The Eric Metaxas Show - Andrew Klavan

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Eric's Socrates in the City conversation with Andrew Klavan 

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m.investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show. Back again, eh? Glutton for punishment, eh? When will you ever learn? Now, here's the host that you hate to love,

the man who was the reason your friend sponsored your last intervention, Eric Mattaxon. Folks, you're listening to a special edition of the show. These are the audio versions of amazing conversations I had. Socrates in the studio. These have not aired yet. The videos are not out yet. We want to encourage you to go to Socrates in the cityplus.com.

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Go to Metaxus talk.com. Click on the CSI banner. Be generous. It's a beautiful thing. Metaxistalk.com. And don't forget Socrates in the city plus.com. And now here's my conversation at Socrates in the studio. Here it is.

So welcome. This is the first Socrates in the studio session with my guest, Andrew Claven. no pressure. This is the first. I could destroy this whole project. I know. You can blow this whole thing into the future. It just simply won't exist.

Why I'm here? Because of the failure of what we're about to do. No, so there's really no audience. If you hear people laughing, I don't know who they are. This is meant to be just a conversation between us. And yet there are a few people here in the shadows. They're not going to be on camera because they're hideous. But the fact of the matter is that this really is the first Socrates and City session.

And as I told you earlier, and as people will know, the conversation that we had a year ago, it's amazing that it's a year ago about your book, The Truth and Beauty. It was so wonderful that I thought, I want to continue the conversation. And I couldn't find the money because people don't like you. And it was just hard. And I said, how can we do this? Something I said. Yeah, it was something you said.

No, I really just thought you're one of those figures to whom I could talk for almost endlessly. And so when we had the Socrates in the city event a year ago, which everyone should go watch on YouTube or on the Socrates site, before this, because that was kind of like the seminal where we covered the basics. But I just thought, let's keep going, because there's so much in the book. I wanted to touch on the subject of the book called The Truth and Beauty, how the lives and works of England's greatest poets point the way to a deeper understanding of the words of Jesus.

In our previous session a year ago, we talked about how you got the idea to do this, But reprise the basics of it, for example, where you get the title, The Truth and Beauty. Yeah, it comes from Keats, the Odon to Grecian Urn, which ends with beauty is truth, truth, beauty. That's all you know on earth and all you need to know. Pretty arrogant of Keats.

Well, you know, actually he puts it in the, in some versions, it's in quotation, so it's the urn speaking. So it's the Grecian urn that's being arrogant. but basically I find these poets, all of them on a single island in two generations, the greatest poets, the greatest English poets, whoever live except for Milton and Shakespeare, maybe. Who preceded them, obviously. Right.

But they're all facing the same problem. The great critic, Jacques Barsen, said, the only way to define the romantic's, there were so many different ones, they're liberals, they're conservatives, they're believers, they're non-believers, but they're all facing the same problem, which was that the entire structure of European thought and belief was collapsing. And it presented certain difficulties. Basically, the church had come under question. All religion had come under question.

Faith was coming under question. It was for the first time you could be an atheist or at least a non-theist and actually talk about it. And these guys had to reconstruct the world. They had to rebuild the world. It's hard to believe that that happened then. I mean, that's one of the joys of this book, is that you remind us of something that we should all know. Yeah. That what we feel is new is, in fact, just a new iteration of something that began in this period.

Well, it's been happening for 500 years. It's been happening basically since, well, it's been happening since the Reformation, but then also the scientific revolution. And it has now reached a place that people predicted it was going to reach, but it hadn't yet. But people saw it. That's the thing about poets. They're like prophets. They see things coming, even if they don't know it. They describe the present world so minutely that you can detect the future in it.

What do you mean, because I don't want to wrap up what you're saying about the romantic period, but what do you mean that now it's gotten to this point? Let's touch on that briefly, and then we'll come back to it. Well, as this is sometimes called the disenchantment of the world, as this idea that the world was a material place, a clockwork, that could be described, and things weren't, the planets weren't moved by the angels. There were forces, natural forces, that took place. And as that gave way to Darwin and we ourselves were just this kind of random creation of a random nature,

people started to say, well, this is going to have an effect. And the one who's most often cited as Nietzsche, who said, God is dead. We killed him. And so now we're going to have to become gods. And what he meant by that was certain kinds of men who called supermen are going to have to find their way beyond the categories of good and evil. Right. To create an entirely new web of being and perceptible.

