.
I don't think in the sort of narcissistic culture which is propagated by the media and by the universities that they're being pointed in that direction.
That is true.
But then it's up to us to point them in another direction.
I think, as an academic, we talked already about that place where the meaning and the fact are conjoined.
And that's the proper place to lecture from, because people who lecture constantly Make the presumption that they're there to deliver a set of facts, but there's an infinite set of facts and so at the very least you have to select the facts and there's a mechanism that selects the facts.
What you want to do as an academic is tell your students through direct discourse and also through action About something that you've encountered that you've fallen in love with.
And to communicate the love that you have for that.
The love for literature.
And not to say, well, you should read this book.
But to say, well, here's this book.
And here's what it can open up for you.
And this is how it does it.
And this is what you'll gain from it.
It's an inestimable gain.
And there's some struggle in it.
But there's something in it that's of unbelievable utility.
And you have to believe that in order to communicate it.
And then that opens one of those doors, you know, and maybe some students will step through that and think, well, maybe that sounds like something I need.
I'm in this dire situation and I need something.
I need a life raft.
I need something to buoy me upward.
And it's gonna take some effort, obviously, because nothing worthwhile comes without effort to communicate that commitment you have to these phenomena that we already talked about, to beauty and to truth and to literature.
and to the classics in the humanities it isn't enough to say what they are and to transmit them it's to manifest yourself as a living part of that tradition and to show yourself thereby as a model for living out as much as you can what that tradition represents and to show that that's So much better than like a short-term pleasure-seeking nihilism that they're not even in the same conceptual universe.
And people are far more open to that.
They know already.
People know, especially when they're hurt.
They know that Happiness is fleeting, and that suffering requires a sustaining meaning.
Everyone who's lived knows that.
And so to say, well here's some balm for the suffering, and it's profound and deep, and here's what it's meant to me, and here's how you can incorporate it into your life.
It's like, people are absolutely starving for that.
We're dying of thirst for that.
This connects with what you earlier said about the curriculum, that the old way of teaching the humanities was, in that manner, as objects of love.
This is what I have loved, what previous generations have loved too, and handed on to me.
Here, try it out and you will love it too.
Whereas the postmodern curriculum is a curriculum of hatred.
It's directed against our cultural inheritance.
One after another, the works are paraded before us, stripped naked and thrashed, you know, by revealing whatever ideology or power structure is being concealed within them.
And that, of course, is not why they were written and it's not how they should be understood.
It's not why they survived and were remembered either.
It's like, this is the best that the best of us could produce.
And it's nothing.
But why should you bother doing anything then?
Well, exactly.
And it means that students who go through that curriculum come out with a sense of the hopelessness of everything.
And thus are successfully educated by post-modernist standards.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
I suppose that's right.
But, you know, there's no reason why one should accept this one.
All...
All good things begin in small areas because two or three people, as Christ said, two or three are gathered in my name.
There am I with you.
But the same is in all cultural activities.
It's perhaps a friendship.
We'll start up a reading group, and out of that reading group, there'll be others come in.
Gradually, if it's founded on love of the thing that's being studied and offered, it will always triumph in the long run over this negativity.
The problem is the negativity is subsidized.
It's subsidized by universities who are paid for by governments, who are paid for by taxpayers, and so on.
And the answer is to take away those subsidies and deprive education completely of money and it will be back with us again.
I suggested something like that in public in Canada not so long ago to cut the budgets of the universities across the board by 25% and let them sort themselves out.
But the no subsidy idea at least forces those who provide education to do it purely on its merits.
And the fact that these counterproductive disciplines, let's say, have been subsidized for so long has given them a power that far outstrips their credibility and their attractiveness.
Now, I wanted to point out that this chat may be seen by a few people online at some point, and draw attention to the fact that we're all wearing poppies, which of course is a symbol of respect and memory for an inheritance of our own past,
for the suffering That has given us or at least protected and given us so much that we hold dear.
I'd like to ask you both about memory and the inheritance of the past and And what it means to have a pedagogy of the transcendent in relation to our past.
How do you open those doorways?
And perhaps if the Spirit moves you to speak about works that you love, that you've been able to open up to others.
One of the reasons for remembering, in the way that we remember the armistice in the First World War, one of the reasons is gratitude.
And gratitude is in short supply in our societies today and it's the greatest gift that we can offer, in fact, to people who are dead.
What else can we do except to acknowledge their sacrifice?
So I think that gratitude is a fundamental part of memory.
There are, of course, accumulations of guilt and so on, and those are being emphasized all the time in the postmodern curriculum, all the ways in which we are not entitled to our inheritance.
But I would think in the face of that we have to insist on the ways that we are entitled to that inheritance.
