The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 188. Saving The Humanities | Stephen Blackwood

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

Dr. Stephen Blackwood: Philosopher, cultural critic and founder of Ralston College. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Stephen Blackwood discuss his work as founder of the Inner City Youth Program and his experience with developing Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. We get into a deep discussion about the inner workings of philosophical aspects about social constructs, University and the humanities, the spiritual ‘culture crisis’ going on today, and more. Dr. Stephen Blackwood is the founding president of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. Dr. Blackwood specializes in the history of philosophy and dedicates a large portion of his work and studies on Boethius. He has contributed a great deal to several programs including the St. George’s YouthNet as well as an educational mentoring program for inner-city kids in Nova Scotia. Dr. Blackwood has been recognized by the floor of the US Senate due to his op-ed “ObamaCare and My Mother's Cancer Medicine” that reached the Wall Street Journal. Check out Dr. Stephen Blackwood’s website: https://www.stephenjblackwood.com/

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast season 4 episode 42 recorded on May 18th 2021. I'm Michaela Peterson. Quick update. My dad is feeling better. Not fully good, but better. Thank goodness. On this episode, my dad discussed philosophy from a historical perspective with his guest, Dr. Steven Blackwood. Dr. Blackwood is the founding president of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, and author of the Consolation of Boetheus as Poetic Liturgy. With a main focus in the history of philosophy, Dr. Blackwood also founded the inner city youth program in Nova Scotia. He hosted and moderated further soul-feeding conversations with my dad, Sir Roger Scrutin, and Slavojizek in the past couple of years. I hope you enjoy this episode. [♪ Music playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing Hello everyone, I'm pleased to have with me today, Dr. Stephen Blackwood, who's the founding president of Ralston College, a newly founded university in Savannah, Georgia. Dr. Blackwood

was one of the founders of St. George's Youth Net, an educational mentoring program for inner-city youth in the North End District of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was subsequently a teaching fellow in the foundation year program at the University of King's College, which is one of Canada's finest undergraduate institutions. Blackwood hosted and moderated a conversation between Sir Roger Scruton and I at Cambridge University in November of 2018 and moderated the debate, happiness, capitalism, versus Marxism between Slavoj Gieciek and I on April 19th, 2019. Dr. Blackwood lectures and specializes

in the history of philosophy, especially Boethius. He also hosts the Ralston College podcast, which has featured guests guests including Douglas Murray, the physicist Freeman Dyson, Andrew Doyle, the online satirist and author, and Theodore Delrampal, who wrote our culture, what's left of it, among many other books. Oxford University Press published his book,

The Consolation of Bethes, as a Boethius, as poetic liturgy in 2015. Welcome, Dr. Blackwood, Stephen, it's really good to see you. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. Thanks for having me and Jordan, it's great to see you again. I think the last time we, yeah, I think the last time we actually saw each other, I believe, was during the debate with Slavojizek. Is that correct? That is right.

I think that is right. Yeah. So it's two years ago. So maybe I could ask you first of all about the inner city youth program and north end of Halifax. I don't know that story. So that might be a nice place to start. Well, I grew up in Eastern Canada and a place that you would know,

but perhaps not all of your listeners know and Prince Edward Island and a sort of pastoral, quiet, sleepy, very rural place than a small family farm. In a huge, well, comparatively by historic standards, a huge by contemporary standards, rather a huge family, contemporary standards, rather a huge family of the seven younger brothers and two younger sisters. My parents, a milk cow, I don't wanna paint too idyllic a picture, everyone knows family life

and firm life is all kinds of ups and downs. But the point I'm trying to make is that I had a very kind of intensely wonderful and rich and very actively busy childhood. And it set me up in many respects for the discovery of philosophy when I went to college and I had the immeasurable gift of meeting some teachers who just open worlds to me. I mean, you know what fundamental matters and not that I was particularly good at it by any means, but just that it was eye-opening for me to see that things I had perhaps intuited in my childhood about the nature of things in some deep sense. We all have these intuitions, whether to nature or music or love or or or or

family life or whatever, that there were ways of thinking about those those things. And I spent quite a long time with some wonderful teachers, particularly in the ancient Greek and Latin and then medieval tradition, thinking about things and particularly about the nature of the human individual, traditional thinking about things and particularly about the nature of the human individual, what it is really, what it's, it's realization is. Anyway, I mention all that because when I came to the end of my masters degree, I'd gone straight through, you know, doing a lot of, you know, thinking work in a wonderful community, it needs to be said. I just, I had kind of, in a way, had my fill of ideas and I had kind of tapped out. I'd gone as far as I could in the theoretical at that point

and I needed to reengage in the, not, I wouldn't say the real world, but in the more, you know, the more the world of activity and action. And I had a dear friend and mentor of mine named Gary Thorn, who was the priest at an inner city parish called St. George's Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia. And he had been with others, including one of my sisters had been working in the inner city,

thinking about, which was, I should say, a very rough and highly dysfunctional place. North end of Halifax is, that is, or was, and in some respects, still is, not least because of an absolutely catastrophic civic decision. There was a place in Halifax called Afrikville, Black community that though perhaps was not entirely up to contemporary standards in terms of technology and things was a vibrant place that Duke Ellington had played there. It was a flourishing community.

Anyway, the city wanted to build a new bridge and part of the foundations of the bridge, they wanted to put an african. So at least as the story I've understood from my own reading about it, and they they they uprooted this entire very vibrant community out of the place that had been called african and resettled them in pretty dismal inner city housing in the north end. And that was not by only means I think the only factor but a very significant moment in the devastation of a community. And when I was there in the late 90s, in early 2000s, mid 90s to early 2000s. There were very many pretty serious problems from drug and alcohol abuse to a prostitution devastatedly broken families. And my friend Gary Thorn and others had been thinking about what modest, you know, one doesn't think one can solve these really very serious problems, you know, simply walk out and solve them. They're really hard. And so I was with a group of people involved in setting up a small, a very small, this is a small community,

a small youth mentoring and life skills program called St. George's Youth Net. And the idea was to be a kind of net work that would pick these, help pick these children up when they fell and to give them, children up when they fell and to give them, well, our observation, Father Thorns observation had been over many years that, that if you wait until someone has already fallen through the cracks, it's in many respects, and this is a terrible thing to say, I know, but in many respects too late, it is very hard to reach people. Not that it's impossible, I believe in redemption, I believe in the whole possibility of things being turned around,

right down to the most, you know, tiniest fibers of my being. But the point is, is that it is very, very hard to do that with someone who's 16 or 17 or 18 already fallen out of, you know, dropped at a school, you know, had a baby, whatever. So we thought about ways of, we thought about what we could do to expand the horizons of these children and youth of all ages, you know, really, but starting with them as young as as as school age and working with them. And I won't go on at length about this, but what I learned was a couple of things that are still really with me today. The first is that human derivization of the individual has to come down at a very fundamental level

to the individual. Like no one else can live your life for you. No one else can come in and just do it for you. That would deny all of the agency that is at the heart of human fulfillment and the driving force of this is me. This meanness of life has to come from me. And in a way, I think that's a standpoint

that at some loose level, people would call the political right seems to understand that there has to be agencies, fundamental. And yet, that is a totally incomplete standpoint at the same time, because we don't simply throw children out into the woods and say, all right, come back when you're fully formed, writing books and playing the flute and fully able to take on the complexities of life. One of the things that's so striking to me is that as people have ability, one of the things they will throw all of themselves into is the raising of their children.

And so damn well, they should. My wife and I have not been blessed with children, unfortunately, but I was as the eldest of a big family and having observed in my friends and many others, you know, they will just give everything they can to carefully tend to the development of each individual and they're not all the same, even in a single family. You can only have two children or three

and they can be very different as day and night. And yet they will give everything they can to these. And so well, they should. But what this points to, I think, is a really fundamental question, which is, you know, what are the conditions, the external conditions for human realization? And what we found with these beautiful, often, you know, children in very, very, very broken circumstances, is that on the one hand, we had to have high expectations for them and their agency. We had to insist that they be there on time, that they, that they, that they treat others and potential, what they could become. And yet on the other hand, we found that we had to move heaven and earth to make those opportunities possible for them. We would go around in the mornings and pick them up at their home, because they didn't have people who would get them there on time. And we would make various other kinds

of, let's say, accommodations to make things accessible for them. And lastly, I will simply say that, you know, it's not enough just to keep people busy. You have to give them ways that open up their own understanding of themselves. And so we took them wilderness camping. Many of these were kids who'd never been outside of inner city hallifax. We took them to Cape Ship, Necto, a beautiful park on the Bay of Fundy, and it was at three days, you know, hiking through unbelievably beautiful terrain. And we had music programs and art, fine art programs. And later on they were teaching them Latin after I left.

And the point is that I don't overestimate what good we did for anyone, but insofar as we did any good for them, I think it was in, It was in believing that helping them believe that they mattered, that they mattered at the highest plane of existence, that they were, that they belonged to that highest plane of existence. It wasn't just enough to learn technical know, learn technical skills or it as important as those are or to note that you needed to come on time to have a chance in life. But that you were made the highest and best things there are were made for you.

