The Eric Metaxas Show - #30 - Socrates Conversations: Heather Mac Donald / Roger Kimball

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

@SocratesITC conversation asks why Western civilization seems bent on self-destruction, and what modern art, politics, and prestige did to beauty and standards, featuring @HMDatMI and @rogerkimball. TIMESTAMPS(0:00) Intro (0:28) Todd Chatman Joins (8:21)  Heather Mac Donald and Roger Kimball Join(15:38) What Makes Art Good(27:39) Beauty And Prestige (42:46) Why West Self Blames (49:24) Merit And Taste DebateSponsors: Christian Solidarity International: http://csi-usa.org/metaxas/ Help Save Lives in Israel Today:http://savinglifeisrael.orgMyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: http://mypillow.com Trusted Partners: ten Boom Coffee— Save 10% with code ERIC: http://tenboom.coffeeLegal Help Center - Get Free Legal Help Today: http://legalhelpcenter.com

Hey, folks, as an almost New Year's Eve treat, I am thrilled to share with you a recent Socrates in the City conversations we filmed this year. We're doing so many exciting things over at SocratesintheCity.com. Your two hosts for this scintillating conversation on what is driving Western civilization to be suicidal are the brilliant Heather McDonald and equally brilliant Roger Kimball. Enjoy. As you know, we're doing this campaign with CSI. We're freeing slaves. And we wanted to give you an update. I don't think we've given you an update.

It's exciting. It's exciting because this is real. So we're bringing on Todd Chapman. Todd, welcome back. Hey, good to be here, Eric. Merry Christmas. I wore my red woodman flannel, just for you. You look Christmas.

And I'm wearing green, so we compliment each other. You're the tree. I'm the guy who's going to chop it down. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yeah, yeah. We're the holly and the ivy, folks. There you go.

All right. So, all right, so give us an update. And actually, wait a minute. Before you give us an update, I don't think I've mentioned this recently, and I want to throw it in because I know there are folks out there. Ladies and gentlemen, I say this every time we do this campaign, one of the things that I can do is offer my time. If I believe in something, I can offer my time. And my time has become preposterously valuable. It's just I have less and less time.

But I offer an evening of my time where we can have dinner together, whether it's just, you know, you and your husband. husband or you and your wife or you or your family or some friends or you want to get together a group of couples or whatever you want to do you know you're paying for the food i show up i give you my time and we can either do it in new york if you want to come to new york or we can do it in your city or in some place in between because i travel all i'll be all over the country this year and we can work something out but i will spend the evening together so anybody who's able to give a big gift of $15,000 to CSI to free 60 human beings from slavery. You can do that yourself. You can do that with several couples, get together, pull it, whatever you want to do, anybody who does that, a huge gift,

okay, because most of you obviously are giving 250 or you're giving 50 or 100 or whatever you're doing. God bless you. We are thrilled. But if there's anybody out there who wants to do that, I offer this. I don't know if I'll always be able to do. this, but as long as I can, I will do this. And every year, somebody takes us up on this or a couple of, and we have dinner, and it's like we've become friends. It's like amazing because we all care about the same stuff. So it's a beautiful thing.

I want to throw that out there. The website is Ericmetaxis.com. You'll see the banner. I'll give the phone number in a minute. Okay. So, Todd, what's the update? What's cooking? What's happening?

So we started this campaign. We've done this every year with you and your program. and this year we started beginning of December. And as of now, we have had almost 300 people participate. And collectively, you have freed more than 360 slaves from North Sudan. And they will be starting a brand new life in freedom and supplied with the resources they need to enjoy freedom, probably for the first time in their life.

And so I am just so pumped up about that. But, you know, I know we're actually recording this a couple days before Christmas. This next week is traditionally just a massive giving week. A lot of people want to get their year-end giving in in time to get tax credit and whatnot. But more importantly, I think, Eric, during this Christmas season, what we're doing for these slaves, this is the heart of the Christmas message, right? I mean, this is why Jesus came to earth to set us free from sin and bondage. And we get to do that for another human being.

And all of this, of course, is anchored in the Word of God, in Christian principles. these are Christian women that have been enslaved their whole lives simply because they are Christians. And you're going to be returning them to their country of their birth, reuniting them with their family. It's just an incredible blessing that you can provide when you give a $250 gift. So we're so grateful. And I'm just trusting and believing, Eric, that we can see another, I don't know, two, three hundred slaves free before the year end.

