The Ricochet Podcast - Going at it Hammer and Tongs

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

This episode of America’s Most Trusted Podcast® is notable for both who shows up and who doesn’t. But James Lileks is our rock, welcoming our own Bethany Mandel into the co-host’s chair, and Dr. Samuel Gregg author of the upcoming book, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization. Then Bethany and James delve into the miniseries, Chernobyl, and explore their, er... Source

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson. No, he's out. With Rob Long. No, he's out too. Well, I'm James Lonnox and we're here with Bethany Mandel. Yay! And we're going to talk to Dr. Samuel Gregg about reason and the struggle for Western civilization. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

I'm reported to say I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory, then by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think you missed his time. Please clap.

Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 452. Peter Robinson maybe winched it down from a hole in the ceiling like Lazarus to come and join us, but possibly not because he's under the weather. Rob Lawn is dead. Yes, he's dead tired of having to explain to people that he couldn't make it this morning, so unfortunately, well, we'll see Rob next week, but fortunately, Bethany's with us.

Bethany Mandel, how you doing this morning? Hey, I'm good. How are you? And I imagine that you have 17 children now who are scurrying around the house, but you've somehow managed to anesthetize them or mute them somehow. It's a miracle. I don't know, man.

It's going to get interesting. We'll see how this goes. That's good. We look forward to the concussion of dishes in the background and the crying and the wailing and the rest of it. But that's what it's like to work from home. You'll be our version of the BBC dad whose child walked in in the middle of explaining the Korean situation. That is my life. Everyone sent me that video.

They're like, hey, look, it's you. I'm like, yep, that is my life. I've been there as well myself. And my daughter is now back from Brazil. So, but she's already. I know. And five days into it, she's already got a job, which I love. So she's off on her job at the at the pavilion at the lakeside serving ice cream, hot dogs and beer.

She's gone from Brazil to the most American thing you possibly can do. And I just love it. That sounds delightful. I want to go get ice cream and hot dogs and beer. Well, come to Minnesota. It's a wonderful, clement place. If you think the transition from New York to New Jersey was something or from New Jersey, where are you now? You're in DC. I live in Maryland. So it was New Jersey to Maryland. Right. Well, the difference from that to here to Minnesota, it's almost like a different country, but it is not a different country as we were reminded this

week i think when donald trump was giving a speech in iowa and was talking about how the uh they needed better broadband better in an internet connectivity because the trucks couldn't connect to the internet or the tractors couldn't connect to the internet and there was a vox reporter i think it was vox or politico over the hill says some young person from inside the bubble who found this hilarious Trump thinks tractors need to connect to the Internet. And then he said that Fox cut away from it right away because it was so obviously embarrassing. What did that I mean, you're out there in the metropolitan Bosnia-Basnia corridor, but perhaps you might have thought, oh, I know what he's talking about.

The president, did you? I mean, to a certain extent. So I grew up in farm country. And so I'm familiar with the fact that we're not still sort of pulling, we're not threshing wheat on the threshing floor of the barn anymore. Like we need technology, we need machinery. And this is just sort of the disconnect that I think that a lot of our mainstream reporters have because they either live in the Beltway or they live in New York City. of so many things in, in middle America, farming, military service. I think like 1% of Americans are, are served, have experience serving in our, in our armed forces. And so this is just sort of a really nice self-own that was also instructive. Like we really don't understand you people, but we've been tasked with, with covering elections in which you vote. It's a wonder that they got it wrong.

I know. I mean, when I go to New York, I know well enough to walk very fast and stare straight ahead and not to look up at the buildings. I mean, I've been to New York enough times I get the basics. But it seems that some people in the old Bosnian Wash Corridor or the media bubbles believe that out in the hinterland, it's Eddie Albert bouncing up and down on a metal seat with springs behind his tractor like green anchors.

When actually it's these these vast technologically sophisticated devices that you can watch Netflix as you're plowing or as you're doing, you know, running the combine because it'll make the turn at the end of the end of the run because the GPS tells it to. So, yeah, that's a nice little cell phone from those folk. But the thing is, it reminds you that the predicate is Trump is stupid and everything that he says is wrong. And that's the default position, which is ill-advised to apply that to everything. I was listening this morning to NPR and they were talking about events in the Gulf and they followed it up with a discussion of tariffs. And in both cases, they were saying that while there's a lot of bipartisan agreement on what Donald Trump is doing, it's the means and the methods by which they disagree, which I thought was quite an admission. You mean there is bipartisan concern about Chinese intellectual property thievery and the way that they demand co-ownership of businesses?

