The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 169. An Atheist in the Realm of Myth | Stephen Fry

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

On this episode of the Jordan B Peterson Podcast, I am joined by Stephen Fry. Stephen Fry is a noted British actor, writer, comedian, political figure, journalist, poet, intellectual and much more. You may have seen him in the films Chariots of Fire, A Fish Called Wanda, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, V for Vendetta, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and The Hobbit film series. He’s also served as the president of a mental health charity. Stephen’s list of accomplishments is far too long to list here.Stephen and I discussed a variety of topics in the realm of drama, literature, and politics. We also discuss among other topics, atheism, religion, rationalism, empiricism, myth/story, bartering with reality, Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology, resentment, cruelty in the world, constitutional monarchy versus a democratic republic, and much more.Find more of Stephen Fry on Twitter @stephenfry, his website stephenfry.com, check IMDB for his many movie and television appearances, and his many books.This episode was recorded on March 28th, 2021.

Welcome to the Jordan P Peterson podcast. This is season four episode 17. I'm Michaela Peterson. On this episode, my dad is joined by Stephen Fry. Stephen Fry is a noted British actor, writer, comedian, political figure, journalist poet, and intellectual. His list of accomplishments is impressive to look at, and he is referred to by many of his compatriots as a national treasure of England. Also by me is a national treasure of England. Jordan Peterson and Stephen discuss a variety of topics in the realm of drama, literature, and politics. They discuss atheism, religion, rationalism, empiricism, myth, and story, bartering with reality, Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology, resentment, cruelty in the world,

constitutional monarchy versus a democratic republic, and much more. This episode is brought to you by Headspace. Wouldn't it be great if there were a pocket-sized guide that helped you be better? There is. And if you have 10 minutes, Headspace can change your life, or at least improve it. And any improvement of life in my books is worth taking a serious look at. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in an easy-to-use app.

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Enjoy this episode. I'd like to announce my new book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life. Unlike my previous book, Beyond Order explores as its overarching theme how the dangers of too much security and control might be profitably avoided. Because what we understand is insufficient, we need to keep one foot within order

while stretching the other tentatively into the beyond. I hope that people find this book as helpful personally as they seem to have found me today, Mr. Steven Fry, who's been described by more than one of his compatriots as a national treasure. If you want to develop a quick inferiority complex, I would recommend going and reading Steven's Wikipedia page. He's a prolific actor, screenwriter, playwright, journalist, poet, intellectual, comedian, television presenter, advertisement presenter, magazine author, autobiographist. It's a remarkable body of achievement and an intellectual figure in his own right

who's known at least in part for his discussions with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and the humanist atheists. And it's partly for that reason that I wanted to talk to him. I met Stephen much to my pleasure during the month debates in Toronto about three years ago when we discussed political correctness, which is one of the things I want to talk about and touch upon today.

But mostly I'm interested in talking to him about the relationship between narrative and empiricism and rationalism. And so thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me. My pleasure. Lovely to be here. So let me ask you and then we'll go forward formally. What do you think we would be best? What do you think would have the greatest impact with regards to our conversation? As far as you're concerned, I mean, there must have been a reason that you, some reason, apart from just being agreeable to do this. What do you think we might be able to accomplish? Well, uniquely. It's a little like the Mount debate we share the platform with. platform with. It's really because I'm so tired and distressed and worried by the great fissia that has opened up the culture wars, whatever we like to call it, the assumption

that there is friends in your enemy and no grounding between, no commonality of no cohesion of viewpoint, no shared things that can happen between people who apparently represent different ways of looking at the world or different ways of trying to organize the world or whatever it might be. And the very fact that I knew some friends of mine who disapproved of you would think I was doing something wrong by associating with you. And I hope our debate showed that wasn't the case. And I felt this would take that further forward too.

I do think the, you know, the last best hope for our society and whichever way you want to look at, whether you want to look at it as some version of the West being able to stand up to the pressures put upon it by China and Russia and other countries that are less interested in liberality in economics and in the traditional political sense of liberality or kind of open society, what anyone would call it. But if we continue to fracture We continue to fracture and we continue to find enemies amongst our own kind so much. Then really it's a very, very sad look at it.

I mean, hardly the first person to say this, and I think you are a very interesting thinker and writer and talker. But it's clear that there are many who are really admire you and like you and follow you, with whom I would have less in common than perhaps with you. I think on both sides, if you want to call them sides, it's very easy to be a bit lax about disavowing people who like one, but who one doesn't like, you see what I mean, it's

so flattering to the ego to have followers, to have people say, you're great, I love the things you say, that it's quite hard to say no, but you've misunderstood me, that's not what I meant, that's not what I meant at all, quite Elliot. So obviously I've spent some time pointing out what I regard as the excesses of the radical left. I've certainly spent no shortage of time pointing out the excesses of the radical right in my classes particularly,

but I'm not publicly known for that specifically. It's my resistance or yeah, my resistance to certain maneuvers on the side of the radical left that propelled me into the public eye. I've thought for a long while that the only people who can probably control the excesses of the radical left are people who are in the moderate left, not people on the right or on the extreme right. They're out of the argument to begin with,

and it's, this is associated in some sense, the difficulty of this is in some sense, the difficulty that you just described. If people have an affiliation with you, just described. If people have an affiliation with you, then it's much more difficult to differentiate perhaps where you should. And so perhaps you see on the left, the moderate leftists, and then the more extreme leftists, but the left extreme leftists are also on the left. And they're friends of of a type and drawing that line is extraordinarily difficult. And that's actually why at least part of the reason why I'm leery of any attempts to restrict free speech because in those cases of difficult differentiation, the only possible solution we have is dialogue about the problem, about exactly where to draw the line. Because otherwise we can't, no one knows how.

And I guess it's because extremism also exists in degrees. And so you say, where do you stop? And well, that's very, very difficult to say, especially among those who think like you, except for certain exceptions. Yes, this is this is very true. I mean, it's a sort of basic philosophical point, isn't it, that you can draw lines between what is reasonable and they can be very narrow lines. But if you keep drawing them out, they become extreme. So for example, you can have a, what some people might, regardless of reasonable age for the termination of a pregnancy due to some, you know, some issue, but if you keep adding days to it, it then becomes a serious problem.

Anything in that nature of differentiating and drawing lines is bound to cause that to be a problem. However, I'm less confident than you are that the left would be persuaded by someone like me, the hard left, the one wants to call it extreme left or the radical left wherever it is. And this may sound a bit like a bit of boo-hooing, which is very easy to do. But if you're a soft liberal, as I think of myself, I can't find any other designation, but that sort of thing, a centrist. These are insults to the left.

I mean, the English politics recently, for example, centrist was the boo word of the Corbanistas, the more socialist end of the Labour Party, a party I've been a member of since I could vote. And I felt very, very much buffeted about and despised for my, oh dear, but really, and oh must we, you know, I do think of myself as a sort of cardigan beslippered old fool who is loathed on both sides. And it is, of course, historically true that in the 1930s, which is the decade, we always go back to when we were very worried about the direction we're traveling in now, the communists and the Nazis, both were absolutely on one mind when it came to people like

me, Jewish, semi-intellectual, soft liberals who went, oh no but shush, because we didn't have any positivity, any certainty, we didn't turn, we didn't, you know, it's, and as they say, I know it sounds like I'm sort of taking on a victim status here that I will pour liberals because after all we've ruled the world for 200 years and pounded the political and cultural argument in the world at the moment is that the liberal project, the Enlightenment project, if you want to call it, that has failed. I would say we've cooperatively guided the world because I think ruled is the wrong term. But the one that's in the right hand.

The one that's in the right hand. And it's a really important distinction because that power is grounded in the sovereignty of the people. And imperfect as that may be, it's more grounded in the sovereignty of the people than any other system we've ever managed to whip up. So I mean, it's difficult also because it's difficult to make centrism dramatic and romantic. And it's much easier to make extremism dramatic and romantic. And that's one of its primary attractions. And that attraction should not be underestimated.

