The Eric Metaxas Show - Tom Holland

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

How the Christian Revolution Remade the Worldb

Welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show. It's a nutritious smoothie of creamy, fresh yogurt, vanilla protein powder, and a mushy banana. For your mind? Drink it all down. It's nummy. I wub, vanilla. I wub, I wop, I wap, vanilla. Here comes Eric Metaxus.

To Socrates in the city in Oxford, England, 2024. We're here at the Randolph Hotel. It is my joy. now to have a conversation with the author Tom Holland. In case you're unfamiliar with him, he's an award-winning historian, biographer, and broadcaster. The author of many very readable, wonderful books will be discussing today, Dominion, how the Christian Revolution remade the world. In 2007, Tom Holland received the Classical Association Prize, awarded to the Indiexian to the individual who's done most to promote the study of the language, literature, and civilization of ancient Greece and Rome.

Hazaa. He's the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Making History. He's written and presented several TV documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4 in subject ranging from ISIS to dinosaurs. And he is also co-presenter of the top 10 podcast. The rest is history, which I believe has just won a big prize. maybe we'll hear about it. Tom Holland, welcome. That's very much for having me. Am I...

You know that originally we tried to get the Spider-Man actor Tom Holland. I do know that. And when he was unavailable, I thought, there's got to be another Tom Holland we can get. So thank you for obliging us. You know, there's actually loads of Tom Holland. Not that I ever looked. I Google myself.

Yes. But there are loads of us. We're everywhere. Well, my favorite part of you are one of the things I like about you is even though your name is Tom Holland, you're not even slightly Dutch. No, not at all. No. So I always saw Alon, it's a kind of French name.

So I always vaguely hoped that my ancestors had come over with William the Conqueror. And I was descended from some aristocrat. And then I discovered, actually, it comes from the old English for high land. And it's a kind of a hill in the Midlands. But we were just a long line of peasants. And it was very disappointed. But doesn't that seem, I don't know if ironic is exactly the word, but when we'd think of Holland, the Netherlands, we think of the low. Yeah, exactly. I know, I know. The ironies just

pile up. It's just killing us. All right, well, many people urged me to read your book, Dominion, How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. And I'm happy that they did urge me because it's wonderful. I want to start just with the, it seems to me, interesting or comedic thought that the British version of the book has a different title and cover. So this is, the American version is Dominion, how the Christian Revolution remade the world. What is the English version? Dominion, the making of the Western mind. And the reason for that was that, as you hint, my background in writing is about the classical world.

so Greece and Rome. And then for reasons that we might come on to, I decided that I actually wanted to write a history of Christianity. And my editor's response to this wasn't entirely enthusiastic because he thought that it might be kind of box office death. He was worried that a book that seemed to be overtly about Christianity might end up in the kind of ghettoized Christian apologetics section of the bookshop. So he wanted, despite the fact it was a history of Christian.

Christianity. He wanted it to market it as not being about a history of Christianity. So he came up with the subtitle, which does, I mean, it is about the making of the Western Mind, so that was accurate. And the cover did, I think there was a single cross inside the O of Dominion, which was the only clue that there might be a kind of reference to Christianity. And then when the paperback came out, they did a kind of Sergeant Pepper type montage of different, you know, different things from different periods of history, all kind of stuck together. And I don't think there was a single Christian thing on the first draft. And I said, look, you've got to have at least an angel and maybe a cathedral.

Perhaps the same, yeah, you know, something to go along with the Beatles and the suffragettes and Hitler and everybody else who was on the cover. So there was definitely a kind of slight sense of cultural nervousness, I think, there. And then when it came out in America, they said, brilliant. how the Christian revolution remade the world. Let's put a massive picture of Jesus on the color. And it just, it kind of summed up so many cultural differences between Britain

and America that I found very funny. Although, to be fair, it is Salvador Dallies. You know, they left out the ant eater and his mustache. And which is actually in Britain, because I think it's in Glasgow, the art gallery in Glasgow. Oh, I thought you meant his

aunt eater and mustache. The answer to get that out. Okay. Okay. So, well, that's interesting. We can start there. I mean, the idea of, you know, people among what I would think of as the cultural elites, people in publishing, you could see them bristling at the idea that, well, Tom, your books have sold very well. We don't want you to, you know, turn down this side alley here and write about something. So, but what's interesting to me is, you know, how does one define the West? Clearly, if you're talking about Athens and Jerusalem, you're talking about the West. But here, you're, you're talking about the West. But here, you're, you're you're, you're you're You're not so much talking about Athens or Rome. You're talking about Christendom. I mean, on the question of how you define the West, I have a slightly eccentric, but I think quite precise answer to that.