You mean there is some bipartisan concern about Iranian activities? Let's take the first one first. There was discussion of it being a false flag. It's a means of Halliburton jacking up the oil prices, et cetera. But, Bethany, do you think it's entirely possible that Iran is responding to the increased sanctions by these little strikes, which aren't fatal, intended to dump a whole bunch of oil or close down the straits, but are sending a message themselves? Or is the administration's posture that this is more bad news from Iran just simply wrong? You know, I think that they are responding.

And I think that what's probably going on is that all of these sort of adversarial countries are testing President Trump on how, how serious he is. And he, he sort of, he's sort of a loose cannon and he is a hard nut to break because he's completely unpredictable and he's unpredictable for us too. And so I think they're sort of, he reminds me of my four-year-old, they remind me of my four-year-old, which they're like, I'm just going to like do this and see how you react. And every country around the world is needling him to see what he does. And this was, this was throwing their fork on the floor of the kitchen in the middle of dinner to see how is President Trump going to respond to that? Well, how is he? Do you think? I mean, I'm waiting for I don't think there's going to be a military strike.

I just think that. Well, it may be a sign that military action is needed, that sanctions are going to do the trick. Now, everybody's saying, of course, that John Bolton, warmonger, wants nothing more than to flatten Iran. And this would be a horrible thing because we have to get along. We have to understand that they have needs, et cetera, et cetera. But the interesting thing is that if the sanctions work and China comes on board with the sanctions, it might be because China sees it in its best interest to get the oil as opposed to propping up Iran, which nobody likes. I mean, the oil that's coming out of the Straits, we think it's going across the ocean to America. But no, no, no, it's going to Japan, it's going to China, it's going to Indonesia. They need that and they have a vested interest in keeping it going, especially since, from what we learn, the Chinese economy, who knows

what the stats have been for these years, but manufacturing is not rocketing through the roof. As a matter of fact, it's slowing down greatly. And the whole idea that everything has to be done in China has to be made in China. Bethany, do you think that there's a sort of shift going on? Because I think Foxconn was saying, well, yeah, we could make Apple phones here if we had to. There's no way we can make Apple phones because we actually have worker standards. And there's no way that we could do to Americans what they're doing to the Chinese. The conditions in those factories are subhuman. And there's no way that that would happen here.

We would have $3,000 iPhones because we would have to actually have working conditions that are not horrifying. So then what we should do is accept a world in which we are vulnerable to Chinese technological production because we want our cheap iPhones. I mean, they've got the raw earths sewn up. They have the cheap facilities where they can beat everybody with switches and have a guy go down the, you know, some big fat naked guy stripped to the waist, oily, beating a drum as he goes down the middle of the aisle setting the working conditions. That's okay if we have our cheap little diversion machines in our hand. That's the tradeoff. I mean, it is the tradeoff.

Yeah. If we want cheap stuff from China, we have to keep on closing our eyes and ignoring the little messages that Chinese workers put in our clothes sometimes about their working conditions, which I like. I'm saying that sort of with a laugh, but that it's the old it's the old joke. You're saying, help, I'm being held for being held hostage in a Chinese fortune cookie. Exactly. Now it's now it's true.

But if we accept that, then do we also have to accept 5G dominance? Because that seems to me to give them a kill switch. You cannot tell me that they would not have, the Chinese military would pass up the opportunity to embed in absolutely everything, some sort of backdoor, some sort of kill switch, some sort of way in which they could control and eavesdrop and listen. It seems to me— That's a terrifying thought that never occurred to me. Well, think about it. There was a debate last year, earlier this year, about whether or not the mainframe,

some of the equipment that was coming over from them, had a little tiny, little bitty secret chip in there that they could activate. Oh, they totally do. Right. Oh, man. Right. This is such a buzzkill. We're only like five minutes in and you really brought brought the whole ship down.