And it's partly why I'm so interested in talking to you. Because you are this incredible dramatist. You have this unbelievable talent that manifests itself in a manner that I thought I was reading your Wikipedia biography in some detail. And it requires that. I thought if you want to give yourself an inferiority complex quickly, going through your Wikipedia entry is a very good way of doing that. I mean, you have 50 films and like 40 TV shows and

five novels and seven autobiographies and a career in comedy that was absolutely outstanding that would have been a lifetime achievement in and of itself and a whole variety of honorary doctorates. And you have an intellectual end that's not trivial as well because you were involved with Hitchens and Dawkins and the horsemen of the book of the atheist movie. Yeah, and I want to really want to talk to you about that too because I especially am interested in your opinions because of all those people, you're the one that has the most connection with with with with drama and literature and fiction. And you you you just published a couple the power and necessity of literary accounts. But then you're also a humanistic atheist. And that's very, I'm very curious about that. I mean, someone like Dawkins, he's so rational that I think for him, and I don't know if this is fair,

and it might be a bit of a stereotype, but it'll do for rhetorical purposes. He's not gripped by drama in the same way you are, and there's a truth in drama that's not trivial, and that truth is allied with religious truth. So I wanna go there too. I can't speak for Richard, it's just been his 18th birthday,

so we wish him happy birthday, and he's not the shrill beast of atheism that some people regard him as, but I won't speak for him obviously, but what I would say is that yes, you're right, he's a rationalist, and I don't think I am, I think I'm an empiricist, and I think that's part of my love of drama and myth and story and literature and history, even, is these are all to do with experience, with human experience, the register of human experience, of testing an idea against what actually happens and how people actually behave rather than devising a system of reason. And it's not the reason when empiricism are always absolutely opposed, but they sometimes are. And in the history of science, they have been, you know, you could argue that Pascal was a rationalist

and Newton was an empiricist for all his, you know, great mathematics and so on. He actually took a piece of cardboard and punched a hole in it, which is something that a rationalist probably wouldn punched a hole in it, which is something that a rationalist probably wouldn't do. So it's experimenting in the crucible of human activity and observing what people say and hear. These are the things comedians do all the time. It's the comic mode is to hear somebody say something grand

and then say yes, but GK Cheston is a perfect example of that. Now he was certainly no eighth-yest, he was a very religious man indeed and a great hero of the Catholic Church in some people even, believe he should be, if not be atified, even sanctified. But he was a huge influence on me as a teenager growing up because I read his essays. Here's an example. He opened an essay by saying, I read in the newspaper the other day this following sentence, at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw,

modern woman rises to take her place in society. I thought to myself, this is very good news, very encouraging. I wonder if it's true. Let's see now, who's a modern woman? Oh Mrs. Buttons, she comes into clean every Tuesday and every Thursday, she lives in Clapham, she comes on the Omnibus, and she scrubs the floors, and she has three children. And if I say to myself, at the trumpet call of Ibson and Shaw, Mrs. Buttons rises to take up place in society, I realize the sentence is not only nonsense, it's pernicious nonsense. And that's a sort of almost comical example, really, of saying, you don't trust an abstract

statement. You do not trust someone saying A plus A equals 2A, because there is no such thing in the universe as A. And although we're all capable of doing substitutional metephyrising or algebra as it were with ideas, the fact is it's much better to say one thing of something that is real that we know, plus another thing of something that is real that we know and have experienced is two of those things. Once you start abstracting and that's what rationalism often is, it's going off on an algebraic journey, which can produce beautiful thoughts and ideas and beautiful schemes. But for me it is beating that out on the envelope, human experience is the absolute key.

And it's a long intellectual tradition in pericism. And I think it would endanger of losing it in a way because... I want to unpack three things that you just said that are very, very complicated. So the first thing you did was draw a distinction between rationalism and empiricism. And you associated Dawkins more with rationalism and yourself more with empiricism. Yesism and empiricism. And you associate it Dawkins more with rationalism and yourself more with empiricism. And not entirely, but yeah. No, no, fair enough, just as example.

And you did that in an attempt to also describe the effect or influence or consequence or reason for your interest in drama or for the fact that drama grips you. So I want to start with the distinction between humanit or between empiricism and rationalism. So everyone listening understands. So walk us through that first. Well, empiricism is an intellectual tradition of using experience or trial and error or experiment to prove or disprove or to investigate an idea. So if you have an idea, I mean a perfect example is in the 18th and 19th century, a lot of women were dying of childbirth,

at childbirth, appalling deaths, what we were now called septicemia. The babies and the mothers were dying, and nobody knew why, because there was no germ theory. Nobody had an idea that there were these tiny things that could infect our systems. So people tried to wezen, and they said, well, maybe it's the smell, because it's a bad smell around. There was a miasma theory, maybe it's the smell because it's a bad smell around. There was a miasma theory. And other people just said it was guard or other people said that it was some moral quality on the part of the women.

And, but a man called Semmelvice in Hungary, Ignor Semmelvice, tried lots of different experiments. He chose a certain number of people to do different things on what we've now called cohort testing, you know, or not quite random double blind testing, such as used as in medicine to prove the efficacy of something. But eventually he got a group of medical students who were attending on these births to wash their hands before doing it. It was an almost random thing to do and suddenly the death rate dropped. I mean absolutely plummeted. And the reward for Semmelweis? He was sent to a madhouse because nobody believed that there was... Where he died, I believe. Because the rationally said there's no reason that that could be

right, but a true empiricism would say it almost doesn't matter what the reason is. The fact is it's repeatable and verifiable and even not understanding, because it took later till Koch and Pasteur and microscopes could show what the process was. He actually did end up in a, you know, and he's a hero, man. I ran and she went to Budapest against the Ignatius Civil Vice Museum in Buda. Just to sort of pay homage to this remarkable man. And I mean, it's a bit unfair on the doctors. They had no reason to know, if you like, but that's the point they had no reason to know. annoying is in insurance. What's called actuarial tables or actuaries are people in insurance companies who look at the statistics. And if they discovered that when your name is Jordan you are 10% more likely to have a car crash, you would pay 10% more of premium on your insurance. And it's no good you saying, but why? They would just say those are the odds. That's the empirical truth.

That's the epidemiology of accidents, if you like, is that people call Jordan, or more famously, of course, actors pay more. And you can then try and look for a reason. And that's a very valuable thing to do. Of course, we all want to know the reason. But sometimes I think there is a beauty in testing and looking and seeing and trying things out and experimenting. It's not a discolored reason that the two go together in finding out the truth.

So how do you associate that with your interest in literature and your clear recognition that the dramatic end of existence is valuable. Well, I suppose it's, I mean, in an obvious way, all literature, people, literature snobs, I might say, will look at politics. I mean, all through my life, I've looked at people like, I don't know, Margaret Fatcher, or indeed, on the other side, Gordon Brown, and thought, if only they read Shakespeare, why do people read books and political philosophy and books on this being a good idea on how parliamentary history without actually reading about how humans behave and seeing how evil and good are

played out in drama, because I think not just literature, but ceremony and ritual are extremely important in understanding everything. And you don't have to be religious to believe in ritual. I love liturgy, I love church liturgy. I'm absolutely passionate about hymns and songs and the Eucharist and the language of it, you know, the outward and visible sign of an inward and visible grace is one of the most beautiful phrases.

I think, ever written in the book of the Eucharist of the Episcopalian Church as Americans called it, or the Anglican Church, as we call it. And there are magnificent shortcuts available if you look at ceremony and the dramatization of human issues rather than attempting to abstract some essence from them, some truth that you can say that is applicable to all. It's in the sense we're all children who have to be shown puppets before we understand. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? Yes. I'm stopped. Sorry. No, no, no, no, it's just stopped and made me think. I mean, the reason I got interested in religious thinking, I went down the pathway that you're describing.

I mean, that's why I got interested in religious thinking, because from a psychological perspective, I mean, the first thing that I realized, and I believe this is what you just pointed out, is that there are truths embedded in fiction, for example, or in spectacle, ritual, drama. And well, then you ask, well, what is it? Those are attractive and they're entertaining. And they automatically engage our interest.

But way more than that, there are also that which culture centers itself around. Greek tragedy, for example, which seemed to be integrally associated with the Illusinean Greek mysteries is something that we know very little about, unfortunately. But for me, and I was influenced by Carl Jung in this mode of thinking, culture is nested inside a narrative structure. Mm-hmm. By necessity.

I even believe that science is nested inside a narrative structure, because the narrative structure is what makes the science practically applicable and useful. Yes, what else is the standard model, but another way of saying a narrative structure, the standard model is just that. And that is the basis of physics today, isn't it? It's a story.

