Pints With Aquinas - Distributism, Memory, and Evidentialism w/ Dr. Alex Plato

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Dr. Alex Plato is an associate Professor of philosophy at Franciscan university. He has done extensive study of Elizabeth Anscombe, Post-Liberalism, and Epistomology. He and Matt speak on Capitalism, Distributism, and Evidentialism. Support and Follow Alex's Work:   @Platos_Academy   https://platosacademy.locals.com/ Support us on Locals: https://mattfradd.locals.com/support Show Sponsored By: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  https://strive21.com/matt

Cool. There is a line in it where it says, so it's just a bunch of it's about repenting. Yeah. And it says, if I have, you know, overeaten or have slept unnecessarily, or if a beggar has come to me and I despised or neglected him, or if when standing in prayer, my mind has been distracted by the glamour of this world. Well, there's one line that I always choke up on. It says, if I have made fun of my brother's sin when my own faults are countless. Wow. No, that's beautiful. You've got to send that to me. I like that a lot. Yeah, yeah. It takes just about two or three minutes to pray. Yeah. It's a beautiful prayer. That's wonderful. I love that. Yeah. So how's it going?

It's going all right. Yeah? So super busy. I got, you know, Franciscan, I'm teaching a lot of extra classes. Last semester I did, this semester I did. So I got a lot, a lot of what I say mental whiplash happens. Well, I remember when the fall semester was starting, you were maxed out, right?

You had a ton of things going on. Have things slowed down since then? No, still maxed out. So I've got extra classes and then I'm teaching an online class as well, the same one again. So all the recordings are already out there. Is this like necessary so you can provide for your family?

Is this why you're doing this? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would love to, it'd be great if I could just do less and then I could research some more. And I still am researching a little bit. I'm working on a paper right now for ACPQ,

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, the big American Catholic Philosophical Association, which is the biggest Catholic Philosophers Association. I'm guessing in the world, definitely in America. Anyways, I'm writing a paper for a special issue on distributism. So I got invited to write something on that. So I wanna try to put together

my kind of version of distributism, which is sort invited to write something on that. So I want to try to put together my kind of version of distributism, which is sort of this post-liberal, new polity kind of version of distributism and see if I can articulate that a bit for a broader philosophical professional audience. Well, let's see, you know, it doesn't CS Lewis say the mark of an intelligent person is if you can bring these heavy concepts down to lay people.

That's right. If you can make me understand that, you're probably good to go. I can try if you can bring these heavy concepts down to lay people. If you can make me understand that, you're probably good to go. I can try if you want me to. So I think of distributism, which has been now renamed localism by Samuels. Yeah, I get that and I see the motivation, but I'm going to stick with the old word. I can tell you why if you want to. But so I think of distributism now as a framework, a kind of social philosophy framework. So it's really Catholic social teaching with just as much emphasis on the philosophical dimensions as we can. So not the specifically theological, revelational grounds for it. So things that would

be available to anybody. So that would be an old school language like natural justice, right? So we want our social order to be one of natural justice corresponding to that order. So it's inspired of course, in the history of it by Chester and Belloc, there's other ones like Vincent McNabb and a whole bunch of other people in history in England. So it's kind of contextualized there.

So that's why I like making it a framework. And so the framework to me, there's basically three enemies and one sort of goal. So the goal is that society should be healthy, which means healthy families. So number one, the healthy family. Like the family is the basis of society. It is a society and its health is a barometer

of the rest of the health of society. So that's sort of the aim we want. What does that say about the health of America then? Absolutely. And I mean, I the health of America then? Absolutely. And I mean, I watched the episode you did with Jones. And of course, he's a friend of mine. And a lot of his thinking has influenced me. But his rail against liberalism as kind

of anthropological individualism, at least that element of it, is directly diametrically opposed to distributism. So it's like man is social by nature. Man is familial. Man is in the solidarity networks by nature. He wants to preserve that sort of peace in those networks. And when that spreads around out through society, then a society is healthier than if not.

If not, if it's not ordered by some other principle that's violating that sort of natural condition of man. So it's like, we believe God made nature, nature's good. And so for natural in that sense, then that's good, you know? So that's the kind of... What does a healthy family mean? So I think, I mean, a healthy family is obviously one where there's love, right? There's mutual love between the children, between the spouses, between the children and the parents, right?

And Augustine defines peace in the family as one where there's a proper order between the ones commanding and the ones obeying. So that is the order, obviously, of society, where there's commands or rules, laws, and then there's obedience to those laws, and there's usually sense to those laws, and there's usually some sort of purveyor or keeper of that law. And of course, we think the law ultimately comes from God, which is why we Catholics think an order is justified, is just to the degree that it's following natural laws, the moral law above.

Humans don't create laws. The laws that we make either correspond to the real ones, and so they're really laws. Or when they don't, then we say with Augustine, an unjust law is no law at all. So we just call it one, but it's're really laws. Or when they don't, then we say with Augustine, an unjust law is no law at all. So we just call it one, but it's not really one. So obviously, like, laws permitting abortion are not really laws and never have been.

And I think if we would take that lesson to heart, I think we'd have a more powerful conviction when we're doing theoretical stuff in the pro-life movement. You know, still got to get on boots on the ground and do stuff. But just like, this has never been justified. This can never be justified. This never was a law, right?

So any authority that says it is can't really be authoritative, right? But it's just acting in a tyrannical mode. So yeah, I think so a healthy family is one where there's that natural peace between the members and there's mutual relationships of love. Now, what that requires for the distributists, the number one thing they thought was the

problem in the modern era was that the proper share in productive property was being expropriated from families. And so you need productive property, you need assets, right? You need material goods, you need not just material goods for food and shelter now, but for provision for the future. So any family that's constantly anxious about what's going to happen tomorrow, it's very difficult being a flourishing family in that situation.

That puts a lot of stress on a family. So that's where the name distributism came from, is we want families. The number of families in society that have property should be distributed as widely as possible. So that productive asset should be distributed to as many families as would mark that society as one of distributist

property. What is productive property? So we think of like, you know, something that you can use, right, productively. So obviously you could use your house or your tools or your garage or your car. These could be productive property for you. There's also we have financial assets, right, could be. So any sort of, it's a tricky definition when you get to theory But basically something that's that's useful to you that can be used to produce something for you So think of if you had your land and your tools right in your house and your equipment machines and whatever to run

It's easier to think of in an agrarian setting. It's not required. That's a good question That's what I'm gonna mean my question. Does it mean I have to have acres of land? No, it doesn't mean you have to but I do think there's a good question. That's what I'm gonna mean my question. Does it mean I have to have acres of land? No, it doesn't mean you have to but I do think there's a natural There's a natural nest to having an agrarian foundation that can't be avoided because man is material and we need food Yeah, so no matter what we need we need farmers and of course to me a society that has Massive agro biz has a lot of problems associated with that and obviously New Pauly, that that's part of the schtick, is the good soil, that podcast. And it doesn't mean we all have to become farmers, right?

Because most of us don't live in rural land and have to live in a city. So how do we do that consistently? Or may not desire to. Yes, or may not desire to. Or even if we did, like I desire to, but I would break, I'm getting too old. I couldn't do that.

And the amount of knowledge required, it's such a learning curve that even if I got the knowledge and I was physically fit, it would be so difficult to transition my, it's just impossible for most of us. But it should be something that we look out for and we care about, even if we don't ourselves do it. But my point was in an agrarian setting, it's easier to imagine that notion

that I said, productive property. So think of if you lost your job, like how would you survive? A lot of people, if they lost their job, they wouldn't be able to survive. They would have to get somebody to help them. But if you have your own productive property,

let's say, then you would have more what Bellot called economic freedom. So you wouldn't be utterly dependent on an employer at all times because you have something to fall back on. Right? So that's one way to think about productive property is the things that you could fall back into

sustain your life out of which you could produce things, the means of production. So it would be like kind of capital and labor, right? And land. This would require skill. People would have to have skill in order to use the property. Absolutely. So you need what we call human capital. I guess you could call it that yeah, so you'd need skill

You need knowledge you need material stuff You'd need maybe the tools or whatever to work with you need land you so interesting back in the Middle Ages They had the guild system right you've probably heard of that Yeah, and so there you'd have like people as part of a trade or whatever would share capital, right? And then they would use that, let's say, machines or knowledge or whatever, to then, you know, in a non-competitive way, be able to have access to that more continuously. And they would form a fraternity as well. And so they would have like their own chapel, their own prayers, right? Their own sort of spiritual devotions.

And so even though people are in doing trades and in a certain sense in a competitive environment Competition was not the name of the game, right? Because these guild systems limited that so Belloc when he talks about the transition from the pre-modern to the modern era He talks about that's one of the major things that changed right is these sort of Solidarity networks that were naturally part of trade and economy were broken down. And so now there's sort of an unrestricted competitive field. And that creates some of the problems of excessive competition, excessive competition, but there would still be competition. Yeah. Presumably. Yes. Even in a guild. Yes, there would be, but it, but he, he, he tells the difference between restricted and unrestricted competition,

which means what? So unrestricted, not restricted by these, the framework of the guild. So like if you, if you, if you, let's say cutthroat your guy in the guild, right? Then you're out in the guild. Like now you know how long you have access to this fraternity and these resources and whatever. So that naturally limits the kind of way you would compete. So, so my point was is that the family is like the number one value, right? That's the aim. So Chester in the beginning of his first book called What's Wrong with the World, and he talks about this, he said his first part is called a home for Jones. Like the problem with the modern world is families don't have an actual home, right? A productive property, an actual thing that can be their fallback. They're completely dependent on the employer. And so that in Catholic social teaching is the whole problem of the modern era of the

separation of labor and capital, right? Or what we might call like crony capitalism or capitalism. How are you trying to bring this down? So like if, if so Thursday is sort of dependent on me, I don't have an employer, I have my own business. But if Thursday was let go, theoretically, just through it, theoretically. God willing, he isn't. Now, he has a lot of skills he could fall back on. Yes, he could. He could work,

editing videos, helping people with that kind of be. That's kind of like productive property. Yes, that's kind of so. So think of the things that we have in the broadest sense of have, which would include skills that are ultimately able to produce something for your well-being, materially especially. So yes, in a broad sense that would count. It's a hard concept to define precisely, especially in our modern era because we have an information economy.

So having skills and technical things that you don't have like land or anything just the knowledge of how to use them. Yeah. Right. Well, hasn't the internet made people a lot more the idea of productive property is a lot more accessible to people since a lot of people work online and I think that has helped a lot. Right. You know that it feels like today a lot of people are less dependent on an employer that they may have been back in the 80s. I don't know if the total amount are less. That's a good question. But there are definitely people, there's a lot more people that can do this, we can see, and being independent. I mean, think about it. Yeah, I couldn't have done this in the 80s.

But think, go back like a hundred years ago, and where there wasn't this information economy like this, right? There was tons of people had family farms, and they could be completely independent. So my grandmother grew up in a, in a just a mere sustenance, right? I just forgot the word. Anyways, so she only had the minimum that she needed in her farm. And so when the depression hit, her and her family did not get affected.

They had the same amount of stuff they had. They had the food they needed, they had the shelter they needed. They never had luxuries, never had extras, but they always had what they needed because they had it at their disposal on their family farm. So this basic level of sustenance farming doesn't mean I'm eking by and I'm barely surviving and I'm not eating. That's not what it means.

I'm self-sufficient. Yeah, it's self-sufficiency, but without luxuries. And of course, that's a difficult state to be in morally for a lot of people because we're greedy and we're covetous, right? We want more. And so that's funny that, I mean, I think of my grandma, I think of how she was raised and what that must have been to go through the depression. And I always think of in the Republic, Socrates, when he's challenged to think about now, you know, what kind of society can we look at that would one be one that represents a just order? He's what he's first challenged by Plato's brothers, right? Glaucon

and Adimantus. And he says, well, here's a city and he paints the picture of this city and the city is called the city of pigs. And it's one like this, where there's it's basic. There's basic needs are all met. Everybody's there's a basic division of labor. Basically, people depend on each other, but there's no luxuries. So everybody's self-disciplined. Everybody's virtuous basically. Why does he call it a city of pigs? I can't remember why he calls it a city of pigs, but I think that the brothers say, well this is not gonna satisfy people. So we don't care about your dumb model here, why don't you create a city in your imagination where there's luxuries, because that's what people are

gonna want anyway. That's funny because when you say city of pigs, I imagined a civilization that is sort of soft and immersed in luxuries that they cannot do without. Pig ish. Yeah, that's interesting. I think it's the other way. Obviously, the other way around here is where maybe the accusation is that's a city fit for pigs because we don't have like these beautiful, glamorous luxuries. Right. And maybe that was an insult from the people that are actually luxury addicts. It's amazing too what we take for granted, which are luxuries that we feel we can't do without. Yeah.

Vacations, televisions, two cars. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I wish I had this on the top of my brain, but in Catholic social teaching, when it talks about the just wage, now that's kind of a complicated concept. But think about maybe more broadly what we call the living wage. There's some way that there's algorithms that can do this.

Like our friend Mike Welker showed me one, and I looked it up to see what are the living wages of people like me or in this area. MIT has one. You can look it up and see how many kids do I have, or do both of the parents work, and what is the living wage. Now, how they calculate, that's an interesting backstory if you're interested in that.

But let's just accept it roughly. So that amount is going to be not just what you need to barely survive. That's going to include a certain amount of security for the future. So I think that what's interesting in Catholic social teaching is that's included. So there's some people call it like the basket of goods.

It would include not just food and shelter, right? But something like insurance, right? Medical needs, some amount of, you know, you should be able to have some amount of flexibility so you can have some time off, right? So we would call that vacation time. That's part of a normal flourishing life. So that's sort of the pattern.

So you have a normal flourishing life when it's not full of excessive luxuries, right? And that's what a family needs. So the wage, right? Should support that. And in history, it wasn't doing that. It was far less than that, especially a hundred years ago, right? And so that's what the distributist nailed and said, that's the, that's one of the main issues is the family's not being supported by the employer. So there's some structural problem with our economy, right?

It's separating labor and capital in a way that it doesn't allow a family to be healthy. And so that's why Chesterton's famous quote about the state of society is he said, the problem with capitalism as a state of society, as a condition historically, not talking about an idea of values or anything. So the actual name of the society itself, the concrete condition, he said the problem with capitalism

in that sense is there's not enough capitalists. So there's too few, and so power is concentrated and expropriated from families. And so then that's the first enemy. So I said there's three enemies to a distributist. The first one is what some people just call like big business, where more broadly, I think it would be like the market system.

The market system itself has structural problems that create these sort of proclivities to distortion and corruption. And that's what we see in history. That's what we've seen in history in the modern era. Now, obviously, there's regulations and other things that pop back, but that's an inevitability given what capitalism is, what it does, where it produces the need to protect the family and human dignity. And so then the socialists come back and say,

well, I'll protect that. Of course, they have a further solution, and often utopian ideas. And so that's a problem. So there's this back and forth. So the first problem is big business or the market system, which Chesterton called gudge. And then the other one is what we might call the liberal state

or the modern state, sort of the political form that's been dominant since 1648, the Peace of Westphalia. And so that political form, it forms what we might call, people call it the liberal order. So it forms that. And so that Chester and called hudge. So you've got the liberal order and you've got the market system, hudge and gudge. And he said they're always in bed with each other. They always help and abet each other. Their existence in history depends on each other. And so that's the enemy. Now there's a third one that more recent distributist

thinkers brought out that I really like, and I add it to my framework. But I see it in Belloc's Crisis of Civilization, which is a book he wrote about sort of the history of man, and the church in the modern era, all the way, or pre-modern to modern era. And, and then in Chesterton's works too. So, and that's what these, I can't remember the guy

who wrote it, but it was maybe on the distributist review, which is a current like periodical. And, and it w and he called it sludge, which would be what Pope Francis calls the technocratic paradigm. So technopoly. So these sort of this, the way in which machines and tech techniques and technology,

basically man trying to control things the way in which he controls his destiny that has come to dominate the modern era. So that's sludge. And I actually think that one's, this is my view. This isn't necessarily in the distributist framework, but that's more basic I think than the other two. Yeah. Distributist review tilling fertile soil. Cool. Yeah. And there's an, there's an article about, I think it's on there about sludge. This third character. So hudggud and sludge, those are the enemies.

So sludge again is what? The technocratic paradigm Pope Francis in Laudato Si talks about this in chapter three, I believe. And it's, it's a view about, he says it's an epistemological paradigm. And roughly that would be what we would know more of sort of scientism, but then not only scientism in terms of a sort of theory about what, let's define scientism.

I define it as following teachers I had. It's a view that the paradigm of truth and rationality is science. And so if it's not scientific, then it's either not that the paradigm of truth and rationality is science. And so if it's not scientific, then it's either not true or rational, or it's like kind of quasi rational or quasi true. It's not really true and rational. So it includes that, but it includes what Pope Francis talks about, and this is so important, is that science itself, the practice of science, has been wedded to tools and machines and technologies and organizations such that now we have a single thing. He called it techno science. And so that to me follows one of the greatest thinkers in the history of the philosophy of technology.

Heidegger wrote a famous essay called The Question Concerning Technology, and he talks about that penetration of the knowledge to make things and the knowledge of reality by which we discover things. So, theoretical knowledge where we receive knowledge from God or from reality, that's one form of knowledge that we receive. And then we have productive knowledge by which we make things. And it basically, those two allied. And so, now there's only one knowledge, the knowledge that we make. So we make things and we make the knowledge that we make. So now everything's in our control. What we know, how we know, and what we do with it.

And so now there's, to me, that destroys the openness to transcendence, which to me is the essence of philosophy. Openness to transcendent insight from above, right? Coming through nature, creation, coming from God, and if everything's under our control. So think about it this way. Nick, let's write it this way. Lewis wrote a book, Abolish in a Man. Have you read that one? Yeah. So in that, he talks about the second chapter talks about a set of characters he calls the innovators. And the third chapter talks about a set of characters he calls the conditioners.

And the conditioners want to make human nature the way they want to, according to their desires, their plans, right, their schemes. And so this would be like the transhumanists, obviously, that we have today that are real. This isn't sci-fi. And so they're trying to make reality what they want it to be. So that's the essence to me of the technocratic paradigm. Make reality or make our reality what they want it to be. So that's the essence to me of the technocratic program.

