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Sept. 2, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show

56:30

“Sh*t Cray” | Jonathan Pageau

Jonathan Pageau joins the show to discuss philosophy and beauty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	What, we gotta do shows over here so we can't keep talking?
	I definitely didn't expect to talk about cannibalism.
	Conservatives are very good at talking about truth.
	We own the libs with facts and logic.
	We're generally very good at that.
	Conservatives are pretty good at talking about goodness.
	The moral majority, the religious right, this is good, this is bad.
	Conservatives are very, very bad at talking about that third transcendental, beauty.
	Here to help us speak about it a little more accurately and persuasively is Jonathan Peugeot, who is an artist, an iconographer, a man who eludes titles.
	Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on the show.
	Thanks for having me.
	It's great to be here.
	Conservatives love to talk about true and false, boom, owned, statistic, fact, debunked.
	Conservatives...
	Used to, at least, and to some degree still do, like to talk about morality and ethics, and you should do this and you shouldn't do that.
	In my lifetime, conservatives have just really ignored that third transcendental, beauty.
	Is it because beauty doesn't matter, or is it because conservatives are just missing something?
	I think they're not only missing something, but I think they're also missing the key to their project.
	Because beauty is that which draws you into truth and goodness.
	It is the possibility of the world, let's say, being transparent to something transcendent.
	But we see that it's beauty that draws us in.
	And so the fact that conservatives have been focusing a lot on economics, on let's say family values, all this stuff, and ignoring beauty means that the other side has captured the world through using those means, let's say, twisting them for sure, but using the means of beauty has been the loss of the conservatives for sure.
	Because if I'm trying to win someone over to my side of a political debate, I guess I can make some logical reasoned argument.
	But that might elude a lot of people, or it might just turn people off, or they might just not be interested.
	If I make a moral argument, a lot of people these days, when we're living in an age of materialism and moral...
	Ignorance and idiocy, if you don't mind the bluntness, that's probably not going to work very well either.
	They'll turn to the big Lebowski argument.
	They'll say, well, that's just like your opinion, man.
	Who cares what morality is?
	But if I show someone a picture of a beautiful sunset, if I show someone a picture of the Sistine Chapel, the Duomo, or a beautiful mountain range, it kind of bypasses the reason.
	It kind of cuts right to the heart of someone.
	It The power of beauty seems much more widely accessible.
	Exactly.
	But it's also, I think, one of the issues we've had in, let's say, the last few centuries is that there's been a movement, especially with the emphasis on reason, there's been a movement where beauty or the appearances are always seen as something which is tricking you, something which is lying, let's say.
	And sometimes that's true.
	And we see that a lot in advertisement and, you know, the modern media has a lot of that.
	But there's a manner also in which, because we believe The origin of truth and goodness is that which creates the world.
	It's that which makes the world.
	Therefore, the world is made in a way that reflects that.
	And that's beauty.
	It's like that moment that cuts through everything, where you're shaken in your body.
	You know, it's not just about up here.
	It's like your whole body participates.
	When you walk into a beautiful building, especially, you know, you feel overwhelmed with this sense of awe, right?
	The hairs on your neck stand up and you feel like you're small and that you're in this amazing presence.
	These are real.
	They're not illusions.
	These are real feelings.
	And you can imagine like even...
	Imagine in the Bible, you imagine the Israelites coming up to the mountain and the mountain trembling and the glory of God appearing on the mountain.
	These are appearances.
	These are things that are...
	It's a seizing people.
	And I think that we struggle with that, especially in North America, I would say.
	We do have a kind of cult of ugliness, and also a cult of the banal is the best way to think about it.
	We love things that are banal.
	We have the strip malls.
	We have the electric wires.
	We have these huge highways.
	And so we've lost our sense of this...
	We've lost our sense of proportion.
	And because of that, I think our souls are impoverished for that.
	I totally agree with your point.
	I was at a wedding in the south of France last year, and I'm walking through these medieval towns.
	I was even walking through Paris, and my wife said, how come they get this?
	How come they get to have this, and we don't get to have these beautiful things?
	So I totally agree.
	But why?
	Why do we in particular have this cult of ugliness in North America?
	I think it's because North America is really the product of the modern world.
	It really is a modern country.
	And it is founded on economic good, on economic progress, on business.
	These are the values that sustain us.
	And so when we make these large, these huge glass towers that show power and And economic success, but they lack a connection to the transcendent that the older buildings have.
	So I really think that's what it is.
	We're very practical.
	We make the best computers.
	We make the best stuff.
	But that also has a corollary.
	And there's also another aspect, which is that...
	North American society in general has moved away from community as being, let's say, the thing that binds us together.
	And so because of that, urban planning has suffered tremendously.
	We've basically planned our cities based on cars.
	And so that totally transforms the space.
	Traditional towns are hierarchical in the way that they're structured.
	So usually you'll have something like a church in the center.
	It's the highest building.
	The tower, nothing is allowed to be higher than the church.
	And everything is aligned towards that church.
	So there's a sense in which the entire church Even the streets, the manner in which you walk through, has a human scale to it and has an orientation.
	And you think, well, why does that make it beautiful?
	But it's about orientation.
	If you orient yourself properly, then things will lay themselves out almost naturally.
	The beauty of a medieval village isn't planned.
	It is this negotiation, this organic negotiation of humans oriented towards the same thing.
	Our modern suburbs are monsters.
	They're just these layouts of houses and houses and houses with no center, no common project, nothing to bind us together.
	And so we create, it's because of the car, like we create these huge shopping districts and then living districts and nobody even knows like where, we don't have places to come together except for maybe entertainment, sporting events, everything.