Did he specifically use the phrase Klaus Schwab? He had a picture. Did he prophetically? Yes. But how interesting, I mean, to be reminded of it, because it's not as though I hadn't heard that before, but that Nietzsche calls it, that he sees it. He calls it. At the end of the 19th century.

And the other person who calls it before, Nietzsche even starts writing it, though Nietzsche was fascinated by him. is Dostoevsky, who has one of the brothers Karamazov, Ivan, who is the brother who, it's not that he doesn't believe in God. He rejects God. He thinks there is a God, but he thinks the world is too cruel to follow God and that God has basically blown it. And there's nothing God can do to make it up to us how cruel the world is. And what he says is, if there's no God, for every man who stops believing in God in immortality, not only will the moral world collapse, not only will his moral ideas collapse, but they'll become

absolutely reversed and the ego will become so important to serve the ego even to the point of evil, which will essentially have become good. And I think that that's a lot of what we're looking at right in this moment and the fact that it's connected to the loss of faith and the fact that it's connected to the slow draining of faith over 500 years makes it almost invisible to us that this thing has finally come to pass. Wow, this is depressing. Can we cut? No, seriously. I have that affected This is so beautiful in a way because you're teasing out some things. What you just said, you talk about, I mean, there is an innocence to the way the romantics or that period processed this compared to where we are now.

Well, for one thing, they had the French, at first they had the French Revolution, and they thought, oh, this solves the problem. Kill the priests, kill the kings, everything will be great. Just a little murder. Just a little, just a little bit. Just enough. But unfortunately, that didn't work out as well as they thought it would. And like the collapse of the Soviet Union in our time,

there were people who said, oh, that actually disproves their thesis that this is going to save the world. And as in our time, there are plenty of people like Bernie Sanders and people like that who just think, no, no, it's fine. It just happened to go wrong this time, but next time it'll work. And Wordsworth, most importantly, he was the guy who saw the French Revolution. and he said, this is bliss, this is wonderful. Everything, all the injustices in the world will be swept away.

And then he went to France and he saw priests murdered in the street. And over time, he came back and said, you know what, this is an utter failure. And in fact, the traditions of Britain are more important and more urgent to maintain than I thought they were. And he started to have to rebuild the idea of what it means to be a human being. and what's to me, one of the kind of wonderful throughlines in the book is the work of Samuel Coleridge, who was of all of them the most, he may have been one of the most brilliant men who ever lived. He may have been one of the ten most brilliant. He was just an absolute polymath.

He knew everything. And in those days, you could know everything. There still wasn't that kind of specialization. It's often said that Milton was the last human being who had read everything, in terms of the world of printing, and that he had read everything that could be read at that time after that, so much was, was written that nobody could do that. But you're saying, in a sense, Coleridge was like that. I think he was the last man to know everything, to know everything there was. And of all the romantic, the great romantics, he was the one who was actually a believer,

a Christian. Folks, right now in other parts of the world, people's lives are being threatened simply for believing in Jesus. People have been enslaved for their faith. So listeners to this show know that I'm passionate about the work of Christian, Solidarity International because they protect and free those who are being persecuted and enslaved for their Christian faith. I've got to thank you for your life-changing generosity for years. Now, if you've given a CSI through this program, you have played a role in freeing literally thousands of captives. So as we near the end of this year, can I ask you to give once again your gift of just $250 will free a woman in Sudan who has been enslaved for years? You can buy a believer's

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Check it out. Folks, you're listening to a special edition of Socrates in the studio. These have not aired yet. The videos are not out yet. We want to encourage you to go to Socrates in the cityplus.com. sign up. This goes live January 4th. You can see the videos. It's amazing. Each of the great poets were touched by Samuel Coleridge in a different way because all he ever did was talk. You met him and he just talked, talk, talk, talk, talk. And every time he talked to

people, they changed. And one of the people he talked to over the course of a long year was Wordsworth. And so he found Wordsworth in the midst of the failure of the French Revolution. And they just started talking. And to talk to Coleridge was basically to listen. You were just listening. And at the end of that time, they wrote one of the greatest books of poetry ever written called Lyrical Ballads. And it completely rewrote the rules of poetry. It rewrote everything. But it also rewrote what it meant to be a human being.

