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Dec. 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:38:03
ART! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? Dr Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stéphane Molyneux from Free Domain here, back with a good friend, Dr.
Duke Pesta. We have done a breakdown of a wide variety of artistic subjects, but we are no longer going to confine ourselves to one single work of art or one single genre.
Now we're doing the three big letters, A-R-T, top to bottom, back to front.
There's nothing you won't know about art when we're done desiccating this language.
So thanks a lot for taking the time today.
Hey, Merry Christmas to you and yours, and thanks for having me.
And you, so just before we start, let's tell people a little bit about FPE USA. Freedom Project Academy is an online school, kindergarten through high school, fully accredited.
It's an alternative to the spin and the ideology of public schools.
And it is fully classical.
And so it's a really... We're getting lots of good kids into college.
And so it's something you want to look at.
We bring the education right to your home through the computer.
So it's a good deal. Good.
All right. We'll put the links to that below.
So you have spent your life dissecting art.
I have spent my life butchering art by creating it.
So we have two perspectives that I think are going to be very important.
So... I know you've thought about this often, of course, throughout the course of your career.
We decided to do this topic some months ago.
Why don't you start us off with...
This is like this old cartoon.
I think it's a New Yorker cartoon.
There's this guy painting in an attic.
Guy walks through the door and says, Hi, I'm Art.
I'm what you do everything for.
Anyway, so what are your thoughts on Art?
Why on earth is it interesting?
Why is it compelling? Why are we so fascinated by it?
And what possible purpose does it serve to believe the lies of creators?
Yeah, I mean, well, I love the way you ended that, right?
The idea that we believe the lies of creators.
And I think that the idea of art that I want to focus on to begin with is, go back to Plato, and as you're a philosopher, right?
And we ask the question, why did Plato basically exclude artists from his republic, right?
Why has there been this Right.
Right. Most art is fictive, right?
We're creating things. We're mirroring.
Sculpture isn't really a living body.
It's a carved body to mimic reality, right?
Painting generally seeks to capture certain aspects of reality, but it's not reality itself.
The fiction writer, who tells great truths in a fictional novel, made up characters and plots, still conveys a tremendous amount of truth, even though those characters have never existed.
And to me, it's the literalist argument in reverse, right?
We talk about religion, and a lot of us roll our eyes when we see people of any religion being so dogmatic and literalist that they box themselves in to textuality.
We kind of roll our eyes at that.
But those same people who do that, who mock the Christian fundamentalist for that, will then turn around and take the exact same platonic argument about art, right?
Utterly literalist, because your art is made up because the characters are fictional.
You're lying.
And we all know that imagination is one of the, if not the great thing that separates us from all other animals.
I mean, you and I have talked about this a lot, too.
I think art, my final statement, opening statement, I'll throw it back to you, is that art, to me, in the focus of all of this, is that one thing, I think, that we can definitively say is not accountable for simply by biology or evolution.
I think there's something more to the art and the artist that, to me, points in a direction Beyond just materialism.
Okay, so this is the annoying paradox that is so absorbing, which is why do we have to have people who lie to us to tell us what's important?
Suspension of disbelief should be for Democrat impeachment hearings, not for the most essential aspects of life, and yet we are so enamored of it.
I think illuminated by, and I think often these days, really distracted by art, right?
I mean, now we have more art coming at us, like this giant tsunami, right?
I mean, you've got YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, you name it.
This show, this is a whole exception to the entire trend.
We have so much art coming at us, and I'm not sure that the art has more truth in it now than it did in the past.
I think it actually has less, and it's more about distraction and dissociation and The consumption of empty hours, you know, this awful phrase, binge watching, which is kind of like junk food for the brain.
So I think that we have to sort of talk about what art is for, well, what it is and what it's for, and what's going on with it now, which is, you know, is a whole separate thing.
So if you were to try and crystallize down the definition of art, what would you say?
I want to say something to the first thing you said.
I don't believe art is actually a lie.
I think that we have rational brains and we have an imaginative capacity that what the literalist will call the lie of art, people lying to us, isn't a lie at all.
I would argue that the truth of art is a bigger truth.
It's not a lie at all.
It's a truth that is freed from its empirical chains, right?
It is purely an imaginative form of truth, which means we – because if I mention to you a mythological creature right now, if I mention a satyr to you, you've got one in your head, right?
Got it. There's no such thing as a satyr, but there is in our mind.
And to me, that's a high – so it's not a lie.
It's not a lie at all.
The poet is not a liar.
And I go back – my definition, if you want to make it really basic, I go back to Keats, right?
Beauty is truth and truth is beauty.
That is all you know on earth and all you need to know.
You know that just gives philosophers facial tics.
I know it does. Right now.
I know it does. I'm getting that little twitch going on there, full-on Eddie Murphy style.
All right. Okay, so the way that I would sort of try and build the conversation, at least from my side, is this.
Play is common to certainly mammals, right?
You think of lion cubs practicing and little baby kittens practicing stalking and lion cubs practicing their hunt and so on, right?
So to me, art is a form of play, but play is something in theater school that an acting teacher told me.
He said, play like children play, which means really, really seriously.
And I thought, wow, that's really freaking deep, man.
I get spent a lifetime working on that one.
And so I think this concept or this idea of play is really important.
And in fact, of course, not to get overly, you know, semantically astute, but, you know, it's called a play.
You know, all the world is a stage and all the men and women are merely players.
So I think play is really important.
Now, why play? Do lion cubs play?
Well, they're practicing, right?
They're practicing the hunt.
When you think of the two most popular games for children when they're little, one is hide-and-go-seek and the other is tag.
Well, hide-and-go-seek is the predator is bigger than you are and tag is go catch a prey that's smaller than you are, right?
So this is sort of foundational to human beings and I think this form of play as a preparation For essential moments in life, I think is really, really important.
And I think that aspect of things...
Do you say to the lion cubs, well, there's not really a tiny antelope that you're chasing.
But it wouldn't make any sense to them because it's like, well, we're not chasing air.
We're not roughhousing with each other.
We're practicing for adulthood of lionhood.
And so we can survive and feed and feed our children and all that kind of stuff.
And I think that aspect of art as an essential preparation...
For adulthood, for life, for the difficult choices that we want to be prepared for and don't want to invent our answers in the moment, I think is really important.
It is, and I think that also makes the point that I made prior, right?
That you don't say that the child is lying when he's chasing – these kids are – they pick up a stick and they play cops and robbers, right?
They're doing the tag. They're doing the hide-and-seek.
You wouldn't say that the lion cub is lying, right?
You would say that the lion cub is practicing, like you said.
And to go back, I also think there's another component of this on top of what you just said.
It's not just play and practice.
Children have a certain capacity that the older and the more rational our minds get, we lose.
And I would call that wonder, the ability to wonder.
No one wonders like a child, right?
You spend all this money on Christmas toys and the kid is endlessly fascinated with the box for four hours, right?
What he can make of it, what she can make of it.
I go back to quote the Gospels really quick.
I think Jesus was exactly right.
When Christ suffered the little children to come to him, I think it was an artistic moment, right?
That there's Jesus doing the heavy work of teaching and preaching adults.
A couple of moms shows up with babies, right?
And the disciples are like, well, he hasn't got time for this garbage.
Leave him alone. And Jesus waves the children forward, puts them on his lap, and he says, if you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, you must enter it like a little child.
What he meant by that is not peeing yourself and drooling on yourself.
He meant the capacity of children to be able to see good in things.
Things that you and I take for granted every day.
Things that we've seen our whole lives.
A child's first look at that.
The ability of children to love people even when we're ugly, even when we're flawed and tainted.
I think Christ's point was an artistic point that if there is such a thing as the kingdom of heaven, you only get there if that ability to wonder, to see through the illusions of life, to see through the vanity and the wickedness of the world and still have, for lack of a better word, faith.
Faith in human nature, faith in people.
Children have it.
I bet your audience, I could tell you the exact moment as a little child when I began to lose my wonder.
My parents were getting divorced.
I was about eight years old I guess.
I was sitting in my bedroom and they were in the basement fighting.
They didn't know it but everything they were saying was coming through the vent and I was listening to it.
Is it the moment your grandmother died?
Is it the moment your puppy died?
Everybody could point back in their childhood to when they sort of separated from that wild-eyed believability into a much more cynical way of seeing the world.
And I think that most artists have that.
They have that ability to wonder in ways that pure material reality seem to pull you away from.
And there's a divide there.
Well, it's funny.
You know, that pops into my mind when I went to – I went to Camp Bolton for a couple of summers when I was in my early teens, maybe about 12 or so.
And I remember picking up broom handles that were just lying there, obviously no brooms, and tossing them to another kid who was a little bit older and saying, "En garde!
Let's sword fight," right?
And the kid kind of did one of those snarky, you know, Draco Malfoy sneers.
It's like, don't you think you're just a bit old for this?
And I remember thinking, like, ooh, what if that's true?
You know, ooh, that's not good.
And then I also remember thinking kind of ferociously, it's like, and I said to him, like, okay, exactly when are you too old to have fun?
And that's sort of an important question.
So there is that pressure.
You know, and this is again, this is from the Bible, right?
When I was a child, I thought and acted as a child.
Now I'm a man. I put away childish things.
And there's real value in that.
But in terms of that sense of wonder and curiosity, the great challenge of adulthood is certainty without dogmatism, right?
You want to be certain of things, but you don't want to be in denial to new information, new arguments, and so on.
In other words, you have to be certain of principles, but open to new reason and evidence.
And Art's relationship to that is really, really interesting, and I'll sort of give you an example.
So I do this call-in show with people, and it's funny, you know, because I run this philosophy show, and I would love it if people were like, you know, well, you know, Kant's approach to metaphysics, I think, is somewhat problematic.
