The Eric Metaxas Show - Andrew Klavan (continued)

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 Mattaxas. Folks, you're listening to a special edition of the show. These are the audio versions of amazing conversations I had.

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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. Just to be fair to Freud, because I feel he gets kicked around a lot because he was wrong about many things. Just because he was a quack. Yeah.

And he was a quack. I mean, he would extrapolate from like 15. hysterical deans, you know, victorious. But he didn't, he did think that repression was a good thing. But implied in what he said. Somebody, René Girard, the French, you know, he's a French Catholic philosopher. He said of Nietzsche that when the Nazis adopted Nietzsche, he said he doesn't feel sorry for Nietzsche.

All they did was they did the worst thing you can do to a philosopher. They took him seriously. And I think that that's Freud's problem. It's the people who came afterwards and took him seriously, and thought things that he would never have thought. But he didn't, because of this idea of materialism, because of this idea that we are mechanistic, the idea that the moral sense is an actual human sense,

like sight and hearing and smell, that reacts to something. And yes, it gives you a human version of it. You know, things don't smell until we smell them. Things aren't, you don't hear the tree fall in the forest until you hear it. But still, it is a realistic reaction. If I hear a tree fall and I hear crunching on the ground and you hear a harp play, your hearing is wrong. There's something wrong with your hearing. And so... Or I just died.

Or yes. Maybe it's a tree. Hit by the tree, obviously. Exactly. It's logical. So, I mean, this, we are talking with this great illogic, but it is an idea unfolding itself. And again, my hope comes from the fact that, shockingly enough, things like quantum physics are beginning to realize that everything exists when it is perceived. Everything takes its form when we perceive it, which then you have to think that, oh, well, then mind comes before matter. So that what came before any matter, you know, what comes before any matter is an actual mind creating something. Well, that idea, I've talked to John Lennox about that in the past and others, but the idea that you have people,

who they are such dedicated materialists, they're such ideologues, that they can't bear the idea that there's such a thing as mind, they can only talk about there's a brain. Right. Because mind would imply something transcendent or something beyond the physical,

mushy thing in our skulls. They don't like that. They want it to just be, you know, that there's this physical thing called a brain, and they can't bear the idea of mind. And that's kind of part of this story that, you know, you touch on in the truth and beauty is how you keep bumping up against problems when you have that view of things. If you say that everything is material, you think, okay, well, then why does it bother me if my family is murdered and raped? Why? Why would it matter?

well, there's some part of me that seems to know that that's wrong. And then, but people like Nietzsche and others would be bold enough to say, well, that's just a social construct, just, just bat it away. And this goes on and on and on. But it's interesting to me that you're saying that now we've come to a time where people who ordinarily wouldn't think of themselves as religious or anything, whatever, something is kicking in. They're saying that something is,

We have reached a crossroads. They use a cliche, but it is a crossroads. On the one hand, you have the ideas of guy like Michelle Foucault, said every human category is going to be erased until man himself is erased like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea. This is what, this is an actual quote from Foucault. And I think that following that...

But in French, it sounds much more... Everything in French sounds like... This is what being a French philosopher is saying wrong things beautifully. that's how you become a French war. But yeah, that is one way of going. And the other way of going is the other one that's saying, no, if we're created, if we are created things,

which just seems more and more likely, even scientifically, if we're created things, then there's something meaningful about the way we're created. So, yeah, we can enhance human bodies. I think we're all looking forward to... We're both wearing glasses. We're both wearing glasses. Yeah.

You know, a pacemaker is a kind of enhancement of the human body. But we have to do it in keeping with our humanity as opposed to trying to transcend it or get away from it because we are created. We have a purpose. We have a point. The scientists, in my opinion, are now twisting like worms on a hook because in order to get rid of the clear fingerprint of creation, they have to come up with these hilarious scenarios. Like they'll say, well, we're all in a computer simulation. Yeah. And I think, well, is the programmer this big Jewish guy with a long white beard? Because I think I know him, you know.