Where was the human being located? If he wasn't located, if the church wasn't telling you where he was located, if he wasn't located in the heavens, where was he wasn't located in the heavens, where was he, what made your perceptions real. I mean, all of this is what Hamlet was dealing with, Shakespeare was dealing with in Hamlet, where he has Hamlet say, you know, because I'm depressed, the things they're usually beautiful or ugly. So therefore, how do I know whether things are beautiful or ugly? What are those categories mean? And those are the kinds of questions they were dealing with.

And I think because the main highway of Western thought went in one direction and the romantics went in another direction and kind of into a dead end because they didn't have faith anymore. What did they say in lyrical ballads or what in others when you say that they put forth this thesis about, you know, what is a human being or what, what effectively are they putting out?

I'll put it, to put it as simply as possible, it basically that the experience of being human is a collaboration between creation, or what wordsworth at one point calls the one great mind, between creation and the human spirit. And that that is a legitimate collaboration. In other words, that is a reality. The rainbow is the symbol of this. You know, Wordsworth has a poem where he says, My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.

So was it when my life began. So is it now I am a man. So be it when I shall be old or let me die. Let me die if I don't take pleasure in the rainbow. And the reason he was saying that is because Newton had recently shown that a rainbow is a real thing. You can't put this light back together. Once the light is separated, it is a real thing. but the only place it appears as a rainbow is in the human eye.

And so it's a reality that only becomes itself through human perception. And what they were beginning to realize is everything is like that. Okay, so, but this is like the deification of subjectivity? Well, that's what a lot of people think. That's what a lot of people think. A lot of dumb people like me? Is that what you're saying? No, because there were so many different romantics who said so many different things.

But Coleridge specifically said how, thinking through, how are we going to know whether this subjective experience is real or not? The experience of beauty, the experience of truth, the experience of good and evil. And he said, he believed that Jesus Christ was what he called the censorium, the model for checking our perception against the perception of reality. And that once you have that, that solves the puzzle for you. And each person he talked to became greater for talking to him, even when they didn't know why.

You know, Wordsworth ultimately became a Christian himself, but it took him a long time. And the other one who was deeply affected by one conversation with Colerge was John Keats, and he died too young to know where he would have gone. But he was certainly a believer of a kind. Well, when you talk about, there's a few threads here, you were saying that they, during this period, could see that something's collapsing. And it has to do with many things. It has to do with Newton inadvertently making it seem like, you know, it's all mechanics.

Now, it's funny. It's ironic because Newton himself didn't believe that, but he puts forth this idea of, you know, so it's all just these forces, these forces, and there's nothing transcendent, nothing beyond the mechanics and whatever. So if I'm tracking with you, you're saying that the romantics felt like we can work with this. We can create some kind of reality. or that's not what I'm clear about. They started to think, well, where is this person located? Because they still all, one of the things that hadn't happened yet,

that has happened to us, was they haven't lost what sociologists called the habitus, the outlook that had been created by a thousand and a half years of Christianity. So they still knew what was true and what was not true. They just had to find a way to justify their knowledge because it was falling apart, that faith was falling apart around. It's interesting, because it's kind of like cheating, right? Yes, it was. Because it's like you know, well, it's like, I guess, one version of this is the people who all somehow knew that the ethics of Jesus were superior.

But they didn't like the miracles, but they said, but can we keep the ethics and get rid of the miracles? Can we make him a great moral teacher, but get rid of the idea that he's God incarnate, whatever? And, you know, that's the 19th century and so on and so forth. So that's part of what's happening here among the figures you're describing. Yeah, the only one who really understood it was Coleridge because he knew everything. And he was the one who got it. That helps. Yeah, so he would go and talk to them.

And each one, when he talked to them, suddenly became a better, like, he made Wordswood a genius. And after Colwood would go away, they kind of sink back. You know, Wordswood lost his talent in some ways after Coleridge went away. He started writing some of his later poetry, just really bad. And he knew it. He knew he had gone off the rails. And Keats is in absolute despair. His brothers died.