	So it's a very deep, deep problem.
	And it actually does start with architecture and urban planning.
	And then everything kind of flows out of that where we're used to living in these inhuman areas.
	And so because of it, we don't see beauty as a value that draws us together.
	Here's where modern conservatives will push back, too.
	Because you're right, I was thinking, I was walking around this town in Les Beaux in Provence, and at the very tippy-top of the town, there is the old church, and it's a beautiful church, and the whole rest of the town is kind of descending around that.
	But a modern American conservative might say, well, I don't give a damn about that church.
	Who are you to tell me that I can't build a building bigger than that church?
	I'm going to build a skyscraper that's 10 zillion feet high, and I'm going to fill it up with a bunch of bankers, and I'm going to fill it up with a bunch of lawyers and a bunch of businesses, and we're going to just make money, money, money.
	And frankly, forget the office building for a second.
	If I want to build my house 10,000 feet high, I'm going to do that too, and you have no right to tell me otherwise.
	Well, in the end, that might be true and that might be fine in the sense that, okay, yeah.
	But then don't complain down the line when you see things falling apart.
	And so don't complain down the line when you realize that everybody is doing their own thing in terms of morality, everybody is doing their own things in terms of how they conceive of family, how they conceive of what is good.
	You know, all these things come together.
	There's a reason why Plato has the three transcendentals.
	It's because they actually are, you could say something like they're actually transparent manifestations of something infinite.
	But you really need all three or else you can't have the other ones.
	Or you can fight for the other ones, but they're slowly going to disintegrate.
	It's difficult to hold that together.
	But by the way, in the United States, there are counter movements and there are groups that are trying to think of the world differently.
	And so there are some cities, for example, Charleston, South Carolina, where there are many groups of developers and groups of architects that are working to Recreate human-sized cities.
	So there's a neighborhood near Charleston called Ion where the developer built the whole neighborhood and the first thing he said is, we need a church.
	At least two.
	So they've got two churches and then they made everything human scale.
	Like the streets are narrow so you have to wait for the other cars to kind of go.
	And I'm hearing some conservatives like rip their hair out.
	But there's something about, let's say, even how do you deal with the problem of cars?
	If you have to slow down and you have to see the person in front of you and negotiate a little bit all the time, then the car doesn't become this weird bubble that you're just alone in.
	It becomes a space of relationship with others.
	So that's a way in which beauty can create community.
	Making something more human-scale and beautiful is actually encouraging community.
	Now, I can't help but notice the conversation keeps coming back to religion.
	We didn't start it out with religion.
	We were just talking about beauty.
	But it keeps coming back to the position of the church, the way things ought to be.
	We're living in a culture where religion is collapsing, where churches are emptying, where the largest spike in religiosity is among the nuns.
	And I'm not talking about Catholic sisters in a habit.
	I'm talking about N-O-N-E-S, people who say they have no religion whatsoever.
	How are we supposed to restore a sense of beauty if you seem to think that religion is so central to it?
	How can I say this?
	I'm afraid to say that I don't have a lot of hope for the big picture, at least for now.
	I do have hope for something like a seed which is being planted.
	So the reality is that truth always wins.
	Sometimes it takes a while.
	Sometimes it's painful.
	I think that for now what we need to do is rather work locally and try to plant seeds of the transcendentals, of beautiful things, work on our families, even our homes, to just have a sense in which our homes are little sacred spaces.
	They have to be taken seriously.
	We can't just treat them as Something to be used, let's say.
	But they are the place where we congregate.
	Even in terms of setting the table, for example.
	That's a little example, but in our house we set the table every day for dinner.
	And it's a little ritual, but it's something which reminds us that we're sitting together.
	We have to care for the place in which we're sitting.
	We have to treat it as if it's valuable.
	And these are little moments of beauty that can help work people up towards Understanding the importance of space, the importance of proportion in our human interactions, even.
	I think it was Christopher Alexander who said that every space that you are in will either slightly elevate or slightly lower your spirits.
	And so the home is so important here.
	The only time that my wife and I really bicker It's over ordering furniture.
	And it's not because we have different tastes in furniture.
	We don't.
	But it's because I drag out this process.
	And sometimes, sweet little Elisa, my wife, she says, we've just got to order a crib.
	We've just got to get a lamp.
	We've just got to, come on, just go.
	And I say, no.
	Because I'm going to have to look at that crib or that lamp.
	And I'm going to have to look at it all the time.
	And I need it to be beautiful.
	And I need it to elevate the space.
	By the way, in her defense, it's very hard even to purchase beautiful things, even for the home now.
	And I'm not saying they've got to be super fancy or expensive.
	There are plenty of beautiful things that are very, very inexpensive, some of which are even free.
	You can get them from nature and manipulate them.
	But it's very difficult to find them because everything is mass-produced in some factory in China following one of the stupidest maxims that has ever come to dominate a civilization, which is form follows function.
	Yeah, definitely.
	We have the same issue at our house as well.
	But we agree, though.
	We're no bicker.
	But at some point, I think about maybe six years ago, we decided that whatever we get for the house, we are going to get the best thing for that place for that moment.
	Sometimes that space remains empty for, sadly, sometimes a year.
	But it's like, no, we're going to get it right.
	Especially my wife.
	She's really...
	And when it happens, then it is almost like a family member that enters into the house because we're careful.
	We took time to really decide.
	One of the problems we have, too, which is actually a big...
	I would say an enemy of beauty is fashion.
	This is a big problem because people mistake the wow of the new and the surprise of something unusual or something surprising.