Let's debate that. And I get like one in a hundred or one in a thousand of those, and people are like, I'm lost in my life.
I think it was 89% of millennials feel there's no meaning or purpose to their lives, which we'll get into how does a society survive in the absence of stories.
We'll sort of get to that, but People want to talk about their histories.
And I'll ask them questions about, you know, their childhood, their upbringing.
And I'll ask them questions about, let's say, their mom, right?
And they won't have any answers.
And I'll say, okay, let's role play.
Pretend that you're the mom and I'm you, right?
And these are people with no acting training, right?
They've never done anything like this before.
And listen, like 99 times out of 100, boom, it's in.
It's on it's like actor studio level interaction as far as all of that goes and you can say well That's not really your mom and then they have access to all of this information about their mother and there's empathy for their mother Whether it's sympathy or not is another matter there's empathy for their mom.
I'm role-playing ask them I don't know them.
I've just met them, you know They claim to not know much about their mom and then boom you like that just open up this whole vault of information Just through an active imagination and Now, of course, I'm not them, they're not my mom, it's not a real interaction, but by gosh above, is there a mountain of truth in there.
It is and I think if we try to boil it down to anatomy somehow, I think when you've got consciousness and you've got imagination, that's what's required of art and that's what's so unique about the human animal.
There's no other animal that has those two concepts, utter consciousness of what we are and then imagination.
You put those two things together. I think you get art and what ultimately is art trying to do?
I go back to what Keith said, right?
That ultimately art is a – are beautiful ways, even if they're tragic ways, beautiful ways to show us basically the archetypes behind our individual experience and the idea of an archetype, right?
Whether you're talking at it from a Jungian perspective or you're talking about it from an artistic perspective, the idea of archetypes, that only human beings can recognize archetypes and, of course, God.
Is the supreme archetype, isn't he?
And so I think that you – all the things that we would consider metaphysical and I honestly would place artistic achievement in the metaphysical category because what it's doing is it's using raw materials of an empirical world, right?
They're using a materialist – all art is based in some kind of materiality, right?
Whether it's a play script, whether it's a piece of marble, whatever it is.
So it's a way of taking the material, the bound material of our existences and transmuting it into something that supersedes.
And Shakespeare is right, right?
That he wrote sonnets as he promised his love.
He wrote sonnets that will exist to the end of time.
Even if the paper they're written on is incendiary, right?
Is burnt up. Or if the tombstone gets dusty and you can no longer read the name on it, you will live in this poem, he says, and thrive in lovers' eyes.
So art has the – it promises us the eternal.
That's what Keith said, right?
Something beautiful that's not decayable, right?
Something eternal that is then truth about our archetypal experiences above our animal bodily realities.
Right. So I was also thinking, it's really, really well put, and I want to touch back on that, but I wanted to just, sorry, to wrestle things, to wrestle the wheel, but I was thinking with regards to art and its purpose, and if it's play.
So you think of a boxer, right? Like a boxer trains for years, usually before the big important prize fight, right?
So there's a huge amount of training, and it comes down to like five or ten minutes in the ring.
Now, it's the same thing.
Think of how much play lion cubs have before they actually chase a zebra or an antelope or whatever it is, right?
It's, you know, a hundred to one, a thousand to one, perhaps, right?
And so, to me, there are moments in life that are so essential, and you don't want to walk into them unprepared.
You don't want to get into a boxing ring having never trained.
I mean, you're just going to get really badly hurt.
And so I was sort of thinking, okay, well, how has art really helped me in my life?
What's sort of the empirical evidence?
So I read, of course, a lot of Dostoevsky when I was younger, in my teens, and a lot of Ayn Rand.
And there is a really strong focus, maybe it's a Russian thing, a strong focus on integrity and independence from material gain.
For Ayn Rand, it's to do with the reason and evidence.
For Dostoevsky, it's to do with the purity of the soul.
But you have to resist...
Earthly Temptations for the Sake of Purity of Spirit.
So then, after I'd read this kind of stuff, my first year of university, I wrote a play, a short play, and I met a woman who worked for the biggest radio station in Canada.
And she really, really liked the play, and she was...
She offered me. I remember sitting in the car in the parking lot.
We'd gone out to talk about the play.
I didn't realize I was having a Me Too moment because it was real early back then for me with this kind of stuff.
I remember she said, I could get this play produced for you.
I could get this on the air.
It could be heard by millions of people.
Maybe we could meet at my place tomorrow night to discuss it.
It was one of these. I was a pretty naive kid, but I wasn't that naive.
So it was very, very clear that I had to date her or sleep with her or whatever in order for this project to move forward.
That was like 100% clear.
I sort of think about that fork in the road because I thanked her and got out of the car and did not take that.
That could have been a big changing moment in my life.
It could have put me on an entire different career path than where I went.
I don't know how people do this Me Too stuff and get out of bed the next morning, but that's maybe because they haven't read enough Dostoevsky.
I don't know. And so for me, I think that the art practiced integrity, showed me the effects of integrity.
If you look at the art of corrupt people in Shakespeare, in Dostoevsky, in Rand...
There is such a horrifying moral decay that comes later.
And this is like the Christian story of, I want to show you what hell is, not because I want you to go to hell, but because I don't want you to go to hell.
If you believe the hell is after the life or just the torture of the soul separate from the divine or from virtue.
And so the amount of practice that I had in integrity, through art, I didn't get that in my family, I didn't get that in my school, I didn't get that in...
Warner Bros. cartoons.
I didn't get that from Bugs Bunny. I got that through art.
And in that moment where I was in the ring for the first time, tempted with material gain and fame and maybe even lots of money for the sake of compromising any kind of decency in sexuality, that art, like a crusader army riding over the hill, saved literally my ass from that situation.
And that amount of practice is like, yeah, okay, a thousand times I rehearsed integrity or saw it or witnessed it through art, the way that the lion cubs play, and then I could take down the zebra of temptation to really make it in a convoluted metaphor.
And I think that practice was really important for me in that moment.
I think what you just said, the way I would phrase it is art is philosophy for everyone.
In other words, not everyone can pop Play-Doh open and get something.
You said you brought up Kant, right?
I don't even think Hegel knew what Kant was talking about when he invented Hegel.
I don't think Hegel knew what Hegel was talking about.
Exactly! Philosophy is hard.
Try teaching philosophy to a group of modern college seniors.
They don't know how to think it.
But you know what everybody can do?
They can watch Hamlet. Kids who have no philosophical background whatsoever, they're moved by the story of Hamlet.
The great Renaissance art critics are Philip Sidney, the great Sidney in the 16th century.
He said the one thing that he was trying to adjudicate, which was the greatest, philosophy, history, or literature, art.
And he said the problem with history, he said, is that the historian is limited to what actually happened, right?
So in the 16th century, the historian goes back and looks at what's there, but he can't invent things if he's a good historian.
He can't create circumstances that history hasn't accounted for yet.
That was the limitation of learning from history.
He said the problem with learning from philosophy is that philosophy tells you what to do.
And unless you're incredibly acute as a thinker, it doesn't move you, right?
For most people, philosophy is cold, right?
Philosophy is dogmatic in a way.
Philosophy is a set of precepts and rules.
And that's hard. It's hard, particularly for younger people.
It's hard to tell people, go out and do what I say.
It's much easier to move them.
Art has the power to move, right?
And art is like giving people the philosophy with a teaspoon of sugar, right?
Artists can be every bit as philosophical as philosophers.
You've read Dostoevsky.
There are few philosophers who plumb the depths of human philosophy the way he does, but he does it in story form, right?
I mean, even Plato. Even Plato recognized that to sit there and just write From the first person philosophical perspective wasn't going to work.
So he invented interlocutors, right?
He actually created dialogues because he intrinsically knew that it's more pleasing and it's more palatable for us to take our philosophical lessons through stories than it is through lessons.
That's why you have much better chance of raising your kids to be good kids if you read stories to them that have morals than rather you give them lectures at bedtime, right?
Right. Well, I mean, and there is a very strong relationship between reading fiction and developing an empathy.
Because, of course, the amazing thing about fiction, and this is true in Shakespeare with the soliloquies, it's even more true in novels, where you literally can enter the mind of another person and experience what they experience, which they have never vocalized.
And, you know, it's that old saying, you know, we read to know not only that we're not alone, but a novel is a chance to try another life on for size.
That we can go into the mind of someone else and experience life from that person's perspective, both the writers and the characters, particularly, of course, if it's a first-person novel or a soliloquy from Shakespeare or other writers, which, of course, is the same transcription of thoughts, usually considered to be without manipulation, like private thoughts are usually not manipulative, and therefore the soliloquies follow that same pattern.
And that idea that there's self and other, you know, we really do have to grow out of the monstrous, glorious narcissism of infancy, right, where our needs are all that matter, and then we have to start focusing on other people to have successful relationships.
And art really does train us to step out of our own mind and to step into the minds and thoughts of someone else, someone of a different race, someone of a different sex, you name it.
And that is an enormous—I remember reading The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood when I was quite young— And I just remember like, okay, so this is, I mean, I'm not saying it's what all women think, but this is a very popular novel for women to some degree, I mean, by a woman, to some degree for women.
So I can really step into this and say, okay, this is how I get the same thing with The Stone Angel, which I found an incredibly moving book to read, and other things, other aspects of things where you go, okay, I can't be a woman, but I can read the thoughts and minds and characterization of a woman and More so than I would get out of something like Simone de Beauvoir, who's lecturing me about womanhood, I can actually go into the experience of that and learn what it's like.
And that, of course, you know, if you're married to a woman, it's kind of important that you understand women and not just give up like Freud did.
And a way to do that, of course, is to read what women write about.