Make reality or make our world what we want it to be. And that's why I think that at the root, it's a satanic enterprise. Satan does that. Satan doesn't want God's world, so he's going to make his own world. Right? And when I say world, obviously I don't mean like the material. I mean like a social world. Yeah. our social world, our reality, right? That we have that that that we mediate to each other through our language through our symbols through our Our things we operate with right? It's that social reality is created by us

So I'm thinking of the Apple vision Pro that people are now strapping on their heads and they're entering into this sort of matrix Where they're being fed information from big tech and they're entering into this sort of matrix where they're being fed information from big tech and they're engaging with That and yes, that would distort one's reality. Absolutely. It would that be an example of this? That's an example what I think that Think about here's an example that I bring up in class is There was a missionary his name was Jim Elliott so when I was evangelical he was like one of the kind of saints of the evangelical world And I think he went to South America somewhere and he was working with tribes and incredible person. And his wife was an incredible person, too. I think her name was Elizabeth, if I remember right. And he eventually got killed by one of these tribes. And the moment in which he got killed is he had

a photograph and he showed a tribes person this photograph and they thought he was like a demon, like a shaman, because he like trapped a person inside this thing. So they didn't know what a photograph was and so they thought he was evil and so they killed him because they were afraid of him, that he would like trap them in this thing. Right? And so those people had no concept of a photograph and so that a photograph's not in their social world. So my point is, is the things that we interact with in the language that we have creates expectations

for what's real, what we encounter. It's our whole linguistic framework. All the words and vocabulary we have give us certain access to things in reality that we wouldn't have if we didn't have those concepts and those words, right? Like a hundred years ago, we didn't have the word throuple, which now we have some use for that because people want marriages to be between three people, just

one marriage with three people. So we invented a word or, um, wed lease. We don't want to have wedlock, right? We want to get married for five years in which the contract will automatically dissolve. Let's call that wed lease. So those people, a hundred years that didn't see those things because they didn't have words or concepts for those things. Now, why didn't they have words for, or concepts for other things is an interesting question about what concepts are and what words are and what it does. So words are tools. Yes. Right. And so they're

tools for interacting with the world. They're like the mediators between us and the world. And they convey concepts, which are intellectual abstractions. Yes. And then that, and then that abstraction, of course, what we're trying to approach as, as I would say, traditional philosophers is the transcendent good, true and beautiful. Right. They have to be in accord with reality. Yeah. So like transgenderism would be another example of a non-thing that we've come up with a word for. And now we're doing,

we're actually manipulating our bodies with technologies of various sorts, incredible amounts of knowledge we have about how physical reality works. To make them conform with this demonic reality. Yes. So Chesterton said the problem with the modern era is we're trying to make reality conform to our soul rather than let our soul conform to reality. It's backwards. So that's the technocratic paradigm. And of course, Pope Francis, what he's seeing in that cyclical is if we follow out this satanic paradigm, then we have a massive crisis on hands. Now, we don't have to go leftist environmental

political on this, but clearly everybody has a stake in the health of this planet, right? And we all have many stories, whether we're right wing or left wing leaning, that, well, this industry destroyed this place here. Or this company utterly annihilated this people group, and now they're different. And it's like, well, that's the technocratic paradigm at work, is controlling things for the sake of some other end. And so it will destroy, it will treat nature or creation as stuff that has no value. It's just stuff to manipulate. See?

So that is the techno-cardioporidem. It looks at nature and this is what Lewis says back to that in that chapter, is that chapter three is that we start looking at nature as what is manipulatable by us. That's what nature means rather than nature is this order that God made that has a value and we have to submit to yes. And we have to conform to it. That's what Lewis in this first chapter calls the Tao, right? This natural order of justice that reality is this hierarchical, vast order that God set up and it works in a certain way. And we're part of it. We're not above it. We're in it. And so we have to conform and harmonize like the Eastern thinkers would say we need to harmonize with nature. That's the right

idea. Right? We'd say have a just relationship to nature, creation, other people, and God. That's justice. Right? So then how do we use science to create machines and technology in a way that doesn't subvert nature and is that even possible? And if it isn't, should we all just be destroying our washing machines and television sets? No, that's a great question. So there is definitely a way to do it. And I think the first, to me, the first lesson of, I guess I'd call it the philosophy of technology, would be that there's a big difference between the question, let me back up, I asked my son, I'll I'd call it the philosophy of technology, would be that there's a big difference between the question, let me back up.

I asked my son, I'll illustrate with this example, rather my son asked me, he said, daddy, is AI a good thing? And that was a brilliant question. But I told him, I said, well son, there's two questions there. It sounds like there's one question. There's actually two questions.

One question is, can I use AI in good ways? Right? Now, of course you can use AI in good ways and you can use AI in evil ways. In fact, let's think about every technology. There's a good use and a bad use. Every technology is a kind of way of doing something. So depending on your end,

it can be used well or used badly, right? So every technology's use, right, is neutral. Is that right? Or is there some technologies that are evil, intrinsically as it were? Like, is the A-bomb intrinsically evil? Or imagine a machine that only showed you pornography and there was nothing else to do on it. Yeah. It wouldn't be an appropriate way to use that machine. Maybe there's one where the end is required for the use of the means,

and so you can't use it for any end but a bad one, then that would be one we'd never wanna use. But think about, I don't know, maybe contraception as a chemical. So obviously it's designed as a chemical, it's end to be used in that way, we oppose. But obviously there's certain situations in medical uses where there's people, women that aren't even married,

that use it for its medical use. So maybe, so I'm saying that as long as there's a good use to which it can be put, to that degree, technology's neutral. And so then AI in that sense is neutral. But I said, son, that's only one of the questions. And to me, this is lesson number one, right? Is that technology isn't neutral. So that means we're not talking about

the uses of a technology. Technology isn't neutral. Yes, which means every technology that's introduced in a society changes the society in one direction. It's not neutral. It always changes the way in one direction. It's not neutral. It always changes the way we do things. And so that way we do things may or may not improve us as a people or as a society.

One example that comes to mind, I was chatting with someone who lives in Pittsburgh, and they were old enough to remember a time before the air conditioner, when families would sit out on their front porches and chat with each other. So everyone had a front porch, you know, and that was conducive to communal life. When the air conditioner came in, people ceased doing that. But are we going to say that because of that, air conditioners are, what, not conducive to human flourishing?

That seems- Well, I don't think on that example we'd say that, but here's, let me pick up that example in a second. So, but you nailed it. There's something that we added a technology to our society and something was lost. There's always things lost and there's always things gained and that's only one directional. That is not neutral. Now the question is once we understand what that change is doing, is that making society better? So then

the question my son asked was, is AI a good thing? Means is there good uses for AI? That's one question. The other was is AI a good thing means is is there good uses for AI? That's one question. The other question is will AI's introduction to society make society itself better? That's the question. Those are two very different questions. And so to me the thing that we miss because we're Technopolized in our minds. We're like obsessed with technology. It's the solution to problems Never mind that some of those problems were probably created by previous technologies. Okay. But it's the solution to the problem. So then we don't think about that more fundamental question.

Is this making our society a better society? In other words, and if it isn't, and if it isn't, then we should put the brakes on that technology. Isn't this what the Amish do? Yes, the Amish. Yes. They're a good example. I have a period of time where they examine whether or not a technology is conducive to their community. So let me ask you the question is, is, is the Internet conducive to the good of mankind? So it to me, it's so hard to determine those questions when we're talking about man. Like the Internet affects the. OK, how about our town?

Is that what you're saying? Like bring it down a small level is easier to. Yeah, to me, it's easier to imagine. So like these cell phones, imagine now you go to Leo's and you walk in there and maybe you see some people, but like 80% of them are looking at one of these or one of these. And so now the lack of being connected to your people that you see repeatedly is now an effect. Now, how do you estimate whether, how do you estimate the extent to that's good or bad for society?

It's almost impossible to tell. Because they might be at Leo's watching our conversation, which might be helping them in some way. Exactly, exactly. So once we're in this technological order, and that is a description of the modern world, a technological order, a technological society, that to me isn't debatable from a sociological point of view, whether you love technology or hate technology, that is a fact. It's funny that technology

has come to mean computers. Yes, and that's what I wanted to get back to again with the air conditioner. So maybe I'll jump over there. So you said, is the air conditioner not good for society overall? And I said, well, first of all, that's difficult to tell. But here's another thing that to me, the second lesson of philosophy of technology is that a technology requires materials and conditions to be able to create it and use it. And so what kinds of things are required to make this?

Because we think of this as a product. It's just, oh, here it is. But tell the history of this. And that's the second lesson. What's the history of this? In other words, there's materials in here that have been mined right in other countries, right? According to procedures and big machines that themselves have a history, right? For how to mine the materials and then how they transfer, transport it to other factories to be refined and then put together and made

into a, a chip. That's just one piece of this thing. And so then you have this massive history behind this. And all of that has other technologies it's dependent on. And all of those technologies have technologies they're dependent on until you get to really basic things like mining. Like we've got to we've got to unturn the face of the earth to get minerals out of it to then make all the stuff that we use stuff for. So in other words, the history

behind it is also part of is this good or bad for society, not just its effects when it's introduced, but what changes will be required in order to produce it. Right? So what I don't know that I don't know the answer to air conditioning. What did we need to get the kind of parts and elements, materials to make an air conditioner? I don't even know, right? But now- Suppose they were benign though. Suppose there wasn't much history to it.

But in any case, even if we mine in a way that was evil, did we have to mine in that way? Yeah. No, we don't have to. So if every step along the way, it's done in a way that respects creation, man and God, then of course you can make technologies. There's no problem.

But the problem is we haven't been doing that. And so now we're in systems that have set up that are already, what do I say, corrupted. They're already tilted toward evil. And so now the question is, how do we redeem that now that we're stuck in it? And to me, the question of redeeming the social order, the technological order, the market state, the market system in the modern state, hudg, gudgeon, sludge.

It's like there's nothing we can directly do by ourselves. It's like literally a stupid question. I can't change that, right? But God can, and I can entrust that to Him. And then I need to realize now I have what I call the casuistical question. I can't change that, right? But God can, and I can entrust that to Him. And then I need to realize now I have what I call the casuistical question. What do I individually do, right, given that I'm participating in this order? So we can't avoid this. I have an Amazon Prime account. I have a credit card, right? I'm in the market system. I'm in the modern state. I'm in the technological order, and I can't get out of it and live.

So now the question is, how do I live in a way that doesn't compromise my conscience and that I can be prudent in asking, should I not be participating in this way? So it's the question of participation. And that's an individual question depending on where you're at, what your job is, who's dependent on you, like what you could do.

I see, yeah. So I'm teaching a class right now to engineers at Franciscan. And I'm co-teaching with Steve Frese. And he's an engineer, and I'm a philosopher. And so all these people in the class are mostly engineers. There's a few just people taking it for philosophy's sake. And so they're going to be involved in some engineering firm and doing some huge awesome stuff, I hope.

But which company are you going to be involved with, and how do they operate? Where do they get their resources? What is their ethical code? So we'll be looking at how to analyze the ethical codes. And so they have to make a smart decision. They might have to say no to a dream job, take a risk to the next job, which pays less and isn't their dream job in order to be more fully Catholic.

So they might have to choose not to participate given what they know morally and ethically and politically. See? So the casuistic question is that when do we participate and when do we not? And then how much do I need to find out and how much do I not need to find out? We've had this conversation before about like investments and stuff. You can't like investigate every single thing, right? But you shouldn't just sign up for blind investing. That's stupid, right?

But you have to investigate to the degree that's prudent for you given your life circumstances. That's the casuistical question, right? Okay, how does this go back to distributism? Yeah, so distributism has those three enemies, hudgud and sludge, and the defense of the family is the number one thing. And there's an emphasis for them on getting them productive property. Right.

And that's a really important thing. Who does that? I think that's why the term distributist is scary for some people, because it sounds like someone has to be doing the distributing. You nailed it. It sounds like redistributism. And then it sounds like you're making the government bigger in order to take things away from people, in order to implement this thing that you think is a good idea.

Yes. Yes. And so what I love about being involved with the Neapolity folks is that we can actually, it helps me know what distributism is because I see it happening. OK. Right? So you have people who, like our friend Rob Pretzel,

is a great example, right? Or Dave Matthews or Jacob Emanuel, these people that can invest, right? So they wanna invest righteously, they wanna get a building in a local place, do something that the community would benefit from. Yes, they're gonna make money, but they're not in it to make money.

They have to make money for the enterprise to sustain itself, right? But it's not about that, that's not the theme of what they're doing it. So they're literally getting property and they're free to sustain itself, right? But it's not about that. That's not the theme of what they're doing. So they're literally getting property and they're free to do so, right? So my point is, is that, or like the doordies, like what they're doing with their farming and stuff,

and then trying to educate. Or like the grocery box downtown. So all these examples is people that are just free to do something, right? For the sake of their community, their parish, their family, right? So the solidarity network is being built naturally. So the way that property should be distributed is naturally.

It will naturally happen in friendship networks. Nobody has to impose anything. It will just happen. Now the problem is, is there's conditions that make what's natural difficult. And so then you're like, well, how do I overcome those? So one example would be to me, what are we doing that overly biases us

towards big businesses coming in? Like versus encouraging local businesses. So that's why localism is one of the names, is that the local means individual people have a stake in the community as a human environment. That's why I like that term better than distributism because localism sounds like grassroots. Yes, it is. Distributism sounds like top down. And I completely accept that. And the only, my only qualm with it is that I'm, I'm working

in like theory, right? And the history of the term. So I don't want to, I want to keep continuity. I understand why like Dale wants to take that term and make it more understandable to people. So, so I would have one qualm with it is localism to me sounds like a political policy kind of angle, but distributism is a social philosophy. It's bigger than policy. It's about how we understand what we're doing and why we're doing, how we're building community.

Take it out of theoretical to the practical for a moment and explain to people how you see localism or distributism working in our town and why that's a benefit to those engaging in business and those who are patronizing those businesses. Yeah, so I think you've got productive property being put into the hands of individuals and groups within the community that want, that love the community.

Can we just talk about the grocery box for a moment? Totally, let's talk about it. Because this is such a great example. So we've got Mark and Maura Barnes and Greg and his wife. They've started this little, what we call a grocery box, and the only things they sell are things that are being produced in the area. So we have candles and meat and bagels that Dave Matthews' wife makes.

My wife gets them, she loves them the best ever. Yeah, this is beautiful. And I'm willing to pay more, not because it's charity, but because I wanna live in the sort of town where my friends can benefit from my purchases. Yes. And so to me, that's a great example of redeeming money, if I can say it that way. So money to me is one of the fundamental technologies for almost every human society.

Now there are some that don't use money, but tons of society, and any complicated society uses money, right? And so, that is an easy way to corrupt the whole system, which is why Christ warns about the love of money, right, and that we aren't to worship mammon. So, that doesn't just mean like a dollar bill or a coin. It means the system, right, under which we control things. And so, when we use our money, right, and it's specifically for the purpose of the community, that's part of my intention of buying, just like you said, now I'm redeeming money, a fundamental element in our social order, right? Or if I if I'm opposed to, let's say, gudge the

market system, to me, this is an example of an actual healthy economic situation, right, from the production of the materials that that farm over there with the eggs or the chickens, right, transported over here by normal people in normal ways, right? And then sold in a way that's a good product. The theme is the product, the theme is the people. The theme isn't profit and the theme isn't money. But those are involved, but that's not the theme.

So it sounds like what you're saying is putting people over services and products. Because I think an argument a lot of people would make about the good that Amazon has brought about is, I can open up this laptop lid, and within half hour or an hour, I could build myself a library that would have made Thomas Aquinas jealous.

Yes. That's incredible. It is incredible. And it can be used for good. Yes. That is the difference that I'm now pouring in my resources into a company that may not as a whole be beneficial to society? So those two questions, the two points in philosophy of technology I mentioned is Amazon.

So you get benefits out of it, it's usable to you, you can do it for your ends and your good, right? So I use it too, right? And so it can be used by an individual. And then we can casuistically try to decide whether I should try to get out of that or not. Some people maybe can, some people can't, right? Or at least when I say can and can't,

I mean prudent or imprudent, okay. But what is the cost to the world for having Amazon? In other words, how does it affect human society in having it? That's the number one question, right, in philosophy of technology. How does it affect society as a whole? Not, can I use it well or poorly?

Because every technology has that. Every technology can be used for well or poorly. So that's a good question to ask. Is Amazon's existence, right, How? A net positive. And that's hard to right? And that's positive. And that's hard to tell. And that's maybe I could say the third lesson,

you already nailed it with the Amish is, since we can't know for a long time, we should be really slow in how we adopt technologies. So Postman in his book, Technopoly calls that a skeptic of technology. Not a technophobe who's afraid of technology, not a technophile who just loves technology because of this technology, but a skeptic who keeps, not a technophobe who's afraid of technology, not a technophile who just loves technology because of this technology, but a skeptic who keeps a distance

from it because he knows there's going to be effects that I can't predict. And AI is the perfect example. We don't know what this is going to do. Even the makers of it don't know what it's going to do. And yet we rush into it and we released it and we're doing stuff with it. And that's the story of technology's productions for the last several hundred years. Not putting the brakes on, not being a skeptic, just introducing it, right?

Is there anything that you've put the brakes on personally? Like are there any technologies? I mean, you've got a prime account, you've got an Apple computer, an iPhone. Are there things that you've thought, I have to resist this? Or are you saying, unfortunately no, because given my circumstances and my income

and those that depend upon me, I have to play this game. I have to be in this system. Yeah, I try to limit it to only things that I need. Like, it would be really hard for me to do my job without this. So I have one, in fact, this is Franciscans, like I rent it from them, right? And so it would be hard to do my job without a computer.

Now I could, but that would require a trade-off. And so to me, that trade-off isn't prudent at this point. Now the smartphone, now I could probably get by without the smartphone. But the smartphone to me isn't really a smartphone. It's a computer. It's a small one of these. And I have a library on here, like you said. So my main use for this is to call, to text, and to have,

and to have a library on it. Tell you something really cool about Peter Crave, who I had in studio recently. He's terrible with technology at like phones can be awful. So he says he has a flip phone, but he only uses it to receive texts. He doesn't text people back. That's great. See, he's in control of it, right? Well, I think it's because he doesn't know how to. But I thought that was so cool. Like what a, what a bowler move to be like, I don't text back. You're welcome to text me. I think he, I think we've, we've got

onto the principle, which is we should use the technology only because we need to. Now, but what a slippery slope. I was going to say, the arguments from necessity are easily abused. But if you are aware philosophically, you can say, you know, do I really need this? You can ask that without manipulating. A child says, I need a third cookie. I need a fifth donut.

