The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 291. How to Combat Hedonism | Dr. Peter Kreeft

Starting point is 00:00:28 [♪ 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 in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in Peter Creeft. Peter John Creeft was born March 16, 1937. He's a professor of philosophy at Boston College and the King's College. He took his A.B. at Calvin College in 1959 and an MA at Fordham University in 1961, where he also undertook his doctoral studies in 1965. He subsequently completed his post-grad at Yale University. Dr. Creeft joined the philosophy faculty of the Department of Philosophy of Boston College in 1965. A convert to Roman Catholicism, Dr. Creeft is the author of over 80 books on Christian philosophy, theology, and apologetics. We're going to discuss religious issues in the modern world today with some foray into the relationship between the Abrahamic faiths, particularly Islam.

Starting point is 00:01:18 Dr. Kreeft, welcome. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. I have the same to say to you. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. I have the same to say to you. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today So some of the things we're doing seem to be somewhat similar. I'm very interested in religious ideas and practices I'm very interested in the idea that such beliefs and practices

Starting point is 00:01:41 sit at the foundation of the web of beliefs through which we view the world. And you're an unapologetic advocate of traditional beliefs in a world that seems increasingly distant from them and skeptical of them. I guess what I'd like to know, first of all, is your books follow a thread. What do you think the thread is that unites your work? And what is it that you're trying to accomplish and why? I know that's not an easy question. Well, I'll give you a very concrete answer. One of my favorite books is Chesterton's book

Starting point is 00:02:15 on Thomas Aquinas, called St. Thomas Aquinas, The Dumb Ox. And the main point of that book is that this brilliant theologian and philosopher is the champion of common sense, that the rising of the intellect to the contemplation of eternal truth on the one hand and practical living out common sense tradition on the other hand are not only not opposites, they reinforce each other. So I think our common respect for tradition is also a respect for common sense, which is why I admire your work. So you wrote a book on Jacob's Ladder

Starting point is 00:02:54 and I recently went to New York and saw these ideas don't seem related, but they are, I saw Wagner's Dimester Singer and in that opera, but they are, I saw Wagner's Dimaster Singer. And in that opera, which is about coblers, interestingly enough, shoemakers, so very, very practical people. The great coblers are part of the guild

Starting point is 00:03:17 and the greatest of the coblers become singers and the master singers from all the guilds get together and elect a new master singer and that master singer that is elected in this particular story is an analog of Christ. What I really liked about the opera was this idea. It's like the brick layer who's building a cathedral, brick by brick. Each brick is just a brick and it's, and you could be cynical about the smallness of the task in some sense,

Starting point is 00:03:46 but when the brick is conceptualized in relationship to the entire cathedral, then it becomes a task where the lowest is united with the highest. And I think that's what Jacob's latter signifies conceptually, that there has to be a conceptually, that there has to be a sequence of action all the way from the most concrete tasks to the highest level of theological abstraction. That has to be harmoniously arrayed in some manner that's approximately akin to a symphony. If that's done properly, then even the most mundane of tasks, which aren't mundane at all, take on a,

Starting point is 00:04:25 well, I would say in the optimal sense, they take on a kind of eternal significance. And it's in that union there of the practical and the highest that strikes me as germane to what you're describing about the link between the practical and the philosophical and the abstract. Yes, I love the old story about some peasants

Starting point is 00:04:49 hauling stones on logs through the mud in a storm in order to build one of the great medieval cathedrals. And a visitor from another country asked one of the peasants, what are you doing? And he was sweating and cursing and saying, I'm trying to get this damn stone through this damn mud. And then he asked another of the peasants who were doing exactly the same thing, but smiling,

Starting point is 00:05:16 what he was doing. And he said, I am building a cathedral. Right, right, right. Well, and it does make you think, it, like I know from a psychological perspective that the emotional functions that fill us with enthusiasm and hope, and also the emotional functions that quail anxiety and despair are related to our apprehension of sequential goals.

Starting point is 00:05:45 So, can imagine that we have nested goals, and so might be getting the mud through, or getting the rocks through a swamp, and then getting the rocks to the building site, and then building the foundation, et cetera. But then it's building the foundation and having a family and doing that within a community, and then building a cathedral in relationship

Starting point is 00:06:03 to the highest glory of the most glorious, well, we can leave it at that, of the most glorious. And then everything along that chain is imbued with the entire, with the significance of the whole. Yes, everything is imbued with significance. If and only if you start at the end of the chain. If there's, just as if there's no first call, as there are no subsequent effects, so if there's no final end, there's no ultimate purpose for doing anything.

Starting point is 00:06:32 Okay, so there's a good thing to delve into. So I've been walking through the Bible recently with a particular goal in mind, and I noticed that in some of your books, you use characterization as explanation. And so it looks to me that if we build a hierarchy of value, a hierarchy of attentional priority, that's another way of looking at it, that there's only two options to how that might be constructed.

Starting point is 00:06:59 One is that it has a multitude of ends, and the other is that it has a single end ends and the other is that it has a single land. Now the problem with a hierarchy of value having a multitude of ends is that it's internally self-contradictory and that has two psychological consequences. One is it decreases hope and enthusiasm because the linkage between each goal isn't associated with something that's at the highest point, but probably more relevant to today's anxious secularism is that if there's no unifying superordinate goal, then the state of psychological affairs that obtains is one of confusion, anxiety, and social disunity.

Starting point is 00:07:47 And I actually don't see any options to that. So something is either put in the highest place or confusion and anxiety and hopelessness rates. Those seem to be the alternatives. I think that is the psychological reason why pagan polytheism declined and Abrahamic monotheism triumphant. We need one great love to be one great person. You can't integrate your personality around multiple sum of monoms, multiple greatest goods. Right, well because it does produce this conflict and then you know you mentioned the notion of a person. So I was thinking,

Starting point is 00:08:25 well, what should be at the highest point? Is it a description, or is it a spirit? And again, I'm trying to speak psychologically and think, well, it has to be a spirit and not a description, because maybe you have a beautiful description of the nature of the objective world. That's something you might do as if you're a scientist, but that doesn't provide a guide to perception and action. What human beings need at the highest place is something to emulate and act out and see through, like you might see through lenses.

Starting point is 00:08:59 And so the phenomena, the phenomenon that has to be at the highest place has to be something to emulate and imitate, and therefore it has to have the nature for all intents and purposes of a spirit or of a being and not of a mere description. I think there are a number of people, especially in academia, who can live for abstractions. It's the difference between Socrates and Plato. Plato believed that the absolute was the good, the good itself. Apparently that is not a God, not a person.

Starting point is 00:09:33 Socrates was moved and motivated by his fidelity to what he called his unknown God. And most people identify with Socrates rather than Plato, except perhaps in academia, because abstractions will not disappoint you, and they will not change, and persons will. So the major objection, I believe, especially on the part of people in the Orient

Starting point is 00:09:57 to Abrahamic monotheism, is that if God is a person and concrete, then he might disappoint you. He's unpredictable. He's a concrete entity rather than an abstraction. Abstractions are safe. Yeah, well, the problem with the abstraction orientation is that it still leaves you with the mystery of how to live and act outside of your obsession

Starting point is 00:10:22 to the abstraction, but even more particularly, you know, I've spent a fair bit of time speaking with famous atheists, and a number of atheists, a very large number, have watched my biblical lectures and apparently found them useful, which I think is quite interesting. And the thing about the atheist crowd, in some sense, especially the scientific, scientifically-minded atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, is that I can't help but see that their scientific pursuit is nested inside a spiritual faith that they leave implicit. So Dawkins, for example,

Starting point is 00:11:01 who I respect a tremendous amount, I've read a lot of his work and I found it very useful. Dawkins clearly believes that there's a transcendent object that you can encounter through the scientific method that will correct you because he doesn't believe that his theories are final. He believes that out in the domain of ignorance, in the logos of the world, let's say, there is corrective information

Starting point is 00:11:25 and that seeking that corrective information is a moral good. And he clearly also believes that the truth will set you free, which you have to believe if you're going to be a practicing scientist. And so I think even those who presume that they've put an abstraction that's disembodied in the highest place are actually wrong psychologically, that there's something that they are embodying as spirits, even if it's mimicry of the great scientists and the scientific spirit of inquiry. There's something they're mimicking that serves them as the highest orientation point, and I can't see how that's not related to the idea of the logos.

Starting point is 00:12:06 Yes, and if Dawkins has this will to truth, and without the will to truth, without the love of truth, truth is meaningless, it may still exist, but it doesn't affect us. Without that will to truth, his whole world view collapses, even his atheist worldview, which is why I think Nietzsche is the key thinker here, because he is the first, as far as I know, in the history of human thought, to explicitly deny the will to truth. He says, why truth?

Starting point is 00:12:37 Why not rather untruth? His contrast between the Dionysian and the Epilonian, between the will and the mind, between the fire and the light, that tears the human heart apart more radically than anything else I think I've ever encountered. So I think postmodernism is a much greater danger than atheism, because the atheists can still

Starting point is 00:13:00 have that will to truth, but the postmodernism has lost it. Yeah, well, OK, so let's go back. Let's concentrate for a bit on the Nietzsche in front. So, when Nietzsche announced God was dead, he did it. He did it weirdly enough the same way that God told Moses, in some sense, to set his people free in Egypt. So I just did a seminar on Exodus, half a seminar with a group of scholars in Miami, which we're gonna release in November. But God tells Moses to tell the Pharaoh to let his people go, which you hear all the time,

Starting point is 00:13:40 that phrase, but that's not the whole phrase. He says, let my people go so that they may serve me in the wilderness, which is very different than just let my people go, which is more like a call to maybe even a hedonistic freedom. When Nietzsche says that God is dead, which is what you see written on bathroom walls, for example. And that's the claim that's trumpeted. He followed that up with an observation that I'm paraphrasing, which is something like, God is dead, and we have killed him. The holiest of all that has ever existed has now bled to death under our knives, and we'll never

Starting point is 00:14:16 find enough water to wash away the blood. And that's very different than a triumphal statement that God is dead. And I've been thinking that through on the atheist materialist front as well. And it's possible. And I think Dawkins and Harris, to some degree, are experiencing this in the culture right now, is that when you lose that sense of the transcendent spirit, let's say, that's more explicitly associated with religious belief, because God is now dead. There's a good possibility that you lose the transcendent object too, and so that if we kill off the Judeo-Christian or even the Abrahamic tradition under the onslaught of post-modern criticism, we're also going to simultaneously kill off scientific inquiry and scientific

Starting point is 00:15:02 endeavor. I think that's inevitable. I agree, but there's something more. The love of truth is not enough. If truth doesn't somehow rebound on you and love you back, if truth is only an abstraction and not a person, not a spirit with a will, you have theology but not religion.