And no, of course, there may be some manipulation in it, as there is with male writers, but it's a window into something that I'd go a little bit broader than that.
He's engaging in something – one of the reasons why people 100 years ago believed that maybe it was Queen Elizabeth who wrote Shakespeare's plays is because the women were so real.
No man, they argued, could understand women that way.
And that's what an artist is, right?
It's that ability to project yourself into the minds of everybody else, right?
To have empathy, to see through – if you're a man, to see through the eyes of women or vice versa.
And it's even bigger than that.
Leo Tolstoy – speaking of the Russians, Leo Tolstoy once wrote – Art must destroy violence.
It is the only thing that can, right?
And his point there I think was is that the – what you said, that ability to see from other eyes.
C.S. Lewis made the great observation.
I read, he said, because I want to see through other people's eyes.
I want to have a window into other people's experience.
He was arguing that the postmodern critical tendency, even as early as 1960, was turning art into a mirror.
This is one of the big problems we have today.
We've so politicized art now.
We started from the premise in the postmodern era that nothing is true.
That there are no absolutes.
Therefore, morality itself is relative.
Therefore, we can never really understand each other.
You see what those philosophical premises mean to art?
It can't exist. So in the modern world, particularly at the universities, what is art?
It's become only politics, right?
All the aesthetic, all the metaphysical, all of the spiritual, all of the universal that art was created for is now no longer accessible to us.
And so what do we've got? We've got only the political, right?
So in other words, we're now telling kids, well, men can't understand women.
Women can't understand men.
We need women's studies classes for women and we don't have the men in them.
We have to have separate dorms for blacks and white and separate graduations.
This postmodern anti – this postmodern relativistic way of seeing everything is the death of art.
And you had asked earlier in the beginning, why is art so corrupted now?
And I think it's because we've lost – you need the metaphysical for art to make sense.
If you deny categorically any – don't even go anywhere near God, but aesthetics.
If you deny the possibility that there is such a thing as universal aesthetics or that there is such a thing as a metaphysical aspect to the psyche, call it a spiritual dimension.
If you deny all those things, then art becomes just another piece of materialist property, cultural materialism.
That's all it is.
So you look at art not for those uplifting universal values, but you look at art for examples of racism or bigotry or anti-feminist spirit.
And the way to sort of get my mind around this too is I look at the long history of communism and I look at the Nazis.
And the funny thing about the communists who were around for 70, 80 years in Russia and the Nazis who existed for about 12 years in power anyway.
And I say, you know, it's funny.
Neither of those two cultures produced any really serious art.
I mean, the greatest artists of the Soviet period were all expats, right?
Marc Chagall or Solzhenitsyn.
These weren't communist writers producing communist art.
And the Nazis produced no art.
Their architecture is utterly sterile and derivative, right?
The Nazis went around stealing the great art of other people's better cultures, right?
And hoarding it for themselves.
And I think when you think about the aspect of communism and Nazism, particularly communism, it starts from that premise, right?
That there is only material reality.
There is nothing spiritual.
There is no God. The churches are driven underground.
All of that what we would call artistic or spirituality is verboten and all you have is this really remarkably materialist take and it produces bad art.
And when you think about the degree to which our modern universities have sold out to socialism ideologically, are we surprised that the universities are turning the great artworks of the Western culture into nothing more than agitprop for four or five left-wing advocacy ways of reading books?
Well, that is a very powerful thing.
And I remember when I first – my very first day in theater school, we went into the head of the theater school's office and he said, well, aren't you all very young, white, and bougie?
Which I guess shows you all about the sort of leftist approach that he had to life And agiprop is basically it's agitative propaganda, right?
It's really naming the leftist art for what it is.
And true art is the pursuit of truth, but modern art is the pursuit of power.
And that is a very different thing.
The pursuit of truth brings us together, right?
And the complexity and challenges of integrity versus acceptance and virtue versus self-destruction.
So, you know, I mean, I think Jesus taught us that sometimes the hot pursuit of virtue doesn't have a particularly positive end, at least for the individual.
And so we have this great challenge of life, very great complexity of life, which true art brings us together and has us discuss those issues.
But the art that is going on these days is all calculated.
It's all political.
It's all about, well, we don't want to anger this special interest group, and we don't want to upset this particular group, and we don't want to be attacked by these.
And it's all very defensive, and it's all very propagandistic.
And I remember when I was a Teenager, I think it was early to mid-teens, there were two movies that came out.
One was The Day After, which was a TV movie about what happened after nuclear war.
Another one was a thing called Threads, which went years after.
And it was a huge cultural event.
I remember a friend of mine was writing in his journal, oh, so now it's The Day After, The Day After, and everyone's suddenly informed.
I remember watching these shows feeling really, really angry, more so than just the idea that You know, jerks across the world could push a button and we could all cease to exist.
But I felt very manipulated and controlled and I wasn't sure why.
And it wasn't until somewhat recently that I found out that the day after was basically KGB propaganda, part of the Cold War, to make Europeans and North Americans so frightened of nuclear war that they might disarm.
And it's all just—that's not the pursuit of truth.
That is the pursuit of control and political agenda, and it dehumanizes, right?
So the true art brings us together, but art that seeks to control and manipulate is the erasure of the other.
Rather than fostering empathy, it fosters contempt, subjugation, and dominance.
Every time I read a movie review, the very first thing I always read is political.
This film has no minorities.
Another collective cast of all white people.
The way the critics review art is purely along political lines.
Which means what? Art adapts now to the critics, right?
Art is adapting to that.
Just in the same way that art is adapting to what the universities are saying is valuable.
And what the universities are saying, what the critics are saying, what's valuable are these very, very materialistic ideas of diversity and inclusivity and multiculturalism.
And so we've already sold out.
The people whose job it is to look after art have betrayed it.
I had a professor in grad school who once I asked him, you know, I'm going to be a professor myself.
I said, I trusted this guy.
His name was Seth, a very brilliant guy.
And I asked him, so what is your take on what we do here?
And he said, you know, I consider myself the guy who opens the door of the museum and walks the people in and points out the great art to them.
I don't see myself, he said, as somebody who determines what is or isn't art or who lectures people or who politicizes art.
He said, our job is to expose kids.
And I believe this profoundly.
My job is not to politicize them.
I teach – I'm a professor of English literature.
I teach art every day.
It is not my job to teach them the proper political stance to their art or to criticize the artist because he was white or praise him because he was not white, which is what they're doing on the campuses right now.
My job is to allow kids to give them the tools, the contextual, the historical, the aesthetic tools to understand what the artist was doing in his or her time.
We've lost that completely now.
It's why the humanities departments are dying.
Why would you major in humanities when the one thing we've got going for us is this huge artistic legacy of truth, and then we're telling the kids none of it means anything.
We're telling the kids that what we do for a living, what we went to graduate school for 13 years to teach, It's now just a culturally materialist bit of propaganda from this or that reign or rule, right?
We have destroyed the humanities, not the sciences.
The scientists are busy doing what they ought to do.
God bless them. They're pursuing scientific truth.
We're pretending. Think about the degree to which English departments are morphing into communication departments now.
History programs are becoming political science, as if you've got historians in lab coats now, right?
What the hell is the difference between history and political science?
Nothing! You're just conforming to a world that seems to find truth only in scientific, empirical ways, so you're selling out the humanities.
The humanities, by definition, are not to be seen as empirical.
By definition, if you hold art, To an empirical scientific standard, Plato's right then, it's all just bullshit.
However, you wouldn't demand, the humanist would not demand of science the opposite, right?
The artist would not say to the scientist, you have to become artists.
Or we're not going to take you seriously, right?
And so that's the problem, I think.
We live in a culture where the progressives on every walk of life have bought solely into the materialist understanding of reality, which means they can't even comprehend the idea.
And I think it scares them. It scares the progressives that most of the great books that have ever been written have been books that have dealt in some way with universal truth.
And so all they can do is tamp those down.
Well, of course, the...
I have my criticisms of the right with regards to art, but I will say this about the left, that the universals bind us together, and their purpose is to sow division, animosity, and hostility between the races, between the genders, between the classes, and so on.
And so everything which touches everyone goes against the leftist agenda of fomenting endless social battles over inconsequential differences.
So that is one of the reasons why, of course, in the long march through to the institutions, they definitely targeted art.
Because if I can read, say, some writer from Ghana who's struggling with his marriage or parenthood and say, you know, yeah, you know, I've seen people like that.
I can appreciate some of this kind of stuff.
Well, we're bound together.
We're in a common march of humanity, despite differences that may be relatively unimportant.
We're still both human beings who have to get up and brush their teeth and deal with the challenges of the world.
But of course, if you can just make art fractious and just make everybody discontented and frustrated and counting the skin tone of everyone in the background, it's like, well, we've just lost that which is supposed to bind us together.
And then we really can't have a culture.
We can't have a community.
We can't have a country. We just have these warring tribes of incompatible interpretations.
Yeah, and the other side of that coin, the exact flip side of that coin, is how the left pretends that they're democratizing art, right?
Art is whatever you say it is.
Art is purely subjective.
Art, everyone's an artist, right?
The five-year-old who scribbles, makes handprints with finger paint, that's every bit as artistic a document as what Picasso did.
And so you see what else they've done.
Not only have they stripped art of its universal connectivity, right, that which brings us together, they're pretending that they're being Democrats when they're doing it.
That they're somehow by making art something that we're all artists now, right?
Bullshit. We're not all physicists.
We all can't be philosophers.
We certainly all can't be priests.
But nor can we be all artists, right?
This idea that anybody who does anything even remotely creative is an artist is nonsense.
I mean we can all and should all play in art, right?
Like you go back to your first premise.
That's part of who we are.
But to make no distinction.