And I'm not I'm not the paranoid guy, but I mean, I'm just totally right. If I'm if I was the Chinese military and I had a huge commercial brand like they do, you know, you'd be slapping your head saying, what do you mean? We're not going to try to do this. They don't even need an IED. They just need the kill switch. Right. I've spent all this time preparing for an IED and they just have a little button. Yeah, you're completely right. So that's a problem. But I mean, one of the things about having a wrecking ball and a bull in a China shop, et cetera, for a president is at least we're talking about this. What's Joe Biden's position on China this week? I forget. Well, it depends on who's making what money. I mean, if we want to talk about foreign interference and foreign influence, like let's have a conversation about that. Sure. We can have

a conversation about Trump and Russia. And also maybe let's have a conversation about Joe Biden, who is the Democratic front runner and, and his connections to China, because they are not insignificant. No, nor his son's connections with Ukraine. So there's, I mean, anybody who hangs around in the swamp a long time eventually becomes corrupted one way or the other. Where is my Ukrainian money? Well, I'm just going to send it under cover of wire a little bit later, but you're not close enough, perhaps, to Washington, to the swamp for that to happen. Let yourself marinate a little bit more in all of that deep, dark, murky water, and perhaps some

Ukrainian money will be coming to you. But with Joe, it's an interesting thing. If somebody came to, if some benevolent government, be they Norwegian or Danish or whatever, came to Joe and said that we have some information on Donald Trump, I guess that Joe would turn it aside and refuse to do so because the new standard is that you can't take any dirt from foreign countries on your enemies, right? But all right, Bethany, but game this out for me, though. Do you think that if in 2016 Hillary Clinton's campaign had heard that there might be some Russian-supplied information about Donald Trump's activities, do you think that they might have attempted to leverage that into electoral advantage? I'm just saying this as a possible thing. You're joking, though, right?

Like that's just like a joking sort of rhetorical question because you know the answer. I think that – This is where we insert the gift of the Simpsons character with a microphone. That's the joke. That's the joke. I think call me pessimistic. I don't know. But if she had her own server that she then erased, let's just say she might not be the most ethical human being in the world. I know it's hard to believe from a Clinton that ethics might be a concern. But yeah, yeah.

No, I mean, there were reports about stuff from Ukraine. This is not—none of this is new. None of this is secret. And that's the thing that I think really propels President Trump, I think, to get him reelected. Because CNN yesterday, people were slamming the desk on Tapper's show, so outraged about his comments that he would take money or take information and maybe call the FBI, maybe not, whatever. And people were horrified because what he said was basically the truth.

But he's the only one who's ever said it out loud. Yeah. But everyone else would do the same thing. And he's just the only one who's admitting to it because he's not very smart. You're not supposed to say that part out loud. That's in parentheses. That's right. You're not supposed to say that part out loud. That's in parentheses. That's right. You're so cynical.

I have no doubt that your children right now are hanging around preschool with heavy-lidded dark mascara, smoking cigarettes. It's just, it must permeate the entire household, this entire moral cynicism that you have. Oh, I need to refresh myself and my spirit with some good, honest capitalism,

hence this spot. Hey, you know, without Rob here, it means that I can carefully craft a segue he can't ruin. But, you know, the thing of it is, I just do those for Rob to ruin anyway. So what's the point? What's the point? I want to tell you about something, though, and you should listen because this matters if you have a credit card. And you do, don't you? I mean, for decades, these credit cards, they've been telling us to buy it now and pay for it later with interest, of course.

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Now we happily welcome to the podcast Dr. Samuel Gregg, he's Director of Research at the Acton Institute. He's written and spoken extensively on questions of political economy, economic history, ethics and finance, and natural law theory. He has an MA in political philosophy from the University of Melbourne and a doctor of philosophy degree in moral philosophy and political economy from the University of Oxford. His latest book is Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization. It'll be released by Regnery on June 25th. We welcome him to the podcast. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. It's great to be with you. Just from the title of your book, which is more important, perhaps, to save Western civilization?

Reason, faith, or are they inseparable? To my mind, the genius of the West, let's call it the West, Western civilization, is its synthesis of faith and reason. If you look at other civilizations, other cultures, you see different philosophers, different theologians, wrestling with questions of the relationship between faith and reason. But my argument is that it's really in the West where we see this synthesis working to such an extent and working so well that without that synthesis, the West is no longer what it has always been, at least since the advent of Christianity. And of course, one of the things I argue in the book is that when reason and faith become detached from each other,

whether it's in the form of what you might call religious sentimentalism, which I think is very prevalent in much of the West today, or, for that matter, in the case of radical Islamism, where reason is basically pushed out of the picture altogether, then I think you start to run into all sorts of what I call pathologies of faith and pathologies of reason. And these things, I think, they don't explain everything that's problematic or challenging in the West right now.