So anyway, I've gone on rather long, but that's it was an important part of life and I came to see things that are still around in the sport. It's an interesting conclusion of life and I came to see things that are still grounded in support. It's an interesting conclusion to draw from that kind of work because the latter part of that in particular was spoken like a true believer in the humanities. And I suppose we can transition our conversation to that. I mean, the first thing I'd like to ask you

though before we do that is, you grew up in this rural community? You went off to college. What sparked your interest in philosophy? Were your parents educated? I mean, how did you come by the interests that you have? Well, I think it would be so interesting when you think about childhood and what really is formative,

you don't make a kid a philosopher by reading a Aristotle at six. My upbringing in my parents and my siblings were unbelievably important to my sense of the world, to my sense of what a human individual is, to my sense of what's good, to my sense of the possibilities of redemption and so on and so forth. So I would say in a very deep way, my earlier childhood opened me up to be able to then

later think about things in a more abstract or philosophical register. But philosophy doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not for no reason that Plato and Aristotle are after Homer. And the things that you can only really think about things that you already, in some sense, into it. You don't just sort of abstractly go off and, you know, discover things that the deepest thinking is about. You have to already have them in some form. You know, you have a sense of, well, you could take anything, you could take the difficulty of life or the beauty of a sonnet or the beauty of

nature or the horribleness of suffering. And it's very hard to think about these things in the abstract. If you've never suffered and never seen suffering, of course most human beings at some point do in pretty serious ways. But the point is that one of the things I think we absolutely need to think about very seriously as a society and as parents and as educators and so on and so forth are what are the deep forms, the deep things that form the shape and individual in such a way as to open up that horizon later in life.

And I know you've done a lot of work under the childhood development and reflected at length on things like play in PHA and others, everything in its own time in a way that is right for the stage of development. But what I'm saying is that I had some very deeply formative encounters with things that I think are of a very, and I think these are not exclusive to me. They're universal human realities. But I had the privilege of encountering some of them in my youth

in a way that then when I went to college, I went to this place called Kings College, In a way that then when I went to college, I went to this place called Kings College, founded in 1789 by Loyalist who went north from New York at the time of the American Revolution, from an earlier university in New York called Kings College, which at the time of the Revolution was renamed or just after then, renamed Columbia.. But the loyalists went to a more northern colony at that time. Of course, this is all pre-Canada and they set up King's College. And King's had been failing after it relocated

to Halifax in the early 70s and teachers of mine founded a place called the, or a program called the Foundation Year Program. And it was really. My son took that as well. Oh, that's right. I, Yeah, so tell us about that. Well, it is really just a crash course introduction to principally western, the history of western culture, not exclusively western, but going back to, in fact, to very, very back from Mesopotamia

up through the ancient Greeks, the Medievals, the Renaissance. The Age of Enlightenment and the Contemporary World, and you simply read and think and hear lectures about and discuss books. And that was into kind of introduction to those things. And then I realized that the teachers who had set up that program were in the classics department at Dauhausi University, some magnificent teachers. And I then spent the next three years doing the bachelors in classics and then masters there. But that classics department I should add was particularly strong in the the philosophical, let's say, the the big ideas that were moving in that period, not that learning language and things didn't matter, but they were particularly strong in those careful readings of texts that really can change your life if you attend to them.

So I, in my early days of my undergraduate degree, I encountered people who were reading these texts and saying things about them that enabled me to understand the things that I had perhaps entuited when I was younger in a more self-conscious, rationally universal frame, which is, of course, a philosophy is. This week's episode is brought to you by bio optimizers. If you struggle with

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free bottles of their best-selling products, P3OM and mass zines with select purchases. So go to megbreakthrough.com slash JBP, now to get your exclusive 10% discount plus the chance to get more than $50 worth of supplements for free. So I've been thinking, well, you've been talking about something that I've been writing about and I've been working about on this for a long time. So I'm a behavioral psychologist. So behavior psychologists are eminently practical. We tend to break things down to the smallest applicable unit of action. Right. So if you're trying to help someone move somewhere better, well, you want to figure out what better is, but then you want to decompose that into, into actions that are likely to be undertaken, and those might be very, very small actions. And I've been thinking about the question of the meaning of life and the first objection, I suppose I rose, that arose in my mind, was an objection to the question

itself because there might not be a meaning in life. There are places where people derive meaning. And you can list them, and it's useful, practically, if people are thinking about how to organize their life, if they're unhappy, and they want to know how things might be better. My observation and obviously not only mine is that people generally need to have a career or a job to keep the wolf from the door, but also to engage them productively with others, which is a primary source of meaning for conscientious people and for creative people alike. You need to pursue your education to flesh out your intellectual capacity. You have to take care of your health, physical, and mental. You need an intimate relationship.

You need a family. You need friends. You need intelligent use of your leisure time. You have to regulate your susceptibility to the temptations that might lead you astray, drugs and alcohol, and perhaps pornography, and those sorts of things. But then there is a core to all that around which these more practical endeavors arrange themselves, and that's something like attention to the spiritual or the philosophical domain or the religious domain. I think you can, in some sense, put all those together, and that might be, well, it might be that the attempt to answer explicitly, or at least to

address the question of, well, what is all of that practical life in service of? And you said, for example, that when you were working with the inner city kids in Halifax, you were trying to help them realize that they were meant for the higher things and vice versa. And someone might ask, well, what's the... Why bother with that when you can just bother with the skills? And it seems to me that the answer is something like, well, we all have to make decisions about how we're going to behave in life and how we're going to act ethically.

And if you help people understand their relationship to what's ultimately noble, then you can help them fortify their resolution to do good in the world instead of to do harm. It seems to me to be, I mean, I think we're always deciding with every decision that we make, whether we're going to do good or do harm by action or by in action. And whether we should do good or harm or nothing at all, I think depends to some degree on who we think we are and what we're capable of. And it seems to me that the humanities, when they're properly taught, are the study of who we could be, each of us as individuals.

And we need to know that because otherwise we'll be much less than we are. And that's not a trivial problem. It's a cataclysmic problem. And I also think that people pine away in the absence of that. I mean, you sent some questions that we could cover. And one of them was, well, you said topics that might be relevant include our historic cultural, spiritual, civilizational crisis. What is it that's root, for example, their idea that there's no truth, but only power.

And the vast longing slash hunger of our moment, you said, I think the woke phenomenon is, at least in many cases, an index of that hunger, although it miserably fails to satisfy this intrinsically human desire for transcendent purpose. And so, to me, the universities are the key element in the conversation across the generations about just exactly what a human being is. And that's something that it's not some abstract philosophical. It's not merely some abstract philosophical concern. It's the central issue that determines how you make all the decisions in your life.

So I just think that's completely right. I'll say two things as quickly. The first is that my father's a medical doctor and he worked in the ER for many years and had seen many people die. And he has remarked to me that no one on their deathbed looks back and says, gosh, I wish I'd spent more time at the office or I wish I'd accumulated more riches

for myself. And so I really do think you're right to say that there is nothing more important than how we understand ourselves. I mean, human life can't be lived for some other end. I mean, you can do all kinds of things for certain ends. You might work hard to get a qualification in order to get a job, in order to make money, in order to provide a home for your family. But at a certain point, it stops. And it stops. It's not for something else.

It's for the lives of these people that I am living, that I, my life, and for the lives of the people that I am seeking to live in relation to. There's not, those are then not for something else. And so the, the point is that our self-understanding, I mean, you can regard this even,

you can even look at this, I think, Jordan, from an evolutionary standpoint. I mean, human beings are evolved as creatures that are self-conscious. They are self-understanding. They have self-regard. And you may think that all of the ways in which they regard themselves or the things in relation to which they understand themselves, whether it's truth or beauty or purpose, you may say all those things are just constructs of the will to power, which

of course is what, you know, the dominant nihilism would have us believe. But, but, but, and which I do not accept, which I think we can show to be wrong, very clearly, rationally, philosophically. However, even if you think they are constructs, you still do not escape. The fact that human beings are evolved in this way, such that how they understand themselves is absolutely fundamental to their nature. Like that is what we are as an evolved species. And so any culture that does not enable human beings

to understand themselves in a way that they find to be richly meaningful, and I'm not saying meaning is just a construct, but if it does not do that at the end of the day, it has failed. It's fundamental test. Yes. Yeah, okay. So now let's look over after this power idea and be okay. So you seem to agree with something that I've also concluded that what's at the root of our current cultural malaise is this idea that human social institutions and then also by implication primary individual motivation that human institutions are predicated on power.

And so the more I've thought about that, the more wrong it seems to me to be. And I've also been thinking about truth and lies some more. And you know, there are those lies that you tell when you just skirt the truth a bit. So there may be the ones that are most easy to get away with and often most effective. But not always, but often most effective because maybe they work the best. You take a truth and you bend it a little bit, and that's still live. But then there are statements that are antithetical to the truth. There are anti-truth lies.

And I think that the idea that human social institutions, especially the functional social institutions of the West, that they're predicated on the drive to power. I think that's an anti-truth. And so let's see if we can take that apart a little bit. I mean, the first question might be, well, what exactly is the definition of power? Who's making these claims? And what the definition of the power of power and why are they making the claims? So let's start with who's making the claim that our social institutions are predicated on power. Well, it does seem to me to be a claim that comes pretty fundamentally out of the academy. I mean, one of my constant refrains is that the academy, the university that is, is upstream of absolutely everything else.

Culture, policy, politics, art and architecture, family life, media, just go down on through the list. And I think that these narratives or frameworks are proceeding fundamentally out of certain forms of really 19th and 20th century philosophical critiques, many of which were important and even necessary and illuminating in their in their original form, but which have been made into very reductive, totalizing forms of seeing the world.