Starting point is 00:15:27 Theology is a one-way relationship. Theology is a science. I try to understand the truth about God. Religion is a two-way relationship. So God's initiative comes first, and our response comes second. That's the grammar of being. And the theologian is tempted to change that grammar of being and play God and and and

Starting point is 00:15:50 almost call God into existence through his concepts. That's the great danger of being a mere theologian. So this idea here, this is another idea that's relevant on the on the issue of the question of whether what needs to be put in the highest place is a spirit or a description. So the other thing that I found very much characteristic of thinkers like Harris and Dawkins, and this is probably even more true of Harris because Sam Harris is extremely obsessed by the idea of radical evil, which he believes in devoutly, I would say, and has been looking for a means of producing, let's say, an objective morality as a counterpoint to the existence of absolute evil, as manifested, let's say, in genocidal atrocity. And so, in some sense, it's accurate to say that his heart is in the right place.

Starting point is 00:16:43 But, like, standing off from that is this observation, which is that Harris and Dawkins and scientists of their ilk also implicitly accept the idea I believe that truth has to be nested inside love because the, the governing idea behind the scientific endeavor is that we're striving for prediction and control to bring about something like life more abundant, to make life better. And so I read this book a while back that was written by an xkgb agent and he discussed GB agent, and he discussed the Soviet attempt, scientific attempt, to produce a hybrid between Ebola and smallpox and then to aerosolize it as a weapon. And so it would be extremely

Starting point is 00:17:36 deadly and extremely transmissible. And I was thinking, well, from a mere technical perspective, how to hybridize Ebola and smallpox is a perfectly valid scientific question. And so then the question is, well, why not do it? And the answer to that has to be something like, well, it's wrong. It's clearly wrong. This is a bad idea. And so, what that also means is that when scientists' attention is directed towards a given set of phenomena and they undertake an investigation, in order to be properly motivated scientifically, and I think psychologically as well, they have to be operating on the assumption that this search for knowledge is going to be beneficial to humanity in the particulars and in the generalities. And so that's a orientation that's essentially predicated on love and that truth, the scientific truth has to be the

Starting point is 00:18:38 handmaiden of that broader ethical concern. Does that seem reasonable to you? broader ethical concern. Is that seem reasonable to you? It's reasonable unless you are someone like Karl Marx, who once said that his favorite line in all of human literature is from Gertr 's fouss, where metastophiles, the devil, utters these words. Everything that exists deserves to perish. That is what I would call absolute evil. I can't believe that, you know, because that's a phrase that I've used repeatedly in my lectures, because Gert that has Memphis Stoffley's actually say that twice. He says it in the first, there's two books to Faust, written very far apart in Gert's life when he was a young man and then when he was a much older man and he has Mephistopheles utter that credo in two different forms and

Starting point is 00:19:34 He basically says elaborate on what you said that Mephistopheles position is that it's like Ivan Karamazov in the Brothers Karamazov He says life is so rife with catastrophe and suffering, betrayal, malevolence. It's so intrinsically unworthy that it would be better if consciousness itself was just brought to an end. And I didn't know that Marx made reference to that. That's absolutely stunning because it is the core ethos of Mephistopheles. And so a core satanic ethos, let's say, that non-being is better than being. It also contradicts these statements in Genesis. This is something very striking about Genesis, which of course you no doubt know, is that when God steps through the days of creation using the word to engender order out of chaos, He insists after each phase, let's say, that what has been created is good. So not merely

Starting point is 00:20:41 that it exists, but that its existence is good and that that goodness is preferable to to non-being. And so one of the issues that I've struggled with is the notion that part of what the biblical narrative does is outline for its adherence, a pathway of existence and perception, so of action and perception and social interaction, that enables, that best enables our participation in creation to be the good that overcome suffering and malevolence. And not just the good that overcome suffering,

Starting point is 00:21:21 but the good that overcome is evil. There's two very different kinds of evil. The evil that we do that we're responsible for, and then there's the evil that we suffer, harm. And the human heart wants both. It wants to love and be loved. It wants to be good and experience good. And if the truth is that those two things are impossible together. If evil is stronger than good and not surrounded by good, if in other words, the benevolent God who created the universe is a myth, and the universe is the ultimate being, and there's nothing beyond it. Then the universe is very much like Red Butler in Gone with the Wind, and says to us, frankly,

Starting point is 00:22:10 my dear, I just don't give a damn. It's beyond good and evil. And I don't know if there's a proof that such a God exists or not, but it's certainly an option. It's a Pascal's wager. You can believe that in the mind of God, there is an adequate and more than adequate reason why God allows these horrendous evils, even though he can miraculously stop them.

Starting point is 00:22:35 Or you can believe that there is no such reason. And I love Pascal because he's very practical. He says, well, you cannot be refuted, whichever of those two wagers you pick. There is such a God, there is not such a God. Well, look at the consequences for life. Even if you're wrong, your life is meaningful and it gives you hope and it gives you order.

Starting point is 00:23:04 And if you're right, then you'll find out in the end that you were on the shoe path. And if you're wrong, well, maybe at the moment of death, you'll find out that it was all in illusion. But even the good illusion is better than nothing. Well, let's take a Kirchegardi and twist on that. the good illusion is better than nothing. Well, let's take a Kirchegardian twist on that. I noticed that you all have also written about Kirchegard and correct me if I'm wrong,

Starting point is 00:23:33 but this is what I derived from Kirchegard. So because Kirchegard talks about this idea of being a knight of faith, and he's clasashed with the Christian existentialists as a consequence of the practicalities of his view. He basically puts forward a proposition that I think is akin to the proposition that undergirds marriage, which is, you cannot find out, and this is relevant to Pascal's wager, you cannot find out whether creation as such is good or evil

Starting point is 00:24:08 without being all in on your bet, just like you can't be married without saying, well, I'm shackling myself to you and I'm not going to run away no matter what. So we better get to know each other and get along because this is how it's going to be. And without that, you can't be deeply committed enough to the marriage to make it work. So it seems to me on the front of faith, which is you have to act in the world with courageous trust, not naive trust, but courageous trust in the potential goodness of being, in order to actually discover whether or not that faith is justified. And that's partly why it's faith is that you have to put the cart before the horse.

Starting point is 00:24:55 You can't wait around. In the book of Revelation, when Christ comes back to judge everyone, he says something like, if you were neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. And so his harshest judgment isn't reserved for outright, unrepentant, committed sinners, and certainly not for people who are 100% committed to the courage of their faith, but to the judgment is harshest for people who play both ends against the middle and who won't commit.

Starting point is 00:25:30 And one of the things that I've started to toy with is the idea that faith is actually a subset in some sense of existential courage. You know, I've talked to my listeners and viewers about the notion that, if you wanna pursue the good, you do that in some sense, despite. So if you're naive, you're good because you think everything is good

Starting point is 00:25:56 and everyone is good, but if you're naive, you're immature and you're unwise, and then you get jolted out of that naivety by betrayal and tragedy, and then you become, or you're temptedwise, and then you get jolted out of that naivety by betrayal and tragedy, and then you become, or you're tempted by cynicism, and the cynicism is wiser than the ignorant naivety. But it's not good. It's the desert, let's say. It's the exodus desert after the tyranny of naivety. And the way out of that is to events a courageous faith. And the courageous faith is something like,

Starting point is 00:26:29 I'm going to do good despite the evidence for tragedy and malevolence and the atrocity of history and all of that. And that's part of the courage of faith. I'm going to commit myself to this. And that, in some sense, bypasses Pascal's wager, because it doesn't even have anything to do, in some sense, with what would you say, your own redemption. It's a decision about how to be in the face of the catastrophe of life. And you have to make a decision, one way or another,

Starting point is 00:27:02 because you're either going to take the mefistophilian root and say, you know, life is so terrible that it should just come to an end and that if there is a God, he should be damned for having the presumption to make such a terrible world. Or you're going to say, no, despite everything I'm going to work in all possible ways to make everything better and to tell the truth

Starting point is 00:27:22 while moving forward. And I'm going to conduct my life according to those principles. And then I'm going to have the adventure that comes along without and see what happens. That's what the scientific atheist does not understand, I think. That there are some truths that you cannot simply discover. You have to live them. You have to make the experiment.

Starting point is 00:27:42 I think of Kierkegaard's night of faith from the viewpoint of Juliet. Here comes Romeo with no guarantees. He does not bring an array of lawyers and philosophers to persuade her that it is utterly rational for her to elope with him. He says, leap into my arms. And she does not know whether that will end well or not.

Starting point is 00:28:06 It's an act of faith. It's a leap. And in the play, of course, it doesn't pay off. They both die. Or you might say that even that, since it was in a sense a noble death, was a payoff. But there's no guarantee. That's why there's faith. Yeah, well, there's this idea, idea from the materialists, determinists, let's say,

Starting point is 00:28:28 that if we just derived enough information about the nature of things that we could produce an algorithm that would enable us how to compute our movement forward. Now, that is naive. It is naive. Well, I think it's technically naive, because I've talked to some great scientists like Sir Roger Penrose, and Penrose believes that, in principle, the horizon of the future is not fundamentally predictable from the positions of the past. So this is not a clockwork universe.