Between little children playing art and adults making real art is the same thing.
There are very few child artists.
With all due respect, the children are playing when they're playing with art.
There are very few child drawings that we would say pass the smell test when it comes to art.
There are no baby lions that take down actual zebra.
Exactly! Much better said.
And so this is equally destructive as the idea that art cannot speak to anybody but ourselves.
It's purely subjective. As dangerous or more dangerous than that is the contradictory statement that we're all artists.
And the left makes both.
These progressives make both.
And no one ever points out to them the logical and philosophical impossibility of both of those things being true.
There's another thing, too, which is there is a chilling lack of creativity in modern art insofar as – I mean, I'll watch it because I do reviews and I think it's important to know where the zeitgeist is.
But you kind of know what's coming up.
You know how people are going to behave.
You know what their perspectives are going to be.
There's very little that is surprising because surprising these days brings shock, brings attack, brings people trying to destroy you.
This is really, really tough for people.
And again, not to sort of bag on theater school, but since that was sort of the last time that I got serious, I took a very, very important writing course later on.
But in terms of like that kind of art, I remember the first two weeks we were there, it was kind of confusing because we didn't seem to have any classes.
And we were supposed to create a show, like the first year students create a show for everyone else in theater school.
And I remember sitting down with the teachers and And I was there for, most of the students were there for just acting.
I was there for acting and playwriting.
So I was expected to write something, and I wanted to, because that's what I was there for, right?
And I remember the acting teacher said, I've got a great, or the teacher said, I've got a great idea, Steph.
You'll do found art.
And I'm like, what now? And he's like, okay, so this is found art.
So what you do is, you know, go downtown, this is in Montreal, go downtown and find graffiti.
And take the words from graffiti and turn them into your art.
And I'm like, what?
What are you talking about? Or it could be a complex billboard or it could be a sign.
I said, listen, with all due respect, I'm not doing that.
I didn't come here to garbage pick other people's syllables and pass them off as some massive exercise in creativity.
I came here for my own voice, my own language, my own words.
So, you know, with all due respect, you know, and I was nervous to do it because, you know, I'm new.
But I'm like, no, I'm going to write something that I think is important.
Like, thanks. Or, you know, and he's like, no, you really should.
You really should. And it's like, but why?
Like, why would you want to limit me to words that I find on the street in terms of the message that I want to give?
And that's not creative.
And also, you know, where he told me to go.
It's like, well, that's not even like, maybe he could say, you know, pick a page of Shakespeare and assemble something on the words there.
But no, it was like graffiti and just trashy, crappy stuff, you know, and it's like, I'm not going to do the equivalent of taping a banana to a wall and calling myself Henri.
University, which is one of the foremost Christian colleges in the country.
And she had a freshman art history course.
And the very thing same, she came home lecturing us about how graffiti was every bit as artistic as the Mona Lisa, right?
The drumbeat she got.
They took one semester, the entirety of Western art in one semester.
And they spent a good two or three weeks of that semester talking about how graffiti was the equivalent of any other kind of art.
That's what they're teaching them now.
Think about the Star Wars, the clown show that is Disney.
They can't figure out now why every subsequent movie, when they're telling you, right, they made Landau Calrissian polygendered, right?
And Billy Dee Williams came out and said it was a big mistake to do that, right, in the previous movies.
Now they're guaranteeing this new one, this new movie coming out, the one that they're planning to make now, they're going to make sure that there are gay characters represented.
The directors and the writers are all saying this now.
You are starting from a premise there that is utterly unartistic.
You are starting with the premise we have to make a movie that is sociologically relevant, which means by definition it's not going to be artistically relevant.
Think about the first Star Wars movie.
In 1976, I went to see it.
I was a little boy. And the original Star Wars was so generationally defining because it was an archetypal story.
Darth Vader is the Dark Father, right?
He's not black. He's not white.
The characters were all iconic fairy tale archetypes.
He took it straight out of Hero with a Thousand Faces, right?
Lucas took it straight out of Joseph Campbell.
I think he even consulted with it to make sure that the archetypes work.
He was straight out of Jung, straight out of Campbell.
I mean he plugged right into the central mains of the collective unconscious.
Yeah, and fast forward 40 years and now we are incapable of seeing those things anymore.
We just see that the cast of Star Wars was all white and the only black man in the film, James Earl Jones, wore a mask, right?
This is all we see now.
And it shows you how since the 70s we have completely transformed the way – and this is the influence of socialism, right?
As socialism has infected the arts, as socialism has infected the universities, as socialism has infected the entertainment community, now simple fairy tale.
I watched your review of Frozen.
I mean – and that movie, the second one, Frozen 2, it has – it's consciously walking away from what made the first one a fairy tale, right?
Now all of a sudden in the second one – Leave the men behind.
The women can't be women until the men are left behind, right, to go on their special separate quests.
And so you look at how many of the modern Hollywood fairy tales have completely walked away from what a traditional fairy – you've got to have – let's paint with all the colors of the wind, right?
You got to have a kuna matata.
You got to have now every different ethnic group has their own similar fairy tale.
And what you're doing is that you're sociologically, as you said, gerrymandering what art is for propagandistic purposes, and you're not letting the real art speak for itself.
Here's another thing I think that's really important to art, which is I think it's a backward-facing time capsule from over the horizon of middle age.
And what I mean by that is I regularly get into, quote, trouble on Twitter, right?
And because I sort of point out That the lessons now that I'm 53, which is still kind of shocking to me at times, you know, I was just at the store the other day and in two years I qualify for a senior's discount.
It's an exciting time in life.
But, you know, the compensation for getting older is, you know, all of this annoying sometimes accumulated wisdom, right?
So I'm old enough now to have seen the arc of people's life choices, right?
Because I've known some people since we were in our early teens and I have seen The cause of the beliefs and the effects of the life.
Like, what do people believe?
How do they interact with people?
And how does that play out?
And I've seen, you know, I've known some women who, like, oh, to heck with kids and so on, and I never want to have children, and I'm not going to invest in the youth and all that.
I mean, I know you don't have kids, but you certainly, certainly invested the youth.
And there is a sense of emptiness, of course, when you get over the hill, so to speak, particularly for women.
There's a sense of emptiness, which is why there are so many childless women particularly, the number is almost the same, percentage of childless women and percentage of women on antidepressants.
And there is no art that deals with that.
There's no art. That follows the life of a woman that, you know, kind of slept around a lot when she was younger and was a woo tabletop party girl and, you know, then got into the rather desperate scrabble of the mid to late 30s, maybe trying to nail down some guy to start a family with, but she's just left with the detritus and the divorcees and the people who've been...
You know, pillaged by family courts and then she kind of sails on and gets into otter and otter hobbies and more and more cats and, you know, you could see that story arc and that's a story arc that's embedded in the lives of like 25% of people, of women in the West, but you can't see that story.
You write that story and it would be incredibly powerful, it would do incredibly well, but you'd be incredibly punished for it for a wide variety of political reasons and so on, right?
And so this, when I sort of go on Twitter and I say, you know, Particularly to the young women, it's like, okay, you know, you're having a blast.
You're in your 20s. You have peak sexual market value.
You guys want to ask you out, and it's really fun and all that, and I get that.
You know, that's a tough party to walk away from, but you've got to remember 40 to 90.
You know, the ages of 40 to 90, that's a long time.
You know, 20 to 40, 20 years, okay, 40 to 90, that's what, two and a half times that, right?
So that is...
You've got to remember and plan for the second half of life.
This is something that I got from Jung.
The first half of your life, you struggle, you expand, you grow, you fight for your stake in the world.
Second half of life, you've got to consolidate, you've got to dial it back a little, you've got to enjoy your relations more and your hobbies and all of that.
You just can't keep burning the adrenals at both ends for your entire life.
The funny thing is, of course, there's so much propaganda.
About, you know, youth is everything and party till you drop and it's better to burn out than fade away and don't trust anyone over 40 and, you know, all old people are prejudiced and bigoted and sexist and probably racist and you can't listen to any of them.
And, of course, they want to disconnect youth from their elders so that they're more easily programmed by their rulers, right?
That's sort of the basic equation.
And so when I... On Twitter, send these messages to people, which I, you know, I mean, but for the grace of God go I. If I hadn't had a few influences in my life, I could be one of these people who, you know, mind or milk youth until the whole pleasure of life toppled over like an evacuated cow.
And so when I pass this back, there's all this deep shock and horror and appalling and what are you talking about?
This is weird and you're creepy to talk about these, all this stuff.
Art used to fulfill that function.
Art used to send back the regret of King Lear to young people and to middle-aged people saying, no, no, no, don't take your children for granted.
Don't milk your power all the way into dotage.
Have empathy and allow your children to raise up to be somewhat more equal to you in your age rather than dominating them like your toddlers, which will only foment rebellion.
Shakespeare, the absolute master of intergenerational conflict, was able to send these messages back and humanize us and have us make better decisions before it's too late to make those great decisions.
Scaring women with, well, you know, you've got 50 years without a family if you don't have kids and you don't have a loving husband and all these kinds of things.
And they get really scared.
And it's like, well, yes, that's sort of the point.
That's why when I was a kid, they had these commercials, which was, you know, last night I really went out and tied one on, you know, which is an analogy for drinking.
And it was a picture of someone with a toe tag on because they died in a drunk driving crash or, you know, seeing the guy smoking with the hole in their throat or, you know, all of these warnings, you know, like this holding up the diseased lung of the smoker saying,
don't smoke. Seeing the effects that you can't see because of youth and, you know, like you don't see over the horizon, you don't necessarily have much access or respect for the wisdom of your elders, but the artist can send these messages of the effects of life back to the course and have you change that course.