Whatever, they always think they need it, just because they want it. Right? And so I think that is the right question for an adult that has some amount of prudence. It's like, well, do I actually need this for what I want in life? So if you- For what's important in life.

I don't mean to make this too personal, but if you would be given a significant raise, would you then consider getting rid of certain technologies, your Amazon account, that sort of thing? Totally. Oh, you would, yeah. The reason why I use Amazon is because of the cost is less. That's why people go to Walmart, because it's less cost.

But then if people think, wait a minute, let's just pick on Walmart just for a second. I know people might want to defend different things in the past, whatever. But let's just take it as a paradigm of a corporation that's done bad things. Right? But if you're not making very much money, let's say, or you're poor or whatever, then you need to go wherever is cheapest, because that's the only option. Right? And so, of course, you're going making very much money, let's say, or you're poor or whatever, then you need to go wherever is cheapest because that's the only option. Right? And so, of course, you're going to go there. That's why Aquinas, I love his article on usury,

right? Which usury, that's an interesting topic in its own right, is this intrinsic evil. Right? We could talk about that, but Aquinas says, well, is it a sin to take a loan from a user? And his answer is no, it's not a sin necessarily to take a loan from a user. So here's somebody who's doing something intrinsically evil, right? In order for him to complete doing that, you need to receive the loan. So that is not a sin. You're not formally cooperating because you need money in your life to let's say, get food or shelter for your family and

So he says actually having usurers in a society can actually to some degree right help those people as a side effect That doesn't mean we justifying usury, right? But to me that's the sort of theme I would have for any any of these cases Right is well, it might be evil to have this company overall. Now, going down that rabbit hole is a long story, but let's just suppose Walmart's evil. Well, if it is necessary for you to go there, then go there. If it's not, then don't.

So if you get more money, you don't have to. If you got more money, let's say, then you could just go to the grocery box all the time or whatever. Well, with Amazon, it's the same thing. And for me anyway, for my family. No, I would rather not be on that. I would rather not have a credit card at all.

Right? So in order for distributism to work, it sounds like it has to happen grassroots and locally and within community. Yes. And so to me, I would call myself like a post-liberal distributist. And to me, what's going on here, which is compatible with the kind of

post-liberal Catholic political thought going on there is distributist. And it's not necessary. So what would you call somebody who subscribes to distributism? A distributist. Okay. So it's not necessary for a distributist to be self-employed.

No. It just means that they're working towards not having to be employed. Yes. And if that wasn't available to them, they could then use their own property to make their own money for the good of their family. And so one of the complaints against distributism was, well, that's only going to work for like agrarian societies and stuff. Obviously it has worked in agrarian societies

and distributism is not a utopia because it actually existed in different places and times in the past. And in fact, Bellot claims it's the normal condition of human society until something imposes a disorder. Yeah, and it's not necessary that one would wish to live an agrarian lifestyle. Is there something wrong with the person who's like, I like my house on Lawson Avenue with

neighbors. I don't really want to have to have acres of land. I think that's the genius of, I would call it the medieval settlement of the feudal system where you have these small cities, right? They're not like mega opuluses like ours, right? And city life has a particular kind of role to play in the broader, what do I say, division of labor. So you've got people in the farms doing stuff,

bringing it to the city. You have craftsmen in the city that need to be used to help build houses or repair houses or whatever that the farmer's living in or whatever. So there's like a teamwork going on between the city and the country, the countryside. And that teamwork's important to human life. And something like that has existed in any, um,

well developed society. So like, obviously like a Greek city state, there's that same dynamic going on between the craftsman and the knowledge required. And of course, part of that would be the leisure class, right? The class that can contemplate and do philosophy and science. And we would say like pray and be religiously devoted to God directly, right? So everybody has their kind of place on the team. And so you don't need to just have one or the other. So cities to me have a particular important role to play.

And especially nowadays when the vast majority of people live in mega-opulaces, right? Then we need to find a way. What does that mean again? Just gigantic cities? Gigantic cities that are really structured for economic purposes and not like, I mean, go to a typical American city, right, versus an old school European city.

They're so different. Yes. That the layout, the architecture, the way the roads are, I mean, the Arc de Triomphe is a stupid place for cars, right? Everybody like stuck around this circle, but like that wasn't designed for efficiency. That was designed for some other reason, right? Which to me is humane ultimately, right? To celebrate something great or whatever and look beautiful, right?

So to me, our mega opulences are kind of technocratic inventions. We build what we love. Yes. We invest in what we love. Yes. And I wonder what it would have looked like if our love was more perfect. Would there be major highways and two cars per family? And? Yeah, to me, would people be living communally and then trying to enrich each other? Yes, through a community of love. I think you're completely right. One thing I absolutely love about being here is, to me, a 10 minute drive is a long drive now.

Absolutely. I just love it. I live five minutes from a grocery store, five minutes from work, five minutes from my parish. Like within five minutes, including walking from many friends, like I don't have to drive my car all the time. And now when I do, I'm a little bit annoyed, which is funny, right?

And I take it for granted. But I absolutely think, I talked a little bit annoyed, which is funny, right? And I take it for granted. But I absolutely think, I talked about the transcendentals earlier and I've talked about that in other times that Ben already showed to me, that's central to philosophy. And so one of them is beauty. And so to me, the antidote to the technocratic paradigm

is that we build with that in mind. What we do, what we make has the transcendental values in mind. So we build something because it's going to contribute to human flourishing, which convey to us the good, the true, and the beautiful. If that was the theme, then we would slow down. We wouldn't be obsessed with profit or mere efficiency or making a deal that's going to benefit me, but not necessarily other people.

We're not going to externalize costs or take economic rent whenever we feel like it. In other words, it's going to be more humane. And so I agree with you. The best way that's going to happen isn't by saying government do this, right? Market do this, right? Machines do this. The only way is for humans to do it, right? On the lower levels where they actually have real friendships and real relationships. So to me, it's the only way. It's not just a response to this problem. It's the way it was before the problem got rid of that. See, I mean, it's the natural condition of man is to have friendship and solidarity networks.

We're not evil by nature, right? We're good, God made us good, and we have inclinations to help each other. Now, we get corrupted by being distracted, we're concupiscent, And some of us are malicious. But most of us are just like stupid and concupiscent. But we're good at heart. We love other people.

And we appreciate being loved. And that's natural to us. And so, yes, building up that fundamental community level, intentional community. So I'm a fan of what is misinterpretably labeled the Benedict option. Because what that means to me is that I'm a fan of what is misinterpretably labeled the Benedict option, because what that means to me is that I'm not looking for gov or market to fix things, right? I'm looking to my friends and my community to fix things, and that's what you should be looking to.

Don't put your hope in princes. That's what Scripture says. Trust not in princes. Doesn't mean you have to hate people, right? But just don't put your trust in it. That's not, they're going to do whatever they normally do, which for the last several hundred years is just self-interested tyranny. Put your trust in friends. Yes. And you might get burned sometimes, but that's life, right? Then you learn better how to discern friends. Yeah. Who to trust. Yes.

I'm thinking of Christ's words, you know, Satan has sought, is seeking or sought to sift you as wheat. But I prayed for you and you think this sifting, so there's like something that's whole and then it's separated. And it seems like that is a big part of today's society that we have our Netflix and we have our Uber Eats and we have everything we need. We don't even come out of the house. We all seem sifted. We do seem isolated.

I think a lot of people relate to that. I don't relate to that because I live in a beautiful town, the people I love, but I think a lot of people feel very alone and very anxious because of that. No, I think that's right. I think that's so many social thinkers for the last couple hundred years and Belak is just one example. I mean, he say that same thing, the lonely soul, the empty soul, the isolated individual, the atomized individual, like Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, secularists, they all who are looking at society notice this has happened.

This is the feature of the liberal order. One thing I want to give Thursday a shout out, he said something that I think was really on point. I was working with a lady called Mother Natalia who has begun recording weekly videos for us and we were all sitting around having a steak one day and we were talking about this. And I think she brought up, is there some kind of contract we should sign or something like this.

And Thursday's like, don't do that. Contract erodes friendship. Something to that effect. I don't want to speak for Thursday, but I think the point he was trying to make is like, what if we just trusted each other and we didn't bring any third party involved? Now, maybe sometimes that's imprudent,

especially when you don't know the person that you're working with. But I love that where it's like, I'm not gonna screw you. You know, if you want to stop or if you want me to take a video down or if whatever, what if we just and and what if we just agreed to love each other and work this out in friendship? Yeah, no, I thought that was good. I think that's so good and that's so insightful and I thought that was good. I think that's so good and that's so insightful.

And Belloc when he talks about the change from the pre-modern to the modern era, talked about the introduction of usury and unrestricted competition, I already mentioned that, of machines and the information revolution, that was the third one. And then the first one he mentioned was the change from status, what Belloc called status,

it doesn't communicate anything to us, but what you just said is what he's talking about. The natural solidarity networks of friendship and relationships, whether that's a guild or your parish or your family or your village or your townspeople, right? That is what structures society's groupings rather than contracts, which are basically manipulatable by people that are in power.

And so that's the problem with a completely contract-based society is it looks like everybody's fairly making deals. But if there's an actual power differential between me and you and I have to sign the contract and I shake hands with you, right, for like a crappy wage and you're my employer, it looks like it looks fair. It looks fair in the sort of abstracted legal sphere, right?

But in reality, it's not fair because I don't have a choice. You have a choice. You don't need me. I need you, right? And so contracts is this attempt to completely impersonalize and make trust whatever unnecessary. But the way human beings naturally operate is through networks of trust.

And yes, we can be burned, but yes, that can be the greatest boon in life. I mean, we've all gone through difficulties, some of us more recently. And it's the friendships with people, their support, their prayers that make you able to realize why the problem of evil does not have as much bite as it does bark.

And so because you have so much love and support coming in, even if people can't explain to you why it's happening, they're like, I'll do anything for you. Just let me know. I want to, can I share a couple of texts that you and I sent back and forth recently? Sure, go for it. You had a loved one who was in the hospital. Is it my email? It's fine. Okay. So your wife was having some issues. And first of all, I just love how, what a

beautiful Christian you are. I try. some issues. And first of all, I just love how. But a beautiful Christian you are. I try. So I said, you know, I basically said, I'm sorry, can I look after your kids? Can I buy you some whiskey? And you wrote, My wife is a saint for enduring this suffering. Pray Christ conforms her to himself and gives her peace, passing understanding. Yeah. And then I wrote back, yeah, yeah, oh, that's frigging great.

But do you want some whiskey? Absolutely. It's beautiful that you think that way and speak that way. I know I so appreciate that, those texts and- But isn't that wonderful not to be alone? I mean, I bought a building, I've shared this before, about a year ago, and about two weeks after I bought it, a building two doors down from mine was demoed

Which fell on my next door neighbors building which ruined my building Domino effect And I'm I feel so out of my element I don't know what to do and all of a sudden I got Dave Matthews and Mike Sullivan like we'll figure this out Like he let me get this and just you just don't feel alone. It's a beautiful thing I know that's exactly and in those people are there for us I mean those are those are, those particular people included. You kind of wonder if a tyrannical government

is a fan of friendship. No, they're not. Because then I have to depend on something other than. That's one thing Andrew taught me through Dr. Jones and his philosophy is the kind of, if you can personify the liberal order, like it does things right now, it's hard to imagine that. But to me, that's the satanic part, that it's Satan is going on underneath this structure and

the individuals in it might have good intentions. Lots of people in a government, let's say, have good int- in our government have good intentions, right? But the effect of it can be can be tyrannical even if the people in it aren't intending to be tyrannical. So, I forget where I was going with that. I was talking about how friendship is sort of like an enemy of the liberal state. Yes, and so it's operating... As is the family. So it wants to make everybody equal and atomized, right?

And so it's trying to approach that as its goal, you might say. So everybody's equally atomized and disconnected from each other, so everybody's equally dependent on who? The big government. The big guy. The guy above who has the things we need. everybody's equally atomized and disconnect from each other. So everybody's equally dependent on who? The big guy. The big guy, the guy above who has the things we need. So we can use fear now to manipulate, right? And make you do things.

And so he wants to eliminate friendship networks. Satan wants to eliminate friendship networks. And I love that episode with, I forget the guy's name, the ex-Satanist. That was one of my favorite episodes. That was incredible. And he talked about that last moment where he was going to go get the final initiation. And he wanted to give himself to Satan because he loved Lucifer, the angel of light. And Satan didn't want that. He just wanted an exchange. He wanted an equal, we could say liberal, exchange.

He didn't want a gift. And so that's powerful. That's what makes us, that's what makes us die for other people. But when a soldier gets up, he doesn't get up to fight, right? Because he thinks abstractly I'm fighting for the justice of America or whatever. He gets up and I, soldiers told me this, right? Including ones that were in world war one, I took a, and world war two, right?

I took a class, right? Called between world wars. And this was years ago. And there was like a 95 year old guy that I interviewed, right? And they all say the same thing as the reason we get up is because the guy next to me gets up and that's why we charge. And that's what makes us die is the love for somebody else, right? Not just pure fear.

Now, I guess people could be manipulated and risk that, but my point is love is that powerful that will give our life away for the sake of someone else. Freely. Freely. Satan's not interested in that. The technocratic order is not interested in that. We talk a lot about family being the basis of society, but isn't it also the pinnacle? It's not as if, well, it's the basis of society that we can then leave and then individually go about our way.

Shouldn't everything be directing back to the same? I'm so glad you brought that up because it crossed my mind before that distributism doesn't end there because remember, it's an attempt to take the Catholic social teaching, the philosophical elements in it, apply them to our social order now to give us wisdom and how to be community. Yeah. philosophical elements in it, apply them to our social order now to give us wisdom and how to be community. But that's not the final story because we are bent and corrupted. We are concupiscent. We are sinners. So we can't just rely on pure humanism, you might say. Like, oh, we're just good by nature and if we just like dig in our heels and just be virtuous, we'll get there. History shows us we're not strong enough. We're stupid and weak.

And so we need strength. In other words, we need the church, we need grace. We need grace to just be a normal, human, healthy community. And so to me, the family is, you might say, the basis, and it's sort of the barometer of the health. But to me, the end is a community that's bigger and broader than just one single family. And so maybe a philosophical concept that I like is Aristotle's, is the political community.

It's whatever that community is, the size of which allows us to achieve the human, to actualize the human potentials in our community. So we need certain families to do certain things like a division of labor, right? So this guy does this thing, I rely on him for this, and you have teamwork going on, and we're building up for this ultimate thing which benefits us all called the common good, right? It's like we need quarterbacks, we need linemen,

we need receivers, right? And they're all different. And so we couldn't attain the good of the football team without all those different roles being together for the common good. And so we need a community bigger, right? And so the perfect community is the church that is the perfect community. Why is it the perfect community?

Because Christ is the head and Christ is the king and he's the head of grace. So all grace flows from him through our lady right down to everyone. And that grace brings us up. And so that's that idea of metaphysical subsidiarity. Like there's a hierarchy, and grace flows down and goes down all the way to the bottom, including us and below us, and then it comes back all the way up to the top. And all of creation that is being brought back to God through this order of grace.

So I'm a Franciscan thinker, right? And so I like the way the Franciscans think about this, is that the order of creation, right? God didn't make, God didn't give grace, right? Just to heal nature, right? He created nature so that he could give grace. So grace is the end, right? God's gift of the incarnation and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which God can do that

whether they're sin or not. He doesn't need sin to do that. And so that means the first in His intention is to share Himself, to share the love, and create a broader friendship circle to bring people into the Trinitarian friendship circle that aren't Himself, other persons, created beings. And so nature exists for the sake of grace, not the other way around. And so to me, this metaphysical hierarchy system is not just a story of what we call nature, like nature is working its way back to God. It's the story of what God's doing so that God can share himself.

It's the way in which God wants to share himself. So ultimately grace in that sense is first and prior to nature. There is still a nature-grace distinction, and there still is a relationship that they build, but grace isn't just to heal nature, but to elevate nature, right? Adam and Eve, they fell into a ditch of sin, but they felt they didn't fall from perfection. They didn't fall from the beatific vision. They still had to be elevated. So, there's healing and elevation that's part of salvation. So to me, the grace of Christ then,

who is absolutely predestined to be in this world, right? Whether sin or not, he's the head of grace, either way. And either way, our lady could be queen, either way, sin or not. And so we have this social hierarchy that's part of creation itself, right way, sin or not. And so we have this social hierarchy that's part of creation itself, right? Whether sin or not. And so to me, that in that sense, the nature grace distinction from a, from a Catholic point of view is like,

it's kind of one activity. There is a distinction we can make, but when we live it, we're living, we need grace so that we can be natural. Right? And we need grace first. So we don't just need it to repair what we're doing. We always needed it to be elevated. That's what I'm trying to get at. So what you've said so far about distributism, namely the importance and primacy of the family, the good of the family being a sort of barometer of where society is at, the desire that people should have productive property to fall back on should they choose.

Those, I think, are the two main elements we've spoken of. Is there anything else? Because my point that I'm getting to is right now that doesn't seem like it would be terribly controversial to someone who would say, I'm a capitalist. No, I think in fact there was a man that came one time to Franciscan and he's a well-known kind of free market capitalist kind of guy. So like a defender of capitalism. And I asked him these questions.

I said, I'll use my language. Do you think Hudge and Gudge are the biggest problems facing us in society? And he said, yes. And I said, do you think the family is the foundation and the barometer? He said yes. So to me, he's already within the distributist framework.

He's a distributist in a real sense. So I agree with that. And that's my strategy when I approach my Protestant friends and brothers is like, you're already Catholic until you prove to me you're not. You're a pre-Catholic until you show me that you're actually disagree with certain dogmas, such that you couldn't be Catholic.

Lots of Protestants have never thought about it. So they're already baptized, and so that's a sacrament. They're already Catholic in that sense. And so I think in the same way, to me, because we should look charitably, I think a lot of defenders of capitalism are more like inconsistent distributists. They already believe those fundamental values and framework. And oftentimes what becomes a disagreement is they think they look at what Belloc said, for example, in the restoration of property, which is how do we get property widely distributed? Right.