If people have died for it and for our sake, you know, that is a fantastic title that we enjoy and we should feel grateful to them for that.
I mean, when it comes to You know, actual works of art or whatever which have opened a sense of the depth of one's own inheritance.
That, I think, is a very interesting question.
There's so many of them, but just to mention only one, the Bach B minor Mass.
To me, that's a door into the whole European inheritance going back to the crucifixion.
There it all is, encapsulated in music.
Music celebrating the universal claims of the Roman Catholic Church written by a Protestant.
It's offered as a gift to mankind, and there it is.
Such things so transcend any minor historical details that one recognizes that that is what the past really is for one, that great depth.
of inheritance that can't be enumerated but just enjoyed.
Just a follow-up before we turn to Jordan.
Roger, at the beginning you talked about how great literature, great writing is writing in which the reader Finds himself, finds herself.
Taking Boxmaster and B minor, you've spoken about this unfolding of the self that is found in these great works, or the reflection of the self.
I know, or at least I think you've written about the unfolding of the theme of that mass in particular, but certainly in other of your writings, the unfolding of the theme in music.
Could you say something about the, I know that's a huge question, but the way in which the unfolding of the theme in music is an unfolding of the self?
It's a really provocative way of putting it.
It is true that when you listen to a theme in music, you're not listening to a sequence of notes.
Something begins in that first note and endures to the final note and it goes on all the way through, even though there are spells of silence.
It's still going on in the silence.
So that our ability to hear Something as a theme is already a contribution that we make.
It comes out of us.
So we've identified with that movement.
That movement is there in the world because it's there in us.
But in so many ways, all our inner life is interrupted and unfulfilled.
It's full of things that start up and then Peter out.
And I think that is one of the fundamental experiences of human beings, that there's an inner disorder, that things never actually come to a conclusion.
But here, uniquely, movements begin and come to a conclusion.
And that conclusion is complete.
It's a satisfaction of the unsaturated nature of the first movement, of the first beginning theme.
And it's an experience.
Why do we value that?
I think we value it in the same way as we value tragedy, because it gives completion and closure to things that otherwise wouldn't ever have them.
And things that are transient as well, because it does have a beginning and an end.
And the end doesn't invalidate the utility of the entity.
That's right.
So, gratitude, I mean, that was exactly the theme that sprung to mind for me as soon as you asked that question.
I mean, one of the things that I find profoundly disquieting about the modern radical, what would you call it, ideology that is so unfortunately dominant on campuses among young people is that it's unbelievably ungrateful.
And when I walk outside and there's not a riot and death in the streets, I'm having a good day.
That's my sense of history.
It's like I'm constantly staggered by the fact that so much works all the time.
It's absolutely...
I met this guy a while back.
He'd been in a motorcycle accident.
He really got hurt.
Man, he was pretty much half destroyed.
And he worked as a telephone lineman.
He worked with this guy who had Parkinson's disease, who was equally destroyed in a slightly different way.
And the two of them together could climb up a telephone pole and continue their job.
And I thought, this unbelievable infrastructure we have that is just an absolute, bloody, ongoing, ongoing miracle is sustained by people exactly like that, you know?
They're having very difficult lives.
In a country like Canada, they go out in the middle of the bloody winter where you die.
It's frigid.
And something breaks and they fix it and the lights are on.
The lights are on all the time.
And I come to somewhere like Europe, and to me it's an absolutely...
It was an overwhelming experience to see King's Chapel today, to wander around this city.
I'm just staggered that people produced this and so amazed that we could do it and so grateful that it exists.
We were talking about King's Chapel.
The people who started it didn't live to see its completion.
They were driven by this nobility of transcendent vision and they produced these enduring forms and out of the bloody misery of history we've erected all this spectacular infrastructure that we're so fortunate to be part of and none of that gratitude is taught and it's partly not taught because people have no sense of the absolute catastrophe of history.
I mean, for me, the Hobbes, it's like nasty, brutish, and short.
The simplest and most likely social circumstances, catastrophe punctuated by hell.
And to see that not happening in a sustained manner, constantly, and to see things improving Around us and and to be reliable in that manner and then not to be grateful for that It's like it's an unbelievable combination of ignorance and will ignorance and gratitude and willful blindness and it does no one's soul any good It's so good to walk down the streets of a beautiful town like this and to be open-mouthed in non-ironic amazement at what's here and so and to not
Instill that sense in young people for them to understand that they are standing on the bones of generations of people who suffered to make this possible despite all their errors and have brought this forward.
It's like...
Yeah, well, Hobbes is a very salutary lesson, actually, because he did look into the abyss and stepped back from it and reported on it, as did Solzhenitsyn.
And we, post-war baby boomers, haven't had that experience.
I had a little glimpse of it in the old communist days, but we only saw the edge of it then, you know.