He's out of money. His books are being absolutely torn apart by the critics. Bumps into Coleridge in a park and has a 45-minute conversation with him and goes off and writes the great odes, the ode to the Grecianurn, the ode to autumn, the greatest poetry since Shakespeare. It is the greatest poetry, English poetry, since Shakespeare. And so Coleridge was like this little spirit who would implant what he saw and go away. And then these guys would suddenly become greater than they had ever been and then kind of fade away again.

It's interesting just talking about the history of, you know, the end of faith or the disenchantment and how that process goes along. I don't remember if in the truth and beauty, the book that's here, if you talk about don't. Beach and Matthew Arnold. Do you... Do you... Do you quote it there, yeah. Because... Talk about that a little bit.

Because it's just so fascinating. Again, we kind of act like, well, this has happened in our time. It's the 60s or something. And it's like, no. It happened, you know, it happened in the 20s. It happened to... You can trace it back roughly to this period

that we're talking about. Yeah, I mean, there's this great shock that is Darwin and evolution and this idea that we are these random things. And if you ever want to read a great poem about this, it's Tennyson's in Memorium where one of his best friends dies. And he writes over the course of months, he writes this long poem, mourning his friend's death.

And all throughout it, he's struggling with this tremendous pain about his faith. He can't quite find it again. His wife is kind of smacking. You know, just believe, just shut up and believe. But he keeps thinking, you know, he says at one point, nature is red in tooth and claw. And when he looks at Darwin, it's not the randomness of evolution. It's not the mechanics of evolution that bothers him.

It's the complete disregard with which species are wiped off the face of the earth. How can there be a good God when entire species just disappear in the course of millennium? And so, no, this is a struggle between the human heart, which has now had implanted over, you know, 1,500 years, had Christ implanted in it in the same way the Jews had the law implanted in their hearts so they could recognize Christ so they could produce Christ. Now Christ has been implanted in the human heart. And suddenly the science seems to be taking it away. Right.

And this is the thing, this is one of, for me, one of the great themes that you have to understand in every given moment. We live in time. And our ideas as human beings develop over time. It made perfect sense. after Newton for people to think, oh, it's a clockwork universe. It didn't really make sense even then, but it was kind of a legitimate extrapolation. We're not all scientists.

You hear that, you know, there's gravity and things spin in a certain way. And you realize that the people who wrote the Bible didn't really understand how science worked. And so it must all be untrue. It's a strong temptation in every epic to say, now we figured it out. And you have to think, exactly, you have to think it through. And because it's an idea unfold. it feels to the human mind like progress, but it may just be, you're going through a, you know,

you've gone through a journey, I've gone through a journey. Part of my journey was atheism. I didn't, I don't look back and say that was an error. I thought it was a footstep I had to take to get to the next place. Now obviously it was incorrect, but I had to go through it in order to see the next thing. And that's, I think, what was happening then. They had to go through this period of materialism,

of mechanism, of thinking it's all a clockwork. but it was never true. Folks, right now in other parts of the world, people's lives are being threatened simply for believing in Jesus. People have been enslaved for their faith. So listeners to this show know that I'm passionate about the work of Christian Solidarity International because they protect and free those who are being persecuted and enslaved for their Christian faith. I've got to thank you for your life-changing generosity for years.

Now, if you've given a CSI through this program, you have played a role in freeing literally thousands of captives. So as we near the end of this year, can I ask you to give once again your gift of just $250 will free a woman in Sudan who has been enslaved for years? Call 888-2533522, 888-2533522, or go to metaxis talk.com. Please do it metaxistalk.com. For more than 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless providers standing behind their values and their exceptional service. They're an example of

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People, they want the parts that they like and that they agree with, and they want to get rid of, and so they're trying to process, how can we keep the parts we like and get rid of what we don't like, right? So with, you know, Thomas Jefferson, you know, he snips out the parts of the Bible that are miraculous, and he keeps out the parts of the Bible that are miraculous, us and it keeps the wonderful ethics of Jesus. And then you want to say, well, what's so wonderful about them? Maybe Jesus was just a nut and it's all wrong and you just like it, but you don't care

that it's logically wrong. You're not being logical about this, you know, that if he wasn't God or whatever, on what basis do you say these ethics are so wonderful? And so you have this, it is funny how some people are willing to be utterly clear-eyed, like Nietzsche, or Dostoevsky, or. and say that if you get rid of God, this is what's going to happen. But you have all these other people thinking, well, no, wait a minute. We think we can make it work.