Starting point is 00:29:03 The horizon of what we've confront is a horizon of potential, which I think as somewhat equivalent to the chaos that God confronted at the beginning of time, that we confront this potential that has multiple potential branches, which is the way that the world could array itself as a consequence of our decision, and that we impose a vision on that,

Starting point is 00:29:26 and that vision is a production of faith, and then we enact a vision, and that enacting is an act of faith, and that's, well, that's part of what's attracted me to the existential thinkers, let's say, rather than the scientific materialists determinists. I would not use the word impose, I would use the word add. Whether the universe is a

Starting point is 00:29:46 clockwork universe or not doesn't much matter because our lives are not clockwork lives so that we can add to the universe new data by our choices, by our living. And what effect that has on the universe, I don't know. I don't know if the stars tremble a little bit when we love each other more or not. I suspect that there's the stars tremble a little bit when we love each other more or not. I suspect that there's some connection because spiritual gravity and physical gravity have to be at least analogous. And if every particle of matter in the universe

Starting point is 00:30:13 is relative to every other particle of matter in the universe, why shouldn't every particle of personality, every individual human being, and their choices, and their loves and hates, also have effects on everyone. That's the Russian concept of subordinates, which is so strong and dusty especially the brothers Karamazov. I love Ivan Karamazov, he's my favorite atheist. He's passionate, he's committed, he's moral, he's a moral atheist, he's

Starting point is 00:30:39 not an amoral atheist. Right, well, and he's admirable and he's charismatic and he's good looking. And I mean, one of the things that's so absolutely wonderful about Dozti Eski, which puts him in the top rank of all-time geniuses, I actually prefer Dozti Eski to Nietzsche in the final analysis, I would say, although it's a tight battle, is that when he makes an atheist, when Dosty Eski makes an atheist, he pulls out all the plugs, man. And so I know in the Brothers' Kramasov, Ivan Wins pretty much all of his arguments with Alliosea, because he's so articulate and so able to put forward his claims. Although Alliosea beats him on the characterological side, which is one of the great, what would you say, brilliant,

Starting point is 00:31:28 literary accomplishments of Dostoevsky? It's really something. I don't think anyone in history has ever written fiction about Jesus, which moves you, except Dostoevsky. And in the Grand Inquisitor Jesus says nothing and does nothing except for that kiss, and that's sufficient. And it looks as if Ivan won the argument earlier than that, because Ivan got Aliyah Shaito admit, if you were God and you were creating a universe and you gave man free will and you saw that it would inevitably result in these horrors, these parents who are torturing their children, would you consent to be the

Starting point is 00:32:06 architect? And Alayasha, who's utterly honest, says, no, I wouldn't consent. So there isn't even in Alayasha. There is a rebel in us. And it's a good rebel. God approves Job's rebellion, rather than the three friends comfort. At the end of the book of Job, God says an amazing thing. He says to the three friends, I burn with anger against you because you have not spoken rightly about me as my servant Job has. But what they said was simply Orthodox. It's in the rest of the Bible. God is great and God is good. Let us thank him for our food, amen. And Job, who admitted that his words were wild because his sufferings were so great,

Starting point is 00:32:46 is accusing God and wishing that he could take him to court. And yet God approves that honest rebellion on Job's part rather than a comfortable acceptance on the part of the three friends. Does he ask you must have loved that? Right, while Job is at least wrestling as honestly as possible with the issues of tragedy and malevolence.

Starting point is 00:33:09 He's facing that four square. And I would suspect that the reason, to put words in God's mouth that Job is approved of is that the more naïve advocates for God's goodness are merely avoiding looking at the calamity and catastrophe and protecting themselves in that way, but that means a real faithlessness in some profound sense, because as Nietzsche pointed out, I suppose,

Starting point is 00:33:37 is that there's some real utility in staring into an abyss. And Nietzsche warned, right, if you stare into an abyss, the abyss might stare into you and that if you fight with monsters, you risk becoming a monster. And that's an extremely wise caution. But one of the things I've sort of sorted out in relationship to the crucifixion image is that the crucifixion image and the passion story in some real sense, and I'm speaking psychologically here, not religiously, at least to begin with, is the ultimate abyss because it brings together all the elements of unfair

Starting point is 00:34:12 suffering that might characterize life or that do characterize life. It brings them together in a single story. And then it makes the claim that if you gaze upon that image with sufficient intensity and duration and perhaps faith, which you have to have in order to gaze upon it at all, is that what you end up seeing and contemplating is not death and hell, but the resurrection and the overcoming of death and hell. And you know, one of the things clinicians have learned in the last hundred years, perhaps above all else, maybe they learn two things, is that honest dialogue promotes health and redeems. And that's the first thing. And the second thing is, if you face what disturbs you and forces you into paralysis and avoidance and tyranny. If you face that for

Starting point is 00:35:07 Forth rightly and voluntarily that that will Enable your character and help you grow and so a lot of what a clinician does is take a fear that someone might have that's Paralyzing them and then break it down into small Sub-sets sort of like the brick in relationship to the cathedral, and then have people practice voluntary confrontation. And what inevitably happens is not that people get less afraid, but that they become braver and more competent.

Starting point is 00:35:36 And so then you might say, if you tied that back into this idea of the evil that besets creation and the notion of human free will. You might say that the universe is constituted such that it's a greater good that evil can exist as a possibility and that it's a greater good that human beings have free will than that they're compelled slaves and the downside of that is that we can freely choose evil and slaves. And the downside of that is that we can freely choose evil. And then that accounts for the per me, the pervasive evil that characterizes human endeavor and the cosmos in some sense, but that a world without that possibility, because it would involve pure subjugation and

Starting point is 00:36:21 no choice and no voluntary ascent and no real destiny. A world without that would be a much lesser place because one of the things you can say is that it's possible that God left human beings something important to do. Yes, and that's very good theology and very good apologetics and even in a sense justifying the ways of God demand. But that's not yet religion. That's still, I'm in the driver's seat and I'm making the road maps and I'm traveling on this journey and I'm making my life meaningful and I'm making my character honest and courageous and that's all very good.

Starting point is 00:37:02 But that's not yet Abrahamic Theism, that's North Mythology. Maybe the gods will go down into defeat. Maybe evil is stronger than good. Well, then let's go down in defeat on the right side, because right is more important than might. And that's noble. That's the second best thing in the world. But then you have the resurrection.

Starting point is 00:37:24 Then you have the God who adds power to His goodness and His love. So you have it all together. But that has to come from God, not from us. So our response to that has to be secondary. It has to be a response. We don't impose that upon the universe. We don't read our faith into the universe. We see, we are Juliet and we see Romeo coming with this marriage proposal and we say yes to it, like the Blessed Virgin Mary, you know, Fiat, be it done into me according to your will,

Starting point is 00:37:56 that's the essence of religion. And that's why I love Islam. It's so simple. It's so centered on an absolute surrender and submission. Okay, so a couple of things to tie together there. So when Nietzsche announced the death of God, he formulated another proposition. He said that we may have to become gods merely to a tone for the sin of a day aside. And so he believed that the overman, the Superman, would be someone who

Starting point is 00:38:29 through the power of his own will set his own values. Now, I spent a lot of time reading Jung, Carl Jung, in relationship to Nietzsche. Jung, for example, published a must be it, For example, published a must be it 1,500 page, two volume book on the first third of thus Spake Zarathustra, and was a very deep Nietzschean scholar. But fell under the influence of Freud, and this turned out to be of cardinal significance, because Freud was one of the first secular thinkers to note that in some unbelievably fundamental sense, we are not masters in our own house. There are subpersonalities within us. There are complexes within us.

Starting point is 00:39:16 There are angels and demons within us. That's another way of thinking about it. And they pull us this way in that sometimes independent of our will and often contrary to our will. And so Freud's conclusion was, it's very difficult for human beings to create their own values because we have an intrinsic nature that's not subject to our arbitrary will. And then Jung took that a step further and he said, well, there's no doubt that we act out a myth and a story and that in the deepest sense that has to be a theological story and that some, the spirit that guides us has to have a unitary nature which he did associate with Christ quite explicitly. And it was a,

Starting point is 00:40:03 it's a vicious rejoinder to the Nietzschean presumption that we can create and impose our own values for the psychoanalysts, those values, and I would say for the wise clinicians, those values have to be discovered, not self-generated and imposed. Plus, you just don't live long enough to do that. You're just not wise enough to generate a whole system of universally applicable values out of whole cloth in the span of your trivial life. And if you know you're doing that, then you reduce life to a game. You have created the meaning of life. Well, who is the creator?

Starting point is 00:40:41 What gives you the right to do that? What gives you the power to do that what gives you the power to do that? You did not create the universe how how can you write the laws of morality any more than you can write the laws of physics? Well, it's it's also people find that shallow, you know in my clinical work. I saw this Time and time again. So if I was dealing with someone who is suffering You know, maybe they had a tragedy in their own life, a medical tragedy, or a medical tragedy among members of their family, or maybe they had been subject to some really vicious malevolent actors, and they were despairing.

Starting point is 00:41:16 They had to discover the values that would lift them out of that catastrophe. They couldn't impose them, and it's a real search. I think this is probably related to your work on prayer. It's a real search. And one of the things I used to counsel my clients about, and I also built a program called self-authoring that helps people do this is, and this is associated with that biblical injunction in the New Testament to knock and have the door open and to ask and to receive and to seek and to find is that you can have a dialogue and interior dialogue that

Starting point is 00:41:53 Proceeds something like this and I think it's a prayer which is okay. I understand Because I'm reasonably mature that there is a tragic and malevolent element to life and it's deep enough to destabilize me and to upset my faith and existence itself. Is there a path that I could walk down that would be so rich and meaningful that I would find the challenge of dealing with the tragedy and malevolence, enobling and worthwhile. And then it's a search, you think, well, what would, what would be of sufficient value to offer that possibility? And people find that in, they find it in love, they find it in family, they find it in friendship, they find it in sacrificial occupation,

Starting point is 00:42:42 let's say, they find it in beauty. But these aren't created values, they're discovered values. And then you bring yourself into alignment with them. That's when you wrote your book on Islam, one of the things that you had to say about Islam that was very illauditory was that the Islamic people have appeared to do a better job of insisting that human beings are subordinate to the divine will in this, in the sense, I think, in the best sense, in the sense of discovery that we're talking about. Especially in Europe and North America, we have this obstacle about an obsession with freedom and a misunderstanding of freedom. We are not totally free.