Still, the sense that it is there, always beneath your feet, and that the crust is as thin as it can be in certain places, that I think is something that young people do need to be taught, without making them get gloomy about it, but to recognize that they're lucky.
A last question before we open up for a few questions here.
It seems to me that the backward-looking that we've talked about, you had a wonderful phrase, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, non-ironic amazement, I think.
You said walking around this transcendently beautiful town of Cambridge, which houses this august and ancient and beautiful institution.
You mentioned, Jordan, as we were seeing the King's Chapel earlier today, that Those who started the work knew they wouldn't be those who would finish, and those who finished knew they had inherited a work that they had not themselves begun.
And so I suppose I want to ask, we've talked about the necessity to turn back with gratitude to the past, to our inherited past.
I want to talk also about the possibility of building and of creation.
These chapels and buildings were built at some time.
You yourself are a composer.
Both of you authors of books that many, many people have found depth and truth in.
So I want to ask about the possibilities for renaissance, for rebuilding or building anew.
New buildings, new forms of community, new forms of art, perhaps new buildings of old forms of architecture, new colleges and universities, more healthy and beautiful forms of courtship, new forms of flourishing arts and music.
It seems to me so important that we not lose sight of the fact that precisely The abiding truth of the transcendent in us gives us hope to To answer that call.
Yeah, it must be the case that when describing our cultural inheritance, we're not just describing something that's gone.
We must be describing something of which we are still a part and which has to change as we are changing, to accommodate us.
All this was said by Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent, you know, that the artist He must be constantly trying to say that new thing that he came into the world to say, but he can only say it if he adapts his style to the inheritance of the tradition, thereby transforming the tradition and transforming himself.
There is no formula for doing this, because a formula is precisely what destroys the creative act.
But we have to assume that new things will come, and they will come through, as they always did in the past, through fasting and prayer, you know?
And an occasional glass of wine, in my case.
Jordan.
Well, we could concentrate, I suppose, on building the future instead of criticizing the past.
I mean, it's necessary to decompose, to reconstruct.
You know, those acts can't be separated, but the decomposition is the prerequisite for the reconstruction.
And, you know, what I've been recommending to people is that they start on whatever scale they can start on with whatever's in front of them, because they have more in front of them than they think.
These circumscribed areas that these small places that people can call their own, even if it's only their room.
You can start to do something creative and beautiful there.
I mean, I've suggested to people that they start by putting their room in order.
And that implies a purpose.
It's like, well, your room is somewhere that you exist.
It's a place that surrounds you, that tells you how to be.
Put it in order so at least it isn't Screaming chaos at you in a soul-destroying manner.
Make it pristine and orderly in a fashion that suits what you're aiming at.
So have an aim.
And then, this is perhaps a chapter in my next book, well maybe you start by putting your room in order and then you make it beautiful.
And then you learn how to make something beautiful.
And to make something beautiful is to make it worthwhile and to participate in that transcendence.
Maybe you need one Certainly, and for your future self, which is also others.
You know, this idea that people are fed even of self-gratification, let's say, as an antidote to nihilism.
Well, take your pleasure in the moment.
It doesn't even work for you, because you're stuck with you tomorrow and you next week.
And so, even to treat yourself properly is to treat yourself as part of an ongoing community.
But I would say, start by, you start in the world if you have Some wisdom and some humility by Taking the potential that lies dormant in front of you and Interacting with it in the logos like manner with truth and with love and by Transforming that potential into whatever you can create out of it.
That's good And even if it's it won't be small if you do that you can transform your whole household by transforming your room You can transform your whole neighborhood by transforming your house like these things spread very very rapidly and And that is right there in front of you, you know,
and people think they're impoverished now that they don't have any opportunity and the opportunity is hidden from them by their unwillingness to take the steps that are necessary to put what they could put in front of them in order and to produce the beauty instead of the ugliness where they could do that.
And I don't think there is anything more powerful than that.
That works.
I've had thousands of people tell me that it works, you know, personally.
Come and talk to me every day now on the street and say, my life was in terrible disorder.
I had no vision.
I wasn't abiding by the truth.
My relationships were fragmented.
I've decided to make something of myself, whatever that might be.
I've decided to adopt more responsibility and to tell the truth.
And things are incomparably better.
And so that's there for everyone to take.
And regardless of your circumstances, and I know that some people have what appear to be larger opportunities and more privilege in front of them, but that also makes their commensurate moral responsibility larger.
So there's a certain balancing that's a natural consequence of that.
Now, recognizing the nature of the finite, there's a train one of us needs to catch.
We're going to have to draw this conversation to a close, but not before we've all had a chance to thank both of you for everything you do to fan the flames of the transcendent for your readers, for your listeners, for all of us.
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