Well, and the idea that we have that science is a useful endeavor, the fact that we're looking to the material world for redemption, that's all part of a narrative. And I was absolutely staggered by Jung's analysis of the emergence of science out of Elkamy. And his notion was that the alchemical tradition was a 2000 year old dream, a narrative dream, a counterposition to Christianity with its emphasis on abstracted spirituality, suggesting that what we lacked could be found in the depths of the material world. And that was, and so there was this motivational dream that if we paid enough attention to the transformations of matter, we could find that which would confer upon us eternal life,

infinite health and wealth. And Jung's point was, well, until that dream was in place, there would be no motivation to undertake the process of the painstaking analysis of the material world that didn't produce any immediate gratification. And it took thousands of years for that idea to assemble itself with enough force so that we could start to have scientists. So the narrative was operative thousands of years before the, before the, before the technical process was instituted and laid the groundwork for it. And also that kind of incredible.

And maybe also took that time for the brain of humans, if you believe Julian James, and I kind of do in a metaphorical way, I don't know if you know his book. Yes, I do. I'm sure you do, yeah. That maybe our brains weren't even capable of processing in that way around the time of between language and writing. The, you know, that sort of time. We were finding ways of describing the world

to the Egyptian, I believe I'm right in saying this is the derivation El chemit the the magic became alchemy which then became chemistry and and it became drill down into an investigation But first you had to believe that there was a Chemit there was a magic inside everything inside substance To which we could be tuned.

Yes, right, a redemptive magic. Yes, if you like. And this is not to repudiate science and numbers, and a very good friend of mine who was a priest's know, physics is a theology that makes machines work. And there's some sort of truth in that. And I love, for example, the story. I tell it in a footnote in Mythos, but it's very, very early on in Greek mythology. When the first, the primal entities, the primal deities are Uranus, the sky or Uranus as children. We love to call him. And Guy of the earth, who mate, the sky and the earth, mate is a common theme in what they call

a mytheme in lots of different myths, as you can imagine, the sky and the earth, mate and they produce whatever is in between the zone which we inhabit between sky and earth. And that next generation are called the Titans of course. But, and there's the famous story of the birth of Zeus, his father, the Titan eats all his children and the mother, Reha, is determined that the last child, Zeus shouldn't be eaten. So she goes and gets a rock from close by

where she lives in Montaure, Ortheris, and she covers it in swaddling and hides it under her legs and then makes the child of, makes the noise of childbirth. And Cronos, the the Titan, thinks it's a new baby swallows it whole and the actual baby is then born on Crete and becomes used the leader of the next generation of gods. But the stone she takes is from magnesium in Greece, which is near Thessaly. And it's a stone that the Greeks have noticed had a very extraordinary property, which is the most interesting property that any object can have on Earth and is very rare, and that it can attract things remotely from a distance,

that without there being a physical force connecting them apparently, a piece of fluff or paper could fly towards this stone from magnesium. And so stones that have this property are named after that part of the world. They're called magnetites and from magnetites we get magnets. And the story of magnets and how magnets were then joined by Thompson and Faraday and others to make them, and Maxwell, to make the electro-motiv force that allows you and me to talk the way we do, and to use that action at a distance, which sciences brilliant at turning into extraordinary magical machines.

The Greek for Atadistances telly. So it's telecommunication, telephone, television, and teleporting. Anything that goes from one distant telegrams and telegraphs. And that is the, and gravity is the same thing. Something moves and there's nothing between it. And it makes us thrill and science can do that. And what we've never found a way to do is, or at least what we try to find a way, is to do the same with our fellow people. But our fellow people are, you know,

the world is surprisingly stable. There's magnet, magnets around the place and there's gold and this stuff and you dig it up and you can do terrible damage to it as we have. But we have moved from small groups, to clans, to tribes, to nations, to this strange myth of a nation and so on, and the individuals within it are much less controllable than the objects around us, and yet we can control those objects so superbly that it gives us an idea that we have a special place and a special power. And I suppose really what we want to do is to reconnect ourselves to the same motive forces that are thrilling, like magnetism and electricity, that exist in also all throughout nature,

that we look at them, you know, which of us can't honestly almost sob with joy when spring happens. And you see that once again these leaves are being pushed out of dead branches and gossips and insects are flying towards them. There's this fantastic process going on. And somehow we've allowed ourselves to feel outside it as if we are special. We've given ourselves a godlike status which is very dangerous I think and very foolish. And the more I look back, the more confident I have in looking forward, I suppose that's one of the other reasons I love myths so much. So, all right, so you described yourself as an empiricist and then you talked about, you started to talk about the attraction that the mythological and narrative world has for you and some of the reasons for that.

And then, but you also differentiated between you and Dawkins to some degree. And so, well, I'm curious about why. Well, I mean, he's, I mean, I'm, as I said, I can't speak for him, but you use the word Russian. And I understand that. And I don't, I don't have any, particularly, points of disagreement with him. I'm really fond of him, he's a friend. And I only feel sorry sometimes that, and this is a cheap point. It's, you know, we're most of it.

It's a bit fed up with this attitude that it's all about presentation. And I could argue that Richard's presentation, his passion is real, his love of science, his real, his love of the joy and the wonder of discovery is real. He's written books on wonder, which is a huge and marvelous and much under-explored human- And a primary religious instinct? Yes, and yet science has shown us, and it really can just can't be contested that we are part of a continuum of life. DNA demonstrates this, the DNA we share, not just with our close ape-like and and and and other mammals, but also with plants and flowers that also have DNA and as we know, so devices. And yet, or RNA, and yet, I don't think, I think it's fair to say that blackbirds don't look at the sun, so I can go, my God, that's so beautiful. Did you see that? I want to paint

it. I want to remember it. How is it? You know, this the sense of literally of marveling. It's the only world we know. When we're born, we don't think, of course, there are 70,000 other globes with much better sunsets. This is the only thing we've ever seen, and yet it staggers us. It surprises us. We're surprised by what is the case, to use the phrase that Victor Einstein loved. Do you know the case is everything around us. And we don't know another one. And yet we go, wow.

Why should we go wow at what is absolutely ordinary? There must be a a reason I suspect that we are astonished by the everyday by the fact of what we see when we look out of the window or when we go for a walk We're astonished by buds and grass and rabbits and sky and clouds and these things are We're astonished. We're astonished by what we want to imitate. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I've thought about that idea for a long time. It's not a casual response to your question.

Yeah. Well, the sun is a hero. The sun is the hero that fights the darkness at night and rises and new in the morning. The sun is associated with consciousness. And we have to imitate the hero. And we see what we have to imitate everywhere. And it reduces us to a state of of awe. And awe is an invitation to imitate. And imagine, so you, you see what you are not yet, but what you could be. And you need to see that because you need to turn into what you could be because what

you are is not sufficient to redeem you. Well, the example, I see that from a Jungian point of you, but I'm and Joseph Campbell, he's on a way too. But in terms of the way myths and then religions developed, the idea of imitating these symbols of complete power and creation like the sun, whether it's raw or whether it's Apollo or any other deity or sense of solar greatness, you're supposed to suffocate or sacrifice to or acknowledge your weakness to, but we could look at sacrifice. That's a great inward point. So I ask my students, especially the children of first generation immigrants. What did your parents sacrifice to put you here? And they can answer that instantly. And sacrifice, like we look at, sock, ancient sacrifice and we think about it as something primordial or even detestable, especially in its more extreme forms and no wonder.

But we had to act out sacrifice before we could psychologicalize it and understand it. And what we learned, and this is absolutely crucial, this issue of sacrifice, what we learned was that if we gave up something that we valued in the present, and so that could be a false idol, That's one way of thinking about it. If we gave up something in the present that we valued, the future would improve. We learned that we could bargain with reality itself by sacrificing counterproductive values to move ahead. And so we acted that out long before we could make it

into a psychological truism. And so it's there is that supplication element, but but it's also the case that you should be prostate in some prostrate in some sense in front of what's ultimately ideal because otherwise you don't have the proper humility. Yes, I mean, I see what you're saying. It makes rational sense, but then the empiricist, he says, well, okay, I'm the mother of some of those children in Mexico who are being slaughtered to the gods in order to make the harvest better. And Loventbel, it doesn't work because there is no causal relation between sacrificing children on a pyramid in Texacuatl.