Starting point is 00:43:29 Our freedom in every sense is limited. We are finite. And we don't like that. We want to play God with regard at least to freedom and autonomy. That's maybe the biggest difference between modern Western civilization and all others in world history. We can think about that freedom, you know, because it isn't. So let's say, here's the claim. I want to be free to do what I want. Okay, well, hang on a sec. Which eye are you talking about there? Are you talking about the mature eye that sees next week and next month and next year

Starting point is 00:44:10 and 10 years old and that takes the community into account? Or are you talking about the impulsive, hedonistic, self-serving, narrow eye that just wants exactly what it wants right now? And what makes you think that when you make a case for that hedonism that you're not just falling under the sway of an impulsive, short-sighted demon, so to speak, you know, this, and then I used to play this game with my students when we were talking about ordered freedom and that the notion that freedom itself has to be ordered. I think I mentioned earlier that when God calls his people out of tyranny, he says that they need to be free in order to

Starting point is 00:44:53 serve him in the wilderness, not to be free in some absolute sense. So I used to play a game with my students. I'd go up to one student, I'd say, do you want to play a game? Put him on the spot and he'd say, yes, and I'd say, okay, you move first. And that would paralyze the student into absolute immobility, because he was now faced with a plethora of choices so utterly broad that there was no pathway forward. And that was part of a discussion about the fact that, if you look at music, for example,

Starting point is 00:45:28 music operates by very sophisticated rules. And so it's ordered and constrained. But out of that rules, system of rules comes an in almost infinite array of possibility. And so, you know, we have this sense, I think it derives from Rousseau, that any constraint of order is a limit on freedom, when what we should be hypothesizing is that with the

Starting point is 00:45:53 optimal set of principles, you get the maximally desirable freedom. And it's not freedom from everything, and it's not freedom to do anything. It's certainly not a narrow hedonistic freedom because that's backfires on you like the next day. Yes. If there is no world outside of Plato's cave, then it is not freeing to escape from the cave. There's certainly a great value to freedom. We must be free from everything that opposes us and restrains our better impulses. But that assumes that there's a better and a worse. That assumes that there's something like Plato's the good outside the cave.

Starting point is 00:46:33 So you can be free from the shadow of the cave. And that notion of Freud's that there are a lot of people inside of us, good ones and bad ones, a little good in the worst of us and a little bad in the best of us, so if it all becomes the worst of us to speak well of the best of us, that's from Thornton Wilder, I think. That's very helpful because when you talk to atheists, you're talking to not just one person, but many persons. One of the things that shocked me the most in talking to atheists was that

Starting point is 00:47:06 when I give them something like the argument from desire, don't you at least wish there was a God, don't you at least see religion as an attractive fairy tale, don't you at least hope that it's true, even though you don't believe that it's true, almost always they say no. I don't want there to be a God. I don't want there to be a heaven. I would be threatened by that. And I think they're suppressing something. I don't think the human heart is that different between an atheist and a theist. The human heart was not designed at Harvard or Hollywood. It was designed in heaven. So we all want the thing we can't define. We're all mystics deep down. We want unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty. This is definitely the case. I mean, I would say in some sense, by definition, is that

Starting point is 00:47:57 the most profound goods are reflected in the structure of the human heart. If people are striving forward, and I mean forward rather than downward, let's say, forward and uphill, they are by definition pursuing something that's a reflection of a transcendent good. It's transcendent because if they already had it, which means it would be imminent, if they already had it, they wouldn't have to pursue it. They posit something outside of themselves as better. And then the ultimate definition of that in some sense is the pursuit of the divinely good. And again, I see that as a matter of definition.

Starting point is 00:48:38 And so, now, you know, on the atheist front, I've read a lot of comments from atheists in my YouTube comments sections on my biblical lectures. I've probably read at least hundreds of them, and maybe thousands of them, but at least hundreds. And one of the things that has struck me continually is that many of the people who become atheists are reactionary. And I don't mean that in a integrating sense, a huge proportion of people who are stridely atheistic were hurt very badly by people who purported to be religious when they were young.

Starting point is 00:49:19 And I think that also applies to Dawkins, by the way. I've seen some evidence for that in his public utterances. And so you have people who've been terribly betrayed by the agents of what was supposed to be the best. And so they carry that utter bitterness with them, that ultimate betrayal. Because I think there isn't anything worse in some sense than being betrayed by people who claim to be acting, let's say in Christ's name. I mean, how could anything be worse than that? And so then they're driven to this atheism, and they're so afraid then again to reestablish a new faith, because they've been hurt so badly that they're willing to suffer this purgatory drought of vision rather than to put themselves

Starting point is 00:50:07 up on the chopping block one more time. Wasn't Freud himself an example of that? Didn't you have a very bad relationship with his father? And can't you use Freud and an analysis to explain Freud? Well, that you can imagine too at a level, because especially in the Abrahamic traditions, God is construed as a paternal spirit in some fundamental sense. I know it's complex when you get to the highest level

Starting point is 00:50:34 of abstraction, but, and what would that also mean was that if you had an impaired relationship with your father or with the patriarchal spirit in general, that that's going to put a resentful twist in your relationship to the paternal spirit as such and I certainly see that as Well, it's something that bedevils our current society as well because there's so much objection to the patriarchal system and the

Starting point is 00:51:01 catastrophic atrocities of history and the fundamental system and the catastrophic atrocities of history and the fundamental in unreliability of the paternal or patriarchal spirit, that all of that is tied together. And it is tied together with the problem of sin. You know, a lot of women who object strenuously to the patriarchy, let's say, are also simultaneously women who have been rendered bereft of any positive relationship with any man even once in their whole life. Yes, yes, yes, I have found that too in my limited experience. And I think the only adequate answer to that is not merely psychoanalysis and understanding

Starting point is 00:51:38 but alliosis gist to experience genuine love, to meet a mother Teresa, that will convert you much faster than all the arguments in the world. Right, well, that's really the theme in some profound sense, both of the brothers, Karemazov and of the idiot, because the great characters, the heroes of both of those novels, El Yosha in the one,

Starting point is 00:52:01 and Mishkin in the other is that, despite their relative lack of facility with delineated abstract arguments even in favor of the existence of God, their character is such that their very being stands as the best proof of their beliefs. And that seems to me to be a way forward to in this interfaith dialogue. You know, I talked to a relatively fundamentalist Islamic leader, a young leader, Muhammad Hizab in the UK. And we were talking about the use of compulsion in faith. And I was trying to sort out how the different doctrines might compete and cooperate with

Starting point is 00:52:47 one another going forward, especially in the face of this secular onslaught, which I think is the worst threat that any of the Abrahamic religions currently confronts, is that it should be something like a competition of invitation. It should be something like let the best man win. And that would mean that an adherent have a given faith, let's say Orthodox Christianity or Orthodox Judaism or Islam, is that the people who abide by those faiths should be such stellar examples

Starting point is 00:53:19 of a light shining on the hill that people are convinced of the validity of the belief by the exemplar of the practitioners. And that's the right place to have a, what do you call that? What's the Islamic word for holy war? G-Had. That's the proper G-Had. Yes.

Starting point is 00:53:37 Exactly. A competition of invitations. And I think that ties into the Old Testament biblical notion of radical hospitality. So one index of that would be, well, how well do you treat strangers, for example, or how well do you treat women? That might be a good example as well. I think God has set the world up in such a way that that necessarily happens. The religion that produces the most saints will make the most converts. Now you earned it, this book on Islam you wrote, you went out of your way to be positively oriented towards Islamic belief and practices. Now you delineate the differences

Starting point is 00:54:18 between Islamic belief and Christian belief, let's say. But nonetheless, you make a strong case that the Islamic world has something to teach the secular and Christian world. So, would you mind elaborating on that a little bit? Why did you do that? And what did you conclude? It seems to me that when I look at Christianity in Western culture, Europe and North America, I see a kind of nice spinelessness, an absence of courage. When Saul Unitson came to America and gave that great Harvard commencement address in 1978, one of the great speeches in the history of Western civilization, I think.

Starting point is 00:54:57 He said, I noticed something lacking here. I certainly would not recommend the US as USSR or communism. We are indeed wicked, but at least we have courage. You don't. Where are the heroes? For all its mistakes and all its faults and all its tendency towards violence and fundamentalism, at least Islam is a heroic faith. It tends to be a bit too hard and spiny without flesh, but we are flesh without a spine. I think we should exchange some of our pops psychologists for some of their fiery mullahs. So we get a spine and they get some flesh. Well, that might be a real positive outcome for a genuine dialogue. I mean,

Starting point is 00:55:48 classically, God has incorrect me if I'm wrong in my presumptions here, but my understanding is that God has long been seen to rule with two hands left and right. And the left hand is mercy and the right hand is judgment. And that judgment element, that's discrimination, that's the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. That's the willingness to pluck out an eye if it's corrupting your vision or to cut off a hand, if it's airing. It's this stringent discrimination between that, which is not worthy and that, which must

Starting point is 00:56:21 be retained. It seems to me that, like like heaven is definitely a place, let's say, where anything unworthy does not exist. And that means that the judgment of what is unworthy has to be extremely painstaking and harsh for anything like heaven to come about because anything that isn't heavenly can't belong there. And so that requires that judgment.