Folks, you could do this, you know, like God has blessed you to be a blessing. that's a basic fundamental biblical principle you're blessed to be a blessing um it's not about you it's your conduit for god's love uh and what could be more beautiful what could be more real uh more significant more symbolic on every level than freeing a slave and i oh i know like a broken record i say this all the time it seems impossible that this is real that that that that there is real slavery this is black on black slavery folks this is not about racism this is about the evil in the human heart to oppress other human beings and then we get to step in and do something beautiful for god and free these slaves it's almost unbelievable but i want to just tell you this is real

like go to the website you can all read all the details eric mataxis dot com the banner will it'll come by as you go to ericdaxcom you got to click on the banner and i'll give the phone number as well just because some of you want to just call, right? So I'm going to get the phone number right now. Are you ready? Are you ready? Here's the phone number. You ready?

888-253-3522. 888-253-3522. Write it down. 888-253-3522. You can call that. number right now and do something beautiful for God. Again, I am so grateful to those of you who've already given. I'm grateful to those of you who are going to give. It's tax deductible. Think about that. God bless America. God bless America. That you can do something beautiful like this and it's

tax deductible. Take advantage of that. And I'll say it again, if there's going to be out there who can do $15,000, I will offer my time and evening and what a blessing it is to do that. So, Todd, we're grateful for your work with CSI. It's just, as I say, like a broken record, it's almost unbelievable, but it's believable. It's believable. God is in the business of redeeming us spiritually and in this case also quite literally from slavery. So Todd Chapman, thank you so much. Thanks, Eric. Merry Christmas. Hey there, folks. As hard as it may be for us to believe, especially for in America, there are people in other parts of the world who have

literally been enslaved because of their faith in Jesus Christ, some of them for decades. Hundreds of thousands of them have been persecuted and enslaved in the Sudan. Together, right now, we can literally buy their freedom and save the lives of some precious. brothers and sisters, give them the joy and hope we celebrate so freely. For only $250, you can provide life-saving aid this Christmas. You can buy a believer's freedom and provide them with much-needed food, a goat, and other necessary goods for their survival. Brothers and sisters enslaved and fearing for their lives, just $250. Maybe you can get more. Maybe you can just give a portion of that. Every gift helps. Imagine buying the freedom of a fellow Christian believer.

call 8882533522. 8882533522. Christian Solidarity International provides life-saving resources for persecuted Christians for almost 40 years. 8882533522 or go to Ericmetaxis.com and click on the banner. You'll see it. Ericmetaxis.com. Click on the banner.

Please give someone the gift of getting their life back. Provide life and freedom for someone right now. God bless you. Welcome to Socrates in the city. here in New York City. I'm Roger Kimball. I'm joined by my friend Heather McDonnell. I am the editor of the New Criterion magazine, a cultural monthly here in New York, and also the publisher of Encounter Books, a broad church conservative publishing house. We have many important authors, including Heather McDonald, many others. And I scribble away from time to time here.

and there. I'll let Heather introduce herself. Thank you, Roger. My name is Heather McDonald. I'm a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, which is a think tank in New York City, that was a willing and delighted participant in the reclamation of New York City in the 1990s, and it's a delight to be here and to discuss, really, for me, the most important thing in my life, which is the need to be here. to continue to promote and be grateful for the wonders of American art and Western art and civilization. Yes, so our topic today is the arts. What's happened to the arts? Why are they important? Are they important? Do people think that art is important? I think it's an interesting question.

Clearly, in some sense, we think they're important. We spend gobs of money building museums, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. People walk to the Metropolitan Museum to see the latest exhibition by whoever the certified master of the moment is. And yet something's happened to art, hasn't it, Heather? I mean, I know you've written about this a lot. And just before we started this today, the name Marcel Duchamp passed between us. My own feeling is that much of what has gone wrong in art can be laid at the feet of Marcel Duchamp, this kind of prankster, Dadaist at the early 20th century, who really created

the two main currents of artistic or pseudo-artistic endeavor that have so besmirched what came after. Those two currents, I think, are one, the utterly banal and two, the transgressive. So when Marcel Duchamp exhibited an ordinary bottle rack or a snow shovel, And the snow shovel was called in advance of a broken leg. And he just exhibited these ordinary objects and said, this is art, and people swooned. Oh, how cool that is. And then he, this is a kind of measure of how far we have fallen.