	They really tend to confuse that with beauty.
	They're not the same.
	And it's difficult, because we really have to retrain ourselves to think outside of fashion.
	It's not that things don't change.
	Forever, things have always changed.
	You know, styles slowly change with time, and there's that flow.
	But we live in a world where things are so intense, where we buy something, and then two years later, it's almost embarrassing to have that thing in the house.
	People need to retrain themselves to learn to see through the fashions, And recognize, let's say, more stable patterns that will be able to create beauty in your house without creating.
	You will miss that when people walk in and go, wow, look at that thing you got because it's so impressive and so exciting for the moment.
	You'll miss that, but you'll get a better sense of being in a space that you can inhabit and that is going to, how can I say this?
	It's going to grow old with you.
	You can live in that space.
	A piece of furniture that has been lived with for years almost becomes a part of your family, like a part of your world, and it has a life in your family.
	So thinking of it that way can, I think, help people to...
	To see through either the ugly, practical, plastic fork aspect of our world, but also this kind of high, glitzy fashion world.
	We live in this insanity of extremes.
	That's the problem.
	And there is a financial motivation here as well, which is that...
	If you deck out your home in the green shag carpet and you fill your closet with powder blue suits, you're going to need to change that fashion within six months.
	Well, really, you should change it immediately.
	But certainly within six months or a couple of years.
	Whereas if you have something that is more traditional, it's not that you're just going back to something that's old and stodgy and outdated.
	That's not what tradition is.
	Tradition is the opposite.
	Tradition is that which has endured.
	In many ways, it's the most vibrant, vivacious, I guess this brings us back a little bit to Christianity, which we keep sort of circling around, described as the religion that is ever-ancient, ever-new.
	You are not just an artist, you are an iconographer.
	Not just an iconographer, a Christian iconographer.
	Is that just a coincidence?
	Not at all.
	You know, I studied fine art when I was in my 20s, and I struggle a lot to find a way to integrate First of all, I was a Christian.
	I was doing contemporary art, which is already a problem because it's so cynical and so heady.
	It's difficult to make something.
	You're always making a comment on something.
	I really wanted to create things that had a place in the world.
	Already, that was a problem.
	Also, I needed to find a language.
	Discovering the traditional language of the church.
	The church developed this Powerful visual language for like the first 1,000 years.
	And it wasn't top-down.
	It was this really organic negotiation.
	If you went in a church like in Spain or if you went to Syria or to England, you would have recognized what you see.
	There was like this universal language, I would say.
	And so diving back into that universal language to me is very deliberate because I think that Our understanding of art and our participation in culture, if we want to renew it, even at the level of entertainment or at the level of furniture, it has to start in the highest place.
	And so for me, this was really a strategy.
	So I make images for churches.
	I make...
	Things, chalices, things that people use within the traditional churches.
	But I also make t-shirts.
	And I wrote a graphic novel.
	And I write fairy tales.
	And so, for me, all of this is connected together.
	That is, nothing is bad.
	Like, t-shirts are fine.
	It's okay to wear a t-shirt.
	But don't wear a t-shirt when you go to church, let's say.
	Right?
	It's like, just...
	Everything has to be in its place.
	And I think for things to kind of flow down and orient themselves properly, they have to start in the highest.
	And so for me, it was really important to rediscover the Christian aesthetics and the Christian language of art in order to then know that later I would be making other things and having them, let's say, flow down from that.
	And I think it's the same with architecture, for example.
	Like if we recapture beautiful churches, That's probably the best thing we can do.
	And then the world will flow slowly out of that.
	It's going to take time.
	But we're going to at least have the place where we gather together and we recognize what is highest.
	That's what we're doing when we're in church.
	We're like, this is what is highest.
	So if the space is this ugly thing that looks like a strip mall, we're not honoring.
	Even if it's not overtly ugly, even if it's not aggressively ugly, even if it's just plain and banal.
	No, I totally agree.
	I always tell people...
	Your church should really be nicer than your house.
	Just keep that, if you at least keep that hierarchy and make sure that your church is nicer than your house, then you should be okay.
	There is, though, there is a traditional language of Christianity, even in the architecture as well, that is the most, I think, reflective of what Of what a church is.
	And you see that.
	There's still plenty of churches that have that.
	But it's difficult.
	A lot of the modern churches, they're going for the entertainment mode.
	They're going for a theater or something that's more like a stadium.
	And that, it's reflective of what you're doing.
	Spaces aren't arbitrary.
	Spaces have The way we give our attention to things and the way that things happen have meaning.
	You can't avoid it.
	Let's say this is going to be hostile to a lot of people.
	I understand.
	But if you stand in front of people The way you dress is going to affect the impression you give.
	It doesn't matter what you want.
	So if you're standing in front of everybody and you're saying, well, I don't want my clothing to say something.
	So I'm going to wear like ribbed jeans and I'm going to have messy hair.
	I'm going to sit on the side of the stage.
	You're saying something, my friend.
	Inevitably.
	You're inevitably saying something by your demeanor, by the way you're dressed.
	And so I think that one of the powerful things of the traditional Christian churches is that they were able to create a language that Every piece of clothing that a priest wears in the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church is related to a psalm, like for sure in the Orthodox Church.
	When they wear, they put their clothing on, they say prayers, they actually recite psalms as they put on their clothing, and so they're putting themselves in a space where they're going to really represent what it is they want to represent, which is they want to gather the people in attention to God.
	And the space is the same.
	The tripartite The way that a traditional church is set up is there specifically for a reason.
	The altar is higher than the seats.