And so, is it reasonable, do you think, too? I've talked about postmodern neo-Marxism and, of course, people who are critical of the way, I think, point out that, well, postmodernism hypothetically is predicated on the idea that all grand narratives are to be questioned, which you would assume would include the grand Marxist narrative, which presumes that the most appropriate way to view human history and human social institutions is by positing the existence of an oppressor class economically and a subordinate class economically, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And so that's the fundamental analytic lens through which Marxists approach the world,

that those who have have because they've taken from those who have not. And the implication there is the fundamental animating principle of our social structures is exploitation for the benefit of the few. And then, of course, if it's my view, anyways, when Marxism became untenable ethically as an explicit philosophy in the late 1960s, as a consequence of the revelation of the absolute catastrophe that the Maoists and the Stalinists had made of China and the Soviet Union respectively There that postmodernism

Transform Marxism into something that was more Pellatable on the surface, but that proclaimed that well, it wasn't exactly economics that was exploitation that was at the root of things. It was just exploitation in general. It was the manifestation of the power drive, let's say, that keeps people who are in positions of power above the rest, and who have at their disposal the means of compelling those people to do what they would not do, otherwise, against their will.

That's an expression of power as well. I mean, do you think, do you think there's something, am I wrong in that formulation? I mean, I've tried to understand this. I'm not trying to be, what would you say, biased or blinkered about it? It's just that's the way it looks, it looks like that to me.

I mean, people like Derrida and Foucault, they were Marxists to begin with. And so, isn't it the case that the notion that our social relations are structured as a consequence of the expression of arbitrary power? Isn't that merely a transformation of that initial Marxist presumption? Or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

Well, I would say a few things, the verses that I am very far from a scholar of these complicated intellectual movements from the late 18th century through to the present. But in my reading, certainly in the main, there's, in the main, I think you are right about marks. And again, I'm not a philosopher of Marx, but if you read, for example, the introduction

to his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right, he outlines very, very clearly this dynamic of focusing all of the force of one part of society against another as an essential kind of material dialectic. And that does seem to me to be fundamentally what is, you know, that is the logic of the power alone revolution. I think that is fundamentally what we're facing in the, well, that leads to a war of all against all, of course, but it certainly leads to identity politics, warfare, and the reductions of feel this the thing is, as you know, when you get into studying complicated things, you always feel you endlessly qualify what you don't know.

It's a huge amount. I don't know about Marx, but I also know that he says that religion does not make man, man makes religion. And at some very fundamental level, there appears to be whether in marks or proceeding out of his interpreters, a wholesale negation or rejection of the idea that there is any abiding, metaphysical or transcendent reality. Well, in marks also points out very clearly that, and this is a key element of Marxist thought that social structures, structure individuals, individual consciousness, it's not that individual consciousness structures, social structures.

So it's the group imposing its nature on the individual rather than the group being led by the individual. And that's a profoundly anti-enlightenment. And I would say anti-Judeo-Christian proposition. And so, and that's certainly something. And then you said something else that was interesting. You know, you said you're not a scholar of these movements. And neither am I. And that's actually a problem, right? Because we're trying to address this parents of a culture war that seems to be manifesting itself first in the universities and then everywhere else.

And it's an amorphous thing. It's hard to get a grip on and it's easy to be wrong. But we're forced to contend with it regardless and to sketch out its outlines. And I've been trying to do that as fairly as I possibly can. I mean, part of this proposition seems to be the insistence, the radical insistence that the radical insistence that the enlightenment insistence on the individual as the primary

unit of analysis is to be discarded in favor of a group centered analysis, and that the only reason that that individual, the idea of the transcendent individual manifest itself was because it served the interests of those who have arbitrary power to maintain it, although the logical connection there isn't clear, because it isn't obvious to me how it served the particular power interests of that group and how it wouldn't serve the power interests of other groups equally as well, seems to be a fundamental flaw in the logic. But I've been thinking about my own experience with social institutions and my knowledge of how people develop as well as how children develop. or part of that is that all the developmental literature suggests that the use of aggression, which is what you'd expect to be developed if power was the fundamental organizing principle

of social institutions, you'd expect that aggressive children would do better than non-aggressive children, and you'd expect that children would be socialized by their superordinates, their adults, their teachers, their parents, to manifest aggression in the service of power. And that doesn't seem to be the case developmentally. The children who preferentially use aggression, self-centered aggression in particular, tend to be alienated and unhappy and in a dismal minority and friendless and then they don't do well in life at all. And the developmental course is from more aggression at the very

early stages of life to less aggression as adulthood inculcates itself. And so we actually become more civilized as we become more integrated in our social institutions rather than less. And so, why do you think the... And then, I think about my relationships with... No, I think about two things. People I have admired who have been successful in social institutions. And then, by experience as a apprentice, let's say, within social institutions.

And first of all, the people I admire and who've been successful are not by any stretch of the imagination notable for their manipulation of arbitrary power. Quite the contrary, the people that I've met who are particularly admirable have done everything they possibly can in their positions of authority and competence to open the door to advancement to people around them, to facilitate their

cooperation, to work with them genuinely in a manner that increases the probability that both of them will succeed. And they've also taken extreme pleasure in the development of their subordinates, so to speak. And then I thought, well, it doesn't, how is it that our culture has got so bloody warp that we don't notice that, you know, you talked about the importance of family in Europe ringing and you speak of your family with great, with great affection. I mean, why don't we believe that the central patriarchal spirit is properly constituted as benevolent father rather than as tyrannical power mad exploiter?

Because I don't see that people who are tyrannical power mad exploiters actually do that well in our social institutions. And it also seems to me that it's a primary pleasure to open the door to people who have ability, but less opportunity. Like it's really, it's a fundamental motivational pleasure for that to occur. And I think it's integrally related with the pleasure that people take in fatherhood.

Yeah, and I think, well, I think that's completely right. And it needs to be said a couple of things. The first is that this rich view of the individual as having, as really mattering, as being connected intrinsically to the reality itself. Fast and fast to Gea is one phrase that the French give us,

face to face with God, but you see this in the ancient Greeks, you see this all throughout the, well, you see this developing in all sorts of ways, throughout the institutions and philosophical artistic movements of Western culture, I'm not saying, not in other cultures, it's just that this is where,

this is the tradition I know and some level of a scholar of. But the point I want to make twofold, first that these ideas of the individual play predate the enlightenment. And in many respects, the enlightenment itself is though responsible for many of our clarifications around these things has also left us with many problems that we're, I think, going to have to face

or we're finished, really, fundamentally. But the second thing I want to say is that, it's not that thinking about power is not important. I mean, there is there are very few things in the entire record of human beings thinking about what it means to be a human being, which essentially what the humanities are right, I mean, it's just the record of other people thinking about human experience throughout time, whether it's art or philosophy or or theology or logic or architecture. I mean, these are the record of the ways in which people have grappled with what the human being is. That's all the humanities are fundamentally. But at the heart of that, and there are a few things more that occupy more bandwidth

in that whole long arc of reflection, then how one restrains the individual's own solipsism. It's the individual's own will to power. The individual's own closed loop of the self against everything else, which it turns out in this rich tradition of reflection is an extremely bad thing for the individuals to do because it's very easy. Well, because the individual that it's shortsighted and it actually runs, see, this is the problem

with pausing that the drive to power is the central automating principle and to make a fundamental critique that might be expressed in such terms as systemic racism, let's say. I mean that the drive to power and deceit, perhaps in the service of power, is best viewed as an aberration to the central tendency. A powerful aberration, and certainly the source of all the fundamental corruption of the central tendency, but it's not to be confused with the central tendency itself, which is more like property construed. And I think that this is perhaps the central message of the Old Testament, properly construed as something like a benevolent father. I mean, the Greeks had their metaphysical reality, too.

I spoke with an author this week, and a professor of classics at Boston University. The author, Brian Morescu, wrote a book called The Immortality Key, and he was talking about the Ellucinian mysteries and the Greek, the saturation of Greek culture in this underlying metaphysical religious reality that was manifested in the Illusinean mysteries and in the Dinesian tradition as well. We talked a little bit about the transformation of the Dinesian into the Christian as a consequence of the union of Greek society

and Jewish society, out of that comes Christianity and this new conception of man as akin to divinity in some sense or a recreation of that idea. I mean, I'm fumbling for words here, but I'm trying to get a picture of the central animating spirit because what we're pushing out of the universities is the idea that we're fundamentally motivated by group centeredcentered tyranny. And I don't believe that to be the case. I don't think that that's what good people are motivated by, and I don't think that bad

people are particularly successful in our social institutions. I think that's an unbelievably cynical and dangerous way of looking at history. It's also a way of looking at history. And it's also a way of looking at history that demolishes your own motivation. Because if the central animating tendency of our social institutions is the expression of tyrannical power, then that's the defining characteristic of your own ambition.