He exhibited a urinal, an ordinary urinal, and he called it fountain. And people thought this was, you know, oh, my gosh, can you imagine? He did this horribly transgressive thing. Of course, we've gone far beyond that now. But these two currents, I think the banal and the transgressive, really define a lot of what has happened to art. The one thing he didn't do, and you've written about this a lot, yourself, I know, is he didn't really get into the political end of things.

And that has a third thing, I think, which really besmirches contemporary art, or contemporary modern art, let's say art since, well, gosh, even the late 19th century, but certainly in the late 20th century and 21st century. Well, when you said, well, we lay it at the feet of Marcel Duchamp, that's exactly what I thought is his urinal, and he's basically, you know, slaying piss all over the artistic tradition. So be careful where you step.

We had to wait for Andy Warhol. Actually, you know, his piss panties, where he actually urinated on these plates, and the image that you see is the kind of residue. I didn't know Warhol did that. We have the Piss Christ at Serrano. Yes, yep. And I ask myself, what gets to be called art?

Because once it does, then everybody suspends disbelief and looks at things very closely. So there was recently pictures of some contemporary sculpture, sculpture that basically was a piece of wood, or we could even think of the Japanese sculptor that works with stones, and once it's designated as art, then we suspend disbelief and treat it with utter respect and formal concern.

Now, these days when the world of politicized art form, even in an exaggerated sense, is not taken into consideration and critique consists exclusively of teasing out the political content. But it is weird, and this is sort of the man on the streets constant question of what makes this art. Yes. And we used to know that.

To me, my criterion, it's a very elementary and primitive one, is can you draw? So one can ask whether Joseph Albre's color studies where he has interlocking squares, rectangles, of contrasting flat color. One asks, to what extent does that require craft vision? But there was a show of Albers decades ago, I think, at the Guggenheim,

and his early drawings looked like Albrecht d'Ur. he could draw a bunny till you can't rest. It was absolutely charming. So my view is if he has learned eye-hand coordination has taught his eye to understand the world in the way that John Ruskin did of an extreme observation of our world, then I'm going to go along with him

if he decides to go completely abstract. But now, like Marcel Duchamp, that required no technique. It required no study of the masters. It required no seeing. It was conceptual from the start. And that's where I'm going to start to peel off because show me that you have learned to see, that you have learned, you have taught your hands to trace what you are seeing in order to teach us ordinary mortals to see the world with a greater sense of appreciation. and to perceive beauty where we might have just overlooked it. Yes, you know, when you began there and you said,

once something is accorded the honorific art, then that sort of changes the whole discussion and people will. And that can work in a bunch of different ways. I remember during the controversy over Robert Maplesorp, the photographer who delighted in taking photographs of the sort of homosexual underground people doing unspeakable things to each other, became a cause-seleb. And there was a court case. And one of the jurors in the court case said, well, you know, if, you know, I don't like this,

but if they say that it's art, then I guess I have to go along with it. So now that is very interesting because why is that? And I think there are a couple of questions here. One is, you know, what gets to be called art? Yeah. You have an Andy Warhol-type figure. We mentioned him. Well, he exhibits, you know, he was in that Duchampian tradition, an ordinary

Brillo Box. He might have done a silk screen of it, but he might, then he just, what makes the brillo box a work of art? And, you know, there's been a lot of, you know, there's been a lot of, Many, many, many words have been devoted to analyzing this question. To me, I think we are in a situation now where the question, what is a work of art? What counts as a work of art has been so expanded that that's no longer the interesting question. And another way I think of formulating what you were saying about the importance of drawing is to say that the interesting question is not whether

object A is a work of art or not, but is it a good work of art? Is it a compelling work of art? What makes that? I'm not sure that I would say necessarily that it was drawing, but that's, you know, because there are plenty of people who can draw effectively who are, you know, as they say, mere illustrators. But, and there's something, you know, I mean, it was Cézahn a great drawer? Probably not, you know, just between us. But he was, I think, an important painter. Many people would say that. Paul Johnson, the English historian, would, and he hated all those Frenches. But it is interesting to ask. You know, I mean, because people say, well, the politicization of art, the intrusion of merely conceptual art, these are things that somehow degrade the aesthetic experience. They, they, they, um, they, um, they, they, um, they, they, um, they, they, um, they, they, um, they,

it is interesting to note that the word aesthetic is a fairly recent coinage. I mean, it, it, in the sense in which we use it, it was coined by this German philosopher, Alexander Baumgart, in the middle of the 18th century, and he uses it pretty much in the way we, we use it. But before that, art, it did have an ulterior motive. It was, most of it was either to prop up the current court or the church, you know. So it had definitely a didactic and, we could say, political aim. So that is interesting. But, you know, you look at something like the Sistine Chapel.