	If you have a place where all the seats are higher than the stage, you're saying something.
	You can't avoid entering into the language of hierarchy that's in scripture, like going up the mountain, Jesus going up the mountain, or Moses going up the mountain.
	You have to think about that, because that's the world in which we have our experience.
	So if you create a stadium where all the viewers are higher than the pastor, You're saying something.
	And even if it's not explicit, it's going to imbibe the culture and it's going to affect the way you understand the world.
	Because we have bodies.
	That's right.
	Because we're incarnate.
	It's just unavoidable.
	We perceive the world...
	The same reason your head is at the top of your body, you know, for the same reason these hierarchies of attention are, the same reason when you lift your head up, you know, to look over something or to see the sun or to, you know, these are all real embodied realities that we deal with.
	Well, you mention this big shift in the culture and specifically in churches from reverence and worship of God to more entertainment.
	And you see this, especially in the Catholic Church in the 1960, really 1970 and afterward.
	The mass was changed radically such that the priest, who since time immemorial had faced the altar and all the people in the priest were facing the altar together worshiping God, the priest turned around and faced the people.
	And a priest friend of mine, Father George Rutler in New York, described what happened then, which is the priests would begin to entertain.
	They would often tell jokes.
	He said like...
	Like a ham actor in a dying vaudeville show.
	They would tell jokes.
	They might consider, my priest friend suggested, limiting their repertoire to the jokes that Saint John told the Blessed Mother while her son bled on the cross.
	You know, previously...
	How's that imagery?
	Yeah, there you go.
	Previously, and I know this because I attend the traditional Latin Mass, and we had been robbed of that Mass for most of my life until in the 2000s Pope Benedict started to loosen it up again and allow people to go back to it.
	It was a total revelation to me because I grew up in the era of priests making dumb jokes and the hymns being lame little ditties from the 70s that weren't even cool in the 70s and acoustic guitars and felt banners and just ugly, banal, bland, whitewashed churches and iconoclastic kind of moment where you take out all of the beauty.
	And then I began to glimpse a mass where all of every syllable It's a symbol.
	Every article of the priest's clothing, as you mentioned, all of the language, all of the chanting, all of the orientation of everything, is symbolic of something.
	It's imbued with meaning.
	And I said, oh my gosh, we're really doing something here.
	This is really significant.
	I totally agree.
	I mean, I'm an Orthodox Christian, and so...
	Luckily, we haven't had that change, let's say.
	We live in that world where the purpose of church is to worship.
	It's something which is It really does reflect North American culture.
	And I think sometimes you could say that, at least here, it happened in ways that are insipid.
	People didn't totally realize what was going on.
	But there's a manner in which we view church as something that we consume.
	This is just an inevitable part of the way we understand culture as also entertainment.
	We've reduced culture to entertainment.
	And so that gets brought into the church where we're there to consume culture.
	Whatever it is that is going to be presented to us.
	And that is a problem.
	It is a problem.
	And it's definitely helpful to have properly oriented spaces and properly oriented liturgies to help us understand that no, we need to orient ourselves towards God.
	And if we do that, then the world will...
	It's funny...
	If we orient ourselves towards God properly, then everything will kind of flow, even in terms of beauty.
	That's what I was saying before, is that for me, becoming an iconographer was about orienting my art practice in the highest way possible.
	In a world also where it was so weird to do that.
	It's like, okay, you're an iconographer?
	I'm an icon carver.
	How many of those are there in North America?
	Yeah, I can count them on two fingers, really.
	And so...
	But still, it was a very strange thing to do, but I knew that I had to, in order for anything else that I do to flow, I had to be oriented properly.
	It's the same with our family.
	So if we think of church as a place to consume, let's say, songs and messages or whatever, then when we go home and we sit at the table, we think that food is just there to consume.
	And so we'll watch our family dinners erode.
	Hmm.
	For this downstream from the manner in which we worship.
	And it's going to happen in the culture generally.
	It's not a direct correlation.
	But you'll see it kind of happen.
	Whereas we don't orient ourselves properly, then things are going to start to fragment.
	You'll come to a point where people, families don't even sit together at all.
	There's a principle here.
	Lexarandi, Lex credendi, Lex vivendi.
	The way that we worship affects the way that we believe.
	It determines the way that we believe, and it determines the way that we live.
	So you're talking about this orientation all coming down.
	It affects the whole rest of life.
	I can't help but think that when God is asked what his name is, the burning bush, Moses asks God, who are you?
	He says, I am who I am.
	I am being himself.
	And when we find our identity in I am who I am, things make sense.
	When we reject I am who I am, when we reject being himself, we're left with this question, which is, who am I? And we've got this identity crisis, and right now, specifically, that identity crisis is manifesting in gender.
	This transgender moment where more than one in five Zoomers are identifying as LGBT and where you've got a huge spike in even childhood transvestitism and gender dysphoria.
	Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? I can't help but notice that symbol is at the very heart of that question.
	The body is a symbol of our soul, for instance.
	No, you're absolutely right.
	And it's something which, the way that you framed it is perfect, because it does have to do with the problem of being.
	And so, you can think about it, fractally, about anything.
	Like, it doesn't have to be just God, let's say.
	There is a way in which you recognize the being of something.
	So let's say, like a chair.
	You have a way to recognize it.
	And you have multiplicity.
	Like there's variation, right?
	There's variation of chairs.
	There's all kinds of different chairs.
	But the further you get away, let's say, from what you recognize as a chair, you're going to start to see things get weird, where you're going to start to see It's kind of like a chair, kind of like a stool.
	It's kind of in between.