But if your own ambition is to develop yourself as a noble being who has a broad purview and who finds fundamental pleasure in serving the higher good. Well, that's a whole different story. It's and the story is the critical thing here. And that's what the universities are supposed to be transmitting is that central story. And if we're wrong about this, we're going to tear things down. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, I don't think we need to say we're going to. I think in many respects we have already. Very, you are going to critique the enlightenment. Well, I think we have already very deeply deconstructed many of the forms of life and culture that actually mediate the individual's

agency and deeper realization. And we were saying a minute ago that, that, you know, if you look at things simply from the standpoint of power and you analyze individuals by that, I mean, the paradox is that, you know, if you tend only to your own power, you know, you, you are a disaster, you are a disaster as a human being. You are a disaster in relation to others. Uh, you, you, you, you end up wildly unhappy and unfulfilled. I mean, that is just, that is the place that is simply effect. It's the path downward on and every level. It's not like you can be an individually

successful psychopath exploiting everyone and end up hedonically advantaged without suffering. That isn't how it works. I've never seen that happen. It I don't believe it's possible. And so I can't understand why we've bought the idea that power is the central, is the central animating principle? Like, what the hell? And why have it, there's an envy in it, there's an envy in it that I can't quite put my finger on. It's related in some sense to this, you know, I've noticed that in the universities, whenever I worked with business people, for example, a lot of my peers would become upset with me. And I always wondered why that was because my sense was that, well, there was just as many good people

and bad people in business, let's say, as there were good people and bad people in academia, and it was just completely foolish to draw an arbitrary line. But it had something to do with envy. And I was talking to Paul Rossi, you know, the New York teacher who got nailed for standing up against the importation of critical race theory, let's say into the private schools in New York. And he talked about the attraction that postmodern theory had for him when he was an undergraduate. He wanted to be a writer, but he didn't really have the talent as far as he was concerned. And along came the postmodern critics who were tearing literature apart, and they appealed to his resentment and his envy, because they were tearing apart, you know, an ideal he couldn't reach.

And so it was very much reminiscences to me, for me, of the story of Kane, you know, who became resentful and bitter because his sacrifices weren't accepted by God. It's a fundamental story of human beings, really. And so there's this envy that's driving us to to misinterpret our institutions and to be careless with them. And the universities seem to be leading the pack. I would say more than leading. Certainly, yes, certainly leading, racing onwards. I think that one of the terrible ironies of this standpoint is that it becomes guilty of the very things that it accuses and others.

And so it violates our institutional life, it violates our whole relation to the past, it violates the individual. That is to say, when you drink the Kool-Aid of there being only power all the way down, you are in a grim world. And what is, I think, so tragically perverse about the dismissal of our whole inherited past, over all of its complexity and beauty and difficulty is that the tradition itself of all of humanistic learning has many of the very tools we need to confront the problems that those who are concerned with the abuse of power are concerned about.

And so the, and I think think revolutions often work in this way is that the first thing they need to do is alienate the entire record of the past from the present because that's the basis upon which you bring in the Brave New World, you know, through your own manipulation of power and system and so on and so forth. So I don't, I mean, I think there are a number of things going on. It's always very tempting. I mean, the siren song of power is, is, is, is, is, there's a kind of drug-like character to, to that. But I think Jordan, we need to ask, you know, why is it that these reductive inadequate, manifestly a historical, irrational, actually, you know, low-grade kinds of analysis have become so dominant? And I think if we can't answer that question, it is difficult to transcend their hold on those who ascribe

to them. Well, you said that the woke phenomena is an index of the vast longing slash hunger of our moment. I mean, the other thing, one of the other things that Rossi said that was quite interesting was that when the the new doctrines entered the private school that he was teaching, he was initially highly supportive of them because they came in flying, let's say the anti-racist flag. And like who isn't happy about anti-racism? And so if you take it at face value,

well, then you get to put yourself on the side of the heroes that are fighting against those who oppress people on the basis of arbitrary characteristics like their race. And so that certainly accounts for some of the attraction on the positive side. I mean, the negative side is, well, the opportunity to tear things down for the sake of tearing them down in the name of some higher moral virtue that just covers the real

motivation, which is to tear things down because you're envious. But, you know, to give the devil his due, well, there's something to be said for working, identifying with a movement that purports to be serving the interests of the poor and the dispossessed and those who are prejudiced against and to take to task those who are perpetrators of such things. And so I see that as part of a religious impulse to do the good, but it's so incomplete and it's so it's so dangerous in its incompleteness because well partly because it provides a two-convenient enemy and partly because it does dispense with the richness of the past and well and then it brings with it and it's in its in its wake let's

say all sorts of ideas that are entirely counterproductive. I mean, it contains within it a fundamental critique of the idea of free market economies, for example, which to me is just a disaster. It just from a computational perspective, we can't do with central planning what the market can do with computation because it's distributed and it relies on the choices of everyone. It's a much more effective computational system, but we seem to have done a pretty bad job of defending it. Well, I think it's a very, very good statement of the problem. Why is that so? I mean, it's, well, let's say a few things. The first is that I do think the whole woke thing,

which, you know, for whatever, I mean, it's for whatever, whether that, what that word even means is I think is a good question to dig into fairly carefully, but I think it is an index of a search for meaning in a deep set. At least for many, of course, there are many people who just cynically take things up. They know it's a power move. It's a power political move. They know what they're doing full well. It's wrong. It's reductive. It destroys people's lives. We know that's what's

worked. There are always people who will do this. But in a much larger sense, I don't think that's an adequate analysis. I think that at a larger level, it is an index for a search for meaning. And we, I think, need to remember Aristotle's fundamental insight into the human psyche, which is that, you know, one is only ever moved by some kind of a perceived good. That's why for Dante, you know, you go down to the bottom of hell, which is just an allegory for him about this life, not a vision of the afterlife, you know, things are frozen. There's no movement at all because the good of intellect or even any perceived good, however, limitately or obscurely perceived is gone. It's just frozen. And so whenever there's any action at all, it's because there's some kind of a perceived good at work, even if that is completely misperceived.

I'm saying it's a perceived good. We never do anything at all. You don't go up to make yourself a sandwich or go get the mail or say hello to anyone without some kind of a perceived good. And so the second thing I would say is that I think we need to think of times when there is a significant, therefore, we need to think about times when there is a significant amount of momentum behind something. It could be national socialism in the 20s and 30s in Germany. It could be the movement to Scottish independence in our own day. It could be the so-called woke movement, Black Lives Matter, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, lens we want to look at this from. We need to really honestly ask ourselves a question, what is moving in this? And I think it's clearly the case that, from what I understand about the formation of the complicated historical movements that led to the Second World War,

that there was in Germany, at least I would be very surprised to learn this is not the case, a vulnerability to an ideological standpoint that gave a defining collective purpose. And that seems to me to indicate a lack of that not being done in a better way. You could say the same thing I suspect about Scottish independence. Is it really that that's Scottish independence or is it that? Well, you know, if you were in Canada in Quebec and you were a lapsed Catholic, a French lapsed Catholic. You were four times as likely to be a separatist during the separatist uprising, say, in the 1980s and 1990s in Canada or 1960s through the 1990s. The Gallup Pole indicated that.

So Quebec was the last place in Western Europe in some sense, that so to speak, where Catholicism dissolved. And that didn't happen till the late 1950s. And it was instantly replaced by a radical nationalism, which really, I mean, I watched it from the outside. I was in Quebec for much of that. It was impenetrable. You could see that it was a displaced religious doctrine, the state had taken the place of Christ. That's the simplest way of putting it. Well, that's a great, that's a great, that's a great historical example. I mean, I think that at a minimum, what many people perceive in these, these, these sort of so-called woke movements is at least some incipient or incoate vision of justice, that the least of these among us matters, the different among us matters.

Now, of course, I think that the standpoint that is through which these things are viewed is completely tragic and unfilvable, unable to fulfill the very ends that it seems to bring about. But conservatives and free market lovers and all these people are very often lament the fact. They say, why is it that, you know,, we call it the left, call it whatever you want, seems to beat us on the moral argument every time. Despite the fact that we know that that that our systems and the

ideas that we espoused historically have been shown to be superior to the very values that the so-called left is beating us at. And I think that this does raise the fact that it, you know, I've been reading a two-piece wonderful copy-table book. I know you had a wonderful conversation with him recently about, you know, how much better everything is getting. In absolute terms, yeah. In absolute terms. And you know, these are, these are, this is a wonderful, it's a very important book. These are wonderful achievements. We should all rejoice and absolutely, you know, face, face them and be glad for them and the things that they will make possible. But it is also very interesting to note, what is not in Tupi. I mean, there, there is, there's no talk about beauty, there's no talk about architecture,

there's no talk about cultural achievement, there's no talk about, let's put it this way, there is no talk about many of the things that are most fundamental to the meaning in human life. And that's not to degrade or denigrate the achievements that are being spoken about there, but it is rather to say that if your metric for human flourishing is do we have enough to eat and are we not getting reigned on and you go through these lists of fundamentally material things, all of which are fundamentally important and not only because they're material, because there's also a spiritual dimension

to those things for human beings. But the point in making is that you see the same thing in Stephen Pinker's work, like the blank slate. If I'm sure I hope I've got this right, because I've read a couple of Pinker's books, but one of the things, so he thinks very much like Tupi thinks, and he wrote the better angels of our nature, if I remember correctly as well, showing that human aggression has decreased substantially over the last number of centuries. But all of the qualities of humanity that you describe are sort of,

they're parsed off near the end of the book into a single chapter, as if they're just secondary side effects of some more profound rationality, let's say, and it's the rationality that's concentrating on material well-being, and I don't have anything against material well-being and the elimination of privation, but there is, and it's interesting that you make that comment about Tupi's work, is that that the spiritual dimension, it's like the list of what should be attended to have a meaningful life that I listed at the beginning of our talk. At the end, I capped that off with some attention

to be paid for the spiritual or moral or religious element of life to bring everything together. It's, and that narrow focus on material well-being, necessary though it is, does seem to lack, to, there's something in it that's missing that's absolutely fundamental that if it's missing undermines the whole project or appears to. Well, I think the bottom line is that there is no deep human realization for any individual