Starting point is 00:56:42 And what I'm seeing happening in the West is that we're making the case. And I think this is a feminist case in some deep sense. We're making the case that the Cardinal moral virtue is mercy and forgiveness and forgetting completely about the fact that, well, another Cardinal virtue is judgment and that mercy, I mean, Freud knew this, right? And this is the brilliance of his insight with regards to the eatable complex, you know? He, he regarded biologically, he thought, well, human beings have this unbelievably protracted period of dependence. And they're basically born in some sense fetal. So there's an evolutionary arms race between the width,

Starting point is 00:57:32 the circumference of an infant's head and the hole in the pelvic floor that enables women to give birth. And there's been a bunch of compromises, so to speak, to make birth possible. One is the baby's head is compressible, which is quite the needle to thread, let's say. Women's hips are wider, almost wide enough

Starting point is 00:57:52 so that they're impaired in their ability to run. If they were any wider, they couldn't run well. And the babies are born much earlier than they would be typically for a mammal of our size. And so, and then human beings have this immense capacity for socialization and particularized development. And so they're extremely dependent, not only in that first postnatal period, the first year, let's say, when they should still be gestational in some real sense, but then for 18 years after, well, they're being socialized, and that brings up a danger. And the danger is that the all-encompassing love that's properly

Starting point is 00:58:34 devoted to an infant will be sustained longer than it should be and become a devouring force. And so the psychoanalysts, I think it was Freud who famously said, and longer than it should be, and become a devouring force. And so the psychoanalysts, I think it was Freud who famously said, the good mother must necessarily fail. It's like the paed at Michelangelo's paed at it. Mary offers her son to be broken by the world, which is a real act of courage on the part of women. But it also means that they can't be, and neither can fathers for that matter, they can't

Starting point is 00:59:05 be entirely merciful and forgiving, because that's good for infants, but it's not good for people who are developing. You have to bring judgment into the equation, and that starts, as soon as the child starts to mature. And one of the things our civilization lacks is a ceremony of adulthood, Lacks is a ceremony of adulthood, a harrowing Courage-inspiring transition from that infantile to adult responsibility. That has to somehow be restored. Well, anthropologists have remarked upon that. So the idea there is, well, girls mature earlier than boys and they hit the menstrual cycle

Starting point is 00:59:48 and they are subject to pregnancy. And so in some sense, nature comes pouring in brutally for women at about the age of 12 or 13. And so there's a cutoff there between childhood and maturation that's very market. That would be the onset of menstruation. But for men, that would be the onset of menstruation. But for men, that's not the same.

Starting point is 01:00:07 And anthropologists have noted that many initiation rituals among archaic people involve something that looks like ritual duplication of the onset of menstruation. So you get penile subincision, for example, which is quite a brutal practice, but it is a it is a initiation in blood. Our sore, the boys will be taken away from their mothers when they're 12 or 13, let's say, and the mother's put up quite a bit of fuss and make quite a show of their sorrow for losing their child and then they're taken away by the men and put through a baptism, like a radical baptism, where they force where their previous identity and they learn to consciously abide by the masculine traditions of the

Starting point is 01:00:54 society. And many, many societies have evolved or produced or spontaneously and wisely generated these rituals of maturation. And they definitely, the closest we have probably is high school graduation, but it's, it's shallow in some, in some deep sense. Would you say that, in an unconscious attempt to substitute for that, we form gangs and perform acts of violence against society? Is that part of the explanation for it? Well, yes, look, here's an interesting case example of that. So elephants are extremely social, and the males can be quite aggressive. The young ones in particular, and that's particularly the case under sexual motivation, in the case of sexual motivation, let's say, if you take

Starting point is 01:01:46 an elephant herd and you kill off all the old males, then the young males basically become anti-social and criminal among the elephants. And what happens among young men is if they don't have older men to guide them, is they do spontaneously form gangs in a attempt to separate themselves from their, from the maternal influence. That happens in teenagehood, you know, when, for every teenager, the friends become more important than the parents. And that's how it should be because the friendship group is this intermediary stage toward full

Starting point is 01:02:19 adult development. So you get these gangs, and then the gangs the gangs do tests of courage and toughness and they can degenerate into a kind of blood-letting brutality without that wisdom of guidance that would be provided by by elder men. So what has to be done then is to somehow combine this justice in this mercy, this toughness and this tenderness, this patriarchal and matriarchal. And isn't the Christian answer to that precisely the crucifixion? Here is justice and mercy united.

Starting point is 01:02:58 Thomas Aquinas wrote his initial, I don't know what the technical term was, that got him a theological degree. On the verse, Justice and Mercy will meet compassion and truth will join hands because truth will spring both from the earth and from the heavens. Here you have the ultimate justice being done, the ultimate judgment on sin, the horror. And the motivation for that is the total mercy, the infinite mercy simultaneously.

Starting point is 01:03:38 Well, there's something to that. So tell me what you think about this. So in this Exodus seminar, So tell me what you think about this. So in this Exodus seminar, one of the things we talked about, okay, this is complicated. So this brilliant scholar, Jonathan Pazio, brought up an issue with regard to the pillars of fire and the pillar of cloud that guides the Israelites through the desert. So you leave a tyranny and you don't go to the promised land. You leave a tyranny, it might be the tyranny of your own presumptions, but you leave a tyranny and

Starting point is 01:04:08 you end up in the desert. And the desert isn't a lot preferable to the tyranny. And so that knowing that is a good is very useful in helping you understand why people won't drop their own tyrannical presuppositions. Because it doesn't free you to begin with. It puts you in the desert. Okay, now what should guide you in the desert? Well, a pillar of fire at night and a pillar of cloud during the day. And Pazzo said, and I thought this was stunningly brilliant. He said, that's analogous to the black dot in the white paisley and the white dot in the black

Starting point is 01:04:40 paisley in the Taoist Yin and Yang. And that the idea is that there's light in the darkness and there's shade and cool and darkness in the light. And the balanced interplay between those provides divine guidance. So it's like the interplay between chaos and order. And that provides divine guidance in the desert. And so that, okay, now take that. Now imagine those two pillars. Now step back in the Exodus story briefly and think about the Passover. So you have the Lintel and there's two pillars one on each side. And then God asks the Israelites to mark the space between the lentils with the blood of the innocent. That's the Lamb. And so then there's an idea, this is an unbelievable idea that the innocent must be sacrificed in

Starting point is 01:05:36 a meaningful way in order for the spirit of, in order for us to escape God's rebuke to the tyrant. And so Christ is the sacrifice of the innocent you think well, what does that mean? Why does the innocent have to be sacrificed and it has to it has to be something like well Imagine that you're living a good life and that you're trying to be a good person and so you're striving towards a kind of innocence You still have to sacrifice yourself to life. You have to accept mortality. You have to accept malevolence. You have to be willing to undertake the sacrifice of the innocent in order for life itself to continue. And so, and that's the story

Starting point is 01:06:18 that's crucial, a crucial central element of the passion, right? Because Christ is a sinless a crucial central element of the passion, right? Because Christ is a sinless being, and he takes the full weight of existence upon himself voluntarily. And I can't help but think that that's something that's incumbent on all of us, is that we're all subject to betrayal, we're subject to the mob,

Starting point is 01:06:38 we're subject to the dictates of tyrants, we have to sacrifice our own innocence as well as our guilt in order for life to prevail. We have to bear all that weight, that's the cross in the most fundamental sense. And that weirdly enough, that does unite mercy and judgment because to the degree that you're willing to act as a sacrifice to the Lord, then life optimizes around you. Because it's a radical acceptance of the preconditions of existence, tragedy and malevolence. That works. It's very practical that to go back to the idea of what's practical.

Starting point is 01:07:15 The only alternatives to that would be the triumph of evil or the conquest of evil by force. But once you conquer evil by force, you yourself always become corrupt. If you conquer evil instead by this strange joining of mercy and justice, then you're like the lamb, the innocent lamb, who defeats the dragon to use the imagery from the book of Revelation. Arneon means we little lamb and Tharion is horrible beast.

Starting point is 01:07:48 And here is all of human life at stake. The heavyweight championship of the universe. And the lamb wins by his blood. That's a secret weapon. Well, okay, well, you know, it does, you know, you might say, well, in order to keep the dragons at bay, the thorns and the serpents at bay, we have to make sacrifices. Now that's the first, why don't the first ideas that emerges in the stories of Genesis because once Adam and Eve are divorced from paradise, they have to toil.

Starting point is 01:08:25 And so that's where the sacrificial idea first comes in. And then in the next book, you have Cain and Abel, and it's a book about proper and improper sacrifice. And Cain's sacrifices are somehow second rate and rejected by God. And because of that rejection, Cain becomes imbitered and homicidal, and his descendants become genocidal, whereas able makes the highest possible quality sacrifices. And as a consequence, he's favored of God. And so then you think, okay, well, do we believe any of that?

Starting point is 01:08:57 It's like, well, we know perfectly well that if we make sacrifices with blood in them, that we're more likely to be successful, right? If we go all in, if we don't hold anything back, if we commit 100%, if we try as hard as we can, the probability that we will succeed is much higher. And we know that if we hold back and offer second rate sacrifices and try to pull the wool over our own eyes

Starting point is 01:09:21 and that of others and that of God, that we're gonna be rejected and fail. Everyone knows that. And so then it begs another question, which is okay. Well, you have to make the highest possible sacrifice, the highest possible quality sacrifice. And that has to be your willingness to sacrifice yourself. Like, what else could it be? There's no greater sacrifice than that. I mean, maybe you could argue that a mother allowing her child to mature and be broken by the world is an equivalent sacrifice. I think you could make that case, but fundamentally, you don't have anything to offer

Starting point is 01:09:56 more profound than yourself, and then maybe even more than that. You don't have anything to sacrifice more profound and more valuable than your own innocence. And I think we all know that. This does not depend upon one religion or another religion. In the Harry Potter series, I know a lot of Christians don't like it because it's author is not a Christian, but I think the morality there is very Christian. Harry sacrifices himself. It's a profoundly Christian.