I'm very suspicious of monocausal explanations, but I do think that when the balance between faith and reason gets out of culture, or when one is emphasized at the expense of the other, or they seem as opposed to each other, that's when we start to run into any number of political and cultural problems.

There are nine hours of conversation to follow from what you just said. There's so much there. But let me start precisely. And the book, of course, that we have to tell to follow from what you just said. There's so much there. But let me start. Precisely. And the book, of course, that we have to tell everyone is Reason, Faith, and the Struggle

for Western Civilization. I want to go back to the idea of religious sentimentalism, which I find I've never heard expressed quite like that, but it's perfect. You have people who are nominally observant

to the emanations of the penumbra of what's left from a guttering fire. In Europe, this seems to be now the dominant cultural ethos. Why, though? What killed religion? Everybody says that the West, essentially, in Europe, died in the trenches of World War I, that so many things were discredited and they could never come back from that.

What was it that led to the decline of belief and the rise of this just sort of mummery that Europe goes through when it comes to Christian traditions and heritage? Well, as you rightly pointed out, I think it's almost impossible to underestimate the significance of the two world wars in Europe in explaining why an entire culture and civilization has essentially lost confidence in itself completely. But in the case of what I'm calling religious sentimentalism, this is what happens when religion becomes detached from reason. When to be a religious believer is no longer seen as a matter of arriving at certain conclusions based upon what you understand about the world, arguments about the existence or otherwise of God,

or the coherence and rationality of religious belief, when reason is pushed out the door and all you're left with is sentimentality. In the case of Christianity, Christianity, of course, emphasizes love a great deal, and it also talks about reason right from the very beginning. When reason is thrown out of the picture when it comes to Christianity, all you're left with is love, but a love that's detached from human rationality. And that very quickly moves in the direction of sentimentalism. And really you see this happening, I think, really at the beginning of the 19th century with particular liberal

Protestant theologians like Friedrich Schleiermacher, but you see this happening in parts of the Catholic world, particularly after the Second Vatican Council. It's certainly true, I think, to say that if you inquire deeply into the convictions of someone who described themselves as a liberal Jew, I think you'd find very quickly that what you're talking about here is this type of love is about emotions and feelings, and the

notion that belief in God or religion has anything to do with reason, once that disappears, all you're left with, I often like to say, is all you're left with is God as a type of celestial teddy bear who does nothing but affirm us, says how wonderful we are, yet it challenges us, yet it tells us that living certain ways

or doing certain things or even believing certain things are wrong. And I think that's what has happened, particularly since the 1960s in virtually all of the Protestant churches in Europe, large swathes of the Protestant churches in Europe, large swathes of the Catholic Church in Europe, but we see it in the United States as well. I think if you look at most self-described liberal Protestants, what you really are looking at is a type of sentimentality. I would argue that you find the same with a great deal of self-described liberal Catholics and liberal Jews as well. And that is, it's a type of religious belief,

but one that excludes any consideration of offering rational claims for why you believe or why you don't believe. And the rational part of it is hard, because faith, at the end, is faith. And you can't come up with an empirical set of beliefs for why you believe this, but it's a component. Reason has to be a component. When you mentioned the sentimentality of it, it reminded me, I think, last Easter, I was in Fargo, North Dakota, and I went to my father's church, which is a very show business enterprise. They had a band, they had a big screen, and they had a pastor

who walked back and forth. And he delivered, as you might not expect, though, with something of that type of church, he delivered a very old-style sermon in which he said, it's not a question of whether or not you believe in the resurrection is what it's about. You that's that's what this is about. And if you don't believe that, then really this day doesn't mean something. So you'd best believe it. And in Minneapolis, my wife went with her sister to a church where essentially the female pastor got up.