And then they have the multiverse, which is my favorite, which is that this world is so perfect for the creation of the human being. Yeah. That we must be one of infinite universes. So this is like you and me playing cards. And I say, you just happen to be in the one game where I pulled five straight flushes in a row. Right. Yeah. So that can't stand.

Well, it's so preposterous. I mean, it's laughable, and it needs to be mocked because it really is so dumb. Yeah. But it's kind of like the emperor has no clothes. Who's going to say it because everybody's worried about, I don't know, tenure or what their friends think or something. But a lot of people in the real world, they're seeing these kinds of things. They're seeing the preposterousness of some of the ideas that are being put out. And so I think that, as you put it, we're at a kind of crossroads in a way.

As we were told we would be. As we were told we would be. Well, you mentioned, you touched on Hamlet. I think that's the first part of your book. It's interesting that Shakespeare, in his genius, is touching on some of these ideas a while before we get to the romantics. Shakespeare, to me, Shakespeare, when people challenge my faith saying, how can you believe that a Jewish carpenter rose from the dead,

I find it much easier to believe that than that Shakespeare was a human being. I mean, those plays, I go through them every couple of years from start to finish, the understanding, the depth of understanding of humanity. And Hamlet is just no question about the Reformation and the ultimate effect of having the church fragment, you know, the way it does. Hamlet is coming back from Wittenberg, you know, it's like the audience, you know, obviously the play, that would be an anachronism, but the audience didn't care. Spears surely didn't care about anachronism.

And the first words of the play are who's there as the guards call for the ghost. And that's really the question of the play. If God is gone, if we can't trust the church, who are we? What are we doing? And it ends, the play ends with Hamlet, Horatio saying of Hamlet, put him on the stage, because if he were a play, we would have understood his life, essentially. And so that is the Gospels. That, to me, is the Gospels.

That, to me, is that Jesus, like the prophets of old, lives out the meaning of life. He doesn't just say the things that he has to say. It's not all in his words. His actual actions are always symbolic, but they're also themselves. And I think that that's the way we all are supposed to live, that my actions have meaning. I think this is why Jesus spoke in parables. You can't listen to a parable and not give it meaning. All it is is a story.

Two guys, two sons, one went away, one came back. But you suddenly know what that means. You know that life has meaning. You know that physical things have meaning, that they represent things, which means that your body, if you're a woman, represent something. Your body, if you're a man, represents something. And if you live into that representation, you're living into the truth of your life, which is greater than the fact that you come and your body comes and goes.

And to me, that is the sort of romantic reading of the, the Gospels, that everything Jesus does is literally the case, but also deeply, deeply mean evil. 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

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beauty, obviously Keats says it, but there's no doubt that there is a connection between truth and goodness and beauty. I say there's no doubt. There's no doubt in my mind. But talk about that a little bit, that concept that beauty somehow points to God. What does that mean? Yeah. Well, I think it's definitely true. I think that there is something in the, you know, when Keith said beauty is truth and truth beauty, he wasn't talking about prettiness.

He wasn't talking about I like this and you like that. He was talking about some objective, like the rainbow, it's an objective quality, but it's only perceived subjectively. that's the whole point of the rainbow. It's not a subjective experience. You actually are seeing something that's there, but it's seen by you. It is created in the human eye and in the human mind.

And beauty is similar. When you are experiencing beauty, you are experiencing something, and I think what you're experiencing is truth. And truth is not just something that you can express. In fact, I think the deepest truths are all inexpressible. It's something that you experience. And my favorite example of this is the Pietta.

which I think is the most beautiful. I mean, when you actually stand in front of the Pia Thai, you think like, oh, my lord, you know, it's actually as beautiful as it looks in the pictures and more. And it's a depiction of the saddest thing that ever happened on earth. A mother losing her child, which is the saddest thing that I think can happen on earth. And the child just happens to be the son of God, who is even vastly, more cosmically sad.