Starting point is 01:10:25 Absolutely. Oh, yes, well, that whole series is amazingly profound archetyply. She has an unhearing religious imagination. And you can tell that because why else would have she been able to get hundreds of thousands, millions of young people to read a sequential array of 600-page books. Obviously, she tapped into something, and I mean, the second volume is pretty much a straight

Starting point is 01:10:56 retelling of St. George and the Dragon, and it's brilliantly structured mythologically, and it's clearly the case that Voldemort is a stand-in for Satan, for all intents and purposes, and that Harry does undertake a track and a quest like Frodo and Bilbo in the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, and overcome evil through self-sacrifice. Those two books are probably the two most popular books in the English language today, and Tolkien, in a more subtle way, is saying the same thing, because the three Christ figures there are Frodo and Erragorn and Gandalf, all of whom sacrifice themselves, all of whom in different ways die. And Frodo can't live in the Shire anymore.

Starting point is 01:11:43 He can only be healed in the other place, and Gandalf actually dies in Rizurex, and Aragorn goes through the paths of the dead, which no other man can do. So there's profoundly Christian imagery of sacrifice there. And our wiser self, when we read that story, that story, we can't help saying yes to it. Right, right, we see ourselves. Or, or, or no. Yes. Right? Because we can reject it. But there's no being ambivalent about it. There's no being not gripped by it. Well, you see the same thing reflected in the, in the new Avengers series, you know, which is a profoundly counter-cultural entertainment series, because it's not woke, or at least it, except in brief and what would you call them, unacceptable snippets.

Starting point is 01:12:39 The main character there, Iron Man, is trying to transform himself into a being of gold for all intents and purposes. And he's a sacrificial agent as well. Like Icarus, he flies up to keep the chitori from descending upon earth and their satanic agents for all intents and purposes. And he sacrifices himself in doing so. And he's an ambivalent character because he's a bit of a fascist and he's an arms dealer. And so he's definitely somebody whose character is complex, let's say he's a technological intellect as well, but fundamentally he's a sacrificial figure in the battle between good and heaven, or good and evil in heaven. And it's so interesting to me that we've poured all these computation resources into telling those stories because stories because a lot of what drives our hunger for computational power is our desire to

Starting point is 01:13:34 render lightnesses of the world in a fictional setting to retell archetypal stories. Because we have enough computational power for most of what we use computers for, but not enough to render potential alternative worlds with this fission degree of accuracy. And so I know people who work very intently on the technological front, and I've asked them where they access demand for computational power comes from. And it's all the desire to render more and more accurate fictional worlds, and they all have an archetypal structure, which is something like the sacrificial battle in the constant war between good and evil. It's always something like that. It isn't

Starting point is 01:14:17 obvious that we think anything is more important than that. So do you see even behind the technological revolution, the same unconscious thirst that Augustine speaks of, the restless heart? Is it a confused search for God? Is there a doubleness there on the one hand we want to be God and play God, but on the other hand we want there to be a God. Well, I think that, I mean, the people I know who are operating on the technological front, the wise ones are hyper-concerned that this endeavor occurs in a moral direction. So, I know people, for example, who are working assiduously to produce advanced computer chip technology

Starting point is 01:15:08 optimized for artificial intelligence. And they're getting close to the point where they're going to produce computational devices that have the computing power of a human brain. That's probably only three or four years away. Now, I could be wrong about that, but that isn't what the calculations indicate. only three or four years away. Now, I could be wrong about that, but that isn't what the calculations indicate. And they're very concerned that this occurs within a moral rubric, and that fight is going on

Starting point is 01:15:41 so, for example, people like Elon Musk, who I haven't spoken to directly, he wants to ensure that the benefits of artificial intelligence are placed in the hands of individual people because he's concerned that if a huge conglomeration like Google gets artificial intelligence first, that that will turn them into something approximating the world's most imaginably effective dictator. And so even on the technological front, I mean, to the degree that we're trying to modify the world to limit malevolence and to bring about life more abundant and to redress suffering, all of the people who are striving forward on that front who are far-seeing are very, very much concerned that this takes place in the proper relationship to such things as

Starting point is 01:16:24 good and evil. But if there only notion of good and evil is human happiness, if what they want above all is to limit human suffering and to conquer nature, in a Baconian and Faustian and prometian way, then this is not going to succeed until they conquer death by genetic engineering, which some people I'm told in Silicon Valley, especially the transhumanists, say is feasible. If that happens, if we get the immortality gene, you don't really think that that's going to make a better world, do you? I think that's going to make a kind of a hell on earth,

Starting point is 01:17:09 because we're designed to, we're designed to suffer and sacrifice and break and learn that way. We're like eggs. We're like eggs. If you don't, if you don't have to go bad, rotten. I should have said unnecessary suffering, rather than suffering per se, perhaps. I don't, many of the people that I'm talking to aren't Promethean in that manner. They're very cognizant of the complexities

Starting point is 01:17:39 of the necessity of mortality, let's say, but maybe I could ask you a question about that in terms of visions of heaven. So I've had visions of heaven and one element of that vision was that heaven was a place where everything was perfect and yet everything within it was striving to make it even better. And I thought about that musically and psychologically.

Starting point is 01:18:01 So you know, great piece of music in each moment is in some senses good as it can be, but then it brings forth something additional that's even better and it just keeps doing that. And that way you get, you know, because you could imagine a state of static perfection as a heaven. But then you might say, well, a state of static perfection is imperfect because it's static. And so what you want is to join being and becoming so that you have a perfect being plus perfect becoming. And so that's a heaven that just gets more heavenly as we work on it. So I'll set that aside for a moment and then ask you, well, I'm also curious about the

Starting point is 01:18:42 beatific vision, let's say, and about notions of paradise and the land of milk and honey and say, well, something backens us forward into the future. And do you think, do you personally think that, I guess, heaven's something that we mutually strive to bring about on earth? You know, like in this dialogue we're having you and I are trying to be as honest as we can and hopefully we're trying to aim at the good. We're trying to establish a little microcosm of paradisal interaction in the here and now. I wonder, well, I think Christ said the kingdom of God is spread upon the earth, but men either cannot or will not see it.

Starting point is 01:19:18 It's like, for me, I don't know to what degree heaven is intermingled in the structure of the reality that we perceive as mortal beings and to what degree we can bring that reality into being as a consequence of our shared effort. Well, there's a very obvious and simple answer to that question. Just as music is a better image of heaven than technology, so human love is an even better image of heaven than music. In fact, it's not an image. It's that which heaven essentially consists of. If you truly love someone, you love them more and more and more every year, despite whatever problems you have. And that's not boring. That's the one thing in human life that doesn't get boring. Because the object is another human being

Starting point is 01:20:06 who is potentially infinite. You can grow forever together. So I asked my parents at one point, they're in their 80s now, said if you could take a drug that would restore you to the health that you experienced and were blessed with, let's say, when you were 18. But you got to keep the accumulated wisdom.

Starting point is 01:20:33 Would you do it? And I asked them to think about it seriously, and they were ambivalent about it. That's made me think a lot because I think of Socrates' apologia. And Socrates' in his apologia basically says something like, if you live your life fully, then it would be enough. And so you could imagine being constrained by our mortal limitations, but exhausting yourself in the pursuit of your life, and emptying yourself in some consequence, maybe what would you call bringing into being every jot and tidal of the law, right? And not hiding your light under a bushel, but letting

Starting point is 01:21:16 it shine on a hill. And then maybe by the end of your life you'd look back and you'd say, well, I did this. I had my life. That was not only sufficient, but wonderful. And you could accept death with equanimity. But then I wonder, we do have this notion of heaven as characterized by immortal existence. And so, would it be possible for us to strive to continually expand our life spans and to start living 300 years or 400 years as we became better and better at that. And then, could it be the case that that would be a blessing rather than a curse? And I don't know the answer to these things.

Starting point is 01:22:00 I think if and only if our quality increases as well as our quantity, that would work, but if it doesn't, if it's 300 more years of the same, it would be oppressive and boring. So I think time itself has to change after death. It's not going to be a linear time based on the movement of matter through space. It's got to be a chiro, a spiritual time. Something like the the expansion of music or better, the expansion of human love. Look, my wife and I are in our 80s and we fell in love in our 20s and we're both old and wrinkled now and we love and respect each other more now than we ever did before. I think that's the way it has to go. You can't go back.

Starting point is 01:22:45 now than we ever did before. I think that's the way it has to go. You can't go back. You go forward. How did you manage that? How long have you been married now? Almost 60 years. Okay, so you said that each person, and I believe this, that each person is associated with the infinite and some fundamental sense, and so there's no end to the degree that a person can be discovered or co-discovered. And that's why there's variety in monogamy if it's deep. There's tremendous variety in monogamy much more. So then serial sexual activity, let's say much more and comparably more. What did you do as a practice you and your wife, if you don't mind me asking, that enabled you to say such a thing after being

Starting point is 01:23:32 married for such a long period of time? It's just a will, it's just a resolution, it's just a commitment, it's an either or, it's an absolute. You are the center of my world, or you're not. And if you are, you are forever. So that's a decision of faith. A choice to love, yes. Yes, right, right, right. Okay, well this is another thing that I've been trying to sort out with the atheists,

Starting point is 01:24:00 this idea that, because there, because their criticism of Christianity seems to be something like, well, religious faith is the willingness to suspend rationality and to abide by a set of arbitrary propositional claims that are analogous in some sense to a scientific hypothesis. Right, so you could think about the biblical creationists in that sense.

Starting point is 01:24:22 And I think, no, no, that's not what faith is. Faith is the courage to move forward in the face of the unknown. It's something like that. Or faith is the willingness to make a marital vow. Because you don't have the evidence, right? You love this person. And I suppose that's some evidence. But then you decide, for better or worse,

Starting point is 01:24:42 despite our mutual flaws and inadequacies, we're going to bind ourselves together, and then we're going to make it work. And that's a statement of faith. It's not derivation from the evidence. And I think we're, and you said that that served you well in your married, in your married life. It's not rational evidence, but in a sense, it is evidence, because it's a response to something that's given. That other person is put into your life by God. So, as the Jesuit

Starting point is 01:25:10 speak about finding God in all things, so I speak of finding God in the other person. Of course, in all persons, because we all bear the image of God, but especially in that one person that God has put into your life as your one and unique other. Yeah, well, maybe that's the intimation. You know, when I've done a couple of marriage ceremonies and I've talked to people about love during those ceremonies and, you know, the classic evaluative framework for marriages where you fall in love when you're young and something like a biologically instantiated delusion, you overvalue the other person, and then that fades away.