And this is the question of, are we going to use the state to do it, to redistribute what we don't want to use the state? It's a broken device. And yet he has certain recommendations and policy requests. But in Crisis of Civilization, he specifically says, these are just my best guesses right now. These are not essential, but these are just my best guesses on how to do stuff right now. That was like 100 years ago in Britain. So I don't know exactly what the right policies are for government, whatever, that to me is secondary to this fundamental vision, right? And so even if somebody critiques that element

of the distributists in history, to me that doesn't touch the framework. And that's the fundamental thing. But if you don't have a good idea about how to bring this about, maybe you do, but if you don't, then isn't this just pie in the sky? This is another objection that people throw at distributism. Like, sure, maybe,

but it, there's no way to bring it about. So let's not waste our time talking. And so to me, the best way to bring it about, we already talked about, right? It's localism community building. And I, and I wanted to add the element of your parish, right? The, it doesn't have to, if you're not a Catholic Christian, right? Then still your, your, your, um, your church community, that is part of Christ's grace coming in to help us repair and heal as well as elevate. So that to me is part of the solution, like the involvement of Christian communities in

the West. And that brings me back to the point I didn't bring up that I did mention it, which is we can't just rely on humanism. And Pieper in his book, Leisure, the Base of Culture says this, he says, a lot of people nowadays, and this was back in the forties, he wrote this after World War II. People think that if we just return to humanism, that will be enough. He says, I have to go on this long digression to prove to you that won't be

enough. And then when he goes on this long digression, he basically repeats what I would call distributism. He has different words. And he says what we need is to restore that proper relationship or property or what he calls we need to deprolitarianize. The proletariat are a class of like propertyless wage earners, roughly, that are fedded to the process of work and they don't have economic freedom or access to it. They're dependent utterly on the capitalist class to give them jobs. So we need to, and he said, well, so how do we do that?

Well, first we need to get them property somehow, and he doesn't explain how. Then he says we need to make sure that we resist various kinds of totalitarianism, whether kind of the internal kind in our own desires, or like obviously overcoercive kind, like communism or fascism or something. And then he said, and the third cause of this problem

that we must remove is a spiritual malady. People don't want to take ownership. People don't want to have the responsibility. We want to be renters. We want the great reset. Well, that's what I was about to say, because isn't the problem with propertyless wage earners not necessarily a capitalist system,

but the fact that no one, as long as no one's preventing them from owning property and being productive, what's the problem? Yep, you nailed it right there. So there has to be that third condition added. So there's those three things, according to Piper, cause what is the three causes of a proletarianized society,

which to Belloc and Chesterton, they would have just called that capitalism. Proletarianism is capitalism to them, meaning a condition where labor and capital are separated into sort of classes, right? And that they need to be brought back together. The problem with society is, problem with capitalists, not of capitalists.

So the first one is there's too many proletarian people, right? And he, and Piper defines a proletarian person as one who is fettered, chained to the process of work. Right. And then the second cause is totalitarianism is of various kinds, internal or external. And the third one is he calls a spiritual malady. What's an internal, internal, totalitarianism. So he mentions the kind of ones that were present in his day, right? So think of fascism and communism. But there's a kind of totalitarianism

that a thinker, I can't remember, I'm not sure I've got his name right, but this thinker calls inverted totalitarianism. And that would be a society that you might say thinks it's democratic, acts in a way that's democratic, but it's actually not democratic. The elections are rigged, right? They think they're voting, right? We think we have control, but through advertising and consumerism and all these manipulative things within our desires, right? We are actually being controlled.

Sounds familiar. Sounds familiar to me, right? So I would say these are the ideologies. So I like the way Jones talks about ideology. So after the French Revolution, which said, you know, liberté, égalité, fraternité, each one of those sort of values of the French Revolution represents a fundamental modern ideology. And an ideology to me is an anti-philosophy. Darren Beattie calls this anecho tyranny.

Okay. Okay. Okay. So I'm sure there's other names for it, but it's, I think it's something people can see when you start to describe it. Yeah. Like, I don't care what the scholars call it. I can see that that's a reality. Yeah. Right. And that's a problem. Okay. So the third, the third problem.

Yeah. Is the desire to be a propertyless. Yes. Is people, people don't want to own property because that takes responsibility and work, right? And yet that's one of the reasons why Aquinas, SCOTUS, Bonamitra, all the fathers say the reason why private property is good in our fallen state is because that people are better at taking care of something.

And when they take care of something, it's better. It's better for that stuff, for that society, that community when people care about what they're taking care of something. And when they take care of something, it's better. It's better for that stuff, for that society, that community, when people care about what they're taking care of. And if they have one little plot, you might say, I'm thinking simplistically, is then they'll care for it. Or like you have one building here, you have a building over there, Rob has a building over there, whatever.

So then you care for your- This sounds like an argument against socialism. Absolutely. Against socialism. 100% distributism is 100% opposed to socialism and 100% opposed to proletarianism or call it crony capitalism or capitalism as it's actually been in history.

And so I like to make that distinction because when people want to defend capitalism, they often talk about the values that capitalists care about like freedom in the market, entrepreneurship, creativity, the unleashing of human capital and skill and knowledge. I'm like, that's all great, right? All that stuff was valuable in any society, right?

We should want that in any society, right? And those values are great, right? I mean, a communist could have said the same thing, like I value sharing, right? I value like when somebody needs something, giving them something I have out of my abundance and according to my abilities. Like, well, that's a great value too. So communist values abstracted from history are valuable, are great, I agree with.

And capitalism's abstract from history, they're great. But what we're looking at is history, what happened in history concretely. So that's proletarianism, let's call that. It is helpful to come up with new terms that don't have baggage yet to help people see what you're trying to say. Well, that's back to our conversation about words, right? We need certain tools to think about certain things. Now, this can be a boon and a risk because if we start to create too many false,

like too many made up words, then we create an echo chamber for ourselves, right? So that's a problem. But on the other hand, if we don't create enough, then we're in an echo chamber. So how did Pippa say we could heal the spiritual maladies? Yeah, thank you for that. So after he went on the tangent, he said, okay, the reason why, even if we got rid of populist way turning and even if we like resisted to

totalitarianism, in other words, if humanism did its thing, we, what about this one? Right. And he said, that's why we need feasting celebration and divine worship. So that's the leisure, the base of culture. The argument is culture or the quintessence of all of human goods, including earthly goods, but also goods of like poetry and literature and leisure goods, right? The goods of philosophy and prayer, all that.

All that is the common good. And culture is what provides that, what he calls culture. So it's a moral concept of culture. That's based on leisure. And a better word for that would be contemplation, man's ability to contemplate the transcendentals. If he's not doing that, then he can't build this moral culture. Right. And that's based on, he says, divine worship, because that's the fundamental place in which we can sacrifice our goods.

That's the inversion of a, an obsession with productivity is I go and I, and I, and I spend money to have a party, right? I spend time to set up a party. I spend time to clean up the party, right? And it's all, why am I doing that? Because of what I'm partying about. The purpose is the theme. And for us Catholics, we have so many feast days,

like we're celebrating this person or this event in the life of Christ or our lady or whatever, our church founding. It's like something worth spending money on to sacrifice. And that is anathema to a purely productive centered, earthly state of affairs. You shouldn't be sacrificing things unless that ultimately gets you more, right?

In the long run. And we're like, no, we're to offer our bodies as living sacrifices. That's our MO. And so he said, without that spiritual condition of celebration, worship, feasting, right? Then we won't be able to address that spiritual condition, because we won't have what humans need, right? Which is a reason to sacrifice, a reason to do something difficult. Isn't just for more productive than earthly ends.

That's the way the world thinks. You sacrifice to get more capital, more money, more productivity. We're like, no, I sacrifice to render God worship. Yes is really good and that's why it's so beautiful you know what we're trying to do here in student bill and what I'm I know for a fact people are doing in other places wherever they are is. We want to build a community that we care about and only when you care about it are you interested in investing in it yes and so being able to say to my children, like, how do you want to contribute to this community? Like, that's the same thing as saying, what do you want to do when you grow up? Yes, that's right. But when you don't have a community that you're investing in,

and when you're just sort of fluid and living in a thousand different places, as I have, the question is like, well, what do you want to offer the world? Yes. What the hell is the world? Exactly. It's an abstraction. That's hard to even comprehend. But like, what do you want to offer the world? Yes. What the hell is the world? Exactly. It's an abstraction that's hard to even comprehend. But like, what do you want to contribute to Stubenville? Absolutely.

What could you give of your gifts that could benefit people? Yeah. I think everybody knows this in their heart. And it's a certainty. If we want to go to epistemology, we can. But it's a certainty. Everybody knows in their heart that when they devote themselves in love to somebody else, their friend, their spouse, whatever, then no matter what happens, that was worth it.

In other words, the consequences don't matter. You know that was the right thing. You did it because it was love. You did it because it was good. You did it because it was beautiful. You did it because it was true. You're connected with the transcendentals. You're where your spirit should be as a human being. There's no... You have that peace, right? That passes understanding when you're in that situation.

And that that's a win-win. You don't have to calculate things. You don't have to imagine how God's providence will take that little act and multiply with other ones to do something in the future of of our country or the global world, right? That's in God's hands. Our responsibility is here. Right. I want to tell you about a course that I have created for men to overcome pornography. It is called strive 21.com slash Matt.

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You won't regret it. I wonder if modern universities are like the, uh, what, what monasteries were a hundred, 200 years ago, namely people. What gives student well stability in a sense is the Franciscans here. And so you've always got a significant number of families who are they have to be here. And so you have this community that gathers around a university. I'm sure you see the same thing with Christendom College,

Thomas Aquinas College in California. Yeah. And I think you're right. It's the religious dimension that matters, right? It's not the fact that it's a university, right? The Christendom is our Franciscan. It's a fact that there is a Catholic religious community devoted to this place. Right?

And so I think that's something I love about that. Again, I learned from Andrew from reading his stuff, is that a community that is going to be a redeemed community that can redeem money, sex, and power, right? It needs a religious order. It won't happen without it. It would be very different if this was an Amazon distributing center. Yes. Like, and that's what grouped us all together. Yeah, exactly. And those bonds can't last.

Those are not real solidarity bonds. Those are based on abstract contracts that are mutually beneficial to self-interested parties. Right, and I'm like, well, that's not a deep enough bond to give us what we need or love in human life. I bring that up because if people are just beginning their married life, their family life, it's probably a good idea to find a place with a monastery or a university. Yeah. And because

otherwise you try to create a little community in a town that's dependent on the business of that town, which comes and goes. And I know universities come and go as well, but there seems to be enough of a stability say here with the college. No, I think this is like a fundamental challenge that oftentimes is, I address this in classes at Franciscan is when you get out, where are you going to go and why? And the number one thing that most of us think by default is I go where the job is. And I'm like, well, I want you to think twice about that because you're going to go to a community.

And if you're a young Catholic, like these people at Franciscan, and you get married and you start having kids, right? kids, right, you don't need just a job. Trust me. You need a community. So if you don't have that, you're gonna be like, I would rather take a lesser job and struggle financially but have friends around me to help me, right, to get through that than to have this good paying job and no community, have like a desert of community. And so that creates a very difficult set of options that must be navigated in this difficult, disordered world because they don't always go together, community and job.

Now, the internet has been really awesome because lots of people that have moved here had a job that they didn't depend on a place because they could work on the internet. And so to me, that's great. I'm so happy they have a job and they can move here and now take, you might say, their knowledge and their skills and whatever sort of productivity

they're doing for that company and basically bring that value to a local place and concentrate it. So now value, instead of being expropriated to global grant transnational corporations is being the opposite. It's like coming in and now they're buying local eggs, right, with the money they got from their job.

That's like, so in other words, that's the right, it's like an inflow of value rather than expropriation of it. How many people would you say have moved here in the last three years? Gosh. If you had to guess, I would just families, I would guess 15 to 20, 15 to 20 families. Yeah. No, it's way more than that. Is it? I don't know. That's just my, I would say at least a hundred. Wow. Yeah. Everyone I meet has just moved here. It's yeah. I don't know. I'm the old one now. Like I've been here longer than most of the people I meet.

The granddaddy granddaddy for that. Yeah. Well that's Scott Hahn. He's the granddaddy. Yeah. It's encouraging. Yeah. So I mean I, I love, I love the distributists. They're not, they're not perfect, but to me in their fundamentals, they're perfect. That framework is perfect. You do a really good job at explaining distributism in a way that helps people understand you. Yeah, I mean, I think that maybe the pushback

for people that don't care about like Belloc and Chesterton is like, I don't care about those guys. I have a different name for all this stuff. And I think their economic policies were sort of misguided and they don't really understand the true way economy works. and like they had a labor theory of value and I criticize that economically and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I don't really care. Do you, do you share this frame?

Are these three things enemies, hudgudge and sludge and not just enemies, but like fundamental enemies? No, I should, I should say a word about that. Now why not just say, cause this might be the sort of capitalist response, is well, as you've already admitted, all of these things can be used for good. So the problem isn't the things, the problem is we need to be moral people.

Yes. So why not just make us moral people and then use Amazon and Apple and iPhones appropriately? I think there's an informed way of agreeing to that and a naive way of agreeing to that. So the informed way of agreeing is like, okay, yes. At the end of the day, for me and my choices, I have to make casuistical decisions. You keep saying that word and I'm not sure what it means. I mean, like, casuistry means case by case.

Okay, thank you. So in our tradition, you take, when you have a difficult case, like a borderline case, in order to decide what to do, you can't just apply principle. It's not obvious It's not just like don't murder or something, right? It's like well is this case a case of murder or not is an ectopic pregnancy actually, okay Yeah, we know thank you. Yes. Okay So so you have to make that individual prudential choice on how much to participate in what affair true at the end of the day Everybody has to do that

Right. Now the question is what do you need to be informed with to make a wise, prudential choice? Not just the sort of abstract knowledge that, well, I can use it for good or I can use it for bad. That's not enough to me. You also have to know that this is connected to a social world, and that social world is subtle in how it manipulates Catholic communities and people. And so you need to know something about the enemy, right? How it works. So not just how to use this cell phone, but like what was it that made this

cell phone? What companies are doing this? How do they mine? Where are they? What international agreements are we compromising or following stupidly to do this? Right? And so now we see that there's a kind of weight of what I call like a systemic problem, right? Maybe a good example would be usury. Like it's hard to identify an individual loan, right? As usurious because nowadays all money is capital. And so there's an opportunity cost, like connected to every single, you know, loan of money. So it's not like it was in the middle ages

where like money was obviously different than capital, right? And so like it becomes difficult to identify an individual act. But is there a question whether we're a usurious society? The spirit of usury is so everywhere. Look at our indebtedness, not just the federal debt, which is crazy, right? Add up the state. That doesn't include states debts and that doesn't include individual debts. If you add that up, we are so debt ridden. It is obvious that we are usurious in our spirit

and in our system. I don't care if you can't identify an individual act of usury. That's sort of irrelevant at this point. So my point is, is there's a systemic problem with our social order. And if you know that, that motivates you to sacrifice your job to start

a right systematic order in your local community. It motivates you to see the wisdom of what's called the Benedict option, right? And again, I'm just using that in quotes. I don't mean to be, say this is like the only way or something, but it signifies that we should be intentional community builders. Why?

Not just so I can have help to use this well individually, but because the system, if I'm in a community or a community that's not intentionally ordered, it's ordered in this systemically corrupted way. And so I need to know that so I can have the proper motivation to sacrifice. That's what I'm trying to say. So that would be the non-naive way to respond to it,

to agree with what you said. So in the end, we have to be moral. But what I don't wanna do is a lot of capitalists, right? And I don't just mean the sort of Catholic versions, but like a kind of free marketeer people. They always say this. They always say like, okay, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations,

and that's one book he wrote, but the other book he wrote was The Moral Sentiments. And the only way to make capitalists work is make sure we read that book and are moral. If we're just moral, then it will work. And I'm like, there's a naive way to interpret that and a wise way to interpret that. The naive way is to say, well, if we just individually

all become moral, we can do it. But that's naive because, well, what are the conditions in which to gain virtue in a society? If we're already radically corrupted in this sort of fundamental way, then it's gonna be impossible to get the moral capital to do the thing you think we need to do to correct it. In other words, the system's already swamping you.

You won't have enough power to get out of the system. Your kids are all raised in it. The people they're all talking to, all the shows they watch are all part of it. There's no way to break out of it to get a moral infusion. Right? And so then I said, that's why it's naive. Now, why is it? How do I interpret it in a way that isn't naive, that it's correct, right? Is, well, if everybody, if there were these solidarity networks and they were in

place, well, how much are they going to care about what the capitalists care about? They're not going to live life in that way. So if everybody did this, right, then there wouldn't be, now this is impossible to imagine, then there wouldn't be this proletarian condition. There wouldn't be, now this is impossible to imagine, then there wouldn't be this proletarian condition. There wouldn't be this capitalistic market system as we know it if we all did that. So that's where it's correct. The insight is correct.

If we were all just moral, then it would, but I'm saying if we were all just moral, then the system that this capitalism depends on would be a different system. Sure, maybe you could have the values of creativity and freedom and entrepreneurship, but it wouldn't be this thing based on fiat banking and fractional reserve banking and like international agreements with modern states and big

corporations and all this crazy stuff that is obviously tearing the globe apart. Right. And there's a massive political realignment because of it. It also might be naive because the technologies themselves often tilt us and our concupiscence in one direction. Yeah, you got it. Right. So it's like, well, you could just use your computer for good.

OK, yeah. But have you ever like opened up YouTube and you start doom scrolling and what's most angry comes to the top? But that's what you almost led to. And now that so something, something I grew that I developed in my philosophy, I think I had a kind of naive view, I'd say maybe 10, 15 years ago, is I would often hear the people that say, well, where you're born, like influences, like what you think and how you feel.

Right. And so like you're even people strongly saying you like are determined by your culture or determined by your society or determined by your family. And I used to hear that and I used to get just mad at that because I'm like, no, no, I'm free. I don't, I'm not determined by my culture and my society. That's all like stupid postmodernist social constructivist thinking

that doesn't trust in reason anymore and truth. And so that was kind of my naive response. And then I realized we are so subtly manipulated and controlled that we need to recognize that we are, that we are structures of sin, like the Catholic, like JP II talks about. We live in structures of sin, and they manipulate us subtly. And so you should expect yourself right now

to have all sorts of inclinations and tendencies that are already sinful that came from your upbringing, your society, your culture, right, the things you entered, the friends you had at school, all kinds of things. So we are not completely determined such that we're not free, right? But we are to a great degree determined by our social circumstances.