And that used to be the function of priests to tell you to be honest, to maintain the Ten Commandments, to worship Jesus, to love God and virtue.
So you don't end up like so-and-so.
This is all the medieval morality plays that were incredibly popular.
This is all of the 18th and 19th century novels about women saying, don't fall for rakes.
Get a guy who's solid and reliable.
Don't fall for the flashy guy from Fifty Shades of Grey because the fact that he's got a helicopter doesn't make him any less of an abuser.
And this message from beyond the horizon of middle age, boy, it's just almost completely cut off.
And now the only people who mean anything is Superman's father who are old who blew up with Krypton.
Sorry, that's a long branch but that was sort of like – We have taken the myth from them, the mythic nature of life.
Tolkien was someone who really talked about this a lot that mythology, what he called mythology, the way we speak about our lives beyond ourself, that that is what endures.
Nothing else does. That's truth, he said.
Your life and my life are rapidly going away.
But as I tell my kids in my Shakespeare class, he's been dead 400 years.
And here you are in a modern classroom reading what he said.
And you know what I said? Now that you've got past the these and those, he makes sense to you.
What he says about love, what he says about loss and death, it resonates with you, doesn't it?
And they have to agree it does.
And I said, 400 years after you'll be dead and everyone's forgot who you and I are, they'll still be reading this.
There is an immortality to that that is universal.
And so you think about the nature of this kind of stuff.
What Tolkien once said really kind of moved me.
He said, we create because we are created.
There can be no other argument for it.
That's his argument, right? That we create because we were created and because we create in our own small way the way the creator created, right?
And I think that's right.
If there is a creator and if that creator is God and God is the one who brought us together and God is the one who took chaotic matter and ordered it, right?
And that's what we're dealing with here.
When we create, the best creation mimics that creation.
And for a long time, and you know this down through Western culture, down through at least the early 20th century, the purpose of art was primarily to hold a mirror up to nature, right?
To show us in a different format what reality is.
Indulge me here. One of my favorite poets is Robert Browning.
Browning wrote a number of really beautiful dramatic monologues.
A single character going on for 700 lines.
All you hear is him. My favorite is Fra Lippo.
It's about a Renaissance painter, right?
Here's how Fra Lippo in Browning's dramatic monologue, here's how he described art.
He said, don't you know We are made so that we love first when we see things painted, things that we have passed perhaps a hundred times and never cared to see, and so they are better painted, better to us, which is the same thing.
Art was given for that.
God uses us to help each other so, lending our minds out.
And so his point is that, you know, you walk past the daisies in your garden every day.
You don't pay attention to them. You got to get to work.
But somebody paints a daisy in a beautiful impressionist way and you hang it on your wall.
We – Browning says we really do see reality first through art, right?
Those things in the real world that we see every day and because we see them every day, the sun coming up, the sun coming down, we don't notice them anymore.
But when you – an artist can take that reality and provide it for us in a form that then we can look at and see that's what art was made for, Lippo says in the poem, right?
We're made that way.
It's a beautiful way of understanding it.
I mean that art was made for this, lending our minds out, that part of us that's not simply anchored to anatomy and death and physiology and lending our minds out to each other So that we can see things that otherwise we see a thousand times and never notice.
Well, that capacity to remind us of the essential nature of depth is to me, you know, the great enemy of life.
And this goes back to another book we're going to discuss at some point, C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, right?
It's really vivid. And you know, it's funny.
A person in my life...
This is the only book they ever gave me and they turned out to be quite corrupt and I didn't see it at the time.
And they gave me that book almost like an angel forced them to in a way, you know, warning me about the danger of this person.
But in that, C.S. Lewis writes about how the great temptations are usually not grand but petty.
You know, how do you make a man corrupt?
Well, you don't tempt him with some great Mephistophelian bargain, you know, like I'll give you Power over art for your soul.
Usually it's like just get him to grumble and complain in his life and stare at a fire and waste everything.
And pettiness is the great enemy.
I come to these shows with you.
I come to the conversations that I have with people.
I come to the books that I write as deep oases in the inevitable desert of pettiness that characterizes a good chunk of our daily existence.
And listen... Pettiness is fine.
Nothing wrong with it. Gotta go to the dentist.
You gotta work out.
You gotta... These little annoying things.
You gotta floss. You gotta get all of this stuff.
You gotta do taxes. There's lots of petty stuff in life and that's fine.
That's life, right? But my God, I can't...
I'm like the opposite of a pearl diver.
Like a pearl diver can go down without scuba gear and grab the pearl but he can only stay down for a certain amount and he's gotta head to the surface, right?
I'm like the opposite. Like I can stay at the surface for a while but I gotta get back down to the depths and art...
It's the bath escape that takes you down and you can actually survive down there.
Because for me, when you're in a relationship with someone, you're dating a girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, whatever, and there's petty stuff that happens.
My wife tied in.
I can't find anything. And there's petty stuff that happens and it's so easy to cheese grate any block of depth you have through these little petty things and end up Grumbly.
Grumble brain. You know, just grumble, grumble, grumble, right?
And that's a massive kick in the nads of this incredible gift of life.
You know, like I'm just going to grumble my way through the day, you know, and all of that, right?
And what art does is it yanks you to the important moments.
It yanks you to the deep moments.
It yanks you to the depth.
Good art, right? The modern art is a lot of this petty, petty, petty, this kitchen sink stuff, a lot of petty stuff.
But the really good art...
is about the depth and power of existence and it reminds us that the sort of petty surface grumble brain that does chug along and help us with our daily life and help our daily decisions is the sufficient but not necessary part of life.
Like, you know, you pay your taxes to stay out of jail so that you can think deeply about life.
I mean, maybe you can think deeply about life if you're in jail like I guess Martin Luther King Jr.
did but art reminds us to step out of This tiny little conveyor belt of daily things and have a deep and larger story arc and depth to our life because that's, I think, where the millennials get stuck.
It's like, yeah, you conquered another video game, right?
There's no depth in video games.
There's very little art in video games.
There's visual art, yes, but not sort of real art.
And that focus on the moments of depth and power in life Allow us to remain deep.
Allow us to remain committed to truth and beauty and virtue.
And that's, particularly for people who aren't religious, that's the only meaning we're going to get.
You know, I go back to what you said about C.S. Lewis, which ties into this.
And my favorite quote from the Screwtape letters is the devil, Screwtape says to his nephew...
Human beings imagine us spending a lot of time putting ideas into their head.
They don't realize that our primary purpose as devils is to keep ideas out of their heads.
That is exactly what you just said and that brings up another thing we have to discuss.
You ended with this just there.
I really do believe that art and morality are the same thing, that the single best conduit we have to become moral people more than anything else – and that includes theology because theology is primarily philosophical precepts, right?
It's the philosophy of God.
I think, you know, the Ten Commandments—and it's interesting to me.
I always was amazed by the New Testament in the sense that Jesus didn't walk around Galilee handing out note cards with what you should do.
He didn't give the Ten New Commandments, right?
He didn't sit there and have a list of rules.
He told—how did Christ communicate?
Through art, he told stories, parables, right?
You think about what a parable is.
And they were the simplest form of storytelling.
A man has a mustard seed, right?
Bread, fish, stone, and water.
I mean, he told baby stories.
But for those who, as he said many times, if you have ears to hear, hear it.
What he was saying is what you just said.
Are you deep or are you shallow?
Do you take my story of the mustard seed and see it nothing more than a botanical story as a completely literalist and shallow?
Or do you see through the ruse of botany to get to the broader point he's making about the nature of salvation?
Christ himself did exactly what you said.
He told seemingly superficial parables that were designed to reach the person who could feel and think more deeply.
And to that end, and this is maybe where I'm going to turn it around and ask you, to my mind, morality and art are the same thing.
And a corrupted art leads to a corrupted morality, right?
And a proper understanding of art humanizes, unites, and ultimately turns us into better people, right?
And it's art more than anything else that does that.
Well, I'm going to burst into tears right here, right now, and I'll tell you why.
You've touched on the third rail of my entire freaking existence as a public thinker, which is, I've always had, in my mind, since I was a teenager, dissatisfaction with existing systems of morality.
And not the conclusions, you know, Ten Commandments, I'm down with most of those and all of that, but the methodology, you know, the reason and evidence, guys, like the faith has always been a challenge for me, let's just put it as nicely as possible.
So, I cleaved to objectivism, and yet I knew deep down, you know, like you have this splinter in the mind's eye.
You know deep down, it's like, okay, I claim that faith is not a good thing, but by gosh, I have faith in Ayn Rand's precepts, because she hasn't proven it from first principles.
She did not make that proof from first principles.
Oh, that which is good for man, it's like, yeah, well, you know, the Obamas have bought a $13 million house in Martha's Vineyard, so they weren't particularly good people, right?
So, it's good for them, right?
So, I had this problem in the back of my brain for a long time, decades really, and then when I realized I could have some public venue as a thinker, I sat down, I remember sitting there, I'm not going to get up from this table until I solve the problem of secular ethics.
I'm just, whatever it takes, right?
And it took a long time.
My butt went numb. And then I started talking about it.
I've called it universally preferable behavior.
And It works.
And this is like splitting the atom of philosophy.
This is like the biggest goal is a rational proof of secular ethics, right?
So I thought, you know, I wasn't sitting there saying, here comes my ticket tape parade, you know, because it's bigger than going to the moon and back, in my humble opinion.
It's one of the biggest achievements.
But I was like, okay, this is going to...
A ferocious debate and massive interest, and some people are going to grab at this like water in the desert, and other people are going to grab at it like poison in their veins.
And it was like, it just...
It kind of came and went. And people would debate me with it on the show and all of that, but it just didn't move people, even though it's really good.
And you know what I hear the most, my friend?
You know what I hear the most about what I do?