And I would define the West as countries which are interested and have historically looked to the pre-Christian Roman Empire. So the Greek world looks to Constantinople, looks to the Christian Roman Empire. Roman Empire, but I think it is only in what you might have called Latin Christendom and its various heirs, but people are actually interested in the pre-Christian Roman Empire. So that's my answer to how I would define the West. Yeah. But the kind of the broader, so the substantive issue in why my editor was nervous about the kind of the identification of the book as Christian is that much more so than the American idea is that, I mean, as you all know, that Europe is much further down the kind of the road towards secularisation than is the case, I think, in America, although America seems to be catching up a fair lick at the moment.

And the argument of the book is that actually the notion of the secular is very Christian and that even atheism of the kind that you might get from Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins is, very Christian in its assumptions. And it is. And that liberalism is very, I mean, basically, pretty much everything except for Darwinism in question is essentially the argument of the book. I can conceivably argue even that with you. But let's not leap ahead to the 19th or 20th or 21st centuries. Let's go back to the beginning because as I said to you earlier, I'd love to gallop with you through the book. And, you know, if I remember correctly, Paul Johnson's history of Christianity doesn't have this the thesis that you do in other words you you you've you haven't just done a history of of Christian faith but there's a thesis there's an underlying

thesis to the book well if there's there's a particular um angle that is suggested in the title which is dominion and and the thesis is that Christianity is the most revolutionary and transformative force cultural expression that humanity has ever come up with. And that that really is the argument that I want to substantiate. So you will probably have noticed that the book doesn't really touch, say, on Orthodox Christianity. I don't really talk a huge amount about the Eastern churches. And the reason for that is that I'm looking at the ways in which Christianity, changed, first of all, the Roman world, but then more broadly, how it went out into the entire globe

and has essentially created the terms by which for the past two centuries, the world has kind of understood what it is to be human, more than any other belief system. And it doesn't require you to be a believing Christian to kind of be affected by that. and I kind of end up by having this idea that it's Christianity. I mean, it's either like a perfume that you breathe in or it's like asbestos that you breathe in, depending on whether you are pro or anti-Christianity. But either way, you are affected by Christianity.

And if you are hostile to Christianity in the West, almost certainly you will be hostile to Christianity for deeply Christian reasons. Again, I want to begin at the beginning. and gallop along. But was there a moment or an inciting incident for you as a writer to say, I want to write about this? What was your... No, it was more a gradual process. So I, as a child, I was raised Christian. I kind of, I liked the biblical stories, but I was always kind of team Pharaoh or team Levittnese or team Pontius pilot. I never heard anyone say that. It's very funny. I was always on the side of the, you know, the big

swaggering empires because I found them more glamorous and exciting. And I found the Greek gods more charismatic, more exciting than the Christian god. So it was never like I had a reverse damascene, you know, deconversion. It was just like a dimmer switch slowly turning off. And I'd always found Greece and Rome more interesting. I'd always identified my own values and my own identity with them. I kind of thought that is the line of succession. But I found writing about the Romans and the Greeks, I found it quite stressful, actually, psychologically,

kind of trying to live inside their heads, because of course they're not remotely. You know, they're terrifying. Julius Caesar in the conquest of Gaul is said to have killed a million people and enslaved another million. And he didn't seem to have any trouble about that. this. And in fact, he thought it was great and kind of boasted about it. And the Spartans, who I idealized as a child for their defense of Thermopyla, I mean, they provided role models

for the Nazis. And not that there's anything wrong with that. Well, we might come on to that, what the role of the Nazis are in current demonology. But I increasingly felt, I, these people are very radically alien. It's not to say that they are immoral. They have a very pronounced sense of morality, but the morality is something very, very different to what I and everyone around me takes for granted. And so I started to say, well, what changed? And the conclusion I came to was

that essentially it's Christianity that changes everything, pretty much. And so that was a kind of idea that was at the back of my mind. And then I wrote a book about the beginnings of Islam that was very controversial because I was dubious about quite a lot that Muslims say, about the origins of their faith. I was dubious about the location of Mecca,

dubious about the authorship of the Quran, dubious about the details of the life of Muhammad. And I remember giving a talk about this, and there was a Muslim woman in the audience, who said to me, after I've given the talk, you know, in the question, why have you done this? You have attacked everything that makes my life worth living in doing this. And it seems that it's just an act of vandalism.