	It's like a hybrid between a chair and a bench.
	And so you start to see exceptions and strangeness.
	And those are, in some ways, they're actually okay if we're all oriented towards...
	The being in the first place.
	And so this is what we're seeing happening everywhere, which is that we're moving into exception, hybridity.
	So that's the opposite of being, is that if you move away from being, you move into confusion, into things that have different identities.
	So if you think about...
	So I like to help people understand, let's say you think about a traditional church.
	A traditional church is built exactly like this.
	Like a Gothic church, for example, is a good way to say it.
	So at the center, we have the altar.
	It's the highest place.
	It's the place where the heaven and earth meet, right?
	The priest lifts up the chalice and he shows you like heaven and earth is meeting right here.
	This is the spot where being is manifesting itself in its fullness.
	And then we have the The people that are there and there's multiplicity and there's all this stuff.
	Then in the corners and in the edges and on the outside, that's where we have gargoyles.
	And gargoyles are fine, right?
	In their proper place.
	And that's what they are.
	They're ambiguous.
	They're humorous.
	They're confused.
	They're a strange mixture of different identities.
	They usually have a kind of...
	Irreverent nature to them.
	Sometimes they're even kind of off-key, like a little salty, let's say.
	And they have their place in the structure, but only if they're in their proper place.
	If you take a gargoyle and you put it on the altar, you're in trouble.
	And I think that this is what's going on, is that exceptions will always exist.
	So there's a sense in which the argument of the LGBT argument to say that there's some fluidity is true, but the fluidity is on the edges.
	It's always in the exceptions and on the edges and in strangeness.
	But you can't make strangeness the thing that you worship because then everything falls apart.
	So if you have a whole month where you're celebrating Idiosyncrasy and strangeness and ambiguity.
	It actually becomes the only thing you're allowed to celebrate.
	If you want to know where a culture is, Look at what you're allowed to celebrate.
	And so as there's a war on, let's say, the 4th of July for Americans, a war on the idea of saying the holidays instead of saying Christmas, like all this kind of little, this little fight in language and what it is that we are, that we should and are allowed to celebrate, at the same time that this rising up of entire swaths of our liturgical year, we could say, to worship ambiguity and idiosyncrasy and strangeness, That's a sign.
	It's related to being itself.
	It's related to the manner in which being reaches its edge.
	And you're getting contradictory protestations coming out of the left, I've noticed, specifically on this question.
	The left will try to change all of our language and force us to call men her and women he, and they will force us to say happy holidays instead of Christmas.
	What holiday are we talking about, folks?
	There's one big holiday here that we're all talking about.
	We're not allowed to say it.
	They'll say, this is so important, change the language, change the language, change the language.
	And also, what do you conservatives care about?
	Come on, it's just words, it's just symbols, who cares?
	You care, you're the one who's making me change all of the language.
	Yeah, and also, I mean, the language becomes, the idiosyncratic language is so precise.
	The whole pronoun thing, you have to use this pronoun, you have to use this, and then there's all these multiple terms.
	Exploding multiple terms of how to define someone.
	And if you don't use that, you're actually making them not exist.
	You're refusing their actual existence.
	It was never about it doesn't matter.
	It really is about what matters.
	Humans can't live without things that are important in a hierarchy of values.
	And so it was never...
	Although people will say, oh, we just have to flatten everything.
	We have to make everything kind of like this.
	It's never true.
	That's always a lie.
	It always ends up with a kind of hierarchy of values.
	And in a way, the way to...
	Right now what we're seeing is something like an upside down hierarchy is the best way to understand it.
	And so it's like where the exception is the rule.
	We used to say the exception proves the rule.
	It's like there's exceptions so you can see the rule and so now it's like not only does the exception invalidate the rule, it becomes the new rule and everything is kind of directed towards the exception.
	They'll say this with hermaphrodites.
	They will say, well, because there are like four hermaphrodites in the entire world, this proves that men and women are not discrete categories that really exist.
	And I think, first of all, even hermaphrodites can be classified as man or woman in virtually all cases, but Ligers exist.
	There's such a thing as a liger.
	Yeah.
	It is a hybrid of a lion and a tiger.
	The existence of probably a similar number of ligers that there are hermaphrodites, it does not negate the existence of lions and tigers.
	Yeah.
	Well, it's because people can't think in hierarchies anymore, in a way.
	Well, they do, secretly.
	But publicly, they don't really think in hierarchies.
	They do think in these weird, radical opposites.
	And so, it's a trick.
	The postmodern trick has been to take everything ambiguous, everything that's kind of in the margin, and use it as a tool to devour.
	It's like a parasite.
	It's like a...
	And I say that, people go, oh Jonathan's saying it's a parasite.
	No, the postmoderns are very much aware.
	Jacques Derrida has a famous interview where he said that his whole work is about parasitology, it's about virology, and that it's about introducing a parasite that slowly devours the host.
	And the exception devours the rule.
	The thing that's righting the world is slowly kind of deconstructing the main body, let's say.
	So this is something that is weaponized.
	It's deliberate.
	When we're talking about these exceptions then, I have to wonder if conservatives are...
	If we're taking the wrong tack here, if we're taking the wrong strategy.
	I think they are.
	Because, you know, especially when it comes to gender, we deny gender expression.
	We say gender expression is this totally bogus thing.
	I've said this myself.
	It's this bogus thing.
	It's ridiculous.
	There's just sex.
	There's boys and girls, XX, and XY chromosomes, and that's that.
	But it's actually a very ancient way of thinking that gender and sex are not exactly the same.
	I find it in the Byzantine Empire, they had this notion that they weren't exactly the same.