And yet it's fantastically beautiful. If that's not the greatest confirmation that life has meaning and purpose and some sense of wonder and awe that you can show me the saddest, most great, why isn't it ugly? Why is that thing not ugly? When I'm looking at a mother mourning her child, why is that not, you know, what makes that beautiful? You can't even speak about it. I can't even get the words out to make that link except to say the great truth of the beauty of life, the meaning of life, the kind of. cosmic importance of life is in that statue. And I think that that is what art does.

Art reminds us that the world is symbolic. It is not. The world is language. Matter is language. Life is language. It's all speaking. It's all speaking God into the world. Tom Howard, who was a friend of mine, and he passed a couple of years ago,

but he wrote a book called Chance or the Dance, where that's the basic thesis is that you have these two views. You know, one is the secular materialist view that says nothing means anything. And the other one, which is what we're talking about here, is that everything means everything. Not everything means something. Everything means everything. Is that God created a universe where everything points to everything else. And so when you're talking about why is it?

it that the Pia Tau is beautiful. It is hard to talk about it. It doesn't mean you can't talk about it, but somehow there's something in us, because without us, there's no, you know, but that it's pointing to something that we know is at the heart of the meaning of the universe, that that's it somehow. And it's simultaneously, gloriously beautiful and unbearably sad. And I think, you know, I guess art in some way removes sort of the fog of fleshliness, because, as I'm sure, you know, you can lose your faith if you stub your toe, you know. You just think, oh, you know, that is so painful. There can't be.

I'm sorry. I was just totally mistaken about this God thing. But when you can experience it at a little bit of a distance, suddenly you see, like, oh, even in this deepest, darkest tragedy, there is some beauty that that doesn't entail being cold-blooded. It doesn't entail being cruel or uncompassionate. It simply is a bigger vision, a vision from a step back, like when you step back to see scenery or something like that. Well, because it's heartbreaking, and that's what makes it beautiful.

And you think, what is beautiful about something that's heartbreaking? Yes. Well, I guess part of that is it implies heart. Yeah. Right? Yep. And it points to the pain at the center. It points to the brokenness at the center of the universe,

which Jesus came to repair, to heal. I mean, it's all there. And somehow we see this intuitively. Yep. And then again, you have to ask the question, well, why do we see it intuitively? Why do we see it? Why would that be?

Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things I love about Keats is he was, He was such an honest poet that he talks about the sort of a door between us and completely entering into the beauty of the world. It's hard because we're afraid of death. It's hard because we're afraid. We're afraid all the time. We know we're walking on water.

We know we could die at any time and we have little faith. And we always want to look down and make sure everything is all right. And tomorrow is going to be something terrible is not going to happen tomorrow. And it keeps us from the jury. that you experience in those moments when you let that go. You know, I think this has got to be the least quoted phrase in the gospel is Jesus says, I tell you these things because I want the joy that's in me to be in you. Like, I never hear anybody preach on that, you know, but because he sees it, obviously.

He's got it all in his, you know, in his scopes, and he wants to give it to us. And you can sometimes hear it in his voice as you're reading. You can hear this frustration. you see this. It's right in front of you, you know. And yet for us, the fear that we have and the death hanging over is the fear of loss and the fear that we won't have enough money, that we won't have good clothes, that we want to have all the things that we worry about. I think it just keeps us from delving into that sea of joy, you know. That sea of joy.

You, when you talk about truth and beauty, again, the title of the book is the truth and beauty, it's interesting to my mind that truth, Jesus says, he is the truth. Right. Which is radically opposite to the idea that there are just facts. Again, that's the mechanistic, scientific, materialistic view, that there's just facts. But truth, who's to say? What is truth? What is truth?

he says, I am truth. And then you think, well, what can it mean that a human being is saying, I am truth? He doesn't say these syllogisms are truth. He says, I am truth, which gets to this idea, which I want you to expand on, that, you know, that everything has meaning and that he embodied that in a way that it was embodied once in the history of the world. Right, right, because only he. had the power to do it. And yet, since it all, when you look at it that way, since it all makes sense, that to me is one of the great, you know, I'm not into proving, you know, the Gospels are true.