And the harvest improving, in fact, there may well be an earthquake the next day and more people die. That very often did happen in whole civilizations, Mayan and Mexican and others, disappeared. And the more they were threatened, the more they sacrificed, and the less you sit was. So there was no, it may have had a psychological purpose

that I don't know. I mean, it seems to me the psychology of sacrificing your children, or even your very rare cattle, upon which you may depend for a year to eat, to gods who will apparently placate you by making a better harvest or not send a tidal wave this year that will destroy the port. And all the other things that our ancestors found in the contingent world in which they and unstable world in which they lived. So I can understand why a 19th century figure like

Fraser or the Golden Ball or like Mary McCarthy or the Young or Joseph Campbell can make wonderful myths out of myths. They're telling a story about stories and telling us what they mean. Well, I don't refute it, I repute it. I allow myself to believe, no, actually, yes, it's all very well, you can build a very nice theory about what these myths mean and who these hero are, what these quests are, and how there are any seven stories. And yes, but again, the stand-up comedian type empiricism system, he says, okay, so I'm a small Roman person under those circumstances. And what does this really meaning to me? I'm sorry, no. I've got, as Wordsworth put, it's getting and spending and doing and having children and looking and hoping life gets better and enjoying life with my friends, but to erect it into a spiritual language and a theatre of human meaning is delightful. And I think we have to recognize that it's a game, to some extent.

It may indeed be true. I mean, I'm not saying this to demolish your argument, but I'm saying it's yes, but in terms of self-respect. Buts are important. Buts are important. And the skepticism is necessary, because you don't want to leave anything standing, except that which can't survive the onslaught. Yes.

And there's no doubt that there's no doubt that the sacrificial idea can go dreadfully wrong. But I would say that's in the nature of the attempt because it's obviously the case that sometimes you make sacrifices towards a certain end, which is clearly an attempt to bargain with the future as if it's something that can be bargained with. Yes, but sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. And later, after that, the cultures of sacrifice around the world came a new system where it was the gods who sacrificed themselves, which is like the

Christian myth, or the many of the dying and reborn kings in various myths that James Fraser, in particular, wrote about. And Christ ran some to himself, as it was so suddenly it's as if humans said this sacrifice is getting us nowhere. If God really loves us, He would sacrifice Himself or herself for us. And that is one of the meanings of the incarnation and the Christian story is it not. and it's not unique in any way. There are many other stories of divine figures being sacrificed to save the society in which they make themselves fresh. You sacrifice your short-term impulses for the long-term good, I suppose. That's one way of thinking about the

discovery of the future. That speaks very well to your books. That speaks very well to your books, because, you know, underlying both your ex- and books of rules of behavior is that I don't mean this in a bad way. The simple truth of deferred pleasure being something that seems to be all deferred pleasure being something that seems to be or deferred advantage, being something that seems to have gone out of human culture lately, that we're all a bit verucous salt. I want it. I want it now, you know. And as you said about sacrifice, you suffer or you you know, in some way you defer what pleasure might positively be yours now in order to have a future advantage. Right. And then we have an immense discussion that lasts forever about what that optimal future advantage is. And that's part of this religious investigation because you might say, and this is something that's manifesting itself in Christianity, which is, well, we're trying to produce something better in the future. And so then you ask yourself, what does better mean? That's the first question. And

what does the future mean? Those need to be answered. And then the final question is, well, what's the most appropriate sacrifice? And so you get an extreme version of that in Christianity, hence its narrative power, which is, well, you sacrifice the most valuable, possible thing for what's of ultimate eternal value. That's the underlying structure. And in some sense, it hits a limit because it's God himself who sacrificed and the purpose of the sacrifice is the establishment, the redemption of humanity and the establishment of the kingdom of heaven eternally.

So that there isn't anything better than that by definition. Or there's a way. Or I know if I was to raise Al-Tusair or a Marxist view of this and say that it's about the power over the people which basically denies them any kind of pleasure now on a promise which is unprovable of a future glorification in some kind or another either for their children or for themselves in a heaven whose direction they can't point to. to and not just out of its own Marxists. Of course many many secularists and atheists like myself have said you know there is a there is a story to be told about religion basically stopping ordinary citizens from having any say in in their life and their world. They are told what the truth is they are told where power comes from and where it resides, and they are told that their poverty and their subservience and

their sacrifice are for the greater good, and they must take that authority on its word. And the meaning of the Enlightenment was that throwing off of those shackles of Aristotelian ecclesiasticism, which constantly laid down these categories of authority, and people began to question them and say, I wonder. Because I think we might just talk about, because I know it interests you, and there are people written quite a few books about it lately, is the distinction between a hierarchy and the network in terms of how you order society. And these religions and these sacrifices all came in hierarchical societies rather. It seems in ones that might be called networked nodal,

or some other word. I know Neil Ferguson has written about this, isn't he? In a book that I can't remember, it's titled, It's Got the Word, Tower, in it. But it's one of the objections people have to the modern, liberally produced world is that morality is relative and that hierarchies are toppled, and that power and authority are no longer seen to reside in some, in some agree, you know, that the curtain is pulled away and the Wizard of Oz is revealed to be nothing, a city of foolish snake oil salesman. And the answer lies within ourselves. So, okay, so I have to stop you there because I can't ask, I won't be able to ask this question. Sorry, you have to. There's so many things that you're saying that I want to ask about.

I they're they're they're there's okay. So with regards to the idea of the opiate of the masses. Okay, well, the first thing we might note, I think reasonably, is that Marxism is the methamphetamine of the masses. And whatever, whatever flaws Judeo Christianity might have had, in terms of its corruption, was certainly matched by the instantaneous corruption. Yes, but the fact that Marxist has a critique of religion does not mean that it falls because Marxism itself falls. No, that's not quite a critique.

I agree. Okay, so there's a second question there. And so the second question would be something like, is the not quite the truth. I agree. Okay, so there's a second questionnaire. And so the second question would be something like, is the corruption of the church that you described in Trenzik to the nature of the church and its doctrine, or is it the corruption of something that's valuable? Now, let me make two arguments for that.

One is that the corruption is in Trenzik, and the whole thing should be just dispensed with. And I would say that that's One is that the corruption is intrinsic and the whole thing should be just dispensed with. And I would say that that's the perspective of the four horsemen fundamentally. And of religious people, I mean Thomas Kranma who wrote the the preabook during the Reformation, there's a great phrase in it, there was not anything by the wit of man devised that has not been in time in part or in whole corrupted. Absolutely, and I think that's also an existential truth. I mean, you just talked about cronos. Yeah. Cronos devours his sons. Cronos is the archetypal tyrant, and he's also time.

And both time and the archetypal tyrant devour their own sons. So if you're a tyrannical father or a tyrannical statesman, instead of encouraging the development of the young people in your charge, he'll crush them and destroy them. He was a castrated, his own father. So that's a... I would say that that's something like demolition of the utility of tradition. I mean, in the Egyptian in Egyptian mythology, you see Horus who's the son, fundamentally, both the actual son, the heavenly son and the son and Osiris. And for the Egyptians, Horus and Osiris had to rule simultaneously. So Horace didn't castrate Osiris. He rescued him from the underworld and joined with him

so that the tradition, which was represented by Osiris, which had a chronos like element because it was tyrannical and destructive, had to be allied with Horace, who was essentially something like, I would say, something like empirical attention. It's something because the symbol is the eye. And so it was like alert tradition. And that's different than the castration of the father.