	It only makes sense because symbols and the symbolized are not exactly the same.
	I am of the opinion that symbols should precisely and accurately reflect that which is symbolized.
	And the further a symbol gets from what it is symbolizing, the more trouble you're going to have.
	But they are different things.
	You know, if gender expression is the symbol, that which is symbolized is biological sex.
	Just as if my body is the symbol, my soul is that which is being symbolized.
	the idea that the soul is the form of the body.
	And actually, it keeps coming back to religion.
	I mean, this has been a real point of great significance between the Catholics and the Protestants, and the Orthodox too, I suppose, which is that in the Eucharist, you have the total unity of the symbol and the symbolized.
	The bread is the symbol.
	Jesus Christ's body and blood is the symbolized.
	And the Catholics and the Orthodox believe...
	There they are, both together.
	And some Protestants believe that.
	There they are, both together.
	And after the Protestant Revolution, you see different Christian groups move further and further away from this, and you say, no, it's merely a symbol.
	And you're rending these two things apart.
	No, I totally agree.
	There's definitely...
	Something about the breakdown of Eucharistic theology is, I mean, this is going very far in the past, but it's definitely part of how, why our vision of the world has broken down and why these weird separations, radical separations between exactly that, between, let's say, the referent and that which is referenced has come together.
	But in terms of, let's say, in terms of the difficult situation with gender and desire that we're dealing with now, we have to understand that modernism is a funny thing.
	That modernism is extreme.
	It tends towards extremes.
	So what we're going through now, for all the difficulty that it's bringing, is a reaction to something that happened at the beginning of the early 20th century, which is that we pathologized everything.
	Men were being castrated in the 1950s.
	We have to remember that.
	A lot of the things that are going on now are like a reaction to that.
	We had a black and white, crazy black and white world after World War II. It was like this, this, this, this.
	Everything was completely hermetic and black and white.
	The world doesn't work that way.
	Fluidity does exist.
	It only exists on the edges.
	And if we try to eliminate fluidity, if we try to eliminate exceptions and strangeness, then it'll come back with a vengeance.
	So in the Bible, you have this image, for example, of the field.
	And the Israelites were supposed to till their field, but leave the corners untilled.
	So you're supposed to leave the corners untilled for the stranger and the poor and the stranger.
	So the sense in which the world can't be completely untilled.
	Can't be completely filled.
	You have to leave a remainder on the edge.
	The idea of having a fringe on your vestment, for example, is a good example.
	The hem of your vestment stops, then you leave a little bit of wild on the edge.
	That's something that has always existed in all societies.
	So I'm not trying to justify morally this or that behavior, but there's a man in which traditional societies would always recognize that exceptions happen, and that we just have to kind of deal with it privately and Not deal with it publicly in a way that is related to law, but deal with it privately in the world of exceptions and strangeness and in the places where our own symbols don't totally fit with that which is symbolized.
	And now the fringes are at the center of society.
	That's right.
	People who frequently, I hate to be offensive, they frequently look like gargoyles, are at the center of society.
	And I also can't help but notice that the people who mutilate themselves in these ways It's not merely that a man is dressing up like Donna Reed, okay?
	It's usually a man mutilating himself in ways that often seem to have very little to do with sex or that are extraordinary caricatures of what a woman is or very frequently that involve occult symbolism.
	I mean, overtly occult symbolism here.
	And if you put that sort of Ugliness.
	If you make yourself uglier than you otherwise would be, and you put that ugliness at the center of a society, my question that I struggle with is, why don't we all just reject it out of hand and say, yuck, between a beautiful artistic environment and this cult of ugliness, give me the beauty.
	Why are we still being drawn into this?
	I think it's actually, this is more something like a sign of the times.
	So think about, okay, so a normal society will always have some of that.
	It's there in every traditional society.
	So think about carnival.
	So traditional societies had a carnival.
	And that carnival would be the place where all the idiosyncrasy, upside-down behavior, strangeness, a little bit of lewdness, a little bit of that, a little bit of drunkenness.
	It's like, okay, we kind of open the valve a little bit, let some of that out.
	We close it down and we go back into the normal world.
	This is something you see in the Jewish tradition, the Apurim.
	We have things like Mardi Gras.
	We still have, let's say, Halloween as an example of that moment where we embody monstrosity and strangeness and exception.
	This is something that has always been part of every single traditional society in the history of the world.
	Think about as if this was a really, really big version of that cycle and now the whole world is just a giant carnival.
	It's all Mardi Gras.
	It's all Mardi Gras all the time.
	I think that that's the best way to understand it.
	There is a manner in which Just like in a normal Mardi Gras, we would leave a little bit of space for that.
	There's something about understanding the reality of idiosyncrasy, which is necessary.
	That's why there are gargoyles.
	That's why on the edge of manuscripts there'd be all these funny figures doing weird things, because that is actually part of reality.
	If we deny it, If we deny it, we're denying a part of reality and the world is going to fix and crystallize and it's going to shatter.
	And so that's it.
	That's where we are.
	We're basically in the massive carnival.
	Now the problem is that living in a carnival for a very long time is not good for your soul.
	And making a carnival your identity I mean, think of a carny, for example.
	We have an image of the carnies, and those images are not just cliches.
	People who live in the carnival all the time, they tend to degenerate and fall into their own passions and have very dangerous lifestyles, I'd say.
	And so it's like, think about now a whole society that is worshipping the carny.
	It's not a good moment.
	It's not a good spot.
	But the solution...
	I honestly think that the solution is not to just bring the knife down and say, chop.