That's pretty different. That might have had a political alibi in the sense. as it was meant to glorify these certain church teachings, but it's very different from Damien Hearst or the Chapman Brothers or whatever. So, I mean, once you kind of start down that road, it gets very interesting. Well, it's very difficult because I'm trying to think,

okay, so is it a commitment to beauty, but then what do we do with Picasso's Guernica? And when you started having art that was, not going to give us an idealized version of the world or not, I can't, let me, let me scratch idealized because for me, one of the great advances of Western civilization in art was a non-idealized representational exploration of character that you started getting in portraiture in northern Europe. very different from what was happening simultaneously in Italy, where with Tishin, you still had an idealization going on, but the just ruthless depiction of age, of sorrow that you saw coming out of Rembrandt and his peers.

It's beauty in a sense, but it's not seeking beauty per se. But I'm not going to go along with you and saying we're beyond the interest of the question, what is art? Because I still think that is fertile. And it's, I can't, I don't know how to explain it. But what's interesting to me is that the Duchampian gesture is, or Andy Warhol, is simultaneously allegedly anti-authoritarian and subversive and transgressive. against a canon, against authority. Yes.

At the same time, that designation depends on authority. It depends on us deferring to the experts who do tell us that this is art. You know, one of the developments that I really hate, and I also think, I'm not saying you have to be an ideal draftsman, but I still think that having some kind of ability to use your hands. But you could ask me, like,

Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, they weren't really great. There was a show at New York University Gallery in the last decade, maybe beyond before, of Andy Warhol and he was an illustrator doing shoes and stuff. It was pretty mediocre, but at least he tried. But one of the developments of the 1990s of contemporary art was the installation. Yes. And this is somebody filling up a room in a museum with every piece of junk, household junk, and invariably a video.

There'd be a video posed some there with an endless loop of somebody screaming, and there may be like used tampons on the ground and string and twine. And my view is, how do you decide whether this is a good installation or a bad installation? So the question of, we're going to concede that if somebody declares this, this is art, we therefore look at it as an aesthetic work, however we wanted to find that, and then decide whether it's good or bad, very puzzling. But frankly, the decision of whether something is good or bad, I have to put on my relativist hat, that is not obviated by a more traditional art, because we know the history of literary

reception, artistic reception, there's always people who are dissenters, and there isn't unanimity as to what is great. I mean, poor John Dryden used to be viewed as superior to Shakespeare, and now nobody reads him. Who? What did he write again? But, you know, one has to admit, as the deconstructors were going about saying, you know, the The canon is just a function of dead white males. It's an act of power, not of understanding.

One has to admit that it is changing. And the conservative response has always been, yeah, but there's always been a certain core of Homer and Esculis and Socrates, Sophocles. Yeah. I'm not sure that's going to rescue the guys who argue that, really, because you push on it. Yeah.

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The global financial elites cannot mess with. Go to metaxis goldir.com. But you mentioned beauty. That is very interesting because beauty, sometimes it can get confused with them merely pretty, but that's not what we mean. So, you know, that in Rilke, in one of the do we know elegies, he says, beauty is only the beginning of a terror that we can just barely endure.

So what does that mean? What does that kind of beauty? Or Dostaski, and he says that beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil war for the soul of man. What does that mean? Well, we, I think, part of what it means, I think, is that there's something very seductive about the beautiful. And we can mistake the merely beautiful for the truly transcendent. That would, I think that's probably what Dostoevsky, you know, a Christian believer, would have thought. But you are absolutely right.

The ironies in this are manifold. So you have these guys who they think they're, they claim they're being transgressive. The New York Times celebrates them as being transgressive and challenging another term in the lexicon of critical approbation these days. But really, what does that mean? So you have, you know, Vito, a country or something

given a, he's transgressive, but we're going to have an opening at the Museum of modern art, occupied by all the beautiful people's, the black-tied dinner, and, you know, the donors are there. And, I mean, really, what are the, what are the, what are the elements of this sociological phenomenon? Well, there's money. There's prestige or to give it its other name, snobbery.