And you would never do this to your own. own beliefs and your own values. And I felt the force of that because, of course, I was taking a polemical position. Just because I didn't believe in the Muslim God didn't mean that I was therefore neutral. I had a particular perspective as well. But more than that, I was coming to think that my sense of identification with the Enlightenment and with Greece in particular as the origin points for my values, that this was inadequate. And so essentially, I wrote Dominion to do to my own beliefs what I'd kind of done to Islam in the book on early Islam,

to question where does it come from? Where does it come from? Is the Enlightenment kind of the equivalent of the Quran, supposedly coming from God? Is it like a kind of virgin birth just suddenly appearing, or might it have roots in what had gone before? And it came to the conclusion, obviously it has roots in what comes before, and what comes before is the reformation,

but before that earlier stages of reformation, and ultimately going back to kind of the biblical texts. And so that was the idea that I wanted to explore and to stress test in writing Dominion. Well, you start, if I remember correctly, with the cross in the book. Let's talk about that, because the scandal of the cross is something that, as you know, and you write about, it's been mostly forgotten. People, you know, they wear crosses around their necks, and they forget the horror of what it is. And when I think of the nightmare of, you know,

the Roman Empire, crucifying people, when you really think about that, it's very painful. And, of course, you just were talking about that, it's disturbing. But it is the, I guess it's the turning point in some ways of everything that you end up talking about in the book. So start there with that idea. Well, this was, I, yeah, the book opens with the crucifixion.

And the reason, I rewrote that after a trip I made to Iraq. So you mentioned in the introduction that I've made various documentaries, and one of them was on the Islamic State. And I was making a documentary in 2016 about why the Islamic State had particularly been targeting Christians and Yazidis in the way that they were. And I'm sure your listeners will know who the Yazidis are, but in case they don't, they're a kind of religious minority that were accused by Islamic State, not just of being infidels, but of being devil worshippers for reasons that are not valid, but was entirely

accepted by the Islamic State. And when we went to Iraq to film this, we went to this town where it had been occupied by the Islamic State. It had been a major centre of Yazidi habitation, and the Kurds had just expelled the Islamic State about three or four weeks before. So I think we were the first Westerners into this place, Sinjar, after the expulsion.

And so the Islamic State were about two miles away across completely flat and open land. And Sinjar was absolutely devastated. And it was a place where, where women had been rounded up and either carted off into slavery, if they were attractive enough to be taken as slaves, and girls as young as eight were being taken away, and those women who were not viewed as being sexually attractive were all killed,

and their bones and their hair and their clothes were scattered across the fields beyond the kind of the defences of the Kurds, and we got taken out and went and looked at it. And the other thing that had happened was that the men had all been, been put to death and some of them had been crucified. So I stood in this town that still smelt of death and it smelt of death in a way that a Roman, a town stormed by the legions would have smelt of death. And it has been captured by people who viewed crucifixion in the way that the Romans had viewed crucifixion, not as an emblem of the triumph of the weak over the strong, but of the reverse.

and it opened up this kind of existential abyss for me. It forced me to imagine a world in which the cross was an emblem of power. And the fact that for us, even if you're completely atheist, you would have a sense of that the cross is the emblem of the victim triumphing over the victimizer. But that, you know, what would a world where that hadn't happened? what would it have been like? So that was one thing, but also to ask how weird, I mean, how strange, how grotesque that an emblem of torture could have come to have the significance that it did. And I was in the midst of researching the chapter I do on Paul, and Paul, of course, is the earliest Christian writer we have, and the cross is at the heart of everything he's writing about.

And you have a sense when you read his letters, these are not statements of doctrine. these are these are someone trying to work out something that is so weird to him that he's struggling to do it and again and again he comes back to the bizarreness of the fact that this guy who suffered this terrible death in some way is a part of the one God who's created the universe and he says you know it's it's a stumbling block to the judeans and it's madness to everyone else to the Greeks and the Romans and I think the fact that Christianity so subverted the value system of the world into which it was born that the cross came to serve for them the opposite of what it had served for the guys who crucified Jesus lies at the heart of the story of what I wanted to tell.