outside of understanding her or himself in relation to higher order principles, truth's realities. I mean, that's just what human beings are. So that is not to denigrate the or himself in relation to higher order principles, truths, realities. I mean, that's just what human beings are. So that is not to denigrate the necessity of improvement in all of these areas that too be so brilliantly chronicles. I don't, to read myself is somehow anti-tupi. I'm a huge fan of this. I'm a huge fan of the inclusive institutions

that they describe as necessary to human, human flourishing. But I think it needs to be said that in the most developed places, so called developed places of the world, skepticism about those inclusive institutions is higher than anywhere else, or at least arguably so. I think it needs to be said that there's nothing in the book about the very disturbing trends

of rising suicide, of rising, a little dopamine addiction, of porn addiction, in young and young men, of course, especially. These are, and I think it needs to be said that many of these things that appear to be a very fundamental malaise of contemporary life are also related to technology. And one of the paradoxes I think that I love to ask you about Jordan relative to your own work on the individual

and human individual realization is that if on the one hand, human beings are becoming increasingly liberated from the demands of material necessity. I mean, the amount of time it took to, they bring up brilliantly to create light, for example, was in immense amount of work or to save up enough calories to make it through a winter. All of these just the bone grinding we hard aspect of human existence for millennia. Then we are very rapidly in the last two centuries. Now almost every human being in the planet, not everyone, but the vast majority are living

at standards of living that were inconceivable by anyone just a few centuries ago. So these are amazing achievements. But it also needs to be said that insofar as at the one hand the individual is being liberated from those bone-crushing realities. At the same time, it does appear to be a key aspect of modern life that individuals are finding themselves less connected, more alienated, and that the very technology in some respects that liberates them also appears to homogenize in a kind of globally reductive way such that, you know, as human life is lived on the ground, the frame in which it's actually lived and where in which meaning is derived that that has become more distant harder to access and that we have far fewer of the tools we might have once had to make sense of that all important sphere. I've talked to Bjorn Lomburg and to Matt Ridley and to Marion Tupy and to other people who are deeply concerned about continuing to make absolute privation, let's say a thing of the past. And to many people as well who are hoping to ameliorate relative privation, which is more the concern of the left, as you already pointed out.

And all of these people are also aware, and Stephen Fry, for that matter, you know, Stephen has allied himself to some degree with the forehorsement of the atheist world, and is a dramatist. And so understands, at least in his bones, the necessity of this underlying poetic, dramatic, religious, humanistic matrix out of which rationality has emerged and in which rationality must remain embedded. I mean, what it looks like to me is that, and I see this dawning realization among people like Richard Dawkins as well, at least by proxy, talking to people who know him and watching what's happened to him with the humanists, for example, who attacked

him, is that this insistence on pure rationality and pure enlightenment rationality doesn't address the fundamental religious impulse. And the hope was among the forehorsement of the atheist world, let's say that once we dispensed with this irrational superstition, we'd all become materialist, rationalists, you know, of the intellectual caliber of Stephen Pinker. But that isn't what's happening. I don't believe that that can be the case. What happens instead is that all sorts of things that religion should be separated from, the higher life, the spiritual life, the religious life, all of that falls down a level or two, and pure politics becomes contaminated with the religious impulse. And then it becomes totalizing. And that looks like a catastrophe. And so it seems to me that we need to pull

up the spiritual domain again to parse it off as a separate field of, of what, endeavor, study, hope to give it its due and that's the role at least in part that the university should be playing instead they're tearing things down. Yeah, and I mean, I think it needs to be said, I mean, these technologies and amazing tool, that's what it is. It is a tool. It does not have a moral value in itself, you know, it's, it's, and it's, and it's, there's no question that question that it largely, well, it is of the this kind of narrow instrumental rationalism, you still are putting this in service of something that you think is good.

You know, it's good to feed people. But you have to ask yourself, you know, why do we think peace is better than war? Or why is it that forgiveness is better than vengeance, or that unity is better than disunity, or that beauty is better than ugliness. This is a point that I know we both are very keen about, we can talk about beauty in a minute, but the point I'm making is that it's too full. So that's relevant to that central animating spirit of mankind, let's say, because that central animating spirit accepts all those propositions that you just laid out as given, that beauty is preferable to ugliness, that unity is preferable to disunity, that life more abundant is preferable to privation. And that's all part of our central ethic. And that's part of the central ethic of our properly functioning institutions as well. And it's part of the central

ethic that enables us to communicate about what's good and what's evil. And it's part of the central ethic that allows our consciences to torment us when we deviate from that path. And that's not merely a matter of aberration from a central power drive. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a real question, you know, the, the, you know, the west, the world at large could very easily become a technological order set over a moral vacuum. And that's is not to denigrate the technology, but actually destroy itself, right? That's what I mean, it's very easy to point that out. I mean, you know, we can, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the national socialist was it was a very largely technological regime, you know, nuclear war as the creation of technology, you know, the gene modifying technology, bio warfare.

These are all things that are either there or almost there with the capacity to, to wreak unimaginable suffering on the entire planet because of the technology. That's not to say the technology is bad. It is to say rather that it must take its place relative to a higher order series of conversations and what I absolutely want to insist on is that those higher order conversations,

they're not mere intuitions, they're not mere, you know, speculative, oh, we can just kind of consult the entrails of a goose or something. They're not mere intuitions, they're not mere speculative. We can just kind of consult the entrails of a goose or something. There are also not mirror expressions of the arbitrary desire for power because that's what's central animating spirit. That isn't why you're trying to build Ralston College.

It isn't to fulfill your own desire for power. That's not a good motivation. It's not pleasing. It doesn't last. your own desire for power. That's not a good motivation. It's not pleasing. It doesn't last. It's not enriching. It's what people turn to when they're bitter and cynical and feel that there's nothing left but the exploitation of others for momentary pleasure.

You can't be more cynical than that. And so we also have to ask ourselves, why the hell did we get so cynical about ourselves? Doesn't, I mean, gosh, that is such a good question. Do you remember in that debate with Giecek, there was a piece that we're going to clip out, but it's part of something I already clipped out of a 15 minute piece of that debate. I talked about the Communist manifesto as a call to bloody violent revolution. And a significant proportion of the audience who were obviously

pro-Marxist and had come to here, Gisec, hopefully defend their hero, cheered and laughed when I talked about bloody violent revolution. And, you know, it's also the case that once you make the prop, look, I've been trying to understand, for example, when the left goes too far. You know, where's the cutoff line? It's very difficult to draw. But the problem with the insistence that power structures everything is that as soon as you insist upon that, you justify it. You can't help but justify your own use of power.

And then that, for me, as a psychoanalytic thinker, let's say, then that makes me suspicious that perhaps that's the motivation for the entire bloody argument. It's like, well, everything's about power. So it's perfectly fine for me to express power in whatever way I see fit, especially if I'm serving the oppressed or I'm serving some higher, more order. But really what I'm trying to do is to find a justification for my expression of naked power.

And you can see the enjoyment in the crowd when that phrase about bloody violent revolution popped out. It's like, yes, yes, it's really, that's what you want. And who is it exactly here that's animated by the desire for power? And so, I mean, is the, is the driving force behind the insistence that all our social institutions are based on power, the desire to justify power as a political weapon. It's that is indubitably a significant part of the attraction, though I think it takes its strength fundamentally morally from the perception that this mode of analysis can help us redress. Well, you insisted earlier, and I was speaking

with someone else who made the same case very recently. I can't remember who it was, but it'll come to me. You know, that there's no impulse to action without a drive toward the good, but I'm not so sure about that. I think that people can become hurt enough and bitter enough and resentful enough so that they are driven by the desire to make things worse, that there isn't a good. Oh, oh, oh, certainly.

But that that's I mean, I know absolutely. But I mean, there is there's a's a, however misperceived, there's some end in the activity. I'm not saying it's a good move. Well, I couldn't end just because I've thought about Hitler in this regard, too. It's like, there's this old psychoanalytic dictum that Jung, I believe, formulated.

I haven't been able to find exactly where he stated it, unfortunately, but the gist of it is that if you don't understand the motivation for something, you look at the outcome and you infer the motivation. And so then I look at Hitler and he committed suicide in a bunker after berating Germany for failing to live up to his noble ideal, left the entire country in flames, left the entire continent in ruins in this massive conflagration.

He was always interested in the worship of fire. And so one interpretation would be that Hitler was attempting to produce a new world order. Another would be that he was aiming at committing suicide in the midst of Europe in flames. And that was the outcome. And I'm kind of likely to attribute that motivation. You know, you can think about it as a warped attempt to pursue the good, you know, in the form of, let's say, an extreme nationalism and the binding of a tribe. But to me, it's more shaking his fist at God in the sky and saying, you know, here's my revenge on the world you created.

And I don't see a good, I don't see any drive to good in that except peripherally. Oh, sure, sure. I'm not saying, I'm certainly not saying that these things are actually good. What I'm saying is that. I know, I know, you know. Yeah, that the action is that the action, however perverse perceives even if it's just the

perception of the furtherance of the self-sown will to power. What I'm saying is it's moved by a perception of an end. And that end may be completely cataclysmic. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm or helping the individual to better perceive what is really good. Good. And so, you know, let me ask you about that. So, I've been thinking psychologically again about Christianity. And I know that Christianity is an extension of other metaphysical forms of thought, but that predated.