Starting point is 01:25:47 And I think, no, that's not right. That love is more like what you see when you see your children when they're very young is that you see them clearly. And that's a grace that there are some people in your life that you have the privilege of seeing in something like a totality. And then that manifests itself as love. And then that's a gift that's given to you, and then it can receive unless you take the steps necessary to fortify it and to continually revivify it.

Starting point is 01:26:18 So it's like a glimpse of paradise, that love that you fall into. But then you have to earn it. Like it recedes, and then you have to earn it. Like it recedes and then you have to earn it and reestablish it. It's the primary image of religion. It is a choice. It is not a proof. It is not a necessity. It is not a substitute for anything else. It's simply a yes or no, it's an all or nothing. It's a zero sum game. You either play it or you don't. Yes, yes. Well, that's, yeah, that zero sum game.

Starting point is 01:26:51 Well, again, as I said earlier, that's part of the reason I was attracted to Kierkegaard and to the existential thinkers, the 1950s existential thinkers in particular, because they weren't, they were also much, as opposed in the aftermath of the Second World War, they were also like Solzhenitsyn, very skeptical of a kind of shallow hedonism. Solzhenitsyn's perspective on hedonism was, well, that just disappears as a orienting strategy. The moment the jackboots kick down your door at three in the morning. It's like, but it's the case if you're, right, yeah, yeah, right. Or it's the case if you're right. Yeah, yeah, right. Or it's the case if you suffer a very serious illness or someone you love does or if you're betrayed or or really if you encounter any of the tragedies of life, it's like that hedonistic short-term happiness just disappears. And if that's

Starting point is 01:27:37 your orienting God, which is something like I suppose the poor man's Dionysius, you're just nowhere as soon as you have trouble. It's not a reliable guide. Love is a much more reliable guide and that bonded faith in a marriage is a much more reliable guide. This is why in the long run, I am optimistic. If Western civilization like a spoiled child goes down the drain, something better will replace it. There's a kind of, I don't know, you call it a capitalism of a spirit. That's the wrong image because bad money drives out good. I'm saying that morally good money drives out bad. Heedonism doesn't work. It's self-destructive.

Starting point is 01:28:23 And if the human race survives, something better will replace it. We will learn. Well, hedonism doesn't work technically. Like, we looked at the effect of positive emotion on decision-making. Okay, so to pursue hedonism is to suppress negative emotion, let's say, but also to pursue positive emotion. And those can be technically differentiated, neurologically and psychologically, conceptually. They're completely separate systems. They're mutually inhibitory. They run on different biochemical pathways.

Starting point is 01:28:57 What happens when you're, hedonically, when you're in the midst of a hedonic experience? And the answer is, you get short-term and impulsive. And a lot of the pure operation of the hedonic system is short-term impulsivity. And so the pathology of hedonism technically is mania. And it's the counterpart to depression, let's say. And manic people, they want to do everything at once, and they're unbelievably impulsive. They want to do everything at once and they're unbelievably impulsive. And so, they can't make good decisions. And you might say, well, if your philosophy is hedonic, then whatever makes you happiest is a good decision.

Starting point is 01:29:35 But then you see pathologies of hedonism that produce impulsivity. And the way out of that is to recognize that it's sacrifice that's the right replacement for hedonism. Because you might say, well, I should be self-centered. We talked about this earlier. It's like, well, do you mean the self that is gonna drink a quart of vodka tonight and then be hung over tomorrow or do you mean the self that's going to sustain itself

Starting point is 01:29:59 wisely and carefully over a 40 year period, let's say in a properly sustaining marriage. And so it isn't even hedonism. It's narrow, impulsive, immature, two-year-old hedonism. And that is not a solution. This is why there are no convincing movies about heaven, because our hedonism has generated this notion of heaven as supernatural, hedonic pleasure, whether it's the B.H.E.V.I.V.I.N. or music,

Starting point is 01:30:30 or golden streets, or whatever. We're bored by that. That's not it. We don't know what it is, but that's certainly not what it is. Problem of boredom goes deeper than we think. Well, in notes from Underground, Dostoevsky dails this to A, because he says, and it's so brilliant, he's criticizing the Palace of Crystal,

Starting point is 01:30:55 which was a building built in the UK for the world's fair, and it was the first modernist building, and it was this image of technological utopia and material plenty, which the Marxists push as well. And Dostoevsky said, what's wrong with this materialist utopian vision? And he says it so brilliantly with his bitter and cynical character. He says, if you set up human beings, so they had nothing to do, but lie around in warm

Starting point is 01:31:22 pools of water and busy themselves with the propagation of the race, and eat cakes non-stop. So the land of milk and honey and the narrowest possible sense, the first thing that we would do is set about the place, smashing it up, just so something unpredictable could happen so that we would have our adventure. And I read that and I thought, man, that's so deadly right is that he said, human beings are ungrateful and we concur. It's the primary thing that separates us from animals. And that it's related to the idea of eating the fruit in the garden of of paradise is that we are made for a challenge. We are made for an adventure. We're not made for this kind of narrow and local

Starting point is 01:32:06 hedonism. It's demeaning and it's counterproductive and it isn't rich in the face of tragedy and malevolence. It's a bad solution. Yeah. Yeah. William James, one of my favorite philosophers, has this reflection on a utopian community at Chautauqua, New York, which he visited for a week, and it was fascinating. Everything was perfect. There were no cops. Everything was free. The culture was wonderful. And when he got back to New York City with all the garbage and all the gunfire, he said,

Starting point is 01:32:38 now I'm in the real world. This is what I was missing there. We're not made for Disney World, for Disneyland. No, there's something trickly and sentimental, but it's like Pleasure Island in the Pinocchio's story, right? There's this overlay of hedonic gratification, but underneath that there's a kind of dark slavery. That's exactly what happens in that movie, is Pinocchiochio when he's striving to become a real boy. He's enticed by a he-hidonic vision and he goes to Treasure Island where you can have whatever you want, whenever you want, but it's ruled by someone who wants to turn everybody who's there into a voiceless brain slave. One of the most surprising books I ever read is called City of Joy.

Starting point is 01:33:25 They made a very trashy movie out of it, but it's a great book. It's by the same journalist Dominic Lepierre, who wrote his Paris burning. And it's about Calcutta, especially about the lepers in Calcutta, who are about the most miserable people in the most miserable place on earth. And the title of the book is quite accurate. He found a lot of joy among this lowest of the lowest class in Calcutta. Simply because they loved each other. They sacrificed for each other. The sense of community that was there. It didn't take away the pain, but it added a meaning to the pain

Starting point is 01:34:01 that made it preferable to the pleasures of the upper class. It was convincing because he was there in detail. It sounds romantic and impossible and ridiculous. And yet it's true. The poor are happier than the rich. Look, what's the poorest continent in the world, Africa? Who smiles the most, Africans? What's the richest subcontinent in the world, Scandinavia? Who the most, Africans? What's the richest subcontinent in the world, Scandinavia? Who can with suicide the most? Scandinavians?

Starting point is 01:34:29 Well, you see, too, that often people who are tried by fire discover the deepest association with meaning precisely under those conditions. And that is analogous to the vision of the crucifix, let's say, that you have to go deep into the darkness, and perhaps hopefully voluntarily, before you can see the brightest of all possible lights. And so this idea that the, you know, part of the problem is, is, you know, if you provide your children with everything, which you could do as a wealthy parent, let's say, you deprive them of deprivation, you deprive them of adventure, you deprive them of destiny, and you remove from them the necessity of grappling in a manner that really does make life meaningful. You know, one of the things that I've really noticed in my tours,

Starting point is 01:35:20 this has been extremely interesting and heartening is that... Whenever I talk about the nexus between responsibility and meaning, the audiences always go dead silent. They're pretty silent during most of the discussions, but that particularly brings a hush to everyone, because it's not a message that people are receiving anymore. It's like, okay, life is suffering and malevolence in its essence in some an undeniable sense. It may not be only that, but it is undeniably also that. And so, you need a sustaining meaning to tide you over while you're suffering

Starting point is 01:35:59 and while you're betrayed. And then the question is, well, where is the most reliable place to find that? Meaning, and one answer is, well, hedonism, and another answer might be cynicism and anarchism, and that sort of wild life that goes along with throwing off all constraints. And there's some attraction to that. But more fundamentally, if you watch people, if you watch how people actually respond in times of crisis, they find that the responsibilities that they've undertaken in the past, to form friendships, to form intimate relationships, to clean up their family and establish tight bonds, to take on some major burden and make sacrifices in their life, that's where they get all the meaning. And I can't believe that we don't teach young people this now.

Starting point is 01:36:47 We don't teach them this at all. And it's such a catastrophe. And you've taught young people now for a very long time. And so what's been great about that and what have been the impediments to your success on that front? I don't really know the meaning of the word success. It's too abstract and general for my liking. I just know that the average student

Starting point is 01:37:13 that I get at Boston College is a mix across section of some of the best and some of the not so best in our civilization. And they're hungry. They realize that they're not being fed, which is why they take my horse. It's not they come in to Boston College in love with Plato or Augustine or Aquinas.

Starting point is 01:37:36 They come with a hunger. And when you give them the old common-sensical philosophers, they eat it up. One of their favorite books is Boethius' Consolation to Philosophy. It's an utterly unoriginal book. It's a synthesis of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Gustin, and they find it astonishingly original because they haven't been taught this stuff. The same is true of Augustine's Confessions.

Starting point is 01:38:02 It's a blockbuster book. It hits it in the heart. It's not blockbuster book. It hits it in the heart. It's not a perfect book. It's a messy book and there's an obscurity in it, but it feeds their unconscious hunger. So all I do is I give them the stuff that's on the shelves that have been neglected. I'm not an original philosopher.