People say, your analogies are fantastic.
And I'm like, you bastards.
It's your stories, not your logic they care about.
You bastards! All of you!
Bastards! All of you!
I worked for 30 years to prove ethics and then some stupid analogy pops in my head and that's what you like!
Come on! I was trying to explain something.
I was on a call just before we got on.
This is one of very, very tragic history.
And she couldn't figure out how to escape it, right?
And I'm trying to explain it to her intellectually and I know it's not connecting with her.
And then I say... It just pops into my head and I say, you know, a bad childhood is like a burning building.
You know, you fight the fire or you get out, but you don't just hang around.
And she's like, oh.
And I'm like, oh, come on!
All of this intellectual analysis!
And everybody likes the burning building thing?
That's great too!
And it's like, so I just, you know, I don't mean to pull the Genie out of the bottle of my discontent, but it's like, this is annoyingly true.
All of this intellectual shit.
And people are just like, yeah, I really like that analogy about the burning house.
Think about all of the sermons that have been delivered in the last 2000 years.
I won't. I refuse.
You can't make me.
Think about all of the dogmatic arguments and philosophical reasons.
And then think about how much more effective a single painting by Caravaggio of the suffering Christ has been to people.
Think about how much more meaningful a sculpture of Michelangelo's has done for truth and beauty and piety than all the collected lecturing of all the philosophers of religion.
I mean the reality – and I think this says something – I would qualify your angst for a moment.
There are few people – You're a philosopher who can move philosophers.
And while that is a huge accomplishment, it leaves 99% of the rest of the world utterly unmoved.
That's the reality, isn't it?
I'm willing to accept that on the condition that you go out with a pair of pliers, a fork, and a taser and rewire humanity according to my preferences.
That's all I'm asking. I will accept everything that you're saying, the Caravaggio stuff and all of that.
But you've got to go out and fix people so they work the way that I want them to.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
And I love the sarcasm.
And I'm out. And of course, as you of course know in the sarcasm, is if you want to reach them, you have to become more artistic and less philosophical.
And that's where your hope is, brother, because as I said to you before, that...
Art and storytelling can be every bit as philosophical as the philosophers are.
You just got to be more clever and more talented, right?
Can you... Wait, wait.
So instead of you going out to rewire the world, my specific request for you...
You have to change. You're holding up a mirror to rewire me.
But you understand, right, Seth?
I'm afraid I'm going to have to feign interruptions here at this point because it's becoming distinctly...
Hey, good. I was about to point out something uncomfortable.
You know, right, that your entire early gravity towards the theater was your nascent understanding of that truth, that for you, what you became as a philosopher was always filtered through the art first.
Oh, a philosopher is like, yeah, it's second price because the lefties own the arts.
That's right. You think I could get anywhere?
In the arts? They own the arts, but they don't own art.
How many great artists were not understood in their day who we revere now?
How many great artists who suffered for their art only to find out that – like Van Gogh, 100 years after he was dead, his paintings are selling for $90 million, right?
So that's the thing, right, it seems to me, that you – you're an artist, man.
I mean you are a playwright.
All the things that you did as a young man – All your intellectual experiences and your development came through for you, particularly theater, right?
It's why you're good at what you do on TV, because you have a theatrical air.
When they say they like your analogies, that's what they're talking about?
Is that right? They're telling you, Steph, I like you precisely because you don't sound like a philosopher.
That's what they're telling you. So, embrace.
I'm back to my grumble brain.
But you loved acting, didn't you?
I mean, you enjoyed it. I did.
Well, no, here's the thing, though.
I mean, I was a bit too stuffed with my own words to be a sock puppet to the words of others.
So I think I'm certainly glad to have done what I did now.
And I've just released this documentary, Hong Kong Fight for Freedom, which I hope people will look at.
If you look for it on YouTube, you have to put my last name in, otherwise they won't show it to you.
But in that, I just, I hadn't, we needed a closing.
And this is, you know, there's no spoiler about this.
It's not like a fictional story.
So we needed a closer for the movie.
And, you know, it's tough to compete with, you know, scenes of rioters and, you know, getting a couple of facefuls of tear gas and all of that.
But what I did was I did a monologue as if I was a lawyer speaking to the court of world opinion making the case for Hong Kong.
And that's, yeah, it's completely theatrical.
It is, you know, your honor and may it please the court and all that kind of stuff.
And the backdrop is an overview of Hong Kong.
We went to the very top of the mountain there.
And yeah, I guess you could say that's my sermon from the mount, and that to me is great art because it was not scripted.
It was very passionately delivered, and it's meaningful.
And that's, to me, really frustrating about the modern art.
And so I appreciate that. I sound like I'm moving on, but it really did annoyingly stick in my brain.
It's like one of those fake arrows, but it actually went through.
So let's talk a little bit about...
This infestation of comic books.
Oh, Lord above.
What on earth is going on?
Because it's not a fairy tale.
It's not common humanity.
They're freaks and aliens and mutants.
And to me, what I loved about art, it's why I love The Fountainhead more than Atlas Shrugged, and why I love Dostoevsky so much is it's the everyday challenges that we need art to strengthen us for, like that challenge in the car with the woman who'd be famous if I slept with her.
And the movie's like, you know, 12 Angry Men.
There's a great Paul Newman one called The Verdict.
There, of course, is the wrestling with conscience that goes all the way through the book.
We talked about crime and punishment.
There's the Ayn Rand novels.
You can sort of name it. And the problem is that those used to encourage, I think, people to have courage in everyday situations, which is where courage is needed.
And the problem with the comic book heroes is like unless you can throw a supertanker through a mountain...
Where does the courage connect to you?
Unless you have superpowers, where does the moral courage connect you to?
And of course with Christianity, the fight for the devil, the pursuit of virtue, the expansion of God's grace and his word, that is the essence of what it is that you're doing which is available to everyone.
And my concern is these superhero movies are completely disconnecting people from everyday necessary courage and turning it into a CGI fest that's completely foreign and divorced from their lives.
I think that's true. I think if you go back to the Silver Age comics, you go back to the 60s and 70s, there was a real movement in those comic books to be not that.
If you think about Peter Parker as Spider-Man, Peter Parker was not the ward of a millionaire.
Peter Parker was not a superhuman guy from Krypton.
He was a teenager, not even a man.
He was a teenager who had a lousy love life and who never got the short end of the stick and everything else.
And so there was an attempt there to demonstrate that his powers did not compensate for his personality, right?
That just because he had these powers, in some ways they were more of a burden for Peter Parker.
With great power comes great responsibility, right?
Then they were a boon. I think what has really gone wrong with – again, comic books are very juvenile ways of representing art, right?
I mean I think they're for little – again, the little kids who are playing, they belong – comic books belong to little kids.
Comic book belongs to the 12 and the 13-year-old who still – I'm sorry to interrupt, but it didn't used to be the case.
So when I was a kid, I read comic books and they were about war.
They were about real people's lives.
They were about real challenges.
I remember one comic book – I remember it to this day.
It was about a guy who signed up for the army and they said, you got to wear these boots.
He says, no, I don't like those boots.
I'm going to wear these boots. And his sergeant said, okay, that's fine.
I just walk around all day. And see how your boots do, right? But that was like real-world stuff.
Not that I'm in the army, but it was not superpowers.
It was not aliens with tentacles coming out of their necks that can travel through time.
That's the point. That's the difference.
Yeah, it is. That's the point is that the superhero genre has gotten out of control.
And I think the movies have made that much worse because, of course, the movies are going for CGI spectacle and they're not going for the moral.
And what's happened with the comic books as they've bifurcated since the 50s and 60s and 70s is now they've become less about the moral and the morality and more about the superpowers.
And as we've said before, now they're becoming politically correct, right?
They're doing to the comic books what they're doing to Star Wars.
Now you've got to have a female – you've got to have Captain Marvel, right?
And you've got to have – now there's all this clamoring for gay superheroes and so Marvel said they're going to be unveiling their new superhero who happens to be a gay lead.
The same thing that's destroyed higher forms of art is destroying the lower ones as well.
And so the problem with the superheroes is that – you mentioned something about millennials and younger people.
By removing the idea of God from Western culture, particularly the Christian God, by consciously keeping it from generations of young people, denying it in the public schools, ignoring it in art, and mocking it from our academic pulpits, one of the things that the comic books do provide is a kind of savior figure that is now missing from our lives.
Everybody wants to be saved, right?
Everybody wants a hero.
So modern heroism comes in the form of really buff, tited men and women who will save us from things, right?
The fact that they're not completely human, they're mutants of some kind, just makes it more noble, right?
We persecute them.
Think about it.
We persecute the X-Men, yet they still fight for us.
It's like the – it's the Christian story, right?
Just stripped of all that made the Christian story really artistic, right?
Stripped of that. And so I think that the comic books, popular culture in general, recognizes that what – they recognize what we've lost.
They've recognized those aspirations of the human mind and soul that are not being fed anymore and their best approximations is what you're getting in movies now, whether it's the cartoon movies or it's where the other stuff – and we see how wholly inadequate it is.
I mean, our millennials have had more access to graphic cartoonism, right?
I would have killed in 1974 for a really good Spider-Man movie.
I would have been all for that. Now these kids aren't even reading the comic books because they can see it in the movies.
And yet you see that with all of this spectacle, you've really lost something.
You've lost that artistic core.
Wasn't it Scorsese?
Who was it that came out the other day and blasted the comic book movies?
He was correct. It was somebody – one of the great directors came out and blasted these things and he's right.
And why he's blasting – it's not storytelling anymore.
Storytelling is – Well, if it was Scorsese, I've got my own beef with him about, oh, good, another Joe Pesci, Robert DeMiro movie with mobsters in it.