But it looked to me like, and some of those were derived from Mesopotamian, some of them were derived from Greece, and some of them were derived from Judaism, and other sources. But they all seemed to me to be part of the conversation that human beings have been having amongst themselves for thousands of years about what the nature of the ideal human being is. And now I see these cathedrals, these works of art in architecture that took a tremendous amount of labor and produced a dome-like structure that represents the sky. And you see Christ as logos

spread out on the sky as a transcendent force. And you ask yourself, well, what exactly is that signifying? And the answer is at least the proposition of a kind of ideal that's associated with, let's say, universal love and truth in speech. That's the logo summed up in two phrases. And if there's no metaphysical reality there at all, there's still this imaginative enterprise that characterizes the entire human, what imaginative effort, cultural effort to posit a transcendent ideal that we would live in relationship to. And I just don't see that case being made very strongly.

And I can't really understand that case being made very strongly. And I can't really understand why, because isn't it rather obvious that at least part of what Christianity has been is the attempt by thousands of people over thousands of years to specify the nature of an ideal? Certainly, I would say so. And I would say that the fact that these principles actually

work is proof of their, of the proof of there being true accounts of what the nature of the real is. Well, let's approach this from a couple of different angles, Jordan. The first is, what are the things that I profoundly believe is that these young people seeking deeper answers and however much they may be flailing about, it's not their fault that many perhaps most of the institutions they will will encounter, will betray that, which is deepest in them, will denigrate,

will tell them, no, none of these things that you're seeking are really real. I mean, I think, I've been talking, thinking a lot over the years about architecture and what is going on in brutalist architecture. And it really does seem to me that in brutalist architecture, to live in relation to brutalist architecture, it is as if you had a parent that said, you're nothing.

You're nothing, you'll never amount to, and of course there are terrible people, terrible to say people actually, there are people in these situations who live with such dysfunctional lack of love and antagonism. This is the way that the home life that they, dysfunctional lack of love and antagonism. This is the way that the home life that they, that some people terribly have. But I'm using this as an example

because I think what Brutalist architecture does is it declares to the whole world and to you that there is no truth, there is no beauty. You are nothing except it. It's just a concrete annihilating force. And it went through six rounds of approval to finally be, to make a set of plans that would meet the local architectural or review board, whatever it was. And I thought, well, it can't be that bad. It's gone through that. And I mean, this structure is abhorrent. It looks like a cross between a, a Verizon server farm and an American penitentiary. I mean, it is just a, it is a declaration that there, that there

is no higher order. You know, in Edinburgh, they're tearing all those out. There was Edinburgh is an unbelievable, beautifully beautiful city. The whole central mile of it, square mile essentially, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it's marred by random placements of 1970s brutalist architecture. And they're just horrible. It's a complete lack of regard for the architectural context, and It's a complete lack of regard for the architectural context, and they're all being torn out and replaced, thank God. So, well, this architectural idea, so back to the cathedral, you know, what's really interesting about a cathedral with, let's say, Christ as Pantocrator on the ceiling is spread against the ceiling, is that it's not the state that's portrayed up there, right? It's not a map of the country. It's not even a map of the world. It's not a geographical locale or a political institution. It's the transcendent individual. And it's just not obvious to me.

It seems obvious to me that that's correct. And that if it isn't the transcendent individual, then it becomes the state. And as soon as the transcendent individual, then it becomes the state. And as soon as it, the transcendent becomes the state, then we have a catastrophe. And I don't see any difference between the insistence that our identity is predicated on our group membership. I don't see any real difference between that

and the insistence that we're just hand-made and of the state. It's a totalitarian insistence. And I think part of that too is maybe, you know, I learned from Jung that, as soon as you pause it an ideal, you also specify a judge, and the more, the higher the ideal,

the more severe the judgment, because of your distance from the ideal. And so part of what we're seeing too might be a rebellion against the awful requirements of that ideal. But that doesn't justify, that doesn't justify the rebellion. Because if it's really the ideal, then if you don't act it out, you fail to act it out at your peril. And then we need to have a serious conversation about the metaphysical, about the practical

implications of the idea of this ideal. about the metaphysical, about the practical implications of the idea of this ideal. I mean, if we've had this conversation about the transcendent individual as the ideal against which we should all be judged and to which we should strive, that we should strive to emulate, is there any relationship between that ideal

and the structure of reality itself? Because that's the hundred dollar question, so to speak. You know, we have a human ideal, and you could say merely psychologically, maybe even merely biologically, that that's something we originated that's part of our biological nature that's expressed in this ideal, and it's nothing more than that. But you could also say, well, and it's nothing more than that. But you could also say, well, perhaps it is something more than that. Perhaps it's reflective of the structure of being itself. I mean, it depends on our position in the cosmos. You know, we are self-conscious. We are

that which reflects being itself or perhaps even makes it possible. It's not that obvious what our rule is, it might not be so trivial, despite our mortality. Well, I would say that not only it is, as you say, but we can know it to be, as you say. I mean, this is what the whole history, in some sense of literature and philosophy and theology is about is a is a is a and I want to insist on this it is a rational grappling with these questions realities and indeed truths. I want to come back to something in a minute but just on this topic one way into this is to reflect on the fact that reality is not zero sum. That, of course, we know this economically. You were talking Jordan a minute ago about, you know, free, you know, the voluntary not zero sum, we all end up over time better. But you also see this naturally in the evolution of the diversity of species, of languages, of cultures. You've written beautifully about play as orienting the child in relation to a deepening reciprocity with others.

We know this in terms of knowledge. I mean, how can it be that in a conversation, I can be wrong and be shown to be wrong? And that be a net gain for me. The whole point of free dialogue is that we can learn from, we can learn in our not knowing that the conversation is not zero sum, that even in our beach, we know this in terms of forgiveness, that even our betrayals of beautiful things can become deepening engagements with what we have betrayed if we have the humility to see it. And so then, I think that leads one to, you know, what, geez, you can go back,

you can go to the level of subatomic particles and physics, I had a pleasure of talking with Freeman Dyson before he died. And Dyson will say very clearly that against the determinists, some of the rational optimists, they're pretty religiously determinist in their in their worldview. And they want a martial modern science as as as saying that their determinism is what science teaches. But that, you know, Dyson, who was a subatomic physicist at the highest level, expressly said the opposite. He said that the electron that you, you,

the essentially he says that the electron is free, that consciousness is not an epiphenominant, that at the very most detailed level of subatomic particles, things are not determinist. And the reason I want to go all the way down to that level is because you can go down to the lowest level of resolution, then you can back up to that to the higher level and see that there is a non zero sum nature to what is real. And then you have to ask yourself, is it good to live in relation to in relation to what is true or should I live in a delusion? And we say, well, it's better to live in relation to what's true than to live in relation to a delusion. And then you say, well, what would it mean then for me to live in relation to this positive sum, this essential reciprocity, which I think is really what the Christian view of the Trinity is about, this essential reciprocity, which is the is really what the Christian view of the Trinity is about.

This essential reciprocity, which is the bedrock of all reality, what would it mean to live in relations that, what would it mean to remember that? And, you know, one can approach that in any number of different ways, but certainly that is what prayer is. That is what all spiritual exercises are. That's what perhaps walking in nature can be.

That's what any kind of meditative activity, intellectual or physical is a recollecting of the self in the deepest way to what is most real. And I know you've written, for example, about gratitude. And I love your words about gratitude, because it's an inversion of the burden. It's not that it all comes down to us, but actually just the opposite, that we place ourselves in the hands of the eternal reciprocity that gathers us up and puts us back together. And I think that this frankly is a deeply rational standpoint

that can be shown to be, despite not making it very articulately here today, shown to be true in economics, in physics, in biology, in sociology, and certainly in all of the higher order spheres of human knowing. This is the nature of what, of biology, in sociology, and certainly in all of the higher order spheres of human knowing, this is the nature of what we are and what the world is. And this is where your image of the Panto crator,

I think this comes back to this because what fundamentally is going on there is that the logos is in us. It's actually in us, that's why when you talk about the divine significance of truth and speech, that we are made to understand ourselves in relation to the whole. That is an intrinsic human need and intrinsic human ability.

And I think that this is where my life is about trying to, in whatever small way I can, you open, if the nihilist darken the horizon and close off in the way that brutalist architecture does, close off what we're allowed to become and understand ourselves as, then I think the work of our time is to open it back up. And that is really what the humanities are fundamentally about. You can go back to one of the things I despise about the current structure of the academy

is it acts as though these things are just for the few. But you know, you'll think about Homer. I mean, Homer was the mode of educating the Greeks for a thousand years. The Pantheon was right there on the highest hill where everyone could see it. Same with Gothagar architecture. You know, JS Bach, perhaps the greatest musician who ever lived, was a parish church musician. Anyone I presume could walk in the doors and listen to his, to his, to his, to his contadas. I mean, Dickens, when Dickens wrote, I've heard recently, people would line the docs to wait to see what

was the next, you know, what was the next installment of Dickens. And so what, what I think, you know, most fundamentally is that the antidote to the spiritual crisis, civilizational cultural crisis we're living in is, is, is, is, is really fundamentally simple in at least it's what we can state it as. And that is to, to, to is to open the horizon again, to turn the lights back on. And what that means is to turn them on so that individuals can better come to understand themselves in relation to these higher order realities in the image of which they are made and in relation to which their fundamental realization essentially depends. So we have, so there's critiques of, let's say,

thought in relationship to the ideal, that Freudian critique of religious structure, that it's infantile. And perhaps that's a consequence of the hypothesis of the divine afterlife that awaits us all. Freud regarded that as an infantile response to the reality of death. And there's the Marxist criticism that religion only serves power, and it's the opiate of the masses. But there's, it's striking to me how poorly the alternative position has been defended given its unbelievable power. Look, we all seem to recognize within ourselves that we have moral culpability, as far as

I can tell, because I've never met anyone who hasn't tortured themselves to a tremendous degree as a consequence of their own perceived inadequacies in relationship to the ideal. I see that people take the deepest pleasure that's possible in life in the facilitation of the development of others. I don't believe that I believe that's wisdom to notice that, to say, well, it isn't the service to my momentary desires for pleasure or even comfort for that matter, where I'm going to find the deepest significance, life-sustaining significance that keeps me away from nihilistic hell and the desire to destroy and hurt.