At some point, you sort of see, oh, yes, as C.S. Lewis said, not only does it illuminates everything, not only is it light itself, it illuminates everything else. But it does seem to me that there's deep evidence for the fact that we recognize in Jesus's life, some truth that we can't put our fingers on. And I think that all of art is like that, right? All of art is this kind of communication. It's not, you know, good art doesn't preach. It doesn't tell you this is true. But it just represents something that you can't quite say. And everybody does this.

We all do it when somebody asks you, what does that feel like? We all turn to metaphor. Nobody says, nobody can describe exactly what it feels like to win a baseball game or have a child. You know, you sort of say, oh, it was like Christmas morning. It was like this. It was like that. And that's all art is, is this kind of preservation of this human experience, which changes over time and yet remains the same in some ways.

So one of the things that really bothers me that's happening now is this bodilization of old art because people were politically incorrect. So they cut out James Bond because he says all these racist or sexist things. PG Woodhouse, one of my favorite writers, one of the great writers of all time. They changed them and boulderized them. And I think, no, these guys had a vision in time. And some of those things we don't want in our time, but we want to know they were there. It's like cutting out an old math book because some of it was wrong and like banning those mistakes that people make.

So you can't trace how they got to the right answer, you know. And I think that's even worse than that. By the way, just parenthetically, thank you for using the word bodlerization. That's never happened here before. Well, no, but that is very interesting that that is happening, that people are that foolish, that they think that you can do that, and that there's some point to that. I mean, it kind of gets to, you know, cancel culture. It's a way of dealing with reality that is obviously flawed. This is not the way, you know, to help the situation. This is a way to say, we don't. don't like what's happening, so we're going to crush dissenting voices. And I think this is part of

what you were saying in the beginning about average people thinking, this doesn't feel right. I wasn't raised this way. We were able to argue and have different points of view. There's something healthy about that. Well, not only is that, I mean, you only have to do it if you're living a lie. You only have to shut people down if you're living a lie. I mean, you know, obviously you keep people from doing violence to other people, but I can't. think of an idea so horrible that I don't want it to express. For more than 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless providers standing behind their values and their exceptional service.

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Those things don't bother me. They bother me, sure, but go ahead and express them and let me answer back. It's only when you stop people from talking. And then we walk around with this burden of lies. You know, we walk around, we're not allowed to see things. not allowed to say things that are right in front of us because we will be branded as some kind of bigot or some sort of wrong think person. And I just think that that's a terrible way to live. And they did it in the Soviet Union for so long and they called it double consciousness

because you would have to speak things believing them knowing they were false. Right. You know, or else you were out of them. But most of us know that somehow it is, it's deeply, offensive to our humanity to live that way, to live a lie, or to be forced to say something that isn't true. And it really becomes, it's a power play. If I can get you to say, you know, Bruce Jenner is a woman, I'm playing a game with you because I'm forcing you to say something that on some level you know can't be true, but to get along, you'll say it. And this

is the way totalitarians and others have, it's the only way they can function. Yeah. And it's shocking how well it works. It's shocking that you can get people, you can talk to an actual woman and say, you know, what is a woman or are you a woman? Or can a man become a woman? And she literally frees up because she's been so bullied into feeling that there's something wrong with her. But to me, one of the great evidences of the fall is how important our virtue is to us. It's only when you realize you have no virtue. You know, that's one of the great reliefs of Christianity is you go like, oh, I get it. I have no virtue. It's not there. It's only then that you can start to say, like, you can't

take that away from me. Part of this gets us to the idea. You know, when you're talking about the romantic poets, somebody needs to say that back then, people actually read poetry. Yes. Well, it was the best-selling, yeah. Well, even if it wasn't the best, then the point is that people read poetry. Right. And something happened in the 20th century, roughly, where elites decided that we're going to create art that average people will think is ugly, but we'll tell them, shut up. It's really beautiful, and you need to say that it's beautiful. We're going to create unreadable poetry, but we're going to say, just because you're too stupid to understand it, it's really brilliant, anything that rhymes is bourgeois, anything that's charming is kitchie. That idea,