Oh, he's so creative these days.
Way to branch out, sir.
I don't remember who it was, but the criticism was valid it seemed to me because you're writing formulaic movies.
You're not really writing moving art anymore.
You're not making art. You're just ticking certain boxes that every action film has to have.
I've talked to you about this before a long time ago, a while ago.
But if you look at modern literature, if you look at modern art for the last 100 years, go back to 1900, one of the things that we lost actually in modern art and I think comic books tried in a weak way to replace it, we lost the idea of the hero.
The anti-hero became everywhere.
The outlaw became the hero.
The thug, the outcast, right, became the hero.
And if you think about the great literature of the last 120 years, there's only really one place where you find a traditional hero, I think, in really great literature, and that's the Lord of the Rings.
You think about The Lord of the Rings.
It's the anti-comic book, isn't it?
Because what it is, it's setting up those archetypal values, isn't it?
I mean what Gandalf represents versus what Sauron does.
I mean you've got – from the beginning, you've got these poles.
And the entire working out of the story of the Lord of the Rings is who is ultimately the hero.
You got the wizards and the warriors, but it's the littlest.
It's the weakest. It's the little hobbits, right, that got to get the ring back to Mordor.
And you think about that narrative arc and Tolkien was very consciously doing this.
He recognized in the modern world with all of our scientific and technological developments.
He fought in World War I. You think about what the Lord of the Rings is.
It really is a lament about the dehumanization of nature, right?
Everything became mechanical.
Everything became machines.
You've got the Ents, right, who are these tree gods fighting the rock and stone of Saruman's bogus castle.
You've got those environmental battles that are working themselves out about what used to be virtuous and what the purpose of art used to be versus what it's becoming in a mechanized age, post-World War I mechanized age.
And so it really is moving to me to read that book because those medieval values in some way – it was a reason why both Tolkien and Lewis looked back to the Middle Ages, right?
Not because of the lack of technology and the brutality of their short lives, but because of the grand artistic narratives that held for a thousand years in medieval Europe and they were unifying ones.
They were spiritual.
They were sacrificial.
They were moral and ethical and they produced great art and they produced great literature And so Tolkien in the sort of sterile 20th century was trying to replace them a little bit.
And that to me was really one of the last great times that you had that kind of expression.
Oh, I remember Lord of the Rings taught me an enormous amount, not least of the value of loyalty, the relationship between Frodo and Samwise.
And although there's class elements and I get all of that, but Samwise's devotion to Frodo is so deep and so powerful that That it really, really moved me and raised the standard of what I thought about in terms of loyalty.
Okay. Let's close with this question.
And it's a big question, so we can chew it for a while.
Can we survive without actionable art?
So we have art, but the art is not particularly actionable.
The superhero stuff is not actionable.
The nihilistic stuff is not actionable.
You know, the Joker, the new movie The Joker, it's not particularly actionable.
So... In the absence of actionable art, can we survive?
People have substituted video games for art, and video games have no connection.
No connection whatsoever.
Not even... Like, even the superhero stuff, you could say, well, standing firm in the face of blah, blah, blah, right?
But there's no actionable art in video games, no actionable stories.
It's all really base of the brain.
It's below even the mammalian level in general.
It's really twitchy stuff.
At the lizard brain level...
The cultures that are thriving are the cultures that have the strongest narrative.
Narratives. The cultures that are dying off are the cultures that have lost narrative and substituted hedonism for narration, which is, you know, I've said before on this show, we can't be less than human.
We say, oh, he's acting like an animal.
It's like, no, we can't be animals because we're humans.
All we can be is inhuman.
We can be human or we can be inhuman.
We cannot be anything else.
And it is human.
As you say, to play with stories of depth and power and meaning.
We in the West facing the greatest existential crisis in our history, I believe, at the moment.
Is it possible for us to survive without stories?
My answer is no. And the older I get, the more I come to recognize that what happens when you remove the great humanizing narratives of Western culture is fascism.
I would argue that fascism is a symptom of the death of the master narratives, right?
The archetypal unifying narratives.
So what did the Nazis have to do, for instance?
They had to destroy the old narratives and withhold them.
They had to burn those books Right?
And why were they so – I mean there were many reasons why they were racist against the Jews, many foolish reasons.
But I think one of the main points that the Nazis did not like about the Jews was the great arc of their narrative, the chosen people, right?
I mean you think about the degree to which Judaism and the arts and the history of Judaism is deeply embedded in some of our most profound artistic creations.
It's because of the master narrative, right?
Which is an incredibly beautiful one that of all – a whole world who had forgotten God, God singled out this generation, this people, made of them a great nation who followed him, gave them some of the great truths that still animate what's best about Western culture, right?
And so I think that there was a kind of culture envy there too with regards to the Jews.
And so I think that the more we – We're good to go.
It's a course that's required for all the people who want to be education majors.
All the people who want to be English teachers have to take this course.
And her entire premise is you should no longer for any reason teach the classics to little kids.
They are old fashioned.
They are racist. They are homophobic.
They are transphobic. You should only teach in your elementary, middle and high school classes this new brand of politically activist literature.
It's anti-bullying literature, pro-transgender literature.
In other words, literature that's not literature.
It's just propaganda, right?
Trevor Burrus And some of that propaganda may have good intentions and may have reasonable outcomes, but nonetheless, it's still not art.
It's not art. And so that's what I'm fighting right now as the Shakespeare professor on campus is that I get kids in my Shakespeare class then who already have been through that class, education majors, and they don't understand why stories matter.
And so to me, I see it on campus.
When you pull the stories away from these kids and all you give them and said are these very politicized narratives, they become antifacates.
They become intolerant.
They become bigots. They hate stories because of who wrote them.
Well, Shakespeare's a white guy. What does he have to say to me?
But when you've got professors telling them that, and so in my final statement, at least in the opening of this last part of the discussion, is this.
I really do believe that it's not a coincidence that those cultures since 1920 or maybe even 1850 who have sought complete control of human minds have sought to do it at the expense of I cannot point to a single piece of Nazi art, not one, that has any redeeming value.
In the long march of the communists, I can find nothing.
Now you could maybe make an argument that they still had great ballet, but that ballet, they left it alone.
They didn't make the great … They inherited that.
Right. They didn't turn ballet into simply communist propaganda.
They allowed the beautiful art of the ballet to continue under communist rule because it wasn't threatening to them.
But painting and sculpture and literature were completely decimated.
And so you mentioned Dostoevsky.
I remember in the 70s, people were smuggling in to Russia, along with blue jeans, copies of the brothers Karamazov, because the only copies the Russians had in their libraries were copies where the hundreds of pages that related to God had been ripped out.
They were reading Dostoevsky without the really Dostoevsky stuff.
Yeah, I think fascism honestly, Steph, is what happens to human beings and you can call it by any other name you want but those fascist tendencies are what happens when we withhold and destroy that primal artistic need in human beings.
A larger narrative that we subjugate hedonism to because this of course is the great – I don't – obviously I'm no fan of fascism at all but there was a very powerful piece of propaganda that was floating around on the web for a while.
Which was a picture of three men.
And the first was a completely starved man, and the caption was communism.
And the second was an obese man, and that was capitalism.
And then there was a muscular man, fascism, right?
Now that's a powerful statement, again, massively opposed to fascism, but that's a powerful statement.
And where the criticism of capitalism, not just of the economic actions, but of the effects upon Our capacity to subjugate hedonism to a higher standard, right?
Because hedonism does lead to the death of civilization, but when you have more than enough, hedonism is almost inevitable.
And that's why I did a speech in Florida not too long ago where I posed the basic question just in passing, can humanity survive any form of success?
It's a really, really big question.
Why do you sacrifice the pleasures of the moment And for what grounds?
Well, it has to be for a higher narrative.
Otherwise, it just feels like self-flagellation, like you're a monk who just likes to hit himself, not because it's some sort of higher calling.
And that question of how on earth do we subjugate hedonism, the mammalian pursuit of mere physical pleasure, you know, yeah, yeah, loose and liberal sexuality when you're young is a great playground and it's lots of fun, but it smashes people up like you wouldn't believe.
It destroys their capacity to bond.
It can physically harm them through the massive increase in spread of STDs.
It causes abortions which break people's hearts.
It destroys our capacity to enter into sustainable marriages and so on.
So, like, all of that fun stuff.
And you think of the rising rates of, you know, really terrible obesity and so on.
The hedonism.
How do we tame people?
Hedonism. It's really, really tough.
You know, one of the things they talk about with parenting that's really tough.
So when I grew up as a kid and I wanted something, you know, nine times out of ten, my mom would say, well, we can't afford it.
And she was right because, you know, we were kind of dead broke.
Now, I was reading an article about parents who are wealthy.
It's really tough. It's really like you live in a mansion and the kid says, I want something and you can't say, I can't afford it.
So when you are in want, you have restrictions that are placed upon you by math and facts and bank accounts.
When you have excess, so to speak, how do you restrain materialism and greed and hedonism?
Now, of course, the answer in the past was man shall not live by bread alone.
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
And that was a way of restraining We're good to go.
And the hedonism, which is the beast that is in the China shop of our history, is currently taking down the whole damn thing.
How do we tame this thing?
Well, we can't say we can't afford it, because for most people it's like, well, the government will just borrow and print money or whatever it is, right?
We've got tons of money sloshing around.
What do you mean we can't afford it? What do you mean we can't afford Medicare for the poor?
We can afford it. We can afford these wars, can't we?
We've got bankers bailouts.
We can afford all of that, so why can't we afford it?
And these are all very, very basic questions.
Hedonism is what we desperately want from a mammal standpoint.
But it desperately undoes our humanity.
Well, the one you left – I think you answered your own question and the one you left out is my favorite.
What profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul, right?
I would argue that the soul of a man is communicated to the man through art.
And so these are tied up – the soul and the artistic – the purpose of art are tied up to the same purpose.
Art is what shows a man his own soul.
Art is what shows us that aspect of us that supersedes the animal.
And I think that that's what's so valuable about it.
And the answer to the question is you have to instill in kids again.
You have to go back and stop teaching kids that they're animals.
Stop teaching kids that all you are are highly evolved animals.
Stop it because that's their desperation because they look around.
They're not stupid kids. They look around and they see what animals are.
They look around and see how many animals are starving in the world and why would you – In solidarity, throw your hat in with them, right?
If the purpose, as you said biologically, is to survive and to be as comfortable as you can possibly be.
And so it is the entire premise of materialism that not just saps the soul and takes that part of us that's not merely an animal, the soul, and degrades it.
But it's the death of art, isn't it?
And what is fascism, by the way, to tie this back to that?
Isn't fascism just more or less a radical Darwinian approach to human culture?
Look at what the animal kingdom does.
If we're going to be animals, we should be the most successful, the dominant animals.
And you weed out the weak ones, right?
Mother nature takes care of the retarded, the sick, the lame, the halt.
They don't live. The weak don't reproduce.
I mean, in a way, all Hitler did through Nietzsche was what Darwin said, right?
Poor Darwin. He didn't mean this.
But Hitler looked around and said, okay, the scientists of Germany in the 1930s, who we laugh at now, but in the 1930s, German scientists were among the most well-regarded scientists in the world, right?
Many of them came and built the atomic bomb here.
These were good – many of those social scientists argued there's demonstrable proof that Jews and gays and Eastern Europeans are all mental deficients, right?
We measure – Yes!
Eugenics. We've measured their skulls, right?
And so if that's true and we don't believe in God because the Nazis really didn't.
They believed in their own occultism.
They certainly weren't Christians.
If we believe this, the fascists said, then shouldn't we treat human beings?
The way nature treats animals because we're no different than that.
And if we believe through our flawed, weak science, if we believe that this race is inferior, well, in the uncivilized world of the jungle, nature would have purged them herself.
Do we not owe mankind the species?
And you know where you see this, Steph?
You see it today, that eugenics, with this idea that if a young mother has a 30 or a 40 or a 50% chance that the baby she's carrying might be a Down syndrome baby, what's the recommendation, right?
Right? Maybe you ought to abort that child and try again.
We're talking even without 100% surety.
And the argument there – and I said this to my university classrooms all the time.
How many of you know Down syndrome people?
And they all raised their hands. Well, do you think that they don't deserve to live because their quality of life is not as high as yours intellectually?
And not one of those kids agrees with that.
Was it just two years ago?
Iceland was bragging that there were no Down syndrome babies born in the country all year.
They were triumphing over that.
And how did they achieve that?
By aborting any baby that might be Down syndrome.
I mean that's the same kind of eugenic thinking here in the 2010s, 2019s that basically Hitler – and we're still making the argument, right?
That because those kids aren't normal, those kids probably wouldn't survive on their own.
They require more money and more care than normal kids do.
Aren't we doing them in the world a favor, not letting them be born?
So you go back to the 1930s and you jump forward to that kind of stuff.
Nothing has really changed here.
It's even worse if the argument that I make when I'm sort of pronatalist is that people say, well, I'm not sure we can afford the kids.
And it's like, hmm, you know, we're pretty much the second richest generation in history.
I don't know that that's a massive issue.
We can afford college for everybody, universal healthcare, but we can't afford those kids.
No, I get the point you're making.
And I go back to my larger point is to tie fascism back to this, right?
That when you get rid of all that art does, right?
Spiritually, intellectually, morally for human beings, to lift them up and above themselves, to show themselves what they are in reality, to emphasize those aspects of life that supersede the material, you get rid of that.
And then life is cheap, right?
And again, you look at the most brutal killing machines in the last 200 years.
All of them have been atheist cultures, socialism, Marxism and communism and fascism.
I mean look at the toll in human bodies.
Those worldly-centered, materialistic, don't believe in anything beyond the physiological kinds of cultures gave us.
They don't give us much art.
They do not like individuality.
They collectivize everything.
They do not like free rights.
They are very censorious of art.
They shut down anything.
Look at – you got China bans Winnie the Pooh now because somebody said Winnie the Pooh looks like President Xi.
That's what they do, right?
For that matter, what modern Chinese painter, sculptor, artist, playwright in the last 70 years of communism do you point to and say, well, there's a world contribution?
No, but you can't. Everybody's too terrified of the mob.
Everybody's too terrified of the mob to create anything profound and original.
That's right. Because you know the state will stomp on you.
No, no. In China, the state, yes.
But here in the West, we have horizontal enslavement.
It's the outrage mobs that shut people down these days.
That's what everyone's terrified of and that's why we can't be original.
The other thing too, of course, with your point around fascism and the sort of base mammalian thing, is that human beings are relatively undifferentiated if they're not allowed free expression.
You think of those, we're not like 50 times the height of each other, right?
Where you get genuine human differentiation is when there is free expression.
Like, you know, Shakespeare is like, An infinitely better playwright to some degree than anyone else, so to speak, right?
That differentiation is important not because we want to sort of just look up at Shakespeare and kneel before him but because when you see a human being with that depth of perception and communication it shows you just how powerful we can be and some of that power is going to rub off on you and some of that capacity is going to rub off on you and some of that ambition is going to rub off on you.
You think of these frozen people in Soviet bread lines they all look kind of the same.
They all dress in the same shabby clothes.
They can't differentiate themselves that much except with the sociopathic pursuit of political power.
But it is in the freedom that we get the heights and the canyons that allow us to aspire.
And we are a spelunking and rock climbing species, so to speak.
We need to have something to aim for.
As we've lost the divine, we also get this relentless egalitarianism that is attempting to erase the peaks and valleys and have us live on this two-dimensional flatland A bland unambition.
And that, to me, we didn't get to the top of the food chain because we're not an aspiring species.
And we can't aspire to be superheroes.
We can't aspire to bring video games to real life.
At least I bloody well hope we don't because then you end up like Columbine.
But what do we aspire to?
What is our yearning pointed at these days?
Well, nothing, really.
And that's why we're not going anywhere other than slowly down.
Yeah, I agree. And you look at the apex predators.
Look at a shark, right? Sharks have been around hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of years.
They haven't changed much, haven't had to.
They're apex predators, but in the same way you could argue human beings are on land.
And there's a world of difference between us and sharks, right?
Sharks are content to feed and to breed.
I always ask this question.
We had lizard brains.
We had dinosaur brains for 250 million years.
And by the end of it, their brains were not necessarily any larger than they were before.
But think about in 100,000 years where the human brain is gone.
We are something different.
And that something different is what you just said.
I don't know what the best word to define it.
If I say the word spiritual, people get pissed off, right?
Because that implies religious.
But there's something clearly about human beings that is not animal.
There is something transcendent about us.
There is something about us that's bigger than our mortality, that's bigger than the sum of our parts, that's bigger even than the complex organ that is our brain.
There is something holistic about humans as individuals and humanity collectively.
Call it memory, call it whatever you want, imagination, call it what you want.
But that's transcendent and that's universal.
And if that's true...
Then that opens – there's two things.
Number one, it means we cannot live by the world alone, can't live by bread alone, that the whole world is not worth our souls if we use the soul to define that thing.
That's number one. And number two, it also means that there are other possible universals that we can tap into.
See, this is the thing. When you say there are no universals, right there you're a liar because you just made a universal statement, right?
It's basic solipsism 101.
I get to say that there are no universals universally and the minute you argue against me, right?
So this is the problem. And I think that's what this culture – we're afraid of this now.
If there is, if we are bigger than what we are, if there is something beyond this, if there is indeed realms of thought or truth that cannot be accessed solely through our science or our logic, then we have to sacrifice.
Then we have to change.
Then there are things that we should prioritize besides ourselves.
And our selfish culture doesn't want to do it.
And hedonism is a lot. It is a lie.
It has to be a lie, right?
Because again, as I tell my university classes, a shark will eat everything it can eat.
If you give a shark enough food, it will eat and become a hedonist, right?
But how many of us are happy with it?
How come hedonism doesn't make us happy?
For all of our wealth and all of our luxury time and all of our freedom and all of our money and all of the – to be 24 years old and to have spent the first 20 years of your life sitting in a school classroom Not having to dig in the dirt for your food or help schlep water back and forth.
To do that is itself hedonistic, I would argue.
And so, yes, I think that's right.
I think we have seen what hedonism is.
We have culturally embraced it.
It leads to radical suicide.
It leads to abortion.
It leads to addiction and opioid abuse, obesity, all those things you said.
We're trying to fill spiritual holes with material remedies, and it just makes us miserable.
Well, of course, if hedonism worked, the happiest people in the world will be those who won the lottery.
And it's almost always the exact opposite.
All right. Well, listen, that's a great chat.
I'm really, really glad we got through this stuff.
It's a huge topic, and I really, really appreciate the depth and clarity you brought to it.
And I also do want to invite the audience.
Leave us comments, suggestions, stuff that you want us to go over.
I think that these two brains can kind of cast a net back and forth and generate some good heat and light.
So just give everyone, if you can, your website.
Mention again what it is that you do, and we'll take it from there.
FPEUSA.org will get you to our main site.
I'm a university professor and an author as well.
And I would say you brought it up.
Maybe sometime next couple of months, let's tackle the Screwtape Letters.
That's a big, big repository.
Love to. All right. Well, thanks, Dr.
Pesta. Really a great pleasure as always, and a very Merry Christmas to you and yours.
Merry Christmas.
Happy New Year.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy.
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