It's going to be something like service to the greater good, and primarily in the form of, well, other other people and their longest possible term interests and that we have not only a divine responsibility to do that but a divine capacity to do that that if not manifested or cripples us spiritually and physically for that matter and mean, the ultimate significance of that remains unknowable, but I don't see any logical flaws in the proposition. I mean, I looked at the manner in which the Mesopotamians

built their savior, Marduk. Marduk has eyes all the way around his head and he speaks magic words. The cosmos comes into being and disappears as a consequence of his utterances. And there's this sense emerging in Mesopotamia as the consequence of the aggregation of all these cultures that the highest order being is extraordinarily attentive

hence the all encircling eyes and is capable of the deepest and most profound speech. And that's not a realization that's in any means trivial. The Mesopotamians had wars between all of their representations of their gods. And what they elevated to the highest position was this all-seeing truth-speaking capacity that also went forward and confronted chaos and built the world as a consequence. And the influence of that set of ideas, or the derivation from the same set of ideas for the Jewish conception of Yahweh is quite clear. And you see the same thing emerging in Greece with the building of a pantheon of gods and

the proposition that something occupies the apex, something alpolenian or something of that nature. And then you see that revolution take place with the dawn of Christianity and the insistence that there's something fundamental about consciousness and spoken truth that is constitutive of reality. And you ask yourself, well, do you believe that? And the answer is, well, you treat people like you believe that because you hold them responsible for the consequences of their utterances and you judge their character

on the basis of what they say. And you end on whether or not they act out what they say. And so we hold each other to these standards with everything that we do. And we be right ourselves when we don't live up to them. And I don't understand how it is that we can be said not to believe it. Now, you know, there's the dogmatic element, the hypothesis, for example, that Christ is literally the son of God. And I mean, my knowledge runs out very, very rapidly when speculating about such things.

But I'm certainly, certainly seems to me that Christianity has at least been a very long conversation about what the nature of the good is, and that that spilled out into the humanities and underlies our culture, and that that has very little to do with the expression of power. It's not the right lens through which to view things. It's devastating. It's wrong. It's devastating. It's wrong. It's cynical. And I think it appeals to envy and the desire to tear down. Well, I think that the, well, two things I would say just

very quickly, Jordan, the first is that, you know, we have immense resources in our own past and in the past of every culture. I mean, one of the things I love about your work is how sync-retisted. Yes, you know, here you've moved me in the last five minutes. You know, moved from Marduk to, you know, the Panto cratter to the Greeks and good on you for doing it. I mean, that's, I think I want to say that you say people have not been good at making the counter-argument.

Well, you've been very, very good at making the counter-argument and the millions of people who have their lives touched and ennobled and deepened by taking seriously the things you point towards are proof of that. I think relative to our spiritual cultural crisis, we should not pretend that we don't have resources. I mean, it's as if, you know, the situation is, is, if you were to give young people the challenge of building something beautiful. And if you were to, if you were to say, well, you're absolutely not allowed to look at or have any knowledge of any previous building. Well, the results are not going to be very good. But as soon as you say, and you can go back to Paladio

and Betruvius and look at all these models and discover all of the things that they give you, I mean, the results will be amazing. And so what I want to, I want to drive towards a kind of optimism not rooted in kind of silly blindness about the depth of our problems, but rather in the nature of what is most real and the whole treasure house of tools. It's like we have these spotlights from the past to help us understand ourselves

and the world around us in philosophy, in religion, in literature, in architecture, in art, in painting, in music. I mean, for God's sakes dig into that, we see that we uncover ourselves more and understand ourselves more adequately. I live in beautiful, very beautiful city in historic Savannah. And I'm live on the edge of a just absolutely stunning civic space park called Forsyth Park. I hope you can come and see it someday. There's a beautiful fountain in the middle of it. And it has these oak trees, these live oaks that were planted by people long dead now,

these oaks of, you know, one to two to even 300 years old. And I not infrequently see young couples coming to stand in front of one of the biggest, the biggest oak inside the park proper to get married. They stand there with the justice of the peace and exchange simple vows. And I think we have to ask ourselves, what in the hell is going on there? And it seems to me, you know, very beautiful and in a way, very simple, it's that they wish that their vows,

they're aspiring to be to each other in some way as the oak tree, as able to live up to the love that they are called to, and they want to instantiate that by, by, that's why they turned to the garden and the tree in the center. Yes. Yes. And act out Adam and Eve. Yes. We born. Yes. Yes.

But there's a related point I would make. And that is that, that, you know, we're not, we are not starting fatherless in the regeneration. I mean, I absolutely, you know, I'm a president of college. The father's nothing but a tyrant. Well, that's the thing we can't do. We've got to stop thinking that way. The father isn't a tyrant. Yes, yes. You know, was it what's so sad? I mean, you, you know, I've been in enough cities with you to be, have been very touched at the people coming up to you.

And I know you almost invariably get emotional when you discuss what it means to you to have people come and thank you for your work. And what I am so struck by in those experiences and in the people who come increasingly to us at Ralston College is, I mean, we had a young man drive all the way from Utah without telling us in the hope of just meeting someone here. It had someone move to Savannah, a former military young man, without telling us. And the question is, what is going on there?

You're these young people who turn to us are not, they are not animated by the culture wars, fundamentally. They are already seeking out higher order realities. They want to give themselves to rebuilding things in a beautiful and fundamental way. And I think we need to remember, we see we must absolutely not buy the line that the revolutionaries want to force down our throats, which is that, you know, the whole past is wicked and terrible and there's nothing of value there at all. Because once we do that, we have cut ourselves off

from the very sources of the regeneration. It's not that we've returned to the past. You can't return to the past. But it's like my image of trying to build beautiful buildings without any access to anything that's ever been built before. And so what I really think is a big problem and this is in so-called conservatism So what I really think is a big problem, and this is in so-called conservatism, is I think deeply fraught with this problem,

is that we subordinate ourselves to the current narratives, to the idea that there is no truth but only power, to the evisceration of our institutional life, rather than take a contradistinctively positive standpoint, which, you know, if I can say to you, you know, this is what I think fundamentally is at work in your work, is opening up a way for individuals to more deeply understand themselves and the world around them, in transformatively beautiful and difficult ways. Why do you stress architecture? That seems to have a particular meaning for you.

Well, for me, it's for a couple of reasons, but fundamentally, as I choose architecture as the example because I think it's the most visible, it's the most visible representation of what the ideas are. And I think the ideas are nihilism. You see in university campuses like at the University of Toronto, one side of it is cathedral, and the other side is brutalist factory. And that's, it's like the university has transformed itself from cathedral of knowledge to brutalist factory

of classroom inculcation. And that's maybe not even so much reflected in the architecture as led by the architecture. Yes, it's not that I think architecture is alone enough. I choose the drill, the drill, and for two reasons. The first is that I think it's the clearest way into what the world view is. I mean, I'm a philosopher and we can talk about nihilism and the negation of higher order goods and what those goods are. But, you know,

that's not the language that most immediately rings with people. But if you show them a brutalist building, they get it. That's what those where those ideas lead. Whereas when you look at the great cathedrals or even just a well-balanced, simple town hall. I mean, my ancestors like you know, I grew as born in Alberta as and grew up there until I was eight years old as you did in Alberta. And you know, my my Ukrainian ancestors, I mean, they lived in very, very humble homes in, I mean, many of them lived in essentially dirt shacks until they could build the next generation, the next year, and they were extremely simple homes. And you can see recreations of these, these elementary forms of architecture, but they are beautiful. I mean,

the idea that somehow, you know, that, you know, beauty is a rarefied thing that only those who are wealthy have access to them. That's just completely wrong. The most, one of the most beautiful buildings I ever saw was a day laborers cottage from, I think, the 17th century in the Netherlands. And so, the point I'm making is that, architecture matters both because it's a symbol of what the closing down of the horizon is,

and conversely a symbol of what opening up of the horizon looks like. I mean, you know, if you live in a place with a beautiful building, that building becomes a means of understanding yourself. In some sense, that building is yours, and it elevates and opens you up, the proportions of the building, the symmetry, that becomes a way of your becoming proportioned or understanding yourself as within those. Now, I don't think, by any means architecture is sufficient. I think in fact, it's even subsidiary to higher order things

whether it's educational, religious, civic, political, familial. I mean, the turning on of the lights again, the opening up of the horizon needs to happen. In my view, at every level, in every domain of our culture and architecture is just one example to help us understand both what the closed or open horizon is and an instance of a domain that is urgently in need, given our epidemic of ugliness,

urgently in need of being reopened again. What's your vision for Ralston College architecturally speaking? Well, we are, we're living in what, at Rolston College in Savannah, and so far as we have, and we'll have in-person programs here, our endeavor is to repurpose historic buildings in the historic core in order to make this sublimely beautiful historic downtown, the campus, rather than to build a new. Now, if we, for example, were to have $100 million

and build a new campus in some beautiful place, we would really, simply, I think, want for that to be in coherent conversation with the history of collegiate architecture. But as I say, fundamentally, we chose Savannah actually because it is a sublimely beautiful place and because the natural and architectural beauty we think is a powerful analog to the discovery of the intellectual riches of the classroom. Can I ask you where the project is in its current state of development? Certainly.