because you're talking about bullying people into saying things or not saying things. You know, you can see that happening in the 20th century, you know, when, when, I don't know, who is it, Duchamp, whoever put the urinal. You know, in other words, it's really, a very perverse view of things that is anti-beauty and it's simultaneously anti-truth. And we can trace it back pretty far. It's over 100 years ago now that that kind of happened. And I think that's interesting because I feel like people, especially in elite institutions, were propagandized into saying like, oh, yeah, Longfellow is passe,

say, anything that rhymes or that you might like or want to memorize. We don't do that anymore. Now it's about something else. And it's kind of this, it's a sick, elitist view of art that, in a way, says that there is no such thing as beauty or truth. It seems to me at the heart of that project. Well, I have a slightly more benign sense of this in that I think it's an almost natural unfolding of ideas. If poetry is the most popular art form, the best artists are going to go there. If Fred Astaire got into the business today, he'd probably be running a dance school somewhere

because nobody's tap dancing anymore. Nobody does the kind of dance that he does. But in that moment when poetry is so popular, these great poets suddenly rise up. So they're at the forefront of human thought, and the thought that is being unraveled, unspooled, is this thought of materialism. So you go a few generations on, and why would you create something beautiful when everything that human beings perceive is simply an illusion, because human beings are just this random creation of evolution?

And what's hilarious about this is while that's happening, ladies are sitting home reading novels, and because the novels are kind of for second-rate artist, you know, and suddenly the novel becomes popular, and now the best writers are all novelists. Now you get these great, you know, you get the Dostafsky's

and the Tolstores and the Dickens and Jane Austen and all those people, taking over the novel, And so the lead thinkers go there, and as the materialism catches up with them, the novel starts to fall apart. And the people go to the movies. And the critics are going, all the movies, you know, that's the same thing they said about the novel. All the movies, it's just for the Hoy-Polloy. I'll tell you, if we have time, I'll tell you, it's just an experience that happened to me the other day. My wife and I went to this kind of weird thing where they took the paintings of Van Gogh,

and they splayed them over this wall. And it was a little cheesy, but it also worked. so kind of interesting. And I had read in the New York Times, just what the guy would have said about the movies in the 1930s. He would have said, oh, the movies. He said, oh, some people, he actually said there some people may like this. Some of the Hoy-Polloy man. Right. As I walk out of this, the usher comes up to me and says, you know, your wife paid for the elite ticket, so you get this as well. And he handed me a virtual reality machine, a mask. So I thought, okay, I've already paid for it and I put this thing on.

Unbelievable. It was great. I'm sitting on a thing that spins around, a barstool spins around 360 degrees. Anywhere you go, you're inside of Van Gogh painting. And you can walk from one painting to another and when you walk through a door and you look behind you, the door is closing. The door is right there

with you. You're in this three-dimensional painting. And I thought, if I were 20 years younger, this is what I would be doing because this is the art of the future. And of course, the guy in the New York Times is going, well, some people, some people may like this. I'm thinking, no, this is the new thing, because it is incredibly beautiful. Are you tired of not getting a good night's sleep? Well, my friend, Mike Lundell, has created the

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Have you stayed at a modern hotel lately? Have I? Yeah. It's kind of you feel like, what are you in for us, son, you know? Well, how interesting. But how interesting? Because when you think about, you know, if you want to think about the Soviet communist era, right? Again, it's this materialist view that says, look, you're nothing.

So you need food, maybe vodka, shelter, maybe some cigarettes. That's it. You don't need beauty. And that crushes the soul. Oh, it's debilitating. And, of course, those ideas carried into the West. And so you have a lot of buildings. Again, this is on the theme of beauty, but that are not, they don't do.