That's the rescuing of the father from the underworld when he becomes corrupt and senile. Now, when you just published mythos, we refer to this mythos heroes and Troy. And so I would say, you tell me if I'm wrong, but from the outside, it looks to me like you're involved in a philosophical, archaeological expedition to find things of value in the past and to bring them forward into the future. And that's what I am trying to do, at least for me, I would say,

with regards to Christianity, is like, I know the critiques, and I understand the critiques. And it's not like I'm not what would you call sensitive to their finer points. It is an open question, right? How much of the tradition, look, I know in Britain right now, there are people who say that flying the flag is an imperialist act. And so what are they asking? They're saying, well, is our tradition so irredeemably corrupt that we have to abandon it wholeheartedly? I can speak to this very directly

because it's something I find very, very interesting. Again, it's so much of its historical ignorance. For those who are obsessed with the flag and the politicians who want to fly the flag, I would urge them to read Rudyard Kipling, who is supposed to be, in some people's eyes, the poet and bard of British Empire, of the Raj, that the spokesman for this very thing, there is a scene in one of his masterpiece, Storkean Co. A book set in a school where a politician comes to the school to give a speech and he has a flag and the school children are outraged, absolutely horrified. This takes place in the second year of Gladstone's five-year premiership, at the absolute height of the British Empire. The Queen is on the throne, she's, you know,

her crown and her flag are fluttering all over the world. And these boys are at this special school, which is actually a kind of feeder for the British Empire. They're all be sent out to fight in Afghan wars and in India and in the Burr war later on and and keeping describes how they die But the idea to them that anybody would dare to wave a flag and ask them to value it was so disgusting They could barely speak. It's a very extraordinary passage where he describes their horror at this politician using the flag and

they're horror at this politician using the flag and claiming to own it. He makes the point that one's relationship to one's country is intensely private and it may be that one has great love for it, but that it's a love that is complex and confounded with all kinds of disappointment and hatred and fear and shame as well as love. And it is one's own thing. But to fly it and to wave it and to say that it means this is a lie and an imposition on the personal experience of those boys in that story. And I would urge everyone to read that because it comes from a surprising source. It's no accident. The best way to go. Would you say the same about burning it. Is it the same kind of, because you, you, you, you just offered a balanced account, because

you said, well, if you're sensible, let's say, and, and that, that your feelings for your country. So let's say your feelings for your tradition or your regard for your tradition is a complex mix of, of emotions from, uh, aborance and shame and contempt to love that entire distribution. Okay, that seems to me to be appropriate and my sense is that that's expressed mythologically by two figures of tradition one the Wise King and the other evil tyrant and all cultures are a meld of both although are a meld of both, although to a greater or lesser degree, because you get pure forms of tyranny and pure forms of benevolent rule, hopefully. I think that's a reasonable proposition. It's complex, but you're willing to accept that complexity. What I see, and maybe this will tie us back into the political discussion that we sort of started

this off with, is that in radical movements, radical critical movements, and I think I place the atheist horseman in that category. There's no, the love is not there, the respect is not there, the pointing out of the flaws is there and the contempt is there, but the attempt, that's not good enough. Look, if you read a piece of literature, you want to dismiss

that, which is no longer relevant and extract out that, which is crucial. That's critical reading. But the purpose isn't to dismiss. Fundamentally, the purpose is to mine. No, I would say another very central piece of literature for me, higher literature than Kipling, most people would say, is one of Flobez short stories and Kerr Sampler, simple heart, which is about this poor peasant woman, Felicity, I think her name is. which is about this poor peasant woman, Felicity, I think her name is, and there's a scene in which she kneels in front of a stained glass window, and this is where the parrot comes from that Julian Barnes wrote about,

so brilliant in Florentin's parrot. But she's incredibly simple, and incredibly ignorant and uneducated, but also incredibly devout. And she kneels there with her knees in desperate pain because she spends her whole life on them scrubbing floors. And she sees this extraordinary stained glass. And Flobar is able to describe the incredible corruption and vignality that went into the spending of the money on this stained, staying glass, and the lives

of the corrupt priests who did it, but also showed the light coming from her rather than from behind the glass. It's a very holy moment, and it's anybody who dismisses religion would be well to remember that devotion and piety can be wonderful things as well as terribly brutal things. Okay, so I want to understand the difference. Right, okay, I'm going to read something and forgive me, but I want to go here. You're face to face with God. Bone cancer in children, What's that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world where there is such misery that's not our fault?

It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world so full of injustice and pain? And then one more, because the God who created this universe, if it was created by God is quite clearly a maniac, other maniac, Ivan in the brothers Karamazov. Yeah, right. Right. Now it's okay. So what happens in the brothers Karamazov is that Ivan wins the argument. Yeah. But Elocia is the better person. Completely so. And we love it. Yeah, it's a book everyone is very interesting.

I would urge everyone to read the Brothers Karamazov because I do think it's a work of genius. There's a lot about Dostoevsky. I really dislike because of his influence. He's again, people who don't understand Dostoevsky think he's a champion of right-wing religiosity without understanding that he went through an extraordinary life experience to come to where he did come and that his novel show his full understanding of all kinds of different points of view, but in terms of the dialectic of that issue about how how there can be a God.

I mean, I was answering a question that I was asking. I know, and I'm not trying to put you on the spot. My point is I don't believe there is such a being, but if there were, and he were, the kind of being that has been worshipped and described by various religions around the world, monotheistic religions, then I would have many burns to pick with him. But of course, I don't believe there is such a thing, but the argument from evil, as it's known, is a very old one, and it goes back through the medieval religious figures as well as later humanists, that this idea that it is very hard to square this loving God who has a knowledge of every hair on our head and

adores us and adores little kittens, but he also, as I say, bone cancer in children, but also life cycles of insects that whose whole aim is to burrow into the eyes of children in Africa and lay their eggs there and cause blindness for those children. I mean, you could quite easily picture a universe in which there weren't such an animal and in which children went hot, said, blind with pain and horror, by the various bugs and fungi and insects and viruses in the world. There's a worm. There's a worm in Africa that burrows under the skin and it's long worm. Oh, yes. If you you can pull it out with a pencil and wrap it, but it breaks, it's

fragile, and then it gets infected. It's a terrible thing. And a doctor recently made it his life's work to eradicate that and did it successfully. And so then I would, so I read what you wrote. And I mean, I take it very seriously. And it wasn't, I wasn't throwing it in your face. I brought it up actually because of what you said about flow bears attitude, you know, because what that lacks, what your statement lacks is exactly what flow bear

highlighted in that woman on her knees. And I'm not saying this is a simple solution, right? And I would say, so let's take the argument, you made there, and there's a direction that goes in that's nihilistic and resentful and vengeful and angry and all understandable. But to me, counter, it doesn't look to me like there's anything good in it. It looks like it's entirely counterproductive. It makes the problem it purports to have been generated by worse. And so then the question is, what's the appropriate attitude given that the argument

you make is actually an extraordinarily powerful argument? And I don't know the answer to that, but I do know I think that resentment and anger, and even the motive that would make you want to say that to God himself, I think that's probably not helpful, even though it's so well. I came to that with great difficulty. I mean, I've had my reasons to be resentful and angry, especially recently, and because I'm suffering a lot of pain, and it makes me resentful and angry and wanting to shake my fist. But I found upon intense consideration that there was nothing in that that didn't make it worse and that therefore that must be wrong.

Even though it's justifiable, right? I told you, I completely understand and you must remember that my response was to a question. I didn't see coming and it was amused. It was because I don't believe in this God, it's not an issue. I'm not really resentful and angry about the fact that there's evil in the world. I'm sorrowful very often and I'm united in my aberration for the fact and the real belief I have that most people, fundamentally, given this dysfunction or this deep trauma, most people are so good, are so anxious to be good, are deontically good, have a sense of obligation and drive in them

to be better than they are. I think that's one of the key things I love about humanity is not just that we are dissatisfied with things that are wrong and can be improved, but with ourselves we are dissatisfied and that most of us want to be better. I know that's true of me, all the time every time I go off to sleep, I think, how did I screw up tonight today? How can I be better tomorrow? Why am I so bad at this? Only I could manage that. In moral terms, genuine moral terms. Yes, I think that's an extraordinarily common experience. I think that's very much under-noticed. Yeah. Yeah. And part of the reason, as far as I can tell,

that talks that I've been giving, let's say, have had the effect that they've had, is because I do point out that that's an extraordinarily common experience. That that that self tortured by conscience and it does indicate this striving towards a higher mode of being. The other question I have when I look at the the the response that I just read is that the amount of the world's evil that's a consequence of our voluntary moral insufficiencies is indeterminate. So you might say hypothetically speaking that as part of God's creation, we actually have important work to do.

And if we shirk it, the consequences are real. And you might say, well, that's just an apology for God. And perhaps that's the case. And perhaps there's no God at all. And so what the hell are we talking about? But I do think it's an important issue. I mean, your life is characterized by a stellar level of constant productive creativity. That's you. And you're offering that to the world. And that seems necessary. And maybe it's because the problems are real and important and and the rule we have to play ethically is of paramount importance truly. Yeah. Why else would we torture ourselves with conscience and and I would say that's the

flowering of the religious instinct within you? Well you could describe it as that but then you know there are I mean you used to phrase earlier than I I wanted to say whoa hang on I'm not sure I know what that means, a higher mode of existence. I don't see, I remember having this argument with John Clees of all people some years, he was a great lover of the Tibetan book of the dead and Gil Brann and people like that, and I've always found them slightly hard to take. And he talked about a, I think the phrase he used was a higher level of consciousness. And I said, I don't, and again, this is my empiricist thing, it sounds cynical and skeptical, it's not meant to be, but what level?