But then behind that, to go back to what you were saying earlier about, you know, you baptize something as a work of art, and all of a sudden people, they say, oh, well, we have to respect that, there is that, that conviction, that semi-conviction, that hope, perhaps, that here in what we're calling art, we're all gathered together here as if we were at worshipping something, that there's, you know, the hope for something transcended. But, you know, it's the, the, one of the ironies is that what we see in the art world today, as distinct, I would say, from the world of art, which is, you know, something more serious. But in the art world, you, you, you, we have, we've created a new salon like they had in the,

19th century in France, where you had this, you know, very, you had to do this sort of thing, this sort of way, otherwise you wouldn't be part of the, the in-group. But it's, it's, there's nothing avant-garde about it except for the, these gestures that are just kind of endlessly repeated. Yeah. Well, and it reminds me of our non-artistic political world. It's the same thing with the progressive left, you know, thinking that it's subversive. I know.

And living very high on the hog, you know, dependent on capitalism. We have, you know, Mandani coming in that's going to have his city-run grocery stores, which is just this little crest of pretend socialism resting on this massive infrastructure of the beauty of capitalism change. Like everything that's sold in that supermarket was brought to you, by capitalism, thank you, but now we're going to pretend that we're, you know, radicals and removing the profit motive, but that's why it's there in the first one. So it's the same thing with the pretend radicalism underwritten by massive wealth and enjoying all the trappings of power. It's hilarious. I just, I wrote something about our mayor to be yesterday and I said,

you know, I pointed out that in the background of this guy was, the theories of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution and all that sort of stuff. And somebody wrote me and said, well, did you know, did you know that Mom Dami wrote his senior thesis? This is almost too good to be true. His senior thesis on France Fanon and Rousseau. Yeah, yeah. You can't make it. No, no, he's absolutely out of central casting.

But as far as, you know, the whole apparatus of power behind artistic production, as you mentioned, that was always the case. And we shouldn't assume that there was some necessarily disinterested motive for creating some of our greatest works. It started, yes, we had the church and then you had the royal... that was all about self-glorification, some of those great portraits of Louis, the 14th, the Hesant-Rourte-Rigaud, and then that spread, of course, to the aristocracy that wanted to get their power and prestige in

and paintings that made very careful to show the heraldic symbols and to portray them in stances that were called, you know, you know, Greek heroes and gods. So there's, that's always been there. And I'm absolutely adored John Singer-Sargent. I am so furious when people dismiss him as being too beautiful because I think that even his grandest oil portraits do, again,

bring you into a world that is so much more beautiful than we've got. But I particularly adore his watercolors because of his use of light, the sunlight in Italy off of stone, his use of reverse sort of ground, figure ground. It's just amazing. But again, he was a darling of the aristocracy, and for that reason is often dismissed. Bold in their determination to learn, in their resourcefulness to solve problems, and in their resilience to persevere.

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bold, Christ-centered, influential. We are Cornerstone University. To get back to the issue again of once something is designated as art, then we all of a sudden start noticing, well, there's a chip at the base of this wooden thing. That's very important, you know. Whereas if it was just a piece of drift when you'd walk right on by it, that's true in the literary academy as well.

when you had in the 1990s, 1980s, people started saying, well, we're going to deconstruct the separate category of literature. We're going to read everything as a text. You know, this comes out of Jacques Derrida. There's nothing outside of the text, which was meant in the one hand to say there's no human beings, we're only a play of language. But also, like, everything, everything can be read as a narrative and text. And like that became ridiculous. On the other hand, there is something useful about that to teach us to see that there's meaning everywhere and that maybe it's worth in passing at least paying attention to this TV ad. Yeah.

That there's, it tells us something about how we in modern America structure human existence. So on the one hand, it can be pretentious and conferring value on ephemera. But on the other hand, there's a part of me that does honor a desire to pay attention closely. Well, yeah, I think, you know, art in some sense can be seen as the project of making the visible visible, not to be too paradoxical about it. I think you're right. I'm not, you're more generous at Derry Dahl than I would be. Oh, no, I don't mean to be. Then I misspoke.