We can make this work somehow. And I would argue that that instinct is evidence for God. That we have something within us that we can't escape, because we are in fact made in God's image by God, that knows something about truth. and so we can't really cold-bloodedly wipe it away and say it doesn't matter. We somehow sense that that can't be right. Well, I think what you just said is absolutely right,

and it's one of the things that keep people, non-believers, keep stumbling over the fact that if everything we see is just an illusion, which is the deduction you have to come to if there's no God, you ultimately will come to the idea that everything. That's why I think art falls apart. That's why you get abstract art where people put squiggles up there because they don't trust what the human beings sees. But if everything that we see is an illusion,

how come every time I walk toward Fifth Avenue, I hit Fifth Avenue, how come you can produce numbers, which are imaginary things? There's no such thing as a two, and yet I can produce numbers in such that they can predict when light's going to hit the earth from a million miles away,

and where and what's going to happen next? How does that happen? So we actually do have a connection, a collaboration with reality. And it's very, very hard to get to that place, the place where you have a collaboration with reality without God, ultimately. And if we have a sense that can do that with numbers, if we have a sense that can see light, the light we see isn't the light God sees,

but it's the light human see, then why shouldn't the morality that we see be morality? You know, this is the whole reason why Dostoevsky has this character say that good and bad are going to change over, because all you've got then is your desires, basically. All you've got left of your egos. That's interesting. You mentioned that a few minutes ago. The idea that it's the apotheosis of the ego, the will, which, going back to Eden,

I mean, it's that we can be as gods so that what I want has to take precedence over everything else. So it's almost like baked into the system. that God created, that if you turn from him, you become this, you know, miltonic, byronic, satanic figure, and it's inescapable. You want to be, you want to rule, you want to reign in hell as long as it's your hell. I mean, it sounds like that's where that's going. Well, this is why in my journey to faith, which took so long because I'm so stubborn, but like in my journey to faith, the Marquis de Saad, who invented Satan, where we get the word sadism,

He was a huge influence on me because at one point when I became an atheist, I started reading atheist philosopher. And I would read the existentialist and I read all the different atheists. I would say, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't hold together. This doesn't hold together. And then I got to the Marquis de Sade who said, no, we should, you know, rape and kill people because it gives us joy. That's what nature does and there's no God.

So why not? And I thought, that makes sense. And that's when I stopped being an atheist because I thought if that's where that's going, I'm not going there. But see, that's right. That takes some kind of courage and intellectual honesty to see where it's going. Right. And so when you read, you know, God forbid people read Marquis de Sade.

People don't realize how horrific some things actually can be. That, like, you don't want to read it because it's really horrifying. It can be, it can be, it can mess you up. It's so bad. It's scary. It's like, you know, if you take that pill, you could die. Like, be careful. And what he's talking about.

about, again, to see things that clearly to say, okay, listen, there's no God, therefore there's no good or evil. But most people can't accept that. They say, well, I don't like God, but I like the idea of good and evil, and what I believe is good is good, and they're not honest about it. So Nietzsche is honest about it. Marquis de Sada is honest about it. And it takes you to a place so dark that it's scary. Well, I think that's why, I mean, I, I, I mean, I, I'm not, you. I I don't know if this is happening to you, but it is happening a lot to me, so I suspect it is. I'm starting to talk to people who are not religious, who have started to talk in religious terms. Yes.

They haven't changed. They haven't changed. They haven't changed. But suddenly the word demonic is coming. Yes. I'm going to hear people talking about the end of days, which, you know, because I trust Jesus who said nobody knows when the end, I never talk about the end of days. But suddenly people who have no faith are telling me, it feels like the end times. This feels like something is coming to an end.

And I think it is because this pattern that the Gospels and the Bible explained to us is kind of being revealed. It's kind of the skeleton is coming out of the body. Well, it's kind of like the thing of, you know, running out of gas and being on fumes for a while. Yes. We've been on fumes for a while. Oz Guinness has called it, you know, the cut flower society. It's like, well, that flower looks wonderful. And you realize, yes.

And yet, it's been cut. It is dying. It will die. Don't be fooled by the fact that it still looks wonderful. It'll only look wonderful for a little while. It's still got a little juice in the green fuse. And then it's over. And Nitre called it the shadow of the dead god.