How and why did this happen? Hey folks, listeners to Mike. show, no, I'm passionate about the work of Christian Solidarity International because they protect and free those who are being persecuted and enslaved for their faith. Thanks to you to date, CSI has freed more than 100,000 people from slavery in Sudan, but the work is not done yet. It's estimated that there are still tens of thousands more still in bondage, and CSI is preparing right now for their final slave liberation of this year. I'm hoping you'll join me and help them liberate another 300 women and children, your gift of just $250.

will free a woman in Sudan who has been enslaved for years and provide her with food and other supplies necessary to start her new life. Call 888-253-3522. 888-253-3522, Christian Solidarity International, freeing and healing captives in Jesus' name. Go to metaxistalk.com. Metaxistalk.com. Click on the Christian Solidarity banner. Metaxistock.com or 888-253-2522. God bless you. I was saying we've lost the scandal of the cross. Yeah. You know, we've lost the context.

Part of the problem as well is that we in the West have so taken in these values that we no longer see them as revolutionary or even as interesting. We kind of assume that everyone in the world has these values. When everyone in the world, even today, you've just described the horror of what they did to the Yazidis and others. I think you can see this very clearly. in the way that Christian portrayals of the cross evolve over the course of the centuries. So Paul's embarrassment, I think, is manifest in his letters, and you're still getting a sense of embarrassment in the writings of Christians

in the second century, in the third century. And then even when Constantine, he sees supposedly the vision of the cross and the sky, and the Roman Empire starts to become Christian. But even then, there's a reluctance. to portray the cross. And it's not until the beginning of the 5th century that you start to get images of Jesus on the cross. And even then, there's a photo in the book

that comes from an ivory casket in the British Museum. And it illustrates the passion. And it shows Jesus on the cross. And he looks like a, you know, a quarterback in the shower. He's kind of got his arms spread out. It just looks brilliant. He's very pleased with himself. He's looking incredibly butch. well-toned. He's an athlete. He's an athlete who has won in the race of life. There's no sense that this is a man suffering, agonies. And it's not until the year 1000 in the Latin West that you first get a portrayal of Jesus dead on the cross. And then over the course of the Middle Ages in Latin Christendom, the idea of Christ's sufferings becomes fundamental to the way that the church.

and indeed the broader, the broader Christian people come to understand what their faith is about. The suffering, you know, the passion, the sufferings of Christ are situated at the heart of the liturgy and of art and of spiritual yearning. And there's a sense, I think, in which it desensitizing Christians in the West to just how strange and horrific this process is. so that now we do find it a struggle, I think, to remind ourselves of what the cross was. And I found actually, ironically, that the modern thinker who kind of most vividly understands the strangeness of what happened

and the scandal that the Christian kind of almost celebration of the cross is Nietzsche, who in a way is the most potent of all atheists. because he takes it so seriously. And he sees it as repellent, the idea that the Christian civilization overturns the worship of the strong, the admiration of greatness that you get in the classical world, and that it kind of, as Nietzsche would put it, fetishizes suffering. And he despises and hates it, but he understands, you know, properly to despise it, you have to understand how shocking it is.

It's interesting because Hitler essentially echoes that Nietzsche's view. He's repulsed by the glorification of weakness. And he says so. I mean, I've written about it. It's fascinating that he's just repulsed. He wants to worship power and strength. And so he really has no use for Christianity. I want to talk for a minute, because you do in the book,

about the way the pagan world, the pre-Christian world viewed sexuality and women. Talk a bit about that because that is, again, a monumental shift. Shift is not even strong enough. Right. So, you know, again, going back to what happened to these Edies, the idea that you could cart women off into slavery. I mean, everyone in the ancient world takes this completely for granted. So that's one aspect of it.