What was the famous line? Vincent Scully, the Yale architecture professor, said that, you know, one strode into the old Penn Station like a god, and one scuttles into the new. Penn Station like a rat. Now, the thing is, he has his finger on something. There is something about beauty that speaks to the soul. And if something speaks to the soul, it speaks to the

question whether there is a soul. Yes. And that's part of it. So when you talk about going to a modern hotel and it sort of feels like a prison, what does that say? I'm telling you, it is a hatred of the human person. I think this hatred of women, which is now permeating our society, this idea that there's no such thing as a woman. I think it's a hatred of the human. And I think that there's some idea, there's some concept that a man is somehow this artificial intelligence. It's a bunch of algorithms. It can

be controlled. If I send you a certain ad at the right moment, you're going to buy this thing. I can control. You're just algorithms working itself out. And this thing that women do that they can't quite get their hands on, they just want to destroy it. And one of the, the, the, Well, it points to God. It points to God in a way that is. very annoying to people who hate God. Yeah. And the idea, the idea of the Madonna, the idea of Mary, the ultimate, you mentioned the Pietta, nurturing, loving, having a womb, there is something about that.

Turning matter into spirit? There's something about that which is as anti-mechanistic as anything in the universe could be. Yes. And it is at war with the mechanistic, materialistic worldview. And the people who profit from that or who see that as the future, I think, are genuinely, I mean, I'm a little bit appalled that more women haven't risen up against this idea that I can, you know, mutilate my body and become them. To me, that's so, so offensive. It really is like saying, it's like saying you could put on an Andrew Claver, mask and become me, you know? I mean, it's just, just, it's an offensive idea. Yeah. Well, but it's also

fundamentally preposterous. That's what's so fascinating to me is how eventually these, these lies become so brazen that your average person says, uh, nah, I'm not buying it. Like I, you know, if you force me, um, you know, to go to the Guggenheim and say like, oh, I like these paintings, I'll do that. But certain things, I, I don't think I can go. I don't think I can go there. I'm interested in the idea that when you talk about these things are anti-human or talking about the destruction of humans, this gets to, you know, the Garden of Eden and the ultimate satanic project, which is revenge on God for creating these creatures in his image. And therefore, what we're seeing right now is, to some extent, a demonic rage against

God manifested as a desire to destroy his creation. And you see this through history, but that's, in a sense, we're seeing a unfortunately mature iteration of it. You know, I think that when you become materialist, everything becomes a power relationship, right? The only power, the only force on earth is power. I mean, this is what Michelle Foucaulte said. everything that we think is good or bad is just a power structure.

You may think you're, people may say you're crazy, but they're just trying to throw you out of the world because they want to maintain their power. And that's why people can't understand the idea of Christian marriage, and it's also why they can't understand the idea of God, why they're so offended by the idea of God, because you submit to God. You submit to God.

There's no, you know, you can wrestle with them. He'll let you wrestle with them, but ultimately you submit to God. And if you think everything is a power relationship, you've just been crushed. You know, if you've now given up your soul, you've given up your free will. And of course, those of us who embrace faith suddenly find ourselves incredibly free, incredibly released from all the things that people are telling us who were true, all the things that people tell us we have to believe or must do, we suddenly realize, oh, I don't have to do any of those things.

All I have to do is submit to God. I don't have to submit to any person unless, you know, that's the right thing to do. The ideas of forgiveness and grace are similarly infuriating to someone who believes it's all about power. Right. That's right. I mean, all of that, you know, it's as if we're looking through, I guess, like a rolled-up newspaper, and we just can't see the rest of the world. I mean, there's so many ways in which we interact that have absolutely nothing to do with power. that we, if all you can see is power,

then everything is a struggle for dominance over somebody else. Well, that's part of the reason. I mean, you asked the question, how is it possible that women today aren't more upset about their own effective cancellation from the universe? But I think it has to do with the idea that they, early on, the feminist movement, brought into the idea of power, that it's about power,

that they wanted to really be like men in a sentence and thought, you know, we'll get ours now, we'll be like men. Because they were at the forefront of how offensive it is that a woman would be, and when you think of what a mother is, unbelievably self-sacrificial. It's amazingly surrendering, yeah. Right? It's a picture.