And after the children were shooed from the front of the because the the children were playing, right, just having them using themselves, none of them vaccinated, I'm sure. The pastor got up and said, it doesn't matter whether or not you believe in the resurrection. That's irrelevant. It's just sort of what it implies and means. I think in a very stark way, I mean, this is the same nation, the same religion, and these are absolute polar opposites of it. And it seems to me that when you get away from the love idea as defined by the church, doesn't the society then move away from agape to eros and start to celebrate erotic love in a religious fashion that says, God will approve of whatever you do because God is love and your love is love, and that creates- And we all love each other and we all love each other

and it's so anodyne that there aren't there's there's no strictures there's no modus vivendi that it's just happy hand-holding love love love and this to you seems a problem the people who say that this is good believe that this is the salvation of western civilization that this is the final liberation of the individual and that's what will save us. Seems wrong. Right, no, that's exactly how I think you portrayed the logic of it very clearly, because I think one of the things I try to do in the book

is point out that Christianity, Judaism, they talk about God, the divinity, as love, but Christianity in particular, to a certain extent Judaism as well, also refers to God as logos. That's the Greek word for divine reason. The Gospel of John, the first words are, in the beginning was the Word. The Greek that's used for the Word is logos.

Logos implies reasonability. What is it in Latin, though? In Princeat Verbum? In Latin? What is verbum in Latin? That's literally a word. It doesn't have the same logical... What we have to understand is that word, when a Hellenic Greek audience was hearing things like logos or verba, the Greek and the Latin, those words mean more than just word in the way that we typically understood it. It implies rationality. It implies the utterance of a divine, reasonable God

who's involved in the world, who created the world, who's involved in the world, who created the world, who never disappears from the world, who endows the human beings made in God's image with reflections of his reason as well. So one of the things I try to show in the book is that when you throw out the notion of God as logos, and God can become one of two things. Either he devolves into this, like I said,

a sentimental teddy bear, which is what you find, I think, in a large swath of religious opinion in Europe and the United States, or God simply devolves into divine will. Divine will, voluntas. And you must do whatever that will says. It doesn't matter if it's irrational, what is being you are being commanded to do, you do it because it's God's will and there's nothing left to talk about, there's nothing left to reason about, there's nothing left to reflect about. So that's the thing. When reason disappears from faith,

it can either go down the direction of sentimentalism, which I think is what you find in much of the West today, or it goes down this highly voluntaristic path, which, as a good number of Muslim thinkers will tell you, is precisely the theological problem that is very characteristic of much of Sunni Islam right now. That's a big problem, because what it means is that you can't look at something like terrorism and say, okay, this is just a result of poverty, etc., etc. No, it's very clear that the people who are engaging in these acts

have a very particular understanding of who God is, and God is this divine will who can command us to do irrational, unreasonable things like fly planes into buildings. And that, I think, shocks people. But when you realize there's a parallel between this sort of hard voluntarism, which you might call a type of fundamentalism, and sentimentalism, they're both the same in the sense that they both have the same full-body conception of reason.

We'll get back to Islam in a second, but I think my co-host Bethany has a question that probably relates to something earlier in class or maybe last class. So I sort of come at religion from a Jewish perspective, because I'm Jewish. Right. And a lot of sort of come at religion from a Jewish perspective because I'm Jewish. And a lot of sort of the fall of what I see as American, of American Judaism is not necessarily reason, but the decision to completely abandon ritual.

And a lot of what you're talking about is sort of, you know, God is love and God is feelings. And in more liberal streams of Judaism, that sort of decided that God cares about tikkun olam, which is roughly translated as like, in their minds, is repairing the world. So instead of keeping kosher, they recycle. And they see that as sort of an equal replacement. And I'm sort of wondering what the role that you find in this framework of the fall of Western civilization, where ritual falls in, because this is also an important aspect of Catholicism as well.

Yes. No, I think this is true. There's a couple of things I'll say. First of all, one of the things I emphasize in the book, that if you want to understand the notion of where this idea that God is rational, where God is logos, where God is divine reason, where this God is a reasonable person, where this comes from, it comes from Judaism. It's absolutely clear.