And that I came to recognize later, which made me, drove me, right? Towards that kind of post-liberal, distributist, you know, new polity sort of thing, is no, this is real. To get out of this, we need a radical transformation ultimately, not just humanism, but like we need Christianity. We need grace.

That's the moral of fusion. It would be like maybe this idea of just be moral within the system might be a little like telling the alcoholic stay at the bar and just don't drink. Thank you. Great analogy. I completely agree that that's tracking what I'm saying. Definitely. That's silly. Isn't it? Isn't that stupidly naive? Don't get the hell out of the bar. Don't go there. Right.

To give us some practical steps to break, get out of the bar. Then if we are hearing you, if it's resonating with us, we want to live better lives. What do we do? I think, I mean, I'm a philosopher, so I like, So it's not my job to solve your problems. No, no, no, no. It's just my job to show you you have to. No, I'm actually going to do something that you wouldn't expect a philosopher to do.

Philosophy is practical in this way, because when you form a habit, philosophy can become a habit. You know this, you're a philosopher, right? Whether you call yourself one or not, you are, right? And you develop a habit where you can think about things. You can receive an argument, right? Or hear a point of view. You can interpret it. You have some sort of cognitive space in which to hear claims that are true or false and think about whether they're true or false,

whether they're going to be beneficial or not beneficial. So when you have that kind of mentality that can reflect on what's ultimately significant, the good, the true, the beautiful, if you have that mentality, then you're in a state where you can then think, should I be, am I in a bar? Right? Should I be in a bar? In other words, you've trained yourself by the habit of reflecting to be reflective when you need to be. Right? And so this is, this is just Plato's cave, right? So we're in the cave or the bar, if you want to say, and there's shadows on the wall and we love them and we don't know we're

chained up. And if we were to move, we'd, we'd realize we're chained up, but we don't even move because we just love them. Right. In other words, the best way to, the best way to get out of the cave right now, this is a big claim. I'm not, I'm not interpreting Plato's dialogue here, the Republic where he does this, but to me, the best way out of the cave is to ask questions. Am I in a cave? Is this truly, are these shadows really satisfactory? I have a kind of qualm inside of me.

I'm not sure they're satisfactory. And that can lead you, right, where you realize you're in a cave. And that's the only way to ultimately get out. Because then somebody who has already escaped comes and unlocks you and you want to get out. So how do you, how do you learn to want to get out? That's what I'm saying. First of all, you have to be reflective. And so philosophy habituates that. So to me,

the practical step would be form a philosophy club, a reading book, a poetry club, that's right. Talk about things, watch this show, whatever. We are naturally reflective. Yes. So the question might not be, how do I become reflective? But what are those things in my life that are blocking that natural reflection? Yes. Technology. Yes.

Phones, doom scrolling. And so I think avoid the evil things. But then I would also, you're right, avoid the evil things. But I would say also add the good things, right? Because all we said was don't lust. Yeah. But that's not going to work. Not terrible. We have to know that,

that non-lusting isn't the virtue of chastity. Non-lusting isn't the virtue of chastity. Right. Chastity is an inner ordering of your entire sexual appetite from your mind and your spirit all the way down to your body and exists for the purpose, right? Of the virgin consecrated as well as the married person. So whatever that virtue is, it's got to be whatever services both of those people, right? Which is devoting oneself, being able to possess oneself enough to fully give oneself as a gift, just like that guest who wanted to give himself to Satan.

He wanted to give himself because he had a decent upbringing, right? He knew that that mere exchange at the end was totally disgusting and wrong. Right. And so chastity to me is the inner order, the structuring of your appetites and your body and your mind together for the purpose of giving yourself. We should start. I'm sorry I'm interrupting you, but maybe we should start a poetry reading clubs and we should spearhead that and get people to start them throughout the country. Totally. Absolutely. I think take great poetry and it's not, you don't have to... Drink beer and read to each other. Yes. To me it's, or for guys, guys love to drink beer and get together and talk.

Well, that's great. Do that. But every once in a while have like a little short selection of something wise. It could be a poem. It could be a little, you know, a selection from some thinker you like, some famous philosopher, theologian or literary person. Right. I mean, you have a lot of literary inspirations and loves take one of those and read a little selection from Brothers K. You know, it's like, okay. And then think about it. I know I bring this up a lot on the show. So I apologize if I'm boring anybody, but this was the reason when we started the cigar lounge,

that we didn't want music in there unless it was someone playing the accordion or the guitar and we didn't want televisions in there. I'm so glad you did that. Reflective, a space that was conducive to reflection and conversation. No, I absolutely believe that and I'm so glad you did that. And there's really, there's nothing so, I mean, it is quite masculine to have a group of guys sitting around smoking cigars and someone reading poetry. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's what we do. I love Bellocke, his life, he was like that. He read poetry, he created poetry, right? He hiked all over, I believe the story, something like this is when he fell in love with, I can't even remember his wife's name, like she was from America, I believe, and he came to America and like walked across the country

to like go to her, right? And along the way he stayed at people's houses and like sang to America and like walked across the country to like go to her. Right, and along the way he stayed at people's houses and like sang to them and recited poetry for lodging. I mean, that to me was like so manly. And somebody who is able to be vulnerable, right, to me is a good example of a man. Like men who aren't able to be vulnerable to me are weak in the way that matters.

So the way that the strength that matters is the strength to be vulnerable. And that's so hard. Because the strength to be vulnerable is just the willingness to open yourself up to hurt. Yes. And criticism. We don't like that. We want to control it and we want to be like, everybody just sort of like praising us. It's our way of being vain, right? Masculine's way of being vain is I'm in control. I don't need help, but to be able to ask for help is a man. What if we do this? You and me, we should start this. I'm game. What could we call it? I don't know. In the description, the comments below, let us know. Cells of resistance is maybe a little gay, but something, you know what I mean? Like something like that. When

we talk about these and we, I'm gay. It's not overly formal, but you get together with men and you have a drink or a smoke. Yeah. And you read, someone reads a short excerpt with poetry. We didn't even come up with a book. Yeah. Where we get these. Make the selections.

Yeah. That are maybe from the public domain. Yeah. Where men can just. And I would say like, let's do it and help people do it. But to me, the purpose of such a group that I would want would be to make other people be motivated and knowledgeable to start their own. That's what I'm saying.

Yeah. So then the group spread all over the place. That's exactly what I'm saying we do. Yes. I'm not saying here. We have enough of that here. It's beautiful. But we could create something and give them something

that they could implement in their own communities. Absolutely. I just heard, so I watched this show with my wife called them All Creatures. Great. Yeah, it's a great show. And so it was just the episode where the main character leaves to go to war. And at the very end when his wife is there, like she's really sad and she's expecting a baby. That's right. I just watched this episode with my kids. Yeah. And then I, you know, the Red Red Rose poem, right, the Robert Burns poem was read by him at the end.

Okay, I missed the start. And his beautiful Scottish accent. And it was like the best reading I've ever heard of that poem. Wow. It was so beautiful. And just having a beautiful reading of poetry and learning how to do that.

Like that's, I talked to John Walker about that. Yeah. Like, you know, tell me how to read a poem beautifully. Like you have that knowledge and skill. Did he give you good advice? Well, he came to my quest class that I've been teaching and taught us how to recite a Shakespearean, a little selection from Shakespeare. Yeah.

It was great. He worked us through how he understood it, like what mentality he got in to say it. Yeah. And then he had a couple students try it out. It was, it was awesome. What did you learn from what he said? How would you read poetry different after having heard his advice? So to me is I need to think a lot more carefully about the poem before I try to read it, because

I usually just rely on sort of technique, you know, like voice and pauses and, you know, reading the punctuation versus reading the line and make a decision when you read the line versus reading the punctuated part. You know, certain words need certain emphases if it's a certain kind of pattern, right? So they're knowing the rhythm in it. So like those technical things I would concentrate on. So him, what he showed me is you, it's more like getting in character.

Like I didn't do that. I didn't get in character. I just thought I'll apply a technique and recite it. And so- But getting in character can feel like laughing. It can feel like it's, you're putting on a show. You're not actually being yourself. I think that's true. I mean, to be fair to him, he actually plays the part of Chesterton and other people

very well. I think we have to try. So maybe getting a character is too strong, too strong about it. Like understanding the meaning of the poem. Yeah. And how the person who wrote it may have read it. Yes. And understanding how you think it might be significant. That's how he was like, took this passage. I can't remember what it's from. That was Shakespearean play. And he read between every line and started thinking about all the metaphors and all the images.

And he was kind of like working through that as a... What's the difference between doing that and dissecting a poem to death? Because sometimes, you overly analyze a poem and it's like taking a butterfly and just ripping the wings off and then expecting it to fly, but you've just ruined it. Yeah, that's a good question. That's a good point. Um, I

Think there's a temptation I'd say especially for men to overly dissect the like you said, so I think This is a completely different advice. But another another thinker named David Allen white He used I think he's still alive used to teach at the Naval Academy He's a kind of traditional minded Catholic. And I've listened to a lot of lectures by him about poetry and literature and stuff. And he has one on Gerard Manley Hopkins where he just reads it.

He just reads through. He doesn't interpret them. Okay, good, yeah. He just reads it and then just waits for a second. And then he just says things like, oh wow, that's just amazing. That's all. I mean, he just like expostulates.

And I think there's something that was very important to me is just to hear it and let it be what it is. And he gave the advice that every poem should be read multiple times. Never read a poem just once. That was his advice. So like in class, sometimes I have poetry read. And so if somebody, let's say we read

a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, then somebody say we read a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, then somebody else will read a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem or the same one. And it's different every time because people put emphasis on difference because they're not doing it professionally. So there's a value there is what I'm trying to get at. Have you read Cormac McCarthy?

He's a brilliant American author, nihilistic usually. He wrote a book called The Road. Anyway, I just bring up because he's such a beautiful sparse kind of writer. Let me just read some of this. Go for it. I want to hear it. When he woke in the woods. I haven't read this before. I looked it up. So I don't know what I'm about to read. When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night, he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days of the night, he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him, nights dark beyond darkness and the days more grey each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world, his hand rose and fell softly

with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light, but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened, he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand, their light playing over the wet flowstone walls, like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some, some granitic beast, deep stones, flues where the water dripped and sang. Isn't he beautiful? Yeah. I mean, I, I'm hearing that and all sorts of associations are happening and thoughts. I mean, he sounds like, like you said, you, you, you mentioned nihilism. So he's, yeah,

I think you can hear, but you can hear he's a nihilist that obviously hasn't given up hope. That's right. And there is this, this, this, I would recommend people check this book out called the road. And at the end, there's a beautiful, hopeful, uh, conclusion. To me, a nihilist who hasn't given up hope is not truly a nihilist yet. Like they, they, they ready. It's like, it's more like they don't have faith, but they have hope. Like, it's like the hope is a little bit deeper because they can't give that. It's part of your desire, right? Your faith is like intellectual, right? Hope is like your part of your desire. And so there's still like, there's the child there. The child is the leader that there's this dream. There's like some way in which something might,

then he constantly doesn't find what he wants. So that's, there's lack of faith there. But to me, it doesn't seem like there's a lack of hope. What is nihilism? I mean, I take it to be a kind of philosophical framework that life is meaningless. And so if there's any meaning we're going to put into it, it's all we have to put it in there.

There's no objective purpose, meaning, goal. And so then I would say, if you take that seriously, then your hope is going to be dead in the end, because we have inside of us a desire that we desire desperately, the transcendental, like Lewis's famous sermon, I love the weight of glory. Like, we have that in us. We cannot expunge that.

We have memories of it. We have memories of memories, like before we can even remember. It's breaking through in different beautiful things all the time, like the way that the pace of that, certain words, certain images, like we feel it, right? We can't get rid of that. He calls it a trans temporal, trans finite desire. So we want something transcendent to me. That's the origin again, a philosophy. And so it's hard to expunge that completely. And so to me, a nihilism would say in the end, that's, that's a dream. That's a,

that's some sort of biological fart, right? It shouldn't be there. It was like some sort of weird thing of how consciousness developed in this particular, like, you know, neural network or whatever, which is so ultimately trying to kill that hope and debunk it. An accidental by-product of nature. Yes. As opposed to the most meaningful fundamental thing that every human being touches to survive a Holocaust, let's say. But that's what they, that's what had to be kept alive. And if that is the case, if there is no hope, if I live like that,

and I choose not to kill myself, it's presumably because at this point in time, pleasure is outweighing pain or suffering. And then you're going to live a life, which is, you're going to, you're going to, I mean, I think for Nietzsche you get, you can, you can imagine somebody who lives that way, who isn't actually his overman, right? But as somebody who's full of kind of suppressed resentments that wants, that wants this, has this ambition inside, but doesn't have the power or the gumption to get it.

And so they constantly do this sort of like coping life, this sort of like empty, and then they create this sort of rage or anger. Notes from underground. That's what I love that. Oh yeah, I love that. When I read that, I took a Russian lit class in college. I was a music ed major in college.

And so I didn't have to take world culture, world civilizations. And so instead, I had to take three literature classes. And I think that was it. Three literature classes replaced that. So I took Russian lit. And that was such a memorable class. That's where I read Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, like Turgenev, Chekhov, like all these poets. And yeah, it was that first paragraph to me, just I'll never forget that. I'm a sick man, I'm a spiteful man, that whole image. Yeah.

Right, I connected so much with that in college, right? Cause you see kind of, if I follow out this certain train of thought in my mind, this is where it goes. And so then he's putting it on display. And then Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. I mean, that is definitely one of the greatest books I've ever read. Yeah.

That I never felt so brought into the mind of a character. Unbelievable. I felt like I was the murderer. Exactly. I felt like I could. This is my hypothesis for why Dostoevsky can't be put into film, is that so much of it takes place

within the psyche of the individuals Yeah, I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man I believe my liver is diseased however. I know nothing at all about my disease and do not know for certain what ails me I don't consult a doctor for it and never have though. I have a respect for medicine and doctors besides I am extremely superstitious sufficiently so to respect medicine. Anyway, I am well educated enough to be not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious. No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. So one thing he's got, what did you like about that? Um, to me,

it represented the kind of values I was feeling. I mean, I went through an existential crisis in college, like a lot of people. Yeah. You're the most joyful man I've ever met. Were you like that? I wasn't at that. For part of college, I wasn't. In fact, I got to a point where I tried to become an atheist at a Baptist college

and I had Christians everywhere around me. You know, it was a beautiful place. And I learned so much about interpreting scripture and caring about scripture and biblical theology and had great friends. And so, but I tried to become an atheist. I had my epistemological crisis, right? I tell people I got content.

I thought maybe everything that I'm thinking is, I'm just producing all this. I'm constructing all these concepts. My language is, I'm trapped behind my ideas. You know, the Cartesian circle of ideas, the veil of perception, yeah, and there's no way out of that. And maybe I'm projecting God's existence because I have some needs deep within me, kind of like, you know, Feuerbach and Freud and stuff like that. And then I got into apologetics, I was into apologetics before and during and after.

And that, I think, for me, was part of my, part of how God's grace preserved me, because those arguments never, were never convincing, but they were enough to, to counteract the other arguments I had. What weren't convincing? The, the like, I'm projecting things or, or I'm constructing things. And so I was in this sort of agnostic state and I wanted to end that by like becoming an atheist. It's almost like a different mode of thinking and you can't get out that way. If you keep digging that way, you can't, you'll just bury yourself further and further.

That's right. What did Descartes do to epistemology? Wow. That's a huge question. I think not only to epistemology, but to philosophy itself. I think he stands as a kind of watershed moment in the history of philosophy. And he marks to me the sort of beginning of modern philosophy and in a real, I mean, there's other people before him, right? I mean, Machiavelli is going on before in politics, but to me in

in the scholastic way of doing things, which was already kind of challenged through the, you know, humanism versus scholasticism going on before him. To me, when it gets to him, modern science now takes over, right, in its technocratic way, philosophy at safe. So philosophy becomes technocratized, which I said earlier, I didn't follow the thought, was what creates the ideologies later on, right? Because ideology is like technocratized philosophy. So anyways, I think he changed philosophy itself, including epistemology. Now some stuff, interestingly, he does an epistemology is similar to what you

see in Plato or Augustine. You know, there, there's this tradition he's touching on. So it's not all wrong and all bad, right? But, but I think his overall project of philosophy is misguided. So let's stay there for a second. Why not begin with universal doubt? Because in a way it makes a lot of sense. I've come to believe things that I now know are false. I don't want to be duped anymore.

So the best way to go about this is to doubt whatever can be doubted and to build the rungs of the ladder to get out of the cave again, as it were. Yeah, no, that's a great starting point to converse about this. I think there's something that makes sense of that and is in our tradition, because Aristotle said this, and I remember this in college, and this was one of my favorite quotes, is doubt is the beginning of truth. And so a lot of us, that's where we first think, wait a minute, I might be right, I

might be wrong. And that's the moment where you can then in the end embrace something as true. So So I say that with, I think Christians need that because a lot of us are nominally Christian. We kind of, we don't have, we don't have what Newman calls real ascent. We don't ascent to God's existence and God's fatherly Claire as a fact. It's a notion we believe. We do believe it. We are sincere, but it's still like a notion in our mind, like an abstraction. And so how do we get to that place where we treat it as a fact? That's what he calls real ascent. Anyway, so I think a lot of us don't have real ascent. And so Christians need to question, why do you believe this? They need the doubt. And I did that to myself. Apologetics got me in

that boat. And I taught apologetic classes at my Baptist church when I was in college, right? And I started like a philosophy club and I tried to do, and I helped people, I think, to a degree, get together and doubt things that they took for granted. And so I think there's something right about that. Now, here's what isn't right about it, two things, I think. One is when we start doubting everything and have this, not just some doubts, but what you call the universal doubt, right? Is then what we do is we forget all the things

we're taking for granted in order to doubt. So Descartes has an entire, this sounds funny, but an entire linguistic background, right? Of terms and connections and concepts that he can't but take for granted, right? It's impossible to get out of that. So he actually takes lots of things for granted within his sort of project of universal doubt.