of someone serving her children, her family, in a way that most people would say, that's so beautiful. It's so touching. It breaks my heart. It makes me want to die for that woman because she's doing something so beautiful. But if you have a view, a materialistic view, a view that's all about power, it's the most offensive idea in the world. But I made me a vow to the moon and stars

I'd search the Humph of Thompson bars And kill that man and give me that awful name You know somewhere in one of my novels I had a character say there's a reasonable explanation for everything And that's the one some people choose to believe Because you see people sacrifice themselves You see them, you know, sacrifice I mean, I know you have, I know I have

We've sacrificed things simply for the right to speak our minds You know, lots of money, lots of positions, lots of love that we've sacrificed simply for the right to speak our minds and they try to explain that with some physical explanation. There is no material explanation for that. You do it because that's where your spirit lies

and that's who you are and to not be able to do it is to be less than human. And the fact that people do that and they do it regularly, they die. I mean, you and I have lost little things like money and friends, but people lose their lives and their bodies and all kinds of things.

And they lose everything to speak the truth, to represent the truth, to do the right thing. There's no material explanation for that. It's kind of funny because I remember when I wrote my biography of William Wilberforce, there were people that they make the argument that like, no, no, no, it was just economics that abolished the slave trade. You know, it wouldn't be possible for human beings to go against, you know, the almighty dollar or the pound or whatever.

In others, they can't even comprehend. that it might be possible for people to say, this is wrong, we need to do what we can to abolish this. Because, again, it offends this idea that they bought into. We still have some time left. I wanted to ask you about your sense of the future. Do you have hope for the future? Where do you see things trending, so to speak? I have hope for the future, very much have hope for the future.

I do have to wonder if, as I say, we've reached a crossroads and the future is going to be two things. It's going to be people who go down one road and people who go down the other. We always think it's going to be one way or the other. We think the society is just going to be one thing. Right. But I've begun to wonder if maybe this is where the ones and the two is going in different directions. Did you just say sheep and goats? The sheep's in the goats.

That's what I was going for. couldn't quite remember. And I, again, I would never predict the end of days or anything like that. But I do think that what's happening with technology is miraculous. It's beautiful. You know, I get addicted to those videos of babies who can hear for the first time because they put an implant and they say, this is, you know. What a cliche. No, I know.

You said, they're sobbing, you know, the whole baby. And I think that so many beautiful things can happen. But as you say, there'll be people in Davos. saying, as one of them once said, think of the compliance. Think of the compliance. I'm glad I hadn't heard that until now. He said, we'll be able to put, you know, tracers in medicine. So when you take the medicine, we'll know whether you took it or not.

Think of the compliance. And so there's going to be those guys. And there's going to be people who say, oh, no, this is actually a fulfillment of Jesus' prophecy that if you think his miracles are good, whether you'll see what you'll do when you believe in him, I think that prophecy is going to also. come true at the same time. And so, look, it's going to be what it always is, a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness. I just want to make sure I'm on the right

train, you know, I mean, I think that that's all any of us can do. And if we're lucky, like, like, I was so lucky in my life, you know, I didn't, there was no war that I had to go to. Just as I reached draft days, the Vietnam War ended, and, you know, so much peace and prosperity. But sometimes you get a different role of the dice, and you wind up in Lord of the Rings, you know, and then you have to get the ring to mortar, you know? It's like it's always, it's always, it's always a, there's always a bit of chance involved or if not chance providence. And, uh, and so it's going to be like that. There's going to be these two choices as there always are. And they're going to be struggles between those who, who feel if you want to choose the dark, go ahead. I'm going

this way. Thank you very much. And those who say, no, if I'm going down the dark road, you have to come with me. And that's always the struggle again and again. And I'm sure that struggle is going to be coming, but it's going to be very technological, I think, in the future.