	The solution is really to say we need to find a way to understand the inevitability of strangeness and find ways to integrate it.
	So having proper Mardi Gras, having proper celebrations, but then also then saying, okay, well, we're done.
	Now let's move into normality.
	So I think that's...
	I think that conservatives have to...
	I know it's difficult because conservatives have a very large disgust mechanism.
	They tend to get disgusted, which I understand.
	But we can't just rely on that.
	If we want to find a better world, we need to be able to understand the inevitability of strangeness.
	This is going to be part of your world no matter what.
	You can't get away from it.
	But you have to put it in its proper place.
	That's right.
	It has to be in its proper place, which is on the fringe.
	All the language, it's already that.
	The fringe, the margin, the exception.
	The water on the edge of the world.
	The fluidity that exists on the edge of reality.
	Why is everybody getting tattoos?
	Everybody is getting tattooed.
	It has to do with idiosyncrasy.
	It has to do with the fact of, let's say, emphasizing idiosyncrasy to a level that is so completely insane.
	That it's no longer idiosyncrasy.
	Exactly.
	It becomes like a strange new rule.
	There's something about that, but there's also something about...
	One of the things we're seeing, and this is difficult, is that we're kind of seeing religion pour back into the world.
	And this is happening in very strange ways.
	Anybody who followed the George Floyd protest will have noticed to what extent those were religious in tone, the processions, the people flocking themselves, kneeling and doing all these things.
	And so There's a way in which people are hungry for the sacred.
	They're hungry for sacred things.
	Well, they literally made icons of George Floyd that you can see in cities around the country.
	And they even framed it as a human sacrifice, like a few politicians.
	And so, this is happening.
	This is inevitable.
	Now, the problem is that We are making the idiosyncratic sacred, and so I think that people who get tattoos, they really see it, or they experience it as something of a sacred thing.
	It's like they're marking themselves, right?
	It's part of their identity.
	Yeah, they're adjusting their identity, they're marking their bodies in ways to, I don't know, like a...
	Circumcision, but like idiosyncratic circumcision, right?
	Something like that.
	And so I think it's also part of the sacred kind of flooding back into the world.
	I was at the Apple store in Grand Central years ago, and I had to buy a computer charger.
	And I'm talking to the guy who's the salesman, and I noticed he's got two tattoos.
	I'm sure he had many more tattoos, but he had two on his fingers.
	On the index finger, he had a little tiny mustache, and And on the side of the ring finger, it said in a beautiful little cursive, Shit Cray.
	And I thought, you know, that's very descriptive.
	That's precise.
	It is cray.
	And I'm thinking about it to this day.
	This was probably ten years ago.
	I bought this computer charger.
	Why you would brand yourself with a symbol essentially of meaninglessness...
	Nobody's lying.
	That's the thing.
	He feels the meaninglessness.
	People tell you what they're up to if you know how to pay attention.
	So I think that a lot of things that are happening today are just basic people just saying what they're doing.
	And so that's it.
	You could say it's like a fetishization of idiosyncrasy in a way that is almost like a making sacred of the Stupidity and banality and...
	Absurdity.
	Yeah, absurdity.
	And also, the thing about...
	This is getting a little deep.
	I didn't think we'd go this deep.
	So there's a sense in which there are two taboos.
	And you see that in the Bible.
	You see that in every culture.
	There's a sacred taboo.
	And so the sacred taboo is something which is too high.
	I don't have access to.
	It's hidden behind veils.
	It's hidden behind...
	Sublimity.
	Exactly.
	But there's another taboo, which is all the things that you...
	Let's say, push away from yourself.
	So everything, all the fecal stuff, all the things that are meant to be in private, that are meant to be hidden, like nakedness, and also if you had some kind of deformity or whatever, you would tend to want to not put that out there, to kind of hide it or whatever.
	And so those two taboos, there's a way in which, in an extremely high, high manner, Christ transcends that and brings them together in ways that is crazy.
	So Christ on the cross, naked on the cross, beaten, you know, with the sign saying that he's the king, you know, with the crown of thorns.
	He joins it all together.
	Like, it's wild.
	But in a normal world, those are separate.
	And you want to keep them separate.
	But there's a little trick that people can play is to confuse one for the other.
	And that's a lot of what we're seeing.
	There's a sense in which revealing the taboo of that which is dirty and disgusting and the things that you usually hide and cut off It gives them a little sense of sublimity.
	It makes them feel like they're participating in something sacred.
	So it really is like a kind of satanic.
	That's why the occult is part of this.
	It is like a weird kind of satanic secret, which if I expose the dark taboos, then I can trick people in thinking it's the same as the secret, the divine secret, let's say.
	That's a beautiful point.
	The conservatives over the last 10 or so years have driven me crazy because they drive me crazy all the time.
	But because I love them and I don't want to see them do the wrong thing, they've adopted this position of free speech absolutism.
	And they'll say, we should be able to say whatever we want, whenever we want to say it at all times.
	That's a good, free, flourishing society.
	I say, have you ever read a history book or thought about human nature or even just looked around with your own two eyes?
	Every society has taboos.
	Society necessarily has not just standards, but overt taboos.
	Things that cannot be uttered.
	Things that will be held either sacred or so incredibly profane and vulgar that we just keep it away.
	So conservatives just completely miss the boat of what's going on, as so often they do.
	And your observation that the left, their little trick is they'll flip those things.
	Oh yeah.
	And that's why people are talking about cannibalism right now.
	This is not arbitrary.
	These are real, let's say, moments where...
	The world is being invaded by meaningful things.