But insofar as his theories do sort of slow us down and make us pay attention to things, I'm in favor of that. But I've always thought, you know, there's no outside to language. You know, there's nothing outside the text, is that central Derridian thesis. I would wonder if he, what would he say if he ran down to the pharmacy and asked for a bottle of aspirin and was given a bottle of arsenic instead. You know, if signifiers are really arbitrary, he'd have no grounds for complaint, but really, they aren't. But no, I think everything matters, really,

in the end of the day. Right. And what, you know, one of the things that art and poetry, what they do is they slow us down. They make us stop and think about things, look a little more carefully here and read a little more carefully. You know, when Wallace Stevens says that poetry resists the intelligence almost successfully, you know,

that I think that's an interesting formulation that it challenges your hermeneutical gifts. But finally, you are able to make some sense of it. But, well, you know, was it T.S. Eliot, I think he said that poetry communicates before it's understood. So the music of the poetry and, you know, some, it's... this kind of panoply of language that is there on the page makes you stop and think about not only the sense of the words, but also the sound of the words. And I think the same thing can be true.

You were talking about Sergeant, you know, his watercolors. That's pretty interesting. Well, I feel like we're all now children of relativism, of multiculturalism. We can't forget what we know. And all of these questions, I find myself listening to you just sort of vertigiously saying, where do I find solid ground? And I think that the history of aesthetics and writing about art and beauty, I think was done with a greater sense of confidence and a lesser awareness that authority disintegrates all around us. And you could assume certain judgments were true about what was beautiful, what was merely pretty. I mean, for me,

this is like, look at, again, these reversals of taste with the salon style. Yes. And Bougerot. Yes. You know, this was viewed. Everybody. was aspiring to this. And now it's interesting. It's sort of cute. And there are some, I'll have to say, some conservative foundations that still love this stuff. It's hard not to see a lot of it as ploying in Kitch.

Yes, yes, yes. Kitch is a very interesting category. Exactly. You've written a long piece about that. But now, you know, I, one of the larger themes that is related to this, but that I struggle with constantly in the last three, four years is what What is driving Western civilization to be so suicidal?

Why is it the only civilization on earth that is determined to tear itself down, to cast phony blame on itself for being the source of all the world's evils? Chinese civilization is not doing that. Indian civilization, African cultures are not doing that. Why us? And why this corrosive questioning of authority all the time and our own accomplishments? Hey there, folks. Quick word from today's sponsor.

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I mean, why is that? The people of, you know, the philosopher of Jean-Jacques Ravel, Jean-Fransois Ravel asked, Western civilization is the first in history, he said, you know, to blame itself. Exactly. Why is that? It's the question of our time. It's the question of our time. And so it's a lack of cultural confidence, isn't it?

A lack of being able to take just pleasure and appreciation and the enormous contributions of our culture, economically, politically, aesthetically. You know, Western civilization is really, frankly, where it's at. You know, it's, as Saul Bello once, no, actually, this is William Henry put it, but Saul Bello made a similar comment. Right.

Yeah, yeah, it's one thing to put a man on the moon and another thing to put a bone through your nose. I know. And, you know, let's face it. I mean, E.D. Amin had an Apollo program, but they were all made out of Bolsa. Yeah, well, I'm listening now on Audible to the Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman, the great 19th century historian of the American West and the frontier. And in this book, he wanted to go see Indians who had not been at all influenced or corrupted by Western culture,

which he felt had happened around Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was. So he set out. to find like Plains Indians to live among them. And it went through Fort Laramie. And it's very respectful up to a point. And of course, nobody's going to justify any sort of, you know, cruel genocide. But I'm sorry.

How can one not notice that here are peoples that have lived for millennia with no change whatsoever? Right. They have made no progress. Right. They are doing the same things that they did 2,000 years ago as far as hunting buffalo and tribal warfare. Right. And the West, from the start, was dominated by this curiosity to understand natural laws. And the progress started happening back in the pre-Socratics.

But so too did the questioning of received wisdom. So you had this... But that Socratic impulse, you know? And even before them, that we are constantly self-critical. So was that the fatal seed? And then of course it's always an infant regress. Well, why that? Like what was it about the Greeks that said we need to examine received wisdom?