Who's at, what a describer level? What is a higher mode? Why higher? What's higher than another? Are you saying it in terms of animals? It's a view, it's an old-fashioned, Huxleyan view of evolution that most modern at Richard Dawkins, for example, most modern evolutionary scientists and so on, the ethylogists would would deprecate to say that there is a higher level of being, a higher mode of consciousness. Is it just like saying, well, you're better educated, you've read more, you know more, is it you've somehow been enlightened that affect clowns effect as the Germans would say,

which is not necessarily intellectual, but is somehow spiritual. And if so, show me an example of it, show me someone who has a higher mode of existence than I do Or the I can I can answer that I think to some degree. Yeah, three ways three ways One that higher mode of existence is what your conscience torches you for not attaining Okay, okay, I think my conscience torches me for not attaining is that I was rude to someone yesterday And I shouldn't have been.

Right, but it's the shouldn't part of it. Yes, the obligation. It's the tea. Exactly. David Hume, the problem of ought. Yeah. Well, and then you think you think about how it manifests itself. Hmm.

You don't, this is why Nietzsche was wrong. You cannot create your own values. Right. The values impose themselves on you independent of your will. Now, maybe you partied, well, that's what your conscience does and good luck trying to control it. This is very anti-neature, isn't it? Well, I'm a great admire. I know you are. That's why I made the point. Well, well, opposite to his philosophy. But it's well, so Jung embarked on a lengthy critique of nature and it's part of his work that isn't well known, I would say, but and we'll leave that be except to say that the cycle analysts starting with Freud, systematized showed that we weren't masters in our own psychological house. Nice.

There were autonomous entities. And those would be the Greek gods to some degree that operated within us. And we were, which is Julian James's point, exactly. Yes. We're in. Yes. Yes. I have my problems with James, but as a overarching idea, there's interest in it.

OK. So there are things happening with us and to us in the moral domain that we cannot control. And that's that that that stunned me when I first learned it as a proposition. It's oh yes, look at that. Here's one. What are you interested in? Yeah. Well, that grips you. Okay, number two, what is your conscience bother you about? Okay, that's your inadequate by your own standards. Now, what adequate would mean, that's a different question, but it's defined negatively by conscience. Yes. And then, better, there's one, I said I would lay out three.

You can look at Jean-Pierre J. P.A.J.'s work on developmental psychology. On the development of the subject, yes. He was a genetic epistemologist. Yes, we wanted to do was, this is what he wanted to do. He wanted to unite science and religion. That was his goal. And he wanted to look at the empirical development of values. And what he concluded, at least in part,

was that a moral stance that's better than a previous moral stance does all the things that the previous moral stance does plus something else? Yes. Yes. And you can say the same thing as a scientific theory. I remember, I had a great, I loved Pierre-Jé, and his observation was so empirical, of course, that they've made absolutely all the development of the child, and the, not quite the theory of mind, that wasn't his thing, but similar developments and signposts where people become aware of self. Okay, so now Piaget looks specifically at the development of morality.

And he was one of the first people to emphasize the importance of games. And what he showed, what he showed was that at two years old, let's say, a child can only play a game with him or herself. But at three, both children can identify a name and then share it in a fictional world. And so that's partly pretend play and the beginnings of drama and then cooperate and compete within that domain. And then what happens in the game theorists have shown this is that within that domain. And then what happens in the game theorists have shown this is that games out of games morality emerges. There's a recit.

So I'll give you an example. And this is a crucial example. So if you pair juvenile rats together, the males, they have to play. They have to rough and tumble play because their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly if they don't. Anyways, they have to play. You pair a big rat and a little rat teenage rats together,

and the big rat will stomp the little rat. First, first encounter. So then you say power determines hierarchy. Yeah. Okay, but then you pair the rats multiple times, like 50. Yeah. Then if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win 30% of the time, the little rat will stop inviting him to play. And so you get an emergent reciprocity, even at the level of the rat. Fascinating, isn't it? And it's not dissimilar to the theory of mind games that were devised by Simon Baron Cohen and others in the question of showing how neurodivergence develops in the autistic spectrum, for example. But one of the things that so interest me at the moment because of the pandemic,

which is slightly close to this, that you might be able to help me with, is I've been very interested in, as I have been over the years, at how completely out of favor, B.F. Skinner and the behavioralists have become, since I guess, since a man you probably don't admire that much, since Noam Chomsky, rather demolished B.F. Skinner famously. On the language front. On the language front, but also the whole nature of behaviouralism and looking at rats and their behaviours. But when it came to this pandemic, one of the things that was hidden from the public was that every country had its scientific committees, which were mainly composed of course of virologists and epidemiologists and immunologists, but always behaviorologists too, because the secret

to getting out of the pandemic wasn't just following science and tracking a micro-invisible virus in the air, it was how people would take it. And Sherlock Holmes in the second Sherlock Holmes book, which is called The Sign of Four, says to Watson, I remember this, it's very interesting, he says, you know what's and the statistician has shown that we can predict to an extraordinary order of accuracy, the behavior of the average man, who uses the word man, where it was now, we would have to say, human or man or woman, but you know what I mean, the average man. We can absolutely predict how they will behave, but no one has yet and probably never will be able to predict how an individual will behave.

So we can be talked about as a mass and advertisers and politicians and about as a mass and advertisers and politicians and psychologists and all kinds of other people are very good at knowing how we behave as a group but as individuals we are unknowable without face-to-face conversation and the history and so on. So that was one and the other one which I think is connected was I believe it was a B.F. Skinner experiment and it's one I absolutely love because it makes me wonder whether all these kinds of conversations are maybe ultimately a waste of time. But he said, if you take a load of mice and put them on a Persepex tray and float them on the water, because they are unaware of the risk they're in, they move around randomly, and their random movement makes the tray even. They just randomly moving around. If you scale it up and put humans

on it, they sink within seconds. Because they think, oh, we're tipping, we must run to this end. And of course, they all run to that end. And so it tips over. In other words, consciousness of the problem, attempting to deal with it, being aware of it, is the biggest problem of all. And that's something new to us, because in the old days we lived in small groups who just didn't know how awful humanity was, what sins we were committing, how dreadful we were making the world. It was only through the telecommunication and through the recent development of the global village or whatever you want to call it, your countryman McLuhan, that we have actually become aware and are now likely to be running around in that tank and causing it to fall over, whereas really we should just be unconscious

and get on with living and randomly run about in our tank and then we'll never sink. Does that make sense? I want to answer the behaviorist question. It's transformed into behavioral neuroscience and affective neuroscience and being taken over primarily by the biologists. Yeah. And part of the reason it's vanished is because it's become more and more difficult to do animal experimental work for all sorts of reasons. And because it requires a tremendous amount of technical expertise. Right. So, um, so that's the theory of conditioning is also vanished with it.

I know it's transmuted and become more sophisticated and being incorporated into all sorts of theories. The most outstanding behaviorist was Jeffrey Gray and he wrote a book called The Neural Psychology of Anxiety, which is an absolute work of genius and it's very heavily influenced by the Schenarian tradition. Right. So I want to tell you something back again

and I've been poking you about this and I don't want to stop yet. Back to the distinction between you and Dawkins. Because I see you as a border figure, you've got one foot in the rationalist human, rationalist humanist, atheist, empiricist world firmly planted, but then there's the artist in you,

which is a major part of your personality. And, and, and, and obviously a part that's incredibly productive and very well received, and that has an intellectual end as well. The, that domain, that second domain that you occupy, isn't formalized. The investigation of that isn't formalized as well by the atheist community. They lose what's there and they don't value it properly. And that's a problem. Like with Dawkins, for example, I get letters from lots of people, lots and lots of people. And lots of them are nihilistic. And because they're nihilistic, they're suicidal.

I had a friend, I went for a walk with him the other week and he was a communist, a atheist when he was a kid. He grew up in Poland and he had criticized his family for celebrating Christmas because it was irrational. And then he realized at one point, he said, I could kill Christmas and we just have another weekend. That wouldn't actually, right, right? Because there's a magic there that rationalism can destroy.