Starting point is 01:38:24 I'm a bridge builder, a matchmaker. Joe, Joan meet Augustine. Augustine meet Joan. First time I ever told Augustine's confessions, my class asked me, can we do journals instead of taking tests? And I said, yes. And there were about a dozen people in the class. And we went through nothing but Augustine's confessions. was instead of taking tests. And I said, yes. And there were about a dozen people in the class.

Starting point is 01:38:45 And we went through nothing but Augustine's confessions. Not even the whole of it. We stopped at book 10. And they all wrote journals. And every single one of them was longer than the confessions itself. That's how deeply Augustine touched them. And one common note to all of them

Starting point is 01:39:00 is I never knew Augustin was that interesting. I took this course on a whim and it feeds me. It makes me strong. Right, right, well that's a cardinal observation there too. One of the things I experimented with, I started practicing this in 1983. I started to notice, probably from reading,

Starting point is 01:39:29 I was reading a lot of psychoanalytic literature, a lot of clinical literature at that time. I started to notice that some of the things I said made me feel weak and disjointed. And other things made me feel like I was stepping on solid ground crossing a swamp and I could feel that like I could really feel that and I thought okay well what would happen if I stopped saying all the things that made me feel weak and only said the things that made me feel like I

Starting point is 01:39:59 was house unified within itself and so I've been practicing that for a very long time. And the issue with these great thinkers that you're describing is that they help people find those solid stepping stones. I mean, you're an admirer of non-Christian philosophers. And so, and you just said that, well, you used St. Augustine as an example, but you've also made illusions to Plato and Socrates, let's say, why do you find the non-Christian philosophers useful? And how do you view that utility in light of your explicit Christianity? Christ has a human nature as well as a divine nature.

Starting point is 01:40:46 His divine nature is unique, his human nature is the opposite of your unique. So in understanding human nature, you'll understand one of the natures of Christ. And if Socrates or Plato or Buddha or Lao Tzu can give you profound insights into universal human nature, then as a Christian, I say that is a very Christian mission that

Starting point is 01:41:06 he has accomplished. Are you still actively teaching? Yes, I don't understand the concept of retirement, why retire for something that's worth doing. Right. And you mentioned in our discussion before we started taping that you're working on a new book on the Lord's Prayer. This is what you're 81st book? That's a lot of books, by the way. Yeah, I've lost count. Numbers are meaning us.

Starting point is 01:41:32 I think two things that will not exist in heaven are computers and mirrors. I think we'll look at each other instead of ourselves, and I think we will integrate the two hemissiers of our mind better than we do here. Well, that looking at other people instead of ourselves, I think that's one of the tickets to heaven, frankly. So this book, this book you're writing now on the Lord's Prayer, why did you decide to focus a whole book on the Lord's Prayer? And can you tell me a little bit about what you're investing in? Thomas Aquinas says, well let's start with Kant. Kant says there's only three great questions. What can I know? What should I do and what may I hope? Aquinas says there's only three things you need to know. What truth to believe

Starting point is 01:42:15 in and that summarizes in the creed and what choices to make and that summarizes in the commandments and what to desire and that's summarized in the Lord's Prayer. So it's all in those three things. So I went through every single word in the Lord's Prayer to try to find hidden depths and I found that in those few words there are dimensions that are infinite. The Bible is an amazing book, it doesn't have an end. It's like an ocean without a bottom. Well, you know, I saw a great graphic representation of the Bible that I popularized to some degree. It showed every verse and its relationship to every other verse. And then a little graph at the bottom showing how many times that verse was cross-referenced with other verses in the Bible. And so it's literally the case, apart from the technology, that the Bible was

Starting point is 01:43:11 among the first hyperlite text, because it densely interpenetrates itself, and it's symphonic in that manner. You know, in a great piece of music, each note and each phrase exists in relationship to the whole, and is informed by the whole, and the Bible, not least because of its asidious and continual editing and selection, has this hyperlinked depth, and so it means that there's an incredible number of pathways through the book. As you know, each verse can be amplified by a relationship to the other verses that pertain to it. And that's often exceedingly enlightening.

Starting point is 01:43:51 I found out a lot in this Exodus seminar that I just ran in Miami. Some of the people there had exhaustive knowledge of the cross-references of each verse, and was incredibly illuminating. There's a beautiful Hindu image for that. It's a net of diamonds, wherever the interstices of the chords meet, there's a diamond, and each diamond reflects every other diamond. Right, right, that is a great image, definitely. And that's a musical image.

Starting point is 01:44:18 And it's something like that great quote from Cinder's List. He saves one life, saves the world. That one life mirrors the world. Right, well, Indosti Eski said something like that too, which was, we are not only responsible, each of us for everything we do, but responsible for everything that everyone else, yes, yes, which is, that's really,

Starting point is 01:44:39 that's a bit much that whole idea. Well, that's the universal spiritual gravity. Whenever you touch humanity at one point, everything trembles. Right, right, right. Well, and then Solzhenitsyn made much of that the gulagarical pelego because he talked about the fact that each person within a totalitarian system

Starting point is 01:44:59 that was willing to lie to get along was a key actor in the totalitarian system, is that without that willingness of everyone to lie at their own individual level of being, the totalitarian regime could not prevail. He also said further, and I think influenced by Dostoevsky, that one man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny. And you might think, well, that's the only way a tyranny has ever been brought down. Actually, is that someone in the tyranny decides not to lie anymore. And so that's extraordinarily interesting. And so, and then, is it said Augustine, you would know this better than me. I read this beautiful description once

Starting point is 01:45:40 of God, which I thought was absolutely remarkable conceptually, which was that God is a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere. Yes, yes. Circumference is nowhere, infinite, no limit. Center is everywhere on my present. God is more present to me as a gust, and then I am to myself. And that's true for everyone. And that's why that individual contact with God is why a number of Russian orthodox mystics say this has become almost a cliche.

Starting point is 01:46:16 If you go home this afternoon and do one deed of genuine sacrificial charity to your neighbor, the result will be that hundreds of years from now, someone on the other side of the world that you never dreamed of will have enough grace to overcome his trials and if not not. Right, if you do one deed of harm to an innocent human being, then somebody on the other side of the world hundreds of years from now will fall because of your fall. Right, right. Well, I believe that's true. I mean, one of the things that my clinical practice taught me first was no one ever gets away with anything, ever, like that book in the sky upon which everything is written.

Starting point is 01:46:55 It's like, that's good enough description of reality. That's the real meaning of karma. Yeah, right. It doesn't mean there's no free will. It means that free will is one of the links in the chain. But you throw a ball at a wall straight, and it'll come back to you straight. You throw a croaker, it'll come back to you croaker

Starting point is 01:47:09 to end the same with everybody else. So let me ask you this. In what manner has teaching all these young people made you optimistic? And in what manner has it made you pessimistic in our society today? So let's start with pessimistic and then end with all. No, let's start with optimistic.

Starting point is 01:47:30 It's made me optimistic about individuals. Individuals can overcome the system. It's made me pessimistic about the system because increasingly individuals are stupid and they don't know it. They don't know their history, they don't know their literature, they don't know their common sense, they don't know it. They don't know their history, they don't know their literature, they don't know their common sense, they don't know their logic. But when you teach them,

Starting point is 01:47:50 they gradually come to realize it. You see genuine progress. And I think this may sound naive, but since light is stronger than darkness and since good is stronger than darkness, and since good is stronger than evil, even in the most desperate human being, there is always that principle working. Somehow, whatever's gonna happen in the future,

Starting point is 01:48:18 they can overcome it. There's nothing this side of death that's not overcomeable. There's always hope. Love death that's not overcomeable. There's always hope. Love is life is hope. I've seen students who are deeply, deeply confused and sometimes deeply pessimistic. And sometimes they have overcome that. It takes great courage, but it works.

Starting point is 01:48:40 It happens. Right. Well, you can see people who are not only conceptually confused, but have been hurt tremendously badly and by malevolent actors and who've been fractured and shattered by that and whose pessimism and cynicism seems entirely justifiable given their experience, yet rise up and overcome even that to become positive players, often under the pressure of artistic endeavor. I've seen that happen many times, but often also spiritual endeavor that they can rise above the catastrophe of their situation and defy the deterministic mantra that, you know,

Starting point is 01:49:27 garbage in and garbage out and transform their catastrophe into something that's unbelievably deep and heartening. So I love teaching you know at the university because I have the same experience is that students come in with a veneer of cynicism, but it's a self-protective veneer, and it's not very deep. And if you offer them genuine ideas, and let's say time-tested ideas steeped in the humanistic and theological tradition, the philosophical tradition,

Starting point is 01:49:59 the scientific tradition for that matter, that they're like, while they're like people thirsting in the desert, they take to the water very, very rapidly and can make unbelievable progress. And that was always a great source of inspiration and hope to see that that was continually and repetitively true. Yes, yes, but the system makes it increasingly rare and difficult. The humanities are in steep decline and the average reason for anyone going to college is simply to get a well-paying job. Yes, which the colleges also tend to be failing at providing.

Starting point is 01:50:32 So, oh well, these conversations are an attempt to rectify that to some degree. We do what we can. We do what we can. That's right. that's right. And we do it hoping that things will be better rather than worse. And so, and they can be. And so there's reason to be optimistic on that front. Thank you very much for talking to me today. It's much appreciated. And thank you for shedding the light that you've shed in millions of lives. So to close, I just want to remind everybody who's watching and listening that Dr.

Starting point is 01:51:06 Creft has published some 80 books ranging across an incredibly wide array of deep topics. And so I would recommend to all of you to check out his, well, Wikipedia page is a good start because all the books are listed there. I would also like to remind people that I'm going to talk to Dr. Krief for another half an hour on the daily wire platform site, and I'm going to do what I have been doing on that site, which is to delve a little bit into his autobiographical background and flesh out the contours of his career. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 291. How to Combat Hedonism | Dr. Peter Kreeft

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