But more broadly in, particularly in the Roman world, their model of sexuality is radically different to ours, because ours is structured around gender, around their male roles and female roles. But in the Roman world, essentially, the binary is between male Roman citizens and everyone else. and those who are subject to the free Roman male citizen are absolutely obliged to offer themselves up to their master in any way

and it doesn't matter whether you're male or female, it doesn't matter whether you are adult or a child. If you are subject, if you are playing the slaves role, the passive role, then then, you know, you have no option, submit to it. I tell you chum, it's time to come blow your horn. Hey folks, listeners to my show know I'm passionate about the work of Christian Solidarity International because they protect and free those who are being persecuted and enslaved

for their faith. Thanks to you to date, CSI has freed more than 100,000 people from slavery in Sudan, but the work is not done yet. It's estimated that there are still tens of thousands more still in bondage, and CSI is preparing right now for their final slave liberation of this year. I'm hoping you'll join me and help them liberate another 300 women and children. Your gift of just $250 will free a woman in Sudan who has been enslaved for years and provide her with food and other supplies necessary to start her new life. Call 888-253-3522. 888-253-3522 Christian Solidarity International, freeing and healing captives in Jesus' name. Go to metaxistalk.com. Metaxus talk.com, click on the Christian Solidarity banner.

Metaxistock.com or 888-2533522. God bless you. It is about power. It's not about love. No, it's not about love. It's about power. And a Roman householder can essentially use, you know, his slaves as the equivalent of a urinal, as a place to kind of evacuate waste liquid.

so the Romans have the same word for ejaculate and urinate. I mean, it's such a kind of alien way of understanding things. And again, I think it is Christianity that totally rewires and reconfigures that. Because what Paul is saying in his letters, say when he's writing to the Roman citizens of Rome, of course, but also of Corinth, because Corinth was a Roman colony. So it's Roman standards of sexuality that are prevailing there, as Paul, a Roman citizen, would have understood. He's writing to them and saying, you, the male householder, it is your role to play the role of Christ, and it's the role of the female to play the role of the church. And that may seem sexist by our standards, but by the standards of Paul's time, it is unspeakably

revolutionary, because the implication of that in turn is that if the role of the male householder to play the part of Christ, then, you know, he can't go around casually raping the scullery maid or the page boy or whatever. You know, he has to have the relationship to a woman that Christ has to the church, in other words, monogamous and lifelong. And that is to impose a pattern on Roman understandings about sex and marriage that is utterly transformative. And it takes a long, long time for that process of change to happen. I mean, many, many centuries, I would say, you know, six or seven centuries. But that is the pattern of understanding about sex and about marriage that we are the heirs to. And it's hard to ever emphasize how novel, for

instance, the idea that a lifelong monogamy should be an ideal is. Nobody had had that before. In the course of writing this, did you feel, my goodness, this needs to be underscored or highlighted again because we've forgotten it? Because it is so revolutionary, and it seems wrong, unjust, to take it for granted. Well, I, so I, one of the things that was exciting writing the book was that I wasn't sure how it was going to end, because I obviously had the that the hold of Christianity over the West was fading. And so therefore, the question of how enduring were these revolutionary transformations was an open question for me.

And I was thinking specifically about sex that since the 60s, you know, with the sexual revolution, I had the vague sense that Christian sexual standards had been radically overturned. You had the vague sense? Well, I, what I was finding was that almost invariable, where I thought Christian inheritance had been overturned, it turned out not to have been. So it was a vague sense, yes. I wasn't 100% sure, but I did think, you know,

probably this is where I have to say, yes, Christianity's legacy effectively is dead. But then as I was writing it and approaching the end of the book, the Me Too movement broke out in the United States and then spread across the rest of the world. And you'll remember on the women's marches, what was it was, I think it followed the inauguration of President Trump. There was a great trend for protesters to dress up in the robes of the handmaids from the TV adaptation of Margaret

Edward's novel, The Handmaid's Tale. And the Handmaid's Tale was, among many other things, a parody of New England Puritanism. And so it was essentially, you know, casting people. Puritanism as something evil and oppressive and repressive, which of course is, I guess, very much the kind of the post-60s perspective on it. And yet what the protesters were demanding was incredibly Puritan. They were demanding that a man show respect to a woman and control his sexual urges and not just treat them as a Roman slave owner would have treated, you know, know, his inferiors, which is pretty much what's his name, Harvey Weinstein had been doing. I mean, he was kind of playing the role of a kind of, you know, a Roman patafamilias. He had all these subordinates.

Why shouldn't he treat them any way he wanted? And it was really telling that in the wake of his conviction and of the Me Too movement and of the women's marches, basically nobody was saying that. Nobody was turning around and saying, well, I mean, why shouldn't Harvey Weinstein do what he wants? Nobody was really saying that. And even men were accepting the force of the Me Too argument. And it seemed to me actually, America and the West more generally is still pretty Christian. But the kind of the moibious strip of complexity is that they're criticizing Puritanism while demanding Puritanism.