Socrates is the bad guy. But then so to be your question, why are we now so uniquely self-denegrating? I'm torn between saying it's all about our guilt about race and that comes out of, one of the most profound thinkers I've come across two summers ago was Reno Camus, who was the originator of the concept of the Great Replacement, which has been totally mischaracterized and defamed by the left. It is a profound concept of understanding what came out of World War II. after World War I and the sense of European civilization has besmirched itself. It has no more, right? And the type of critique that we got Dada out of. Yeah, and look at the titles of the books that came out after World War I,

the decline of the West, the wasteland, you know, and it's a long litany of things. But, of course, World War I destroyed European civilization. essentially as we knew it. Right. It is, it's, it's, it's very profound. And, um, but the, the, the gadfly of Athens, Socrates going around asking this endless series of questions, uh, and, and asserting that he knew nothing, but, you know, that, that was what he knew that he knew nothing.

Um, but it actually goes back before Socrates, you mentioned the, the, uh, pre-Socratics or the Ionian philosophers. It's the questioning of appearance, you know, the, being able to be able to, you know, to distinguish between appearance and reality. That's where it really gets going. But I don't think that that necessarily leads to the lack of cultural confidence that we see around us now. Because look at just one example, 19th century Britain.

It was full of confidence. So, you know, and, you know, toward the end, you get things like Matthew Arnold and Dover Beach, the long withdrawing roar of, you know. But before that, it was really a culture that was very robust, that was full of the, full of, you know, confidence about the future and full of optimism, not in the candide sense, but optimism in the cheerfulness, shall we say, about the prospects for men. Science is going to do all these great things. We're going to be able to go farther, faster, better. and to a very large extent, that happened. I think that's adjacent to this question of merit.

How can you not be in favor of merit? Merit means accomplishment. It's better, you know, and that gets back to something you raised earlier. I mean, are some works of art better than others? Are some books better than others? And here's the even more embarrassing one. Are some cultures more important better than others? Well, the answer, in my opinion, is clearly yes.

Well, I would argue clearly yes to the latter question to the former, in that clearly civilizations that have, which is one, Western civilization that has managed to banish posity, poverty, want, childhood death for most of humanity, if they follow what we discovered. Right. That is superior. I have no question.

But the aesthetic judgments, those, again, I have to say for myself, I live in a postmodern relativist world where I'm no longer confident about those regiments. I am. I'm pretty confident about my judgments. I admit that I might be not appreciate certain things that are great. And I know that there are certain things. things that are great that I just don't like. You know, one responds

more or less to it. But, you know, David Hume, the philosopher, David Hume, his had an essay called The Criterion of Taste. He said, what is it that makes a work of art, a work of genius? What is the, what are the criteria?

And he had, what I think is not not substantively a satisfying answer, but it kind of makes a certain historical point. He said it was durable appreciation. We think that Homer's a work

of genius because he's always been appreciated as a great gene. And that has I think as a first step, that's pretty good. But there's definitely a lot more to be said about about that. And you know you say things that you know are great

and you don't like, I'm going to reveal something. I don't like Wagner very much. I like I like the, I like, I'm impressed and moved by the very radical harmonies, them in, in, uh, uh, Tristan and Isolda, and Parsifall. That I like, but the, a lot of it to me is like boys' adolescent movement. It's bombastic. Yes. It's the opposite of, of Mozart. It has no irony. He's completely self-important. But I have to acknowledge, I don't know, a single conductor who does not assume. to conduct Wagner or singer. So I'm missing something and my life is poorer for that. But, you know, on the other hand, I'm contemptuous of people who dismiss Brahms.

You are not hearing the terrifying arrows of this music. To me, it is the most exposed, vulnerable, emotionally deep and again, erotic music, especially the solo piano works, or the people piano concerti, and yet there's people that think that he is the bombastic one or like just uptight or something. So I don't know. I see so much variance of opinion. And I did, you know, allude to that idea of that somebody that's, there's been sort of consensus around Homer always. But then there's these other borderline cases in opera, Belcounter.

repertoire, Bellini, Rossini, D'Aucetti, was in abeyance. Right, right. For a long... Why is it that everybody used to read Walter Scott? Nobody does now. Exactly. Everybody used to read, you know, Orlando Frioso. Nobody does now.

I know. So, I mean, it's very interesting. So there definitely are fashions in taste. There's no doubt about that. Yeah. But it's, you know, I don't know, we could go on forever. Have you read Nietzsche on Wagner? It's very interesting.

He began as a disciple and then totally turned against him, but his reasons for turning against him, I think you would resonate too. I'm wondering whether we will never get to the end of this conversation. But we should probably give our listeners a little rest. I think so. Probably it's got enough. And I'm confused enough as it is, and I don't want to get even more confused.

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