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We can't go any farther. But we've had, as you put it, and you, when you're talking about the romantics, they, they had had centuries of this. You get this in Europe, too. They have this kind of cultural heritage,

which carries them, uh, to some extent. But you're saying that people who ordinarily wouldn't see themselves as religious are kind of looking around and solving for X. Yeah. And when you solve for X, you go, I don't have any other explanation except to say, this looks maybe evil.

What is happening? You know, recently I had this idea come to me that all the history books of the Bible, the stories of the kings and all this stuff, are one conversation. And the conversation is God saying, don't kill babies. And the Israelites saying, well, what if, what if we insist? No, no, just don't kill the babies. And the people say, yeah, but my wife is a foreigner. I'm telling you, do not kill the babies.

That's the entire history of the Israelites. And finally, when one of the kings just goes out and kills the babies, does it in Gahena, which becomes Jesus' synonym for hell, you know. And now that we are living in this world where we are killing, not just killing babies, but we have to fight to convince people that it wasn't their right to do it, which to me is specifically evil. I can understand a person in distress doing something terrible, but to declare that that terrible thing is a human right.

It's an actual act. There's no other, I hate to use the word evil because it cuts out any kind of argument. But still, that's an actual act of evil. The idea that we are butchering children in an attempt to change their sex, to turn their body into a costume of the opposite sex, I mean, there is something demonic about it. It's hard not to believe that something has escaped through a crevice in the ground, and come up to take us over.

And I just think the fact that secular thinkers like Nietzsche and deep religious thinkers like Doste actually saw this moment that only this moment could come, that you have to think that either when we reach the end of that prediction, something new and beautiful will occur to save our butts, or we've reached the end of the road. And it's hard to know which. Well, you know, when you refer to the idea of, you know, cutting up body parts and in a sense trying to refigure ourselves as though we could, as though we are gods who can create ourselves, that of course takes us back 200 years to Mary Shelley and to Frankenstein.

So it is fascinating that some of these poets and seers, so to speak, these visionaries, were already putting their fingers on what we're looking at. Well, it brings us back to Frankenstein in two ways. One is in the kind of idea that human beings can create any kind of person that they want, but also in the elimination of women, which she foresaw. I mean, to me, Frankenstein is the story of a man who makes a human being without a woman. And the motherlessness of the... What do you mean to you is to...

That's true. Well, yes, but there are very few people who've articulated it. Right. A lot of people say it's about a man playing God. And I say, well, no, because people do create human beings. All he does is remove the woman. He's not removing God. He's removing the woman.

And I think that is so important because we've not only want to remove women by saying some guy in a skirt can become a woman, that makes him a woman. But we want to remove the values that... womanhood has really defended and represented throughout history, the values of home, the values of nurturing, the values of humanity. We can only picture, as materialist, we can only picture every relationship as a power relationship. Which is itself a demonic concept. And it's also a parody, you know, that's the toxic masculine part of masculinity. In other words, it's a bastardization of,

of what real manhood is. Yeah. But it's interesting when you mention, like, you know, the verb to nurture, talk about a dirty word. I mean, that, today's, you know, whatever, thought leaders would sneer at the idea of women as nurturers, that they would absolutely somehow be uncomfortable with that. Like that that's just, that's Passet or it's bourgeois or I don't know why. But it's so interesting when you think it used to be this beautiful thing.

Well, it's actually an amazing thing that we have reached the point where we say of homemakers that they're just homemakers. They're just at home bombs. I mean, even what's funny is a lot of this is fall. One of the things that gives me hope is a lot of this is scientifically falling apart. It has already fallen apart. A lot of the ideas that contributed to this materialism are, going by the wayside scientifically.

One of these ideas that has now been shown physically, I mean, I hate to say it's been proved scientifically because it was true. It was proved by simply human observation is that people receive their individuality from their mothers.

After birth, in their interchange, there's things that happen in the human mind and the human brain that only happen in the interchange between the baby and the mother. And the baby and the mother are actually one person, even after birth, until that individuality comes in. So it's one of the urgent, you know, spiritual tasks of human beings.