And for reason. I have exactly that problem politically with the royal family, which on the face of it is of course, more preposterous, even than Christmas and religion is the idea that we still have a Royal Family. But, part of my belief in ceremony and ritual and symbolism is I look at America and I think if only Donald Trump and now Biden, if every week they had to walk up the hill and go into a mansion in Washington, and there was Uncle Sam in a top hat and striped trousers, a living embodiment of their nation, more important than they were.

That's the key. He, Uncle Sam, is America. The president is a fly-by-night politician, voted for by less than half the population. And he has to bow in front of this personification of his country every week. And that personification, Uncle Sam can't tell him what to do. Uncle Sam can't say no past this act and don't pass that act and free these people, give them a pardon. All he can do is say, tell me young fella, what you done this week. And he'll bow and say, well, Uncle Sam, say, oh, you think that's the right thing for my country? Well, that's what a constitutional monarchy is. And, um, of course, it's absurd, but the fact that Churchill and that show everyone had to bow

every week in front of this is something, there's something. And also empirically, look at the happiest countries in the world. That's all you need to do, and they happen to be constitutional monoghies, Norway, Sweden, Benilux, or it's Japan. They're always right up there on the list. Now, it may be that we can't find the causal link between their constitutional monarchy,

but it might just be something to do with that. And that's, it's a way of answering your question in the same way as religion is that I can see the absurdities of the claims of many religions. And I can see the history of the wickedness and depression and suppression, particularly in my own instance, you know, being gay, growing up, gay, and I, there's a long history of religion in particular, being intolerant.

And to this day, even this Pope Francis, who I had some hopes for, seems to be beginning to add to an ancient slander and nonsensical attitude towards sexuality, which is extremely annoying and upsetting. But you know, I kind of, that doesn't mean I throw the whole baby out with the bathwater, I kind of, that doesn't mean I throw the whole baby out with the bathwater, I can see in the same way that I don't believe in in in Greek mythology. In actual fact, I don't believe that on Olympus Zeus lived there with his wife, Hera, but I do believe Hermes and Hera and Zeus live within us. There is a Hermes inside me.

There is a there is a trickster, a liar, a Joker, a cute funny side, as well as a harmonic, a Apollonian and a bestial dinosaur inside with his appetitive and addictive and frenzied. And I see the value and the truth in those religious manifestations, those principles, those elements of my character and the character of the human family. In Mesopotamia, the God who became supreme was Marduk. He had 50 different names. And one of them was he who makes ingenious things

as a consequence of the combat with Tiamat, chaos essentially, which is a brilliant, brilliant name. But so, Marduk was the aggregation of 50 gods. So imagine that each of those gods was the representative of a tribe at one point. Yes. And that would be the value system of the tribe personified, something like that. And indeed the Greek gods derived from those Mesopotamian gods. They came. Yeah, exactly. Fundamental development in the history of religious thinking

and dramatic thinking. Well, let's say each god is a manifestation of a value structure. Yeah. And we say, well, value structures have some commonalities across them, just like games have some commonalities across them, value structures have some commonalities across them, just like games have some commonalities across them or Languages have some commonalities across them. So then you start to aggregate gods. Yeah, and you produce a metagod and the metagod is Marta Can he's all eyes? Because he pays attention like an empiricist, let's say and speech

Yeah, and so the messopotamians had already figured out that attention and speech were the key elements of proper sovereignty. Right. Brilliant. And the Egyptians, right? They worshiped the eye, same idea. And it was the eye in part that the Egyptians associated with the immortal soul, and they associated that with the proper local of sovereignty. Yeah. Because they started with the proper locale of sovereignty. Yeah. Because they started to abstract out the idea of sovereignty from the sovereign. And so the sovereignty could be something that was now not embodied in any specific person, sort of like the Uncle Sam figure that you described. Yes. Wouldn't be the... I often thought with presidents, they'd have a much easier job if the symbolic weight

was lifted from their shoulders. A fourth branch of government, right? Symbolic. Which is what a constitutional monarchy exactly is by accident of history, certainly not by design, but it just somehow the bits of the sovereign that were inimical to human development, the tyranny, the autocracy, the whimsical caprice, all these were sort of chipped away because of the human failings of different sovereigns until by 1688, what were you called in British history, the glorious revolution when the Bill of Rights was written and so on, which was the same as the American Bill of Rights under the years later essentially, and it became a constitutional monarchy, and that was slowly refined as well.

And of course, I know many people find it absurd, and that rage is and they live in palaces, and they've got all this money and it's unjust. And of course, all that is true. And I wouldn't defend it on any rational grounds, but I would on empirical grounds. Maybe that's a good difference between rationalism and empiricism. So this, you were talking about the gods within. Okay. And you said, well, you believe that the gods are within.

Yes. I know that I know I understand the claim that you're making and and the limits of that claim. But I want to explore that. Okay. So as humanity advances, we'll say advancement is the aggregation of larger societies, our more sophisticated view of the world, more technological power, that sort of thing, more ability to predict and control. Indeed, a longer lifetime. Yes, yes, and the things that come along with that, and more peace

by the looks of things and more food and the Stephen Pinker things. Yeah, right, yes, and the things that come along with that and more peace by the looks of things and more food and and the Stephen Pinka things. Right, right, this exactly that. So the God's aggregate and unify. That happens across as cultures collide and integrate the God's integrate and unify. It's the battle between the gods in heaven. That's the parallel development to the battle between tribes for dominance on earth, but it's an integrative process as well as a submission process. Yeah. Okay, so those are within. Now you have an integrated god within.

Yes. That's what torches you with your conscience. Yes, that's your Germany cricket. It's your, what philosophy is called your deontic or deontological voice. So then you ask yourself. Yeah. Then you ask yourself, and this is a dead serious question.

So imagine that people are exploring the moral domain, whose reality is blatantly obvious, but difficult to formalize, let's say. We're exploring the nature of the moral realm tentatively. And we develop more powerful and more integrated theories as we progress. You end up with a unified God, so it's a monotheism. There's a God within. Then the question is, well, what exactly is that God within?

Does it correspond to something that's real? Or is it just a figure of the imagination? But then you say's real? Or is it just a figure of the imagination? But then you say, well, if it's just a figure of the imagination, what exactly is the imagination? It's a Christian, I think partly Christianity insists that this integrated God figure also had a real existence. That's how Christianity tries to solve this particular problem. Yes. And people like C.S. Lewis and Jung to some degree as well would say, well, once in history, someone acted out that unified God so completely that something happened. That's the proposition. Okay, well, that's the limit of the proposition. And then the question is, well,

how real is this moral striving? It's real enough so you torture yourself when you don't engage in it properly. It's real enough so you can't avoid its call. It's real enough so that It's real enough so that you can make moral errors that are so severe that you can doubt the validity of your own existence. It's real enough for that. And this is an honest question. It's like, I don't know. I certainly see that how much good is done when people are good and how much evil is done when they're evil? Yes, but it's very hard I think empirically to be really boring and use the word again. It's quite you know to build up a list and show

that there is more morality on the side of those who follow the particular faith, a particular systematic religion than those who didn't. I mean, you know, that it's, well, that's the question. You can certainly have morality without religion. That is not. Okay, let's take that for a second, move back to the political. Okay, because that's the key issue. Yes.

So let's say we're going to defend the values of the West, to the degree that they're worth defending. Then we are making a claim that the inheritors of a particular tradition have something valued valid morally on their side, or we cannot defend that position. And we can't defend the position. I mean, look, I know this is bothering you, what's happening in the broader public landscape. You got tangled up, for example, with JK rolling, right? Well, with what's happening around her. Yeah, I'm actually a friend and we'll remain a friend, but I'm also sorry that people are upset. You know, the two things are not incompatible. I don't have to break links with JK Rowling to say that I have a huge sympathy and

and I endorse the efforts of trans people everywhere to live the lives that they feel they want to leave it lead. And I hate how they are often treated. And I recognize the courage it takes to choose. Yes, and you've put your money where your mouth is on that front over the course of your whole life. I've tried to, yes. So it's not just a claim. You can look at your biography and see that.

But your disturbed nonetheless at what's, let's say, there's something that's happening in our culture that's not sitting right with you. Okay, how do you defend the damn culture against it without making the claim that we do have something of let's say higher value that is the consequence of following a particular tradition. Yes. Because without that you lost, you lose the argument instantly.