I would perhaps say just by introduction that our analysis and the need for founding new institutions is directly related to the things we've just been speaking about, the cultural spiritual crisis, the upstream influence of the university over everything else, the fact that it is the epicenter of at very best, unhelpful, at worst, downright toxic forms of ideology that spread through anything and everything that is catastrophically beset with high costs, low value, and so on and so forth. But our analysis is simply that there is huge demand in young people for alternatives, people who are seeking alternatives to the indoctrination and activism and fraudulent low value of the academy. I mean, I think your own work has shown

this about as clearly as anything else historically ever has, that it's a mistake to concede the, you know, your new book you write about the need for creative dynamism in relation to our institutions. And it seems to me we're in a moment not only in which that is urgently necessary, but also eminently possible if we have only the courage to do it. So what I would say is a few things. The first is that Rolson College has as really four fundamental commitments. First, to seek the truth with courage, second, to apprehend beauty in all of its forms, third, to the freedom of speech and thought that are the conditions of those pursuits and finally to the friendship or even fellowship that is the context for all of these pursuits.

And what's become clear to us, Jordan, over the years is, it's been a long runway. It's not easy getting a college going. Anyone who thinks that you need to go off and fight in a war in order to undertake something really hard of value, can call me up and we'll have a talk about other things, other projects that may be very, very difficult to bring into the world, but necessary and beautiful.

What's become clear to us in these years of development, which we're sort of at the end of, as we now are launching our first programs and first degree, is that Rolson College has a double vocation, both on the one hand to be a reinvention of the academy, a place for in-person degrees, a new model for the university of the academy, a place for in-person degrees, a new model for the university that we hope be

pretty radically disruptive, not just because, you know, we're going to change everything, but we hope that it will lead to many other people doing new and different and more beautiful and more adequate and perhaps cheaper and faster, but above all, just more important and higher value things in the space of higher education. So on the one hand, to be a reinvention of the academy, a reinvention and a revival of the academy. But and on that side, we've received our degree granting powers from the state of Georgia. We expect to launch our first degree this autumn. In what? In what? This first degree will

be a master's in the humanities. So it will be a pretty intensive boot camp in thinking about the big ideas tracing them and their development through history, which we think is important both as a revival of those forms of life and thought and culture, but also because we think they are the as it, the key to opening up the depths of the self for the students themselves. You know, it's not that every human, if I can't play the piano, it's not that every, you talk about resentment earlier, you know, it's not that every human being should have to play the piano like Martha Argeri, or Glenn Gould from your current town of Toronto,

99.99% of human individuals couldn't play the piano that way. But because Glenn Gould could end it, we can all hear the music. And in some level, I think what the high end of the academy is about, is about playing the music so we can all hear it. And so on the one hand, it's the reinvention of the academy in a degree form. But on the other hand, the second side of this double vocation is to be a kind of platform of humanistic inquiry

for anyone, anywhere who wishes to engage with the riches of the human istic tradition, who wishes to seek the truth with courage, who wishes to ask the fundamental human questions that every human being must face about truth and beauty and forgiveness and love and suffering. I put a reading list online of 100 books. It's at JordanBPeterson.com under books for those who might be interested. And people are buying those books like Matt and reading them. And it does really seem to me that,

you know, if you can open up access to people to these great ideas and provide them with a pathway that there's all sorts of people who are more than willing to tread down that pathway as rapidly as possible. And so, you know, I'd be interested as we progress in this conversation at some other point to know in more detail what it is that you're planning. But I would like to ask right now, I mean, how do you envision opening up the humanities to a broader range of people?

What are you going to do that's different or what are you hoping to do that's different? Well, there's in one sense, it's, gosh, you know, we have to confront the fact that the universities have in many respects, I'm not a catastrophe, I mean, there are many wonderful people teaching in many, you know, institutions around the world. It's not like it's just all bad all the time everywhere. But I think, and I clarify things because I don't want to be perceived as a catastrophist, while I say that, the universities

have by and large fundamentally forgotten, if not betrayed their fundamental value proposition. Well, what's happened to enrollment in the humanities over the last 20 years? My understanding is that it's plummeted. Yes, of course, it's dropping from everything I read. But I think we can look at this at a higher level of resolution or higher level of if we zoom out a bit. I think we can say that when people, the average person anywhere in the world, when they are looking to make sense of their lives, whether it's suffering or loss or cancer or joy or sorrow or whatever, that the place they do not look for answers to those questions is to the university

by and large. And I think this tells us where you're living in a historic moment in which the institutions that are meant to have those questions at their heart are no longer tending to them in any fundamentally visible way. And so that's true. That's true. The church is well. Definitely. I mean, again, with exceptions here and there and so forth, but I think at least in my experience, I can't speak for other religious traditions.

I think that in many respects, not again, not as a catastrophe, but in many respects, the various denominations of the Christian religion have lost their way in a way that is similar to the humanities having lost their way. And what I want to, you know, just really insist upon is that, you know, of course, Jordan, you know, that there are certain kinds of intellectual activity or intellectual domains, let's say, you know, string theory, or, you know, the highest and hardest questions

in philosophy that are not fundamentally very easily accessible to anyone unless they have gone through years of apprenticeship to be able to encounter those questions. However, the vast amount of humanistic inquiry of art and music and literature and architecture and so on and so forth throughout virtually every humanistic domain are not only accessible to, but are made for the enjoyment and illumination of human beings everywhere and anywhere.

And, you know, I had a very moving experience with someone who's quite close to me in my extended family be any kind of marker of value as a human being. It is not. But we were in London and we were my wife and I were suggesting we should go to Shakespeare's Globe and spend some go watch a Shakespearean play. And this person in my extended family was who's very, very dear to me was was quite insecure about going and she really sort of said, you know, no, you know, I won't understand anything, you know, I'll go off and you know, walk around and you all go in and joyous, you know, shake spears. You know, her view was, shake spears not for me. But we insisted and she came along and it was a play I had never had seen before. And here I had my, you know, PhD and whatever. And by the intermission, I am not exaggerating as they,

she knew far more about what was happening in the play than I did. And what I want to insist Jordan is that, you know, the great high watermarks of the humanities, whether it's Bach or Matisse or the Gothic cathedrals or Homer or just go on and down through the list of all of it. They are made for everyone. And so the question is, how do you open them up well? I mean, dammit, we're going to do everything we can to open them up however we can. I mean, you're one of our great examples of how you open things up.

I mean, you think about them. You try and share them in a medium that seems right for a certain audience. And you can't do everything to everyone all the time. I mean, there are some things that you can do in the internet and some things you can't do in the internet. Some things you can do in person in a weekend. Some things take a whole year. But the point is that by and large,

the internet gives us the opportunity and modern travel gives us the opportunity of gathering people either virtually or in person, totally extraterritorially to the university. Why should the university have to be the place that these things are, these things are done or encountered? I mean, most of your work, though, I know you were formed and shaped in the university, the vast amount of your work that has reached large audiences, is not taken place in the university. And so I think that- Or that's where the university has moved. Yes, truly conceived. The university is as the community of those who pursue the truth.

Yes, it's like Israel is those who struggle with God and the university is those who struggle with the truth. Yes, exactly. So, I would say that we think that there is enormous opportunity. We have a partnership now with a global online learning platform called Future Learn, which grew out of the open university in the United Kingdom with, I think it's 15 million users in 200 countries. Our first courses will go up on Future Learn, open access available to anyone anywhere with minute-to-connection. There's no credit. There's no, you're not getting a degree. We're just trying

to share these things as widely as we can. The first course will be Tony Daniels, AKA Theodore Dalrymple, who's, I know some of whose books are on your reading list on Johnson's Rassilus, which is going to be a wonderful course. Andrew Doyle is doing a course on Shakespeare's Titus and Dronecus, and so on and so forth. We'd love to have, have you join this initiative at some point if you're able an interested at the point is is that we we live in actually very exciting times from the standpoint of the sharing of information freely at low cost through the internet and that's not that you know, which should be internet ideologues as if everything meaningful

in life can be done in the internet. It cannot be. But we should at the same time, as you have very beautifully and courageously shown, embrace the possibilities that it does, in fact, offer us. And, you know, our deepest hope is that we can, if I can use a scriptural metaphor, break the alabaster box and take the greatest, most beautiful minds we can find, and to have them share the things that they know and understand for anyone who is seeking to ask those questions, to encounter those truths, to look at those beautiful things,

and to understand, understand themselves more truly and love others more fully. I mean, it's in a way a very simple endeavor, but we, I think, have to insist that we ought not to be captive to the closed horizon that would tell us, you know, it's too late, it's not possible. The very hunger, the deafening hunger around us is a sign that at a minimum, we can try to give what we can to those who seek it. That's a really good place to stop. Thanks very much for talking with me today, Stephen. Thank you. Thank you very much for talking with me today. Stephen, and best of luck with your initiative. And thank you very much for the conversation.

Thank you, Jordan, for having me. you