And while other people can fill in, nobody can quite do it like the actual mother. And I think that that's, you know, one of the, I think that's one, I think one of the things we're trying to destroy is our humanity, to be honest with you. You know, I think that when people say, people are now talking about, well, maybe this AI will replace us. And you think, replace us how? What do you think a human being is? Do you think a human being something?

I just have to interrupt here. I want to just say, for now and all time, artificial intelligence is artificial. And it's not intelligent. It's nonsense. It's utter nonsense. And you have people trying to, you know, this gets to everything we're talking about. But the idea that there are people foolish enough to think that if a computer what is powerful enough, it's going to make the leap, the infinite leap to some consciousness

or something like that, which is, you know, like, how do you do it? That's like if I'm creating a ladder and eventually, you know, I'm going to be, I'm going to be able to touch the sun, you know, and you think that, no, it actually, it's worse than that. If you go back to what you were just saying about, you know, Newton and Darwin, and we are just, you know, we're nothing. We're just material, right? If you believe that, then all this stuff follows. That's right. And that's kind of where we are, that there are people who believe somehow that we could create, I mean, it is like, you know, Shelley's Frankenstein, we can create a human being out of parts. It's like, well, a human being is more than a bunch of parts.

Well, this to me is the center of everything we're going through. So we'll talk about it, yeah. What is a human being? What does it mean to be a human being? And I think it's really fascinating. Like everybody's looking for a new, because we are in such political difficulties, everybody's returning to political philosophies.

A friend of mine the other day was reading a very famous essay by Carl Schmidt called the concept of the political. He's describing this thing to me, and I'm listening to it. So I actually went back and read it. it's only like 75 pages, so I read the essay. And the thing about Carl Schmidz is he became an enthusiastic Nazi. And I think...

Not that we're judging. That raises questions me about your philosophy. But as I was reading it, I was thinking, oh, yes, I recognize this. This is Machiavelli, this is Nietzsche. This is all these people who come up with systems. Freud, too. And this is not to say these people aren't brilliant. They notice how things work, but they have no way of acknowledging the in

built sense of morality that human beings are given. So Sigmund Freud, a great example. And I, you know, he was a quack, but he was a brilliant quack. And he said a lot of things that are true. And he talked about repression. He talked about, you know, your sexual desires being repressed. Freud didn't want you to take the repression away. He was a Victorian. He thought the repression was just great. But people extrapolated from that as they went forward saying, oh, what we need to do is we need to, you know, get free ourselves. We need to free our sexuality. But Freud, and the reason they could that about Freud is because it never occurred to Freud that we had an inbuilt moral sense that accepts some repression.

As a good thing. And just says, oh, yeah, no. It's like a helpful guard against madness and suicide. And of course we do. Of course we always have, you know. They say that philosophers get their idea of human beings from the most advanced technology they have. So, you know, Plato has the chariot.

and the horsemen is our reason and the chariot. The horses are different, you know, feelings we have. But the charioteer has a moral sense. He knows where the chariot is supposed to go. So he has this idea of a built-in moral guide. Whereas Freud is building his idea off of the steam engine.

Things are repressed and the energy has to come out. There is no moral guide there. We're just a machine. Our psyches are just mechanical. And now you talk about things that are, you know, download software or software our hardware and all this stuff. But none of this accounts for the fact that we are perfectly capable of saying something is wrong, even when we can't explain why it's wrong.

And the evolutionary biologists are now saying, well, you know, we evolved so that when we smell something bad, we think it's wrong. And you think like, well, really because we evolved sight too. And my sight actually is fading, but it will get me down to the corner of the street. So I'm actually seeing something that's really there. So why should my moral sense be utterly open to question? Well, yes. And they contradict themselves at every turn with all this kind of stuff. And it's interesting, too, because when you bring up Freud,

because Freud was talking about sexual repression, it was literally sexy, right? So it's the idea that... there should be any boundaries. It's like, we'll throw that away. We just want freedom, sexual freedom, as though it will lead to good somehow, right? But you wouldn't say that about repressing violent tendencies, right? In other words, you say, no, no, no, it's good that you repress your violent tendencies.

Don't be stabbing people in the face just because you hate them, because that could be a bad thing. We don't have any problem with that concept of repression. But Freud obviously, you know, hitched his way. wagon to the libido and made it sound like some kind of a just a general good.