And so it makes you blind to those things that are certainties that you can't get rid of. Right? We can come back to that point if you want to. So then when he arrives at what he thinks are the only certainties, my point is there's more than that. There's more certainties than just the one

he thought he landed on. Can you give us a couple of examples? Yeah, so the certainties that he didn one he thought he landed on. Can you give us a couple of examples? Yeah. So the certainties that he didn't recognize. That he didn't recognize. Yeah. So to me, there's, let's say you have a proposition or a judgment that you make that is unquestionable to you.

Meaning, if you questioned it, you wouldn't know how to proceed in life. You wouldn't know how to act. Okay. So I don't know. Maybe like if I step through that door, then I'll step in the lava. Right? So it's like an unquestionable belief that through that door isn't lava. Right. So that's an unquestionable certainty. Now that certainty is what I call a practical certainty because it's what you're basing your choices on, but it's unquestionable certainty. Now that certainty is what I call a practical certainty because it's what you're basing your choices on, but it's unquestionable to you.

Now Descartes wouldn't find that acceptable because it's not infallible. It's fallible. You could be wrong about that. It could be lava in some weird scenario, right? But that doesn't mean it's not unquestionable to you just because it's fallible, just because it could be false. So to me, that class of certainties is one that Wittgenstein was really interested in, these practical certainties.

And so to me, the very way in which he proceeds to raise an inquiry that is a process with certain moves that you make that are correct or incorrect is to presuppose a way of acting, let's call that justification. So that process is an action or there's an action dimension, and so you have to take for granted certain things to do that. And so the background conditions in which you justify yourself or attempt to justify yourself or respond to defeaters or find whatever you're doing, find certainties intuitively that presupposes this other, these other background certainties. And so those are some examples I think matter. And, and so he thought the only ones that matter were ones you could sort of like see straight in front of you.

Right. Right. So he said there's clear and distinct ideas and there's these infallible, incorrigible, indubitable judgments. In other words, epistemologists call those epistemic immunities. So whatever the foundations are have to be epistemically immune, right? In special ways. And so he thought those are the only foundations.

So something like a priori truths, conceptual truths, which to him included God's existence. Remember? And then, and then, well, he has an argument for it. Yes, he does. But then those are based on concepts, which he said were innate, but they're clear. Bad argument. At least the first one. I thought it was quite bad. Yeah. So, but even if we grant that, yeah. Okay. Let's grant that. So he's got that is one of the beliefs that we can have indubitably. And then the foundations underneath that actually, the first step of his project is to say, I think therefore I am. So all the stuff that's directly in present to your mind, right?

That you might think of as using the first person with some sort of mental verb. So I think, I feel, I doubt, I hope, I believe, I desire any of those verbs with the first person in front of it, like said, assertartorically would be a Kojitatsione. He calls it like a, like a self-presenting judgment that has to be true. It can't, it can't not be true. It's impossible for it to be false. And so that would be the ones that is the basis, the foundations of knowledge. And then to get all the rest of the things we know every day, which he forgot at this point, all the practical certainties, remember? So he

thinks always God is these and then we say God is not a deceiver so I can believe I have a body, I can believe that the past, the future will resemble the past, right? And all this stuff, right? That's how he works it. So his foundations are this one tiny set of things and in reality it seems like, yeah, there's certain indubitable things, judgments like that. Right? But what makes them indubitable? That's an interesting question.

And even if they were indubitable, and even if God existed, and even if it was a good argument, does he get everything back? To me, it seems like you can't justify the principle of induction, even with his system, which is like things and like circumstances behave in like ways, which science is based on that principle. The uniformity is sometimes Hume says, well, that's based on the uniformity of

nature, but that's based on the principle of induction. So you have this, like the problem of induction. So it seems like that's one of those things that we presuppose as absolutely certain in what we do. In fact, all the things in what we do presupposes that. See, So that he can't get out of a system. So he misreads what are the certainties that we have and he reduces them down too small and thinks they're only the only uncertainties that matter like intuitive ones not practical ones too. So he misses all those and then I think he actually misses some of the certainties that are not infallible,

but fallible ones. Right? That would be something like, you know, our general, our trust in our senses generally, we have this like trust in our senses generally, we would say, I'm certain my senses are reliable. That's a kind of intuitive judgment. Right? And you say, well, why? Well, because they haven't been defeated and you have started relying on this, right? And that's fair, fair game. So that's, I think, the first reason why is he misses out what's actually certain, the certainties. And the second one is he, so he misses out on the certainties and misidentifies them.

And then he takes for granted a bunch of stuff, right, about from his linguistic background and his framework, you might say. And so that universal doubt, it's the universal part that I'm worried about, not the doubt part. To try to bring it full circle. I think doubt is the beginning of truth. Um, and, but not universal doubt in his way. And then the second thing I would say is I learned this from Peeper. Peeper was a great teacher to me in that book. I use that book in a lot of classes, Leisure, the Base of Culture, and the Philosophical Act,

is he says that wonder is actually the beginning point, but doubt is part of wonder, right? But doubt is the negative part of wonder, that you're not sure about this, you recognize your ignorance, right? But wonder is a positive structure like hope. So it wants to know more, right? And so that's the positive mention. It's, I'm ignorant, right?

I recognize that, but I want to not be ignorant. And so there's a directionality of wanting to remove the ignorance that is more fundamental than the doubt. Does that make sense? So he said wonder is the starting point of philosophy following Plato, right? And Aristotle would agree with that. wonder is the starting point of philosophy following Plato, right? And Aristotle would agree with that.

Not only the beginning point of philosophy, but as he said, it's like the sustaining fuel that helps you sustain philosophical, a philosophical attitude. Like think of all the things we've done in philosophy. You read Descartes, you know, you read Hume, you read these people and there's all kinds of stuff you don't know. Like right now, my philosophy isn't worked out. There's all kinds of stuff you don't know. Like right now my philosophy isn't worked out. There's all kinds of stuff I don't know, right? There's all kinds of natural mystery, space, time, right? The,

the, the essence of things that those are all to me clouded in mystery, but I want those and I think I can get them in the end. Right. And that's why that that's why Pythagoras said, don't call me, don't call me a wise man. Call me a lover of that stuff that I want to get later. And so that to me is wonder sustains this project of saying, it's okay if you don't know, you will know, you have that hope that you will know.

And so doubt might get you to recognize what things are mysteries that I can't penetrate, right? But I will later and I can have hope I will. And what are the things that I can penetrate now and for what purpose? So I think his universal doubt doesn't recognize wonder and wrongly focuses on one kind of certainty. Namely infallible?

That infallible, indubitable, intuitive one. The one you can just see with your mind's eye versus the practical ones, which is what you take for granted in how you act. I wanna tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd.

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it helps you meditate, helps you sleep better. It helps you build a daily routine and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get through at all. Just go check it out. Hello.com.slash.mattfrad. The link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories for them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com.slash.mattfrad. stories to them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Memories are funny things. Yeah. Because what the heck is that? If I remember myself last night at the pretzels house with Dave Matthews, we were hanging out, did a few things. It's not entirely clear to me what it is.

I'm seeing it's a bit fuzzy. I remember some of the conversations, a word here or there. What were they wearing? Oh, I think I know. If I was to imagine what it might be like tonight, if I was to hang out with you and Jacob and do so, that's just as clear to my mind in a way. I can make it just as clear in my mind as the memory is. And yet I feel kind of certain that that thing happened yesterday. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I do think that this practical kind of certainty, it does, um, it is a kind of conviction. It's a psychological kind of certainty. You could say that. Um, but I don't have a problem with that. I think that's totally normal and we have that all the time. Um, we have what all the time we have that practical certain convictions, not infallible, but it's not infallible. It's fallible. Good enough. But it's, but it's certainty. I want, I think certainty is an important concept in epistemology. Very much so. So I think that a lot of epistemologists

who reject Descartes, they reject his Cartesian foundationalism. We can talk about what that means if you want. And so they opt for what's called a moderate foundationalism. So they say the foundations of knowledge are not absolutely certain and certainty is not really important. What is important is this other epistemic value. Let's call it justification or warrant or something else, some other positive epistemic value to a belief. And that's what matters. And it doesn't have to have epistemic immunities. It doesn't have to be incorrigible or indubitable. Well, it doesn't have to, because that's just not how you live anyway. Isn't that part of it?

That's true. But Descartes obviously thinks you can. That's part of his project. He thinks we can rebuild the house of knowledge. Yeah. Right. Again, now foundationalism. Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself.

But he doesn't expect everybody to go about his same method. That's a good question. And he wouldn't call them irrational for not doing it, presumably. You could ask him, Descartes, do you think an ordinary run-of-the-mill farmer is supposed to do your practice of universal doubt? I think he would say no, but anybody who can should.

But then it's ambiguous between whether he's saying, we don't have knowledge until we do that, or we're trying to secure the knowledge we already have through this way. So then to me that divides epistemology itself. So the project of ancient and medieval epistemology to me, like from let's say Aristotle, and then once Aristotle gets in the curriculum in the scholastic era, that project, right? To me it seems seems like there's, that project is what we might call the idealist project. And I don't mean that to mean unachievable, but we're trying to develop an Aristotelian science,

like a single subject, which we have kind of logically demonstrable knowledge based on axioms that are self-evident. And our whole system, it has that structure. And that's the ideal we want in any science, whether it's biology or geology or metaphysics or theology, anything that's called an Aristotelian science. And so it seems to me like they have an idealist sort of,

knowledge is an ideal and knowledge that they want, that epistemology studies the kind they want, is this science, this sciencia, where it seems like what Descartes ends up doing is, he's in that tradition still, but he's breaking free from it. But then what happens is epistemology becomes something that's something that is a battle against the skeptic,

a battle against the, we don't really live in this, it's a dream world, or it's a brain, we're brains and vats, or there's this radical skepticism that's now our problem. We're trying to face down the evil genius or the evil demon that he hypothesized. Right? And so now epistemology is about me as an individual, right? Trying to recover my sense of knowledge again. It's not about our human project of getting a shiancia. So it shifted in Descartes. And now we have those, those two threads seem to be part of the way I think about it is I'm not sure if you can argue why say Plato

or Descartes turning towards the world, either in trust or skepticism is better than the other. It feels like this fundamental posture towards reality. Am I going to doubt it in order to come to know truth or am I going to give myself over to it? And then eradicate those things that end up being false or questionable. I mean, I think it's not, I think, I guess I'm, I can't think of a reason why not to go day cuts way. I guess I would say I can't avoid going away from day cart. You can't avoid. I can't avoid it going away from day cart. Meaning what?

Because if you're gonna, if you're at the point where you're intuitively in the situation in your mind where I can make a choice to trust or not trust. Yeah, yeah. And I can do this or that. You've presupposed, right, an entire background, which let's call that your human consciousness. Yeah. Framed by your whole linguistic background, which let's call that your human consciousness, framed by your whole

linguistic background, which I don't just mean like a sort of concepts, like pictures and stuff. I mean ways of doing things with words. Words are ways of doing things, which is, which includes like questioning and inquiring and justifying. And so those processes are mediated through our words. Words do things, words aren't just pictures, right? And so those are abilities you have.

You have abilities right now and capacities that were acquired through acquiring language when you were a child. And so you have that. And when Descartes starts doubting, he already has that. He takes that all for granted. So none of that makes any sense unless you take for granted what's already been given to you as abilities.

So you can't, what I'm saying is you can't not take it for granted. You can't take what? These abilities and capacities to, there's a way of, there's a way of justifying things that can be correct or incorrect. There's certain moves in a conversation you make that you go, well, that's dumb or that's smart. And the rules in the language game, if I can call it like, us inquiring about something includes questions and answers in a complicated way. And when you say something about something, it can be correct or incorrect.

In other words, reason is active. And the rules by which, or the criteria by which something is correct or incorrect, is given to us when we are trained in using language. Using language is like a training we go through as children. My son one time, I said, August, go get that trash can, empty it it then bring

it back to me and get your next command. He's like, daddy what did you say? I said, and I told him again, he said, daddy I don't know what you're saying. That word's too long. To him it was one word. So what is a word, right? A word, we think of words as pictures. Like we see a word, pints with Aquinas. That's three words. But children don't have visual words yet. They don't know the letters. So there's hearing sounds. It's like one sound, pints with Aquinas. That's one thing. And so what I'm saying is just as a concept, an individual word, as we understand it like pints, right? That has a meaning only because it relates to other words, like

with, right? In Aquinas, you couldn't say with, with Aquinas. That doesn't make any sense, right? So the sort of grammatical spots in a sentence are interdependent. So concepts are dependent on sentences, if you will, which are dependent on whole sets of sentences, which are moves that we make in life. So children, when they don't know how to lie, you probably had this experience with your children. When they don't know how to lie yet,

they'll say something which is just a bald lie to you, but you know they don't know what lying is. And you're like, and you think, why are they saying that? And of course, they want something from you. So they're making what appears to be a description or an assertion, which is obviously false and obviously a lie because you know they think the opposite. But they say it because they get a cookie if they say

it so they're using what looks like an assertion as a Command or as a persuasive device get me a cookie Because words are always doing things words are always interwoven with our actual way of living To put that another way is intellect is never actually separated from will intellect and will are always together in actual life Including when we learn language So my point in trying to say that is when you learn how to make an inquiry Like August now knows how to do certain moves in an inquiry, right? Of course, he will try to manipulate certain things sometimes right but all of us do things like that

But there are correct ways of doing it and incorrect ways of doing it. The standards by which to do it rightly or wrongly are embedded in the process that we learn it. And so if we have that habituated now, we have an ability, we have an ability to make an inquiry, an ability to justify a claim, an ability to persuade somebody, an ability to manipulate somebody.

These are all different linguistic maneuvers we make. Wittgenstein called that a language game. So these are things that we know quote unquote before you even get to ask the question, yes, how do I know if anything exists or not? They're presupposed in order to know anything. Yeah. You can't, you couldn't know, knowledge in a way is a capacity, right? You couldn't ever get it if you didn't have these other fundamental ones. Yeah. And of course, the only reason we have those, and we explain this metaphysically as Catholic philosophers, is well, because we have the power of reason. And we have that because we're human beings.

Animals can't do this. You can teach a chimpanzee certain one-to-one relationships with words, and they're like, fascinating what they can do with that. But a chimpanzee can never creatively use grammar. That's never been observed. If that is observed, then I'll eat my shorts. It has never been observed, but humans do it all the time.

Kids do it all the time. My son, I was plugging in and out this, he was plugging in and out this thing in the wall, coordinate, and I went in and I said, son, stop that, don't do that. And he said, daddy, stop, don't plug that out when I took it out. He's never heard me say the word plug out.

But that's a perfect grammatical construction that I knew was meaningful because it was interwoven with his nonverbal behavior at the time that he had verbal behavior. So meaningfulness is always that inner weaving of verbal and nonverbal behavior. And when we teach kids, that's what we're doing. We're weaving our words with their behaviors.

So your point is that Descartes knew more. He assumed he took for granted the things that he knew when trying to universally doubt. He couldn't universally doubt. That's impossible because in order to doubt is a kind of thing you can do well or not well. It's already one of those things. And that's why actually Wittgenstein says, if there is an indubitable proposition, like I seem to see a green cup.

Wittgenstein's like, fine, that's indubitable. But because that is indubitable, right? It's not really an item of knowledge. I see. What he means is, it doesn't make sense to doubt this because it can't be known. And it can't be known because it doesn't make sense to doubt this because it can't be known and it can't be known because it doesn't make sense to doubt it.

Okay. How do we get from Descartes to Hume's denying the self and denying induction? I mean, it sounds, it feels like that escalated really quickly. Yeah. No, great question. I mean, I see it, my understanding is that Kant tries

to save us from universal skepticism and the inability to know anything from Hume. Yeah. Hume, as Kant said, Hume awoke him from his dogmatic slumber. His dogmatic slumber was he was a rationalist. He was trained by rationalists, like let's say the Leibnizian tradition where we can sort of mathematical and a priori truths. You can sit in your arm chair and like map out reality. Right? And so that is one tradition that flows from Descartes, the rationalist tradition. But then the other tradition is the empiricist tradition. And so the empiricists through, you know,

through Barclay and Locke, right, come and terminate in Hume. Hume is like a radical empiricist. And so in a certain way, you might say, he's the termination of the empiricist tradition. Now, like a Locke and a Barclay would say, no, he's not. I'm the apex. I don't have to be a skeptic, and then they'll try to argue.

But the history of philosophy sort of is taught that way, and I think that's roughly right. Again, I'm at like a 30,000 foot point of view. I'm sure there's Hume scholars or Locke scholars which would say, no, I think I can defend a Lockean view. Whatever. So that terminates the empiricist tradition. Meanwhile, the rationalists are going on.

Kant is here. He's like, I can't do my thing unless I respond to this. And so he tries to synthesize them, just like you said. Now, how do we get from Descartes to Hume? So I think that that's part of the thing I said earlier. Descartes is not just changing us epistemologically, like he's not introducing a new epistemological paradigm only, but a new philosophical paradigm.

So to me, one of the fundamental problems with the empiricist is they deny that whole thing I just told you about language. Because they think this is how we learn words. You hold up a cup and you say to your son, this is a cup. And you hold up this and say, this is a computer. This is a table. And you point to individual things. And then they assign a word to it.

And then all the other little words like with and the and over and above and all the prepositions and if, and then all those just take care of themselves. Right? So we learn like basic nouns by pointing and then language kind of takes care of itself eventually. And it kind of builds up from that starting point. And that starting point for them is obviously empirical,

which is like a direct experience. Yes. Okay, so once they have that picture, then let's call these private objects because the person can see it and now have it in their own mind, like privately. It appears to be a green cup. It seems to me there's a green cup in front of me.

And so then we identify and label those things with all these nouns and language takes care of itself. And that's sort of our mind-world connection through what Bickenstein calls And so then we identify and label those things with all these nouns and language takes care of itself. And that's sort of our mind-world connection through what Bickenstein calls that private ostensive definition. You point to it and define this as a cup. Right? Now he does this interesting experience.

He might, he did it, I think, with a pencil. And he pointed and said, I'm pointing at this. What am I pointing at? A pen? You might say a pen, but that's, but I say, no, I'm not. I'm pointing at this. What am I pointing at? A pen? You might say a pen, but I'd say, no, I'm not. I'm pointing at the black of the pen. Or you could say, I'm pointing at the air in between this pen and my finger,

or I'm pointing beyond it to that chair over there, or I'm pointing at you through it. So this act, this behavior is under determined. So what makes us know what we're pointing at is some sort of contextual feature that we are implicitly aware of. Yes. Right.