One of the subsections in my book is called The Miracle of the Jews, and I basically point out that the Jews, centuries, centuries before the Greeks did, had a very clear understanding that there is one God, that this world that God has made is ordered, instructed, and that we can know it, and that we can make free choices. The Jewish people came to these insights, the Hebrew prophets came to these insights centuries before the Greeks, and the Greeks didn't even really do a good job of it anyway. So that's very important, because I think that this understanding

of this particular Jewish contribution to the rise of the West and this understanding of God, which I think is so essential to it, is indispensable. Without the Jews, there is no Western civilization. So that's the first thing. The ritual thing, I think, is also very important, because ritual is a way of living one's life, of honoring and giving homage to certain things that are held to be sacred,

because they are in some way reflective of what God, this reasonable God, wants for the world. And part of that is acknowledging that He is indeed the Creator, and because He's the Creator, we act in particular ways, ritualistically, about Him, and in accordance with His will and His teaching, in a way that we don't when we're in a supermarket, or when we're in a bank, or something like that. So this is very important, and you're right.

I think this is very important for understanding why, as I'm sure you appreciate better than I do, why so much of American Judaism has essentially moved in the direction of being Jewish means being in favor of social justice. And I think you see that also in the Catholic world. I see that in the Catholic world, whereby there's a tension to understanding who God is, why that matters, and why you worship and pay heed in particular ways and not other ways. or seen as patriarchal, structured, oppressive, etc., then you very quickly see a lot of American Catholics and European Catholics move in the direction of ideology.

And their religion becomes really a question of ideology rather than paying heed and teaching the truths that have been made known to us by the Creator. The good news, I suppose, is that that's not self-sustaining in the long term. In the long term, it basically becomes politics, and any dimension of religiosity quickly disappears. But that is the direction in which a lot of America, and even more so in Europe, Judaism and Christianity have gone. And I think it's very destructive of the West, because this is very central to who we are as a civilization. Without a God who is all through his love and reason, we are in big trouble.

You know, when you mention Europe again, I keep coming back to this and the exhaustion of Europe. I mean, Christianity in Europe inhabits this syncretic result of the absorption of the church in Rome. So all the people grew up, even if they weren't a Gothic church, they were in a church that may have manifested all of the signage and the the signage and the shapes and the forms of Roman power. They had, they moved into that husk and inhabited it. And so Europe at the end of it is a 2,000, 2,500 year history that they feel as though is no longer relevant at all to the modern experience. The 20th century broke with all that artistically, linguistic, I mean, everything about the 20th century seemed determined to extirpate their connection to the past. And now they find themselves in these places where it's a wonderful art exhibit to go to church, but it means nothing to them. And this, of course, this is what you've said before and what you've said in the book.

My question is this, is that now they have within their midst people who seriously believe this stuff, and they really believe that they are doing it, and they have an energy that European, the traditional European, semi-post-Catholic, whatever, can't match. Reason is not going to be sufficient for them to combat the extreme faith of other people. How does this play out? Well, I think it plays out in several ways. One is, as you pointed out, the recognition that there are now significant numbers of people living in the continental European land space who really certainly believe certain things to be true about the world.

We really are talking about Islam. So that's the first thing. And that also, however, means acknowledging that these people take their religion seriously. And one of the mistakes, I think, that are often made by highly secularized people is they think, well, you know, people just grow out of this. It's not real. They'll become just like us. Well, not really. That's not actually happening at all. Because, well, for all sorts of reasons, but one reason, I think, is that there is this sense that they look at the West and say,

well, do we really want to go down that path? No, they don't. So that's the first thing. Second, the second thing, however, is that any religion that doesn't pay strong homage or heed reason seriously, I think it becomes very hard to offer defenses of it. So if Christianity in Europe is to revive, it really must engage this question of the reasonability of God very seriously. The good news is that I think that's actually very easy to prove. Theologically, it's easy to prove. It's very easy to prove in terms of

thinking through why the world the way the world is, etc. And to do so, if they go down that path, and lots of them won't, some I suspect will, then they can present a compelling alternative, a logical, compelling alternative,

to this understanding of God as pure will who can command us to do unreasonable things. So is this going to change overnight? No. Europe is in big trouble existentially, philosophically, theologically, culturally. But the more that religious believers understand that they need to take this seriously, the better that position they will be to be able to say to these large numbers of people who live among them, who are very strong believers in their particular faith, look, your God is not reasonable. He can command you to do unreasonable things. In other words, if European Christianity doesn't reintegrate reason very much strongly into its central way of talking and thinking about the world, it will never be able to offer a powerful alternative to

the type of radical Islamism that's very prevalent in some particular Western European countries. Dr. Gregg, I implore you to write for the BuzzFeed audience something like, 10 Ways the Irrevocable Decline of the West Can Be Arrested. Number 7 will shock you because this is a message that needs to go out to them. But in the meantime, people who want to read an actual book and cogitate on the issues will pick up Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization. Ragnar Reed is going to be putting it out on June 25th. Thank you, Dr. Greg, for appearing on the podcast today.