	And so the fact that the weird kind of leftist people are obsessed with bringing up cannibalism constantly, they just keep doing it.
	Or just the idea of eating bugs, for example.
	Like all of this type of thing where we want to take The strangeness and the weirdness and we want to elevate it up to the top.
	These all have coherence.
	Nothing of this is accidental.
	It doesn't mean that it's a conspiracy that people are controlling.
	These patterns play themselves out.
	We fall under principalities and we play things out even without knowing what we're doing.
	But the idea of cannibalism, for example, is a good example.
	We have...
	The Eucharist.
	That is the highest.
	It is taboo.
	It is hidden.
	It is secret.
	And then you have vulgar breakdown of causality where you're going to eat, not only cannibalism, but you know how they wrote these articles about growing your own meat of your own body and then eating it.
	Do you understand that you're at the end of the world when you do that?
	When you have self-causing, self...
	You have a breakdown of causality, where it's just circularity.
	It's like the serpent eating its tail.
	You really want to engage in that?
	You're bringing about the end of the world, people.
	This is not good.
	Yeah, but it's so titillating.
	That's right, exactly.
	It has that kind of taboo titillation to it.
	Because I think you see this especially in porn.
	This is a major cultural shift that over the last, what, 10 or 15 years...
	Porn is everywhere, and it's because of the internet, and because of cell phones and laptops.
	People just have access to everything.
	Anything they could possibly imagine or not even imagine, they've got that at their fingertips for free, blazing fast.
	People write into my show constantly.
	And it's young men who say, I got hooked on porn, my life has been destroyed by porn, I'm addicted, it's perverted.
	Not even just my relationships, but the whole way that I view the world.
	I read some study, it's like 92% of...
	Men have looked at porn a lot in their life.
	Presumably 8% are liars.
	That's the caveat to the study.
	Especially in pornography since time immemorial, you see a lot of this overt, occult kind of imagery.
	It would seem to me...
	The way to understand porn is that porn is an act of worship.
	Yeah.
	It's definitely sacred.
	There's something sacred.
	Sexuality is sacred.
	You could understand that Christian sexuality is sacred and sublimated.
	It moves towards sublimation.
	It's not completely sublimated, but it moves towards...
	Let's say, ultimately, you're...
	The highest point of sexuality is to be the bride of Christ.
	That would be the highest point of sexuality.
	The church is the bride of Christ.
	You think of Dante, his erotic love for Beatrice, his lover, leads him directly to this vision of God.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So that's a beautiful image of that.
	But now, so porn is a...
	If you want to understand in the Middle Ages when they talked about incubi and succubi, you can understand that pretty well right now.
	This is what's going on.
	We're being invaded by succubi and incubi.
	The porn is a medium by which Sexuality is being, our attention and our sexual attention is being pulled as far away as possible from the sublimation of it.
	But what it means is that it's also being pulled away from the lower levels, which means just having normal sexual relationships with your spouse, having children, all this.
	So it's like it's pulling us away into a kind of worship that is...
	People are going to, maybe not, I hope they understand, but it is, in a way, a kind of demon worship.
	Of course it is.
	Because, obviously, the people, you're not engaging with the people that you see in the porn.
	They're just disembodied images.
	Spirits.
	Yeah, they're vehicles for this breakdown of sexuality into all these idiosyncrasies.
	So it's a perfect example.
	If you...
	If you want to understand in the Middle Ages when they talked about these demons, we got them now.
	This is actually what's going on.
	And the purpose, if you read in the Middle Ages, if you read the books that talk about these things, they were saying that the purpose is to undo the world.
	That's the purpose.
	The purpose of the incubus and the succubus is to take the male seed and to have women not have normal relationships with their husband so that The world will be undone, basically.
	We're seeing it happen for our very eyes.
	The birth rates are falling like crazy.
	Young, healthy people, they're just not entering into normal relationships with people from the opposite sex.
	And it's just ripping us all apart.
	And it's just weird.
	It's so weird because it's so clear now.
	It's actually a good time to be alive in some ways because 30 years ago or 20 years ago, if you had said, oh, this is anti-human.
	People actually want humans to exist as little as possible.
	You said, oh, come on, Jonathan.
	You're making it up.
	It's like, Well, at this point, it's pretty clear because now they're just saying it straight out.
	We just want humans to exist as little as possible and to remove them from the earth as much as we can.
	And it's an actual agenda that is up there in the official agendas of the UN or whatever, big organizations.
	Well, you see the two images of sexuality in our culture.
	You've got the one you've just described of sublimating our sexuality to be the bride of Christ.
	Dante, looking up at Beatrice, leads him right up to God.
	And then the other one is Fifty Shades of Grey.
	That's right.
	And I can't help but notice the former, the Dante and the Beatrice and the Bride of Christ, it's full of angels and harps and bright light and beauty.
	And then the Fifty Shades of Grey is full of...
	You're just whipping people in chains.
	It looks like hell.
	No one's pretending anymore.
	Look at an image of hell from the Middle Ages, the one that your professors made fun of Christians for believing, and then that's the world, that's it.
	These are the images that entice people today, and so what are you going to do?
	Nobody's lying anymore.
	Nobody's lying.
	I love that line.
	Nobody's lying.
	You can't escape it.
	You can't escape meaning.
	You can't escape symbolism.
	Like that old political philosopher Bob Dylan pointed out, a moral theologian.
	Everybody's got to serve somebody.
	And there is no neutrality here.
	You're going one way or the other.
	Jonathan, I could stay here all day, but my producers won't let me.
	Thank you so much for coming on.
	It was great.
	Thanks for the opportunity.

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