And of course, you could ask me more questions. I said, am I pointing at a pen? I said, no. Then you can say, well, OK, are you pointing at the black? No. And so on. And now you can inquire and figure out what I'm pointing at. Yes.

So his point is this, well, when you have a private object, it's the same problem. So in order to point at this and call this a cup, that presupposes what he would call like the logical form, which is this is a substantive, a cup rather than a color or a shape, right? Or something like that. And so it belongs in that category, which is presupposed to be able to identify it as a cup, which is a noun, which functions in certain ways in certain linguistic situations. And so his point was that idea of private ostensive

definition, which Locke is kind of like the paradigm of, is a complete myth that doesn't happen and it couldn't happen that way. And so the empiricist project at the foundations doesn't work out. Now that's how I would criticize empiricists, but let's say you accept this story, this what Anscom calls the universal fraud of ostensive private definition. Let's say you accept that

and you're going down this empiricist route, right? And you ask, well, how do I know about God, or how do I know about morals, or how do I know about the good, the true, the beautiful? You're not going to be able to reduce that to some sort of empirical picture, right? And so that's not knowable. So that's why Hume gets and says, right, if it's metaphysics or religion, it's cast it into the flames, right? That's just sophistry and illusion, right?

The only things we can know are things directly before us. Now, when he says, well, look inside of yourself and see if you see what Descartes was talking about. And he's like, I don't see that. I just see like a thought here and a feeling here and a hope here. I don't even see there's one thing doing that thinking or feeling. I just see a theater in my mind and things go across it like thoughts and feelings. And so there is no self. Now, Locke went one step from Descartes. So Descartes said, we can just see myself. I'm this

unity, right? That has all these feelings, this presupposes this. This underlying substance of experiences. Yep. There's the thinking things. Yeah. And there's other things. Yeah. Right? And those are the only things in the world. Okay. And that was his metaphysical,

what his metaphysical paradigm shift, that's to reject the scholastic view of substance and being. He's rejecting that in that move. And so he says, okay, I know this stuff. Locke says, well, I don't see that self that you're talking about, but I do have this memory that connects me to my past memory. And I am this sort of like contiguous memory worm

back into the past. And that's what I am. And those are of course, empirical moments he thinks. And Hume says, I don't even see that. And so to me, that's like a direct de-evolution. Right. To where like, Hume is just following at the radical empiricist foundations.

If knowledge is ultimately this like sense data that I received. Well, not to get us off track, but even if it were the case that you could imagine yourself like, what did you say? This worm thing with your memories going back to you. I still don't know how to answer someone who says, well, maybe every night when you're asleep, you die and a different subject enters your body and retrieves your past

memories like a baton in a relay race. I don't know how you would answer that. I don't know why you'd want to, but I don't know. So, so to me, I guess, I would say to answer that is one is I, even if it, even if I grant you that that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Which I'm not sure I do, but even if I grant you that makes sense to wonder that at best that is some sort of weird logical possibility. Yeah. How does that provide me any counter evidence for anything? What do you mean? So it's to me, it seems like what often happens is somebody feels a doubt because somebody raises a logical possibility.

Yes. And so to me, it doesn't seem like a possibility is a probability. Right. It's not an argument. It's not an argument. It's not a reason in favor of something. So in other words, to doubt, right, isn't just a feeling. To doubt can be something that's correct or incorrect.

That's right. It can be something that's correct or incorrect. That's right. It can be something that is reasonable or unreasonable. Well, what about just the very fact that it's logically possible? Yeah. So then I want to say, okay, fine. That might be the case. It's logically possible that we're in it.

We're a brain in a vat. That's also what I'm trying to tell you. It's logically possible we're merely dreaming. Yeah. Now, if I grant that that makes sense, which I ultimately don't want to grant that, but we can talk about that in a minute, but if I do, I'm like, okay, well, so what then? Is that, is that counter, is that evidence? Is that possibility evidence that I am a brain in a vat? And say, well, why, why would it be evidence?

I think what you would say is, okay, maybe that's logically possible. But unless I have a good reason to think that I Am gonna believe that to kind of use Mills language and within my rights to yeah Totally go on believing as if it didn't yeah Yeah, I would say you need to give me a reason to think that might be the case Right if somebody said well imagine, you know, you know forgetting your identity or something and then somebody's trying to tell you you're Matt Fradd. Yeah, right. mean, look at this picture. This looks like, you look at yourself, this is you.

And you might, well, maybe that's a twin brother. Maybe that's a production of somebody. I don't know this person. I've never had this. I've never been on this show. I don't know what you're talking about. Right? You can imagine that situation. They say, well, no, no, I'm saying it's possible you're Matt Fradd.

And you'd be like, but who cares? You need to convince me. Give me a reason why I am Matt Fradd. It wouldn't do anything in your life. It wouldn't have any traction. And so the reason why that sometimes gives people traction because they're overly disposed to feel doubt without asking whether it was reasonable.

Because I don't know why. That's a good question. You don't know why what? Why we are disposed. Like when I was in college, I was disposed to feel that. Like maybe I'm just constructing everything. Maybe I'm projecting God. Maybe that's the case.

And because I couldn't eliminate that possibility, I was bothered. Yeah. Right. But I never asked myself, wait a minute, what reasons do I have to think that that's actually the case? Now, all I could have said then, but I didn't ask myself as directly as I am now is, well, Feuerbach thought so, Freud thought so, lots of sort of neuroscientists think so,

but I'm like, well, why should I trust them? Now I'm playing the reason game. That's fair. I didn't do that. I just like felt, oh my gosh, because now I have a question I've never thought about. And so I feel like I don't have any grounds. Unless I can answer it.

Yeah, and so what I'm saying is we already have a ton of grounds. We already have a ton of evidence. Would you not, would that also kind of apply to Descartes? Someone might say to him, what if everything you've ever believed is wrong? And he could say, sure, that's possible. But give me any evidence to think that all of it is wrong. That's a very different thing to saying you've believed a couple of things

that you thought were true and they're wrong. Therefore, everything's wrong. Or everything's potentially, you know Say that one more time. Well, you're saying if I say to you the external world is an illusion Yes, that's a possibility and you say sure it's a possibility. But why should it concern me? Yes What I'm saying is could we not say the same thing to Descartes who says maybe everything you've believed is false and you could say Sure, it's possible. I think I me a reason to think it's true.

I think we should say that to Descartes. Now what Descartes? Why should we say that to Descartes? Is that because where things seem to be true and therefore is it kind of this, what do we call it? Epistemological conservatism that unless someone gives me a defeat or to the thing that seems obvious to me, I'm within my rights to believe it. So I want to say a little bit more than that because I don't know what I mean'm within my rights to believe it. So I want to say a little bit more than that because I also don't know what I mean by within my rights to believe it.

So I want to say a little bit more than just we have to have the absence of defeaters. So some people say you're within your rights as long as there's no defeaters. So so in epistemology, there's that what it's to say within my rights means I have warrant epistemically something you have something like value, whether it's a warrant, justification, evidence, whatever. So that's crucial because to me, epistemology in the Cartesian tradition, epistemology as a discipline, to me, even though the Cartesian epistemology

is mistaken in certain ways, and many false moves are made because of this wrong setup, I still think that epistemology is a very central part of philosophy and that we've developed and discovered things in this sphere of philosophy that we didn't know before the modern era. So it's had some use. Right.

So yeah. And so I think that the fundamental question to me now that epistemologists are concerned with is, are we going to go with a kind of evidentialism, sometimes it's called, or a non-evidentialism? Okay. Define those. Right. So sometimes it's called, or a non-evidentialism. Okay. So sometimes that's called internalism and externalism. But I want to understand that in the broadest way of sort of a way of doing epistemology rather than just a view within epistemology.

So to me, what that comes down to is what are we interested in when we're doing philosophy? And what we're interested in when we're doing philosophy isn't to just defend common sense. That's part of it. What we're interested in doing philosophy is attaining to the transcendentals. We have this special knowledge that we want. We have the knowledge of good, true and beautiful, of essences, of the mind of God, whatever you want to put it. That's what we want. That's what philosophy is for. That's what it's always been interested in Right. So philosophy isn't just to sort of clear the ground of doubt. So then science can show us stuff Clear the money. Yeah, all right

So what happens in the modern era is the science that sort of naturalistic philosophers? Say the point of philosophy is really to be a handmade to science Yeah, so just clarify things conceptually and get rid of these stupid doubts so then science will tell us what we can know. And I wanna say, no, no, no, that's an abandonment of philosophy itself. And so philosophy itself is this project of I wanna understand the inner reasons

for why things are the way they are. And I wanna have access to that. I wanna be a philosopher. I wanna be inside that process of that way of reflecting on reality itself, to see my way to the end. So that to me is an internalist, if you will, or an evidentialist stance in philosophy. I'm interested in this following this path myself, not just telling, not just somebody saying science says, keep following that and there's no

defeaters. Whereas to me, the externalist route is more like that, or the non-evidentialist. So even though lots of them are Christians that I deeply respect, like Plantinga, Alston, Nicholas, Walter Storf, there's lots of them. There's Catholic ones, too. Those guys are all not Catholics. So they defend a kind of externalism.

And so they want to say that we have God designed us in some way, let's say, or we have certain causal processes that happen some way. These are all third person perspective kind of things, not internal, not psychological, right? And so that's all good to go until you defeat it. And since that's good to go, that stuff confers the special values we're interested in.

And so now you're within your rights. And I want to say, but that doesn't feel, that doesn't feel satisfactory to me as a philosopher. It feels like you're doing something different than I wanted to be done. When I asked the question, what a wonderful sentence that was. And what is that thing that you wanted to be done? I wanted to understand an epistemic value from within my psychology,

like what's the evidence or the old school word for that is justification. I want that. I want to be able to, what do I say, be an individual who can be sensitive to reason from within and follows reason wherever it goes. Well isn't that what Plantinga would say too? I'm sure he'd say that, but when he comes to the foundational beliefs, right? So for example, my perceptual beliefs, right? Or my memory beliefs or any basic source, testimonial beliefs, you want to say,

but what justifies those? And he says, he says, I'm not interested in justification. I'm interested in warrant. Warrant is a value that's conferred upon your memory belief or your perceptual belief or testimony from the processes or cause and effect functions of your being that are not in the purview of your psychological reasons. There's something that happens because it's designed to do that.

Like God designed your faculties to give you reliable truth. And that's why you have warrant. You're like, well, wait a minute. Does he begin there, does he? But look what he says at the very end. That's to me the most telling. The very end of his whole trilogy. He says Christianity is warranted if it's true. Oh yeah. You're like, well, what I want to know is whether it's true. Give me evidence and give me reasons that I can know now in my psychology of whether it's true. I don't want to know whether it's warranted. If it's true,

I want to know whether it's true. And so I want something like justification or evidence to be pointing me right. And then say, well, I think it's likely to be true, right? Because X, Y, and so I guess it would be warranted. But isn't he saying that? I mean, doesn't he say that like one can come to know that God exists if one's cognitive faculties are working correctly,

and if one's cognitive faculties are working correctly in the proper environment, and that one's cognitive faculties are working in the proper environment such and such. Therefore, if it seems to, in that certain circumstance, right, it has to be all those things set up first. It seems to me that God exists. Therefore, that's my, that's my warrant. Now, I think as you just described it, as you just described it, I would, I would affirm all that and say, and if God designed it that way,

and if it's doing that way, then you have evidence. So you have justification. And he would say, I don't need that. He wants to reject that as a requirement for knowledge. He wants to reject what? Justification, what's called justification or maybe broader evidence. So evidence or reasons from within, from within your psychology, that's not necessary to have knowledge. You can have knowledge without that because warrant doesn't require justification. Warrant is an external epistemic value. I am way above my head here in this conversation. Sorry, maybe I could say this. So I think you're correct in the way you stated everything. If our faculties are designed by God and they're working rightly and we think about his world right then we'll know God exists.

No, but you could go about it the other way. You could say, it appears to me that God exists. I don't know how not to believe that. Yes. I've tried to not believe that. I've looked at evidence against what seems to obvious to me and I can't be disavowed of this belief. Yes. But do you have evidence for it? I'm asking you personally, would you say you have evidence? Depends on what you mean by evidence. Do you have anything that indicates depends on what you mean by evidence. Do you have anything that indicates that that judgment's true? The fact that it seems to me to be the case.

Well, that would be evidence. And if you think that indicates that it's true, then that would be a kind of evidence. Now, I think you probably have more evidence than that, but you at least have that. Yeah. And if you think that evidence isn't good enough, then you also think, so planning it thinks that evidence isn't good enough, then you also think, so my evidence that you exist. So planning of things that evidence isn't what confers warrant. What does he think confers warrant?

That it's a proper functioning thing that output what it normally outputs. What normally outputs? The cognitive process or function. So you have a mind, let's say, or he would say like census divinitatis, like it like has an inputs, right? And it produces outputs which are judgments and when it's doing what it's supposed to do

Yeah, those judgments are likely and I wouldn't say that those judgments are more or less Those judgments are more often true than they are false. Right? They're reliable. Why do I care about Warren? I Don't think you should care about it that much. I don't think, I don't think that's what we should care about. But you said, but you wouldn't have warrant. You would just have what? If I say, I think God exists because it seems to me that he exists. Yes. And you say, well, that's not a warrant word, or if you just mean whatever it is that makes a belief good. I guess I mean the same thing by justification. That's what I mean when I say warrant. Yeah, so you're using it in a generic sense. It's like whatever makes a belief good as a belief.

Yeah. Right? So a good making feature, that's what we call epistemic value. Okay. So yes, to me, epistemic value requires just something internal, some reason, evidence, something you can grasp more than even if it's the way things seem. But didn't I just give it to you? Yeah. Yeah, you did. And so you're an evidentialist for believing that.

If you think that's necessary to have knowledge, do you think that's necessary to have knowledge? Well, yeah, I think one of the examples- Or just optional? Could you know God exists if you had absolutely no evidence that he exists, even it seems to be the case? No, of course not. So you believe that knowledge requires justification or something internal. Correct. That means you don't agree with Plantinga's project of warranted proper belief. Really?

Yes. So he has amazing insights and I absolutely love him to death. He's such a great writer. And I think what I was talking to Logan about this, and we both agreed with this, is we thought, you know, I think what's going on when we read Planaga is he's just like kicking ass against the naturalists. That's why we love him. Like we just love him like laying into the stupid arguments of the naturalists and exposing, right? They're hubris and exposing their presumptuousness.

And he's a master at that because he has a beautiful sense of humor. This man, he does. It's just, it's a gift. And so, and I think, so a lot of people see that and they feel like the confidence of I can really be a Christian. These guys really are wrong. But then the positive project, I feel like he, I think that's where I feel like he goes wrong. Right.

And that last comment is what's always stuck in my craw. Well, like, yeah, Christianity is warranted. Something you can know if it's true. I'm like, what the hell? I already knew that. I already knew it was something good to believe if it was true. I'm trying to figure out whether I should think it's true. So I'm looking for evidence. I'm looking for justification. I'm looking for reasons.

And so his project says you don't need that. You could have that, he says. He says, yeah, he's got like two dozen or so arguments for God's existence. Remember that page of his, you can look him up. He has two dozen or so arguments for God's existence and he gives, Oh, they're all ingenious, right? And they're all many, like recycle one from the past. But what he says in the end is you don't need any of that. Yes.

But I agree with that. Here's how I agree with that. Cause I wanted, I was leading you there. Right. And so I make a distinction between having an argument and having evidence. You can have evidence without having formulated into an argument, but he explicitly says you don't even need that internal evidence. I agree with him. We don't need those arguments, but every one of those arguments is somebody's attempt to articulate evidence they had like grandma, grandma, why do you believe in God? Yeah.

And she'll say something like, well, I don't know, look at the world. And she's not formulated an argument yet, but she's articulating her evidence. Well, look at this thing. This is beautiful. How could this all be like this? If there wasn't a God. Now I could make that in a complicated five ways, 30 ways, a half dozen ways. Well, who cares? Like there's lots of ways of formulating that, but that's the evidence that we have. So evidence and argument must be kept distinct. That's what my mentor, Doug Guy that taught me that props to him. And that was a fundamental distinction that I was like, that's really important. So you think I disagree with planting a, because I

require evidence to believe in God, even if that evidence is seeming, you require, you require evidence to know that God exists. I require evidence. It's about knowledge. What counts as knowledge. Okay. Now let's suppose, so an externalist or a non-evident just thinks knowledge is something like true belief plus the right process or faculty having produced it.

Yeah. So it's an external condition, meaning non-psychological, that produces the kind of belief that then counts as knowledge. Whereas what the traditional analysis says something like, well, you need the true belief, of course, to have knowledge. You've got to believe it and you've got to be true. But you need something like reasons or evidence or also known as justification. Yeah, I'm quite lost in this conversation at this point, which is my fault, not yours. But okay, to sum things up, it seems to me that I can believe that God exists and be confident that that belief is right independent of arguments, but not independent of evidence. You've nailed it. That's absolutely right. And so that's to me, an evidentialist must and should say that Descartes doesn't do that.

He wants it to be formulatable as arguments, right? Because he thinks that, um, that, um, that idealist project of having a she and see a member, I mentioned that he thinks he's giving a specialized modern science version of that for an individual person. I mean, nobody would say in order for a belief to be rational, it has to be something you can argue for. I, I, I, no one would say in order for a belief to be rational, it has to be something you can argue for. No one would say that. If they said that, they would be wrong.

Right. So, but, but we do hold things to be true that we believe we have evidence for, or else we wouldn't believe them to be true. That's right. So it seems like to have a belief is already to think it's true. Right. That's right. And to have a belief that we think is true. If somebody- Is to think we have evidence for that thing. Yes, yes, exactly.

And that's why you always have a little bit of evidence. Now, of course, then defeaters have to be considered. That's right. Like, well, it seems to us like, well, it seems like there's coffee in here. And I take a drink, I'm like, no, that was just foam. Yeah, yeah. Right, oops, counter evidence.

Now was I right or not? I was wrong now. So the counter evidence can't be responded to, right? So having just a seeming, if you will, I mean, that does provide evidence, but that's such a minor, tiny amount of evidence, right? But it doesn't mean that no defeater condition's irrelevant. So you have evidence and that's some,

it's difficult to articulate, right? But I don't know if like the ordinary person needs to go in search of defeaters. Maybe the philosopher does. No, I don't think so. So I think the analogy that in, since Descartes, the analogy of how knowledge works is a structure of a house. It's got foundations and then stuff's built on it.