I mean, I think a lot of it is to do with the necessity that we all have of redefining it. We have to remember that morality is a question of manners. It is literally what morality means a question of manners, it is literally what morality means, that our parents and grandparents had a very, very different and very firm sense of what was immoral. If the word immoral was used in a newspaper or by a person there, and that person's immoral, it would have a sexual meaning. It would mean that they lived with someone with whom they weren't married, or they lived with someone of the same sex, or that in some way they were philanthropists or loose in their morals, meant entirely to do with the bedroom. These were the unforgivable behaviors of a generation that close to us. We can still hug them if we're allowed to in the garden in COVID times, that that's how quickly morality changes.

So the idea of the culture is a false one. There is no the culture. That there, you know, it's not like a human version of a biosphere, even I don't think. There is the state of things that has now exist. But like when you were talking about religion and saying this, you know, this God, that what religion has been brilliant at and it's needed to be, but so has science

is redefining what God is. What God was in 1400, it was, God was capable of being remarkable things. He was answerable for everything. And we worshipped him for it. A couple of hundred years later, a few things had been taken away from him. And we could answer for traveling the world and knowing it and discovering how the stars actually were not holes in a black cloth, but maybe were celestial objects with, you know,

and then a few hundred years later. And similarly, science, we use the word cosmos. Well, cosmos used to mean a very small sphere of the, you know, as a section of the solar system. And now it's some infinite thing. And there may indeed be dozens of them, millions of them, who knows, according to string theory and quantum theory and all kinds of shredding as number and all the rest of it,

everything is redefined in each generation. So what is left that is absolute? And this is where religion has an argument with intellectual progress because it wants to hang on to something that it believes is eternal and permanent and utterly always true. But there is no such thing. The morality, I mean, I did a debate with Christopher Hitchens actually about the Catholic church and the people defending

it. When we attacked the their attitude towards child sex scandal said, well, when the 1960s, it wasn't such a big sin. And what that is actually true, but it's not true coming from a Catholic whose whole point is that they are eternally true, that their morality is as true now as it was when St. Peter founded the church. That their enemy is people like me who are relativists who say that there is no absolute morality, but that things change according to situation, circumstance and knowledge. And so that is true of God. God alters every day. He adds a little bit of a quality here, or she does, and takes away another bit. Now no longer responsible for disease and no longer responsible

for earthquakes, but maybe responsible for something else, but it's a shrinking kingdom. And so the idea of there being an absolute and an eternal, it just doesn't seem to square with the way we have developed over the certainly over history, which is to say over the last 5,000 years, since we've been able to write things down. Before that, we can only judge how and who we were according to objects and artifacts and architecture. But since we've been able to write, it's pretty clear that the instability of, and I'm not saying this in a derri-der-way of instability of meaning, although I do think you misunderstood Derri-der-ding.

I hope you've read Peter Samman's biography, by the way, it might change your mind about him, but that's a whole other subject. But yeah, so I'm- Let's go back, okay, so let's go after the eternal varieties. Idea. Clearly religious conception shift, although there is a core tradition that remains intact. Well, a tradition by definition stays intact. There's something that identifies it as the same entity across time. Yes, right. Maybe that's even mutable, but I've looked for what might be regarded as eternal verities in the moral domain.

So let me put a few forward. The beautiful is more valuable than the ugly. Truth is to be sought after in opposition to falsehood. That's particularly true in relationship to the spoken word. The spoken word brings about remarkable transformations of reality itself. And it's for that reason that verbal truth is constitutive, but also of vital ethical significance. It doesn't make it all the more important to look at the discourse beneath verbal speech, to, to, I hesitate to use the word, but to deconstruct it, to, or at least to attempt to look at the currents that run through speech, to see, and they're not all deridarian or, you know, lecanean or fukotian or whatever

the adjective of fuko is, they're not all about power, they're not all necessarily Marxist. The project, you know, the Socirian project and the others of looking at where language comes from, not just in a philological sense of derivation, but in the sense of where the discourse is come from is paramount, therefore. And so to say verbal, you know, it's not just an utterance is in and of itself transformative, or if it is transformative, it might be wickedly so, or it might be negatively so at least. Well, with regards to your point about the analysis of the narratives and even the deconstruction, I would say it depends on the motive. And it's the motive.

And this is, I suppose, to some degree, why I'm skeptical, let's say of the atheist skepticism, it's it's destructive. There's a destructive element to it. There's not a there's no archaeological redemption. But that's nothing to be promoted. You said it was all about the motive. That's not necessarily the case that it has nothing to do with motive. Motive mode of is a tough motive. Well, that's not necessarily the case that it has nothing to do with motive.

Motives are tough one. Yeah, it is. I mean, if my motive is to make money and I make a great discovery, it's as valuable as if my motive was to make a great discovery and I made a great discovery. The great discovery is made. How is the motive relevant? Well, because your motives determine the decisions you make along the way, if I'm fundamentally motivated by the belief that being is worth preserving, let's say,

because on the whole it's a good, I'm going to react and think much differently than if I am ambivalent about that, or if I feel at the bottom of my soul that the whole bloody project is of questionable utility and might as well be shelved. And that dichotomy that characterizes us, you know, we have Cain enabled inhabiting us. There's no doubt about that. That's that's a fundamental truth. And if Cain has the upper hand, even if it's in the scientific endeavor, the consequences of that manifest themselves and they manifest themselves destructively. That's why it's interesting that you have to say, can enable because I think this brings us back to the very beginning is the importance of myth and and also of parable. I'd like to end because we're getting towards a bit where I have to move away.

But Oscar Wilde is known as a master of epigrams and wit and people mistakenly think of him as Shallow or trivial or facetious or vain or peacocky or something, but he was very profound in fact and of course he could be peacocky too. But there's a story that isn't necessarily at all. No, they don't rule each other out. But here's an example of a great parable, which is why, again, it's why I love literature and the art of wit because it zooms to the truth so much more quickly. It seems to me that so many other attempts to describe or rationalize truth. And here's one where, while was at a dinner and someone was being rather kind of envious of someone and being rather unpleasant. And while suddenly he said,

the devil was walking one day in the Libyan desert and he saw a monk being tormented by some of his demons and he approached and the demons bowed in front of him and said, Master, and he said, what, what goes on here? They said, Master, for 39 days and 39 nights, we have tried to tempt this holy monk away from his God and his religion. But he has stayed steadfast and holy to his God and his religion. We have offered him powers and principalities, we have offered him the joys of the flesh, we have offered him wine and food and riches, but he has turned us down. There's nothing that we can do to win this holy man to our cause, and the devil said, out of my way, and he whispered in the monk's ear. And instantly the monk took the petrol cross around his neck and

snapped it and filled the air with hideous curses against his garden, his church, and his religion, and swore he would never follow Christ again. And the demons fell down and in front of the devil and said, Master, what can you have said in one second that we could not? What did you say to him? And the devil said, Oh, it was very simple. I just told him his brother had been made bishop of Alexandria. Now, that seems to me, hey, it's very funny, but it is profoundly truthful and it is this, this is the way we show people how envy and resentment, so much a part of who we are that if you know I mean it seems like a trivial example but it just it's a model to me that if you want to say something and you want to change minds and you want to burn people with the flame of

love and hope and connection that we all secretly believe in, that makes us gas when we read poetry or makes us feel what love is and joy and all the things that we're mostly to embarrass to talk about because they're a bit soppy but truly they matter more than anything else. We displace them on kittens and so on but we really really we care about these things and and the way I think to to bond people to it is not to talk abstractly about ideas necessarily unless you're talking to someone who has the same reading as you and that sounds a snobbish point but unless you're talking to someone who has the same reading as you, and that sounds a snobbish point, but unless you're talking to someone who's also read the same box, or at least has the same ideas as you, or is open to them, it just becomes a bit lectury, whereas if you can tell a story instead, or a parable, that's, especially if it's funny,

or it's sexy, or it's got some quality that just tickles that strokes us. Then you bring people to a connection. Unfortunately, most of the world who use the art of rhetoric and persuasion and do it for nefarious purposes. And maybe that's the keys to try and build up, as you are doing, and I hope I'm doing in my own way, the value of story and looking deeply into the nature of characters within stories that even though it's just a story, it might actually be a portal to something really profound that will touch you and change your life. That's just exactly the right place to stop.

Good, I'm sorry, it has to stop, but it's been one of the bad recorders. I knew that we would, I was primarily worried about this conversation because there were so many things that I wanted to talk to you about. I didn't know what I would talk to you about. Well, we may have to have a second one in a few months, if you'd like. Yes, well, after we digest this one. you