You know, you probably don't realize it, but for saying Moibious trip, you get $50. Do I? Yeah. American dollars, not Canadian, American. No pounds. But it is, no, it is interesting to me that, you know, the people in the Me Too movement seem utterly to have forgotten the Christian roots of their protest against, for example, rape or using people sexually. That's, that's something that's been so assumed that it's no longer marked upon, which is one of the values of your book is to say, well, let's at least see, let's look at, where this idea of the dignity of women came from.

Right. Well, I think that that is due to... So I think that I've described Christianity as the most revolutionary force. I think it basically invents the idea of revolution, of things being born again. And you have the initial Christian revolution, the transformation of the Roman world. But then in the 11th century, you have a very radical innovation,

which I think in the long run is why Latin Christendom is the most influential form. of all the various Christianities that we have, which applies that idea of being born again to the whole of society. And that idea

that sin can be washed away and the entire world be brought into a kind of condition of baptism, it convulses the medieval world. The medieval church is a revolutionary institution.

The Middle Ages is not a hide-bound period. It's radically revolutionary. And then the Reformation repeats the prehistion. process, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution. And I think that the 60s is another iteration of that. And just as it took people who lived through the Reformation about a century and a half to realize that they had lived through something called the

reformation. I don't know what we're going through at the moment. But it's whatever it is, we're going through it. Yeah. Two things, right, some of bread of lots of things, but there are two particular historical events that animate it. And one of them on this side of the Atlantic is the experience of fascism. And on your side of the Atlantic, it's the civil rights movement. And the civil rights movement is deeply Christian movement.

It's saturated with biblical narratives and assumptions. The Reverend Martin Luther King, you know, Jesus is an extremist for love, the patterning of exodus onto the experience of black Americans. And then in the 60s, that paradigm is picked up by other groups. so gay rights campaigners or feminists or trans rights campaigners into the present day. And that, unlike the civil rights movement,

where the biblical and Christian connotations are very, very plain. And conservatives can accept that and see that. That is not that, it's less the case, say, with feminism or with gay rights. And so it seems to me speaking as an outsider, and I hesitate, I mean, I know that these are topics that you debate and have very trenchant opinions on. But my sense is that over the course of the 70s, 80s and 90s, that what previously was a Christian culture where everything was shaped, I mean, both sides on, you know, in, say in the Civil War, we're using biblical argument. to justify their positions. What happens in the 60s and 70s is that people on one side of the argument,

the more progressive side, come to see Christianity itself as part of the problem, but it's sexist or homophobic or whatever. And so you start to get this kind of entrenched positions. And what always happens when people carve out trenches is that it becomes very difficult to meet in the middle. You know, the no man's land becomes somewhere

where you go to get kind of, shot or bombed or kind of shot or tangled up in barbara whatever and and and and the consequence of that is that people on the progressive side of the arguments in the united states have every polemical reason not just to to to kind of shut their eyes to the way in which they remain deeply christian and their arguments remain rooted in christian theological paradigms but to cast christian is something that is evil, something to be completely rejected. But it does seem to me that there is no aspect of the culture wars that are currently raging that are not fundamentally about arguments about Christian theology.

You know, which aspect of Christian theology do you emphasize in something like abortion debate or gay marriage or whatever? And that, I think, is something very radically new. that one side, although progressives are deeply Christian, it seems to me, their assumptions and their style of argument, nevertheless, for the first time in American history, they are not acknowledging that. And so therefore, it's starting to seem like a kind of a Christian on one side and progressives on the other. But, you know, it remains a theological argument, it seems to me. It's, I want to go, well, I mean, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is he described that as I was reading about it.

And the book is that it's funny when people feel so strongly that they're right, but they can't exactly say why. And, you know, in other words, if I'm against slavery, I can say why, because we're made in God's image and we're supposed to treat each other as we would want to be treated. and it's morally wrong because of God's view of every human being. But if I were just to assert that and say, but I don't know why, it's just my feeling. Yeah, I mean, you've written about Wilber before. So you know how strange it is that today, across the world, we completely accept that, say, institutional slavery,

is something that is simply intolerable. But 300 years ago, that would have just seemed bizarre. Yeah.