But I like that there's two other metaphors, which I think are helpful for epistemology, is Quine has a metaphor of the web of belief so your beliefs are like this complicated web and they're all interrelated in complicated ways but there's a center okay and there's a periphery and when you question it what if I question whether this was coffee or not or just or decaf or calf right I could take her leave that belief in my web is gonna be this on the exterior yes yeah you can take early that it's not in my web is going to be the same. So that's on the exterior? Yes. You can take or leave that.

It's not ingressed, is his word. It's not deeply ingressed. But if you said something like, I'm a cyborg. Yes, you're a cyborg or God doesn't exist, right? Or bread is poisonous or cholesterol in eggs is actually really harmful, right? Things like that. I'd be like, no, I don't. That's weird.

I don't want to. if I take that away, my life changes in some way. I eat eggs every day. See, this is actually, this brings us to a slightly different topic. If I'm, if you're pro-choice and I try to, what happens as Christians, we often argue against the pro-abort

as if it's a peripheral belief. Yes. Not realizing that we're actually going to the kind of center of their epistemology. Brilliant, Matt, that's absolutely right. Yeah. I think that's so... And if that falls apart, like if I'm wrong about this, then everything falls apart.

That's terrifying. Yes, that's terrifying. And so that's where we need courage to be philosophers, because sometimes your deeply ingressed beliefs might be wrong. And so that's why I think a lot of people that went in apologetic situations, and you start to give them all these arguments and all this evidence, and to them they're always feeling like, oh my gosh, I have to be a Christian, I have to say there's a God, I have to say a prayer. Like, they feel that even if they don't expressly think that, right?

Because they feel like it's a new way of life being suggested to them, right? And that's what makes it hard to sustain an inquiry for them. And that's the same reason why Catholics, why I want to introduce Aristotle's principle, doubts the beginning of truth. Because when they question their Catholic beliefs in the center, that is disturbing. I want to know what you mean, what Aristotle means by that. Because I can come to know that something's true.

And just because I haven't doubted whether or not it's true doesn't mean I don't have knowledge of that thing. Yeah, no, I think you're right to qualify it that way. I don't think it's absolutely doubt. Is it more that in order to kind of make it less abstract and more like mine, that I have to doubt it? Yes, I think that's what he means. In order to become a real conviction of yours,

that really matters, you need to question it. You have to drop it and see if it breaks. Yep, you gotta test, you gotta scrutinize it. It's gotta pass through the fires of reason. I think that's what he's saying. Okay. So, but I think you're right. So that's one metaphor that to me is really helpful.

And the web. The web of belief. One reason I like that metaphor is that sometimes the, when we have a belief, think of it as a thought before our mind, right? A judgment that is under a certain description. Okay. Right? I mean, I could, I could say there's liquid in this cup, I could say there's liquid in this cup.

I could say there's coffee in this cup. I could say there's brown stuff in this cup. And each one of those could be a different judgment. So the description that we give for what we're experiencing is the form of the judgment. Now you might ask, well, why did I have that description as opposed to another description? In other words, now we're talking about what I called earlier cognitive framework

So like Jim Elliott those those natives didn't have the concept of a photograph They couldn't see that that was a photograph so they conceptualize it in a way that was available to them They described it in a way available to them right which actually distorted what it was So sometimes our descriptions don't matter like brown liquid liquid, coffee, or whatever, just liquid. Who cares about the differences? But like demonic device or photograph, like that makes a big difference. And so the reason why they had that description and we don't

is because we have this whole background of ways of describing things. So to me, that is a deeper feature of the web of belief, is that sometimes the belief that you gain is because it fits in with these other beliefs. That's why we called it that belief or why we described it that way. So then in a certain way, your beliefs,

you talked about there already have evidence. So now I'm using another metaphor. When you get a belief, it's something that to some degree coheres with the beliefs you have. And so the whole alternative view of epistemology, rather than foundationalism, is sometimes called coherentism. And that the evidence that you have that we care about is a feature of how all the beliefs are interrelated to each other.

Now, it's challenged in certain ways because you might say, well, obviously people can have those natives have a coherent system of beliefs and they were totally wrong. Right? So I think that there can be challenges to coherentism, but I think they're right that the way a belief coheres, and that's a hard thing to explain what that means. It's a complicated thing to explain. It does provide a kind of evidence because it does fit right.

And there's some in the everything. This is why sometimes showing people you can accept this without obliterating the center of your belief system, is a really helpful way to go about it. So I could say to a Protestant- This can cohere and you show them how it can cohere. I could say to a Protestant, you don't have to be Catholic

to accept that Mary's the mother of God. What would you have to give up? You can still disagree with us on the sacraments and et cetera, et cetera, but if Jesus is God and Mary is his mother, then you could be one of those Protestants who believes that. Or there are certain Protestants who believe in purg mother, then you could be one of those Protestants who believes that, or there are certain Protestants who believe in purgatory.

You could be like one of them, and you don't have to believe all this crazy to your mind. That's right. That's like a helpful apologetic tool. Super helpful apologetic tool strategy. I agree completely. Like, yeah, because as soon as we get afraid. And then the other, the other-

That the web of our beliefs is going to collapse. That's a terrifying thing. Then we have resistance to evidence. That's the problem. Then we resist evidence for the sake of personal beliefs is going to collapse. That's a terrifying thing. Then we have resistance to evidence. That's the problem. Then we resist evidence for the sake of personal comfort or security. And you can do that, a Catholic can do that even though Catholicism is true.

So to be a Catholic student to me is to be philosophical that can raise fundamental questions. Is there a God? Is there resurrection? Is there any evidence for that? Is the Bible reliable? Like all those apologetic questions apply to a Catholic who already believes it just as much as somebody who doesn't yet believe

it. Right? So the other model that I like isn't a foundation or just a web, but is the idea of a leaky ship. So we're in life and we're already going along the journey. We can't get out. And if there's a leak sprung over, then you go fix it. There's a leak, you go fix it. So that's like the defeater thing I like that. So there's a defeater that they'll go fix it. And if you don't fix it, you're an idiot. You're irrational So go fix it when there's defeaters So somebody just plugged their ears and never had the feeders and never allowed there to be defeaters that what they're doing is closing Their eyes that there's leaks going on. So give me let me give an example So I'm going along the journey of life in my big boat and I believe that God exists and all of a sudden evil exists therefore God doesn't exist and I see that and I need to plug

it now I can either plug it by the blue plug which maintains still the God exists yes because I have a response to the defeater yes or I agree that God doesn't exist and I plug it with the yellow plug yes so I have to plug it either way. Yes. You got to deal with it. Yep. That's right.

That's a beautiful thought. That's right. This is my level, Plato. Blue plugs and yellow plugs. It's perfect. This is as good as I got. And so the person who just closed their eyes, they're like, no, I believe in God. I don't have to think about evil.

Yeah. They're like saying it's not leaking too much. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. It's not leaking too much, but that causes a epistemological disease, right? Because then you start not caring about whether your beliefs are true. Now your beliefs are what you like because it helps you feel comfortable. Or it's, we would say pragmatic. It's useful to you or comfortable for you. It has some other sort of emotional or

useful purpose and not just it's true or false. And this is true too, like within the kind of framework of Catholicism, right? So it's not maybe a foundational in the center belief, but it's things like if I don't know how to believe that homosexual marriage is impossible. And if I think the church is wrong about that, but I just go, I want to be a good Catholic. So I have to, then that will, I think, begin to erode my, my confidence in other things the church teaches if I haven't dealt with that one thing. Doesn't it? No, I agree with that. Now I would say this is that, no, to be a Catholic student, right? I don't just mean a university.

So I mean like we're students, right? Cause we're learning, requires dealing with these and being sensitive to these issues. Now, some people, let's say back to grandma, my example of grandma, let's say she's 85 years old and does she need to investigate these things right now? I mean, she might say, well, now I think homosexual is wrong because I just believe what Bishop Barron said. He's right.

Now, that might be irresponsible or that could be irresponsible. So relying on authorities is an argument. There's nothing wrong with that. And if somebody said, well, Bishop Barron actually made a mistake about the science, I heard this critique of it. I'm not saying this is true, hypothetical. Then she'd say, hmm. Then she would need to think twice if she was rational.

I see what you mean. So you could think to yourself, I can go on living my life, even though someone's just put a chink in my arm or that's very uncomfortable, but I'm going to pretend that's not there. But I like what you said that that kind of poisons everything else. Yes, it can. It's because it's sort of a, what is it? Well, you're, you're making your truthful. Yes, you're not being truthful. You just nailed it. That's what I was going to say.

You're not, um, your sensitivity to the truth is being, um, desensitized. So, so I do think though, on the other hand, that there is a way, Lewis wrote a great essay that I think is useful to read in this regard is, it's called the obstinacy of belief. Right, because sometimes you have sophisticated people, like say you go to college and you go to a secular college and you're a Catholic or a Christian,

and all these professors are saying like really sophisticated arguments against the Bible and reliability. And they have like all the haters of Christianity that say, oh, this is all oppressive and patriarch. And they're getting all this evidence and all these cases and you're like, oh my gosh. And you're feeling like, what am I doing? What, why am I a Christian? All these people around me aren't and I'm like stupid. And so Lewis has this thing that he calls the obscenity of belief, which is a function of faith. So if you have faith, then you should have a bit of obstinacy in you to change from that position. That's rightful is what I'm saying.

That's the deeply ingressed part. It might be that you're being obstinate because you need, because it's so deeply important and you are caring about truth, it's going to take a lot to defeat that. So you'll take care of that. You're not going to ignore it, but you're not going to immediately capitulate. So you're going to wait and be patient and say, well, like, wait a minute, I got to take that seriously. Maybe these guys are right. Maybe now I need to investigate a little bit. I need to be uncomfortable in my agnostic kind of, I'm not sure,

but I'm not going to capitulate this thing because it is in the center, but I'm going to be, I'm going to have to look into that further. So I'm not going to let it disturb me too much yet. And so I can just, I can be obstinate rightly to a degree. Do you see I'm trying to get it? I'm trying to, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, we're going to mix metaphors here, but if this is indeed the foundation of my epistological system and you're trying to crack away at it, it's worth telling you to please stop cracking for a bit. And so I can investigate the foundation

because I don't want things falling apart without reason. That's right. Without a good reason. And you've had this experience, I'm sure, in many conversations is, and I think men are probably the worst at it, is that I've had arguments with lots of people, like quarrels is what I mean.

And the other person, I would say maybe a couple of times in my life, have I or somebody else in one of those conferences changed their belief. Yes. It always happens later. It never has happened to me. It's not a deeply held belief. No, I think we should never expect somebody to change in the moment of the argument.

To just say, to end it with like, look, I gave you my best argument and until you have a good response, right, I gave you my best argument and until you have a good response, right? I think you're in a difficult situation. So I'm happy to hear back whenever, right? But I just think it shouldn't be ignored. And if they, at the best they should say, you're right. I got some homework to do, we'll come back and talk later. Right, and then what happens is in the meantime,

you start thinking about it. And then sometimes if they actually, they might change their belief outside of the context of the pressure, right? The interpersonal vulnerability of like, Oh my gosh, can you think of a deeply held belief you've had that you've recently changed? Doesn't have to be recently, but what's the most recent deeply held belief that you ended up giving up or.

I mean, I don't know if this is not the most recent one, but if, if I go back in time, so when I went, when I was in college, I believed in the young earth creationist account. And then when I went to Talbot school of theology, I ceased believing in that and believed in a kind of difficult earth. That was, that was difficult to some degree, but because I had lots of good Christians around me, which I knew were good and conservatives and were not like destroyers of the Bible, they believed in inerrancy and infallibility of scripture.

And they gave a sophisticated understanding of both the fair version of the young earth and a fair version of it. I was like, okay, that's permissible to me now. And so then it became to me an option. And so I didn't, right now I would say, it's an option to me You don't have to believe in one or the other but to me there's pressure

There's some pressure to me for the young earth Interpretation of the Bible right now and this could be compatible with older depending on what you did But I want to make I want to take seriously that like genealogies in the Bible for example Like if I just if I say that's not literal in order to accommodate Old Earth, then I'm doing it backwards. I should say, look, this genealogy, right, is scripture. And so can I hold that and then accommodate Old Earth, Young Earth? So I want to start with that.

So I had a student come to my office, and he asked me, what do you do with faith and reason in these situations? Like, when science and reason conflict, like, what do you do? And I said to me, I have a reflective equilibrium model, which is sometimes the science will make me modify something here. And sometimes this will make me modify something here. But in the end, you've got to have reflective equilibrium. You've got to be sensitive to both and it's a case by case thing. Right? So sometimes this might change this and sometimes this might change that. We never want to say it's just going to be one or the other.

But I did say, I think there should be a little bit more weight on the theological side. There should be a kind of default preference for the actual authentic tradition of the church, right? That should have a weight that can, it's not that it can never be modified or changed. I'm not, I'm talking about non-dogmatic definitions, obviously. Those can't ever change. Yeah. So, so I think that would be, that would be how I'd understand that. And that's one of the things you've changed your mind on. Yes. And I changed my mind from being committed to the, to realize change our minds on are

through safety. It's like, we're afraid of what it'll mean if I believe this thing. We need to be sort of shown that one can, yeah. Here's the more recent one, maybe. I, when I said I had that time where I tried to become an atheist, I had read a lot of apologetics and one of the ones I loved was William Lane Craig and the Kalam argument was like super important to me.

Like I couldn't find a way to defeat it. Now I could think, right, there's some complicated cognitive process and I'm like for your Bach subject and I'm projecting out, I thought that's possible, but then I couldn't get rid of this one. So I had both of them there. But then later on, I came to believe when I was at Talbot,

I came to believe that the Kalam is actually not as good as I thought it was. I still think there's something going for it. And that evidence argument distinction helps me. Which premise do you find? So the one that the universe had a beginning. Yeah. So that to me is not, the philosophical arguments for it

are not as strong as I thought. So like the infinity ones, those are the ones. So like scientifically, it seems like it's really hard to kind of get around that. And even that it feels like you're not gonna come with the same sort of certitude. You got it. So that's why it's a lot more disappointing

if you don't have the philosophical ones. I don't know if you saw the debate that Jimmy Aiken did with Craig on my channel over this. No, I didn't. It really. Fascinating. It was quite interesting. Because Craig had a really strong version.

Where he defends that, is he still still defending this I haven't even checked is where well I haven't seen impossible for there to be an actual infinity. I think that's what he and so when I was at Talbot a lot of us there at Talbot where Craig was a research professor and taught there every winter term. A lot of us didn't actually agree with Craig we thought there can be actual infinities like numbers, right, but there can't be a like concrete set of infinities in reality.

I think that's what he holds, that one. Yeah, so that's the one I came to question. That's why he says, he says, he has this line where you can slap the hand of the mathematician, you know, but I mean, then he will use Hilbert's hotel to show that in reality it can't happen, whereas Aiken disagrees. It was quiterees. Yeah.

And it's, it was quite heated. Yeah, no, I... As heated as two sort of like people trying to be polite with each other. I guess I would say on this one again, Matt, I'm not, I don't think I've, I don't think I agree with the, with the falsity of the premise, but I don't think it's convincing. So now I'm at the point where I'm like, I'm not sure how good it is. I feel like that with all of arguments for God's existence. That's my next. I don't feel convinced by any of them. That's how I went.

I don't feel convinced of any of them in the way that you might argue for. But see, I also don't feel convinced about you proving that I exist. If you gave me an argument, I don't think I would look at that and feel convinced by it. If you gave me an argument that the past was real, that argument wouldn't it. I'd feel the same way about that argument as I would for arguments of God's existence. When I look at them on paper, I go, yeah, I guess. But my, my experience of myself and the past and reality of the world is really what then makes the arguments have the weight

that they do. Well put. I completely agree. That's. And that's that extension of this change. I went from being like seeing the argument as the way to articulate the cosmological evidence, as I remember, evidence, argument, distinction. Then I thought, well, maybe this isn't the best way to articulate it. Maybe the contingency argument is better.

And then there's all different variations of that. And that gets really complicated with infinite essential orders. And then obviously, sophisticated philosophers, like I would use Anthony Kenny as an ex-priest philosopher, I really respect, like criticizes the five ways and various ways. And it's like, there's always a sophisticated way that I wouldn't know how to respond to. It seems that that was my experience.

And I was like, well, but because I have that evidence argument distinction, I can always put it back on the person who critiques my argument formulation to say, well, how would you articulate the evidence I'm feeling? There's something about the cosmos, its contingency, its beginningness. I don't know something about it that seems unaccountable or unexplainable apart for something like God. So give me a way to explain the evidence I have better. And so then I'm relying ultimately on sort of like abductive in what's the best explanation kind of reasoning. So that's really to me, the base rather than like, what I find a lot of atheists do,

and this might not pertain to more sophisticated atheists, but what a lot of atheists do is to say, it takes humility to say we don't know. And so they actually don't give you a better explanation for what you're experiencing. They'll just say, we don't know. And so they actually don't give you a better explanation for what you're experiencing. They'll just say, we don't know. We don't know yet. Maybe one day we will, but we don't.

What do you say to that? I mean, I say, well, maybe you don't have the evidence I have, right? And so then I would say, well, do you see if you had this, if there was something about the world, right? It doesn't seem like this is just purely necessary. And if they said, well, it is, then if they bought that and they said it is necessary,

and they believe that now, say, well, then you don't have the evidence I have. I don't think it, I don't see it as necessary. You'd have to argue to me that it's necessary for me to understand what you're saying. That would be a way to explain away my evidence is to convince me that my feeling is a will of the wisp. Now say if you haven't done that then you haven't given an

explanation. If you just say well it could be, it could not be. That's to leave unexplained or unaccounted for. This phenomenon that we're talking about. But what if they said well it is unaccounted for. That's what you're missing. You ought to suspend your judgment in God's existence like the rest of us heroic people. Instead you probably have some psychological need to be missing. You ought to suspend your judgment in God's existence like the rest of us heroic people. But instead, you probably have some psychological need to be comforted, for there to be meaning in the world, for you to go to a nice place when you die, and that's what's influencing you.

Yeah.