I hope to talk to you the next time you write another great book. Thank you for having me on. It's been a hope to talk to you the next time you write another great book thank you for having me on it's been a pleasure the um the great thing about uh bethany's heritage is that what is the calendar now bethany what is it is here are we in 47 33 47 34 what we're in the 50s i thought we were i thought wait why wouldn't you give me a heads up to google this first now i sound like an idiot. I know, but I love the fact that seven something when you're talking to somebody of the Jewish faith or extraction and they were mentioned that we're in the 50s now, they mean the five thousands. Not not not the nifty ones with the tail fins and the pastel cars, which is great. But the thing of it is, is when you've got that much history, there's a lot of genealogy back there, isn't

it? I mean, there's begatting and begatting and begatting and begatting and begatting and begatting. And me, you know, freshly arrived two generations away from the old country, it's hard because, heck, once we go back past my grandfather, it's terra incognita, there's dragons, there's no documents. Or is there? There are. That's the amazing There's no documents. Or is there? There are. That's the amazing thing you find out if you try to trace your ancestry. And if you are trying to trace your ancestry, why wouldn't you go to a place called Ancestry.com? Now, if you're on that search, it's because you probably wonder where your family is coming from.

Well, you can discover more about them and learn more about your story by combining the Ancestry DNA test with billions, billions of historical family records. Ancestry DNA gives you so much more than just the places you're from. Ancestry connects you to the places in the world where your story started using precise geographical detail and clear-cut historical insights. You can even trace your Ancestry journey over time by following how and why your family moved from place to place and what they did. And to amplify your results, you can start a free trial, free, free trial on Ancestry and build a tree so your ancestors become more than just a name. And they've combined DNA results with over 100 million family trees and billions of records to give you more insight into your genealogy and your origins. See, with all of these things with the DNA and the insights and the

records and the trees, only Ancestry can tell a story this rich. Unique features that give a more complete picture about a person. Tells you about the events that shaped them. I mentioned before where they moved. More than moved. How did they make a living? Where did they go to school? What did they excel at? Here's where you'll find that story. Ancestry's unique features and record collections can give a more complete picture of people from your past, and you'll learn where you came from. It's a good thing to pass on, too. And it's easy to get started.

All you have to do is do what I did, which is go to Ancestry.com. I'm lucky because my name's pretty easy. There's not too many of us about. But even if you've got a more complex name, you know, like, I don't know, Anderson with an O or Anderson with an E. You can start with phone books. You can start with, you know, county records, or you can go to Ancestry.com like I did and just find out where you come from. For a limited time now, go to Ancestry.com slash Ricochet. Get your Ancestry DNA kit for $69, just $69.

You look at those other prices. Yeah, Ancestry.com slash Ricochet for $69. That's Ancestry.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Ancestry for sponsoring this The Ricochet Podcast. I did this Ancestry DNA test. I paid more than $69 BTW. And I did it because I desperately wanted to find out if my dad was really my dad because I have always had dreams that it was like secretly the milk man. But my dad was really my dad because I have always had dreams that it was like secretly the milkman. But my dad was really my dad.

But the results were straight on. 50% Irish, 50% European Jewish. Dead on. Could not have been more on the nose. And I found relatives. I love these things. I'm such an addict for all of these things. What did you find out? I mean, we're off the spot now.

We're off the script. We're just wandering off into the ending, closing chat and the rest of it. But what I want to know is when I find out, for example, that I've got Czechoslovakian ancestry, it doesn't necessarily mean that I all of a sudden am deeply interested in feeling Czechoslovakian. I don't feel Czechoslovakian. I feel like a North Dakotan. I feel like an American. And I kind of want to make that my primary identity. Where particularly this blood happened to be originate from on the other side of Europe. It's fascinating to know, but it doesn't change my psychological, emotional feeling about my country.

Isn't that the great, isn't the great – I mean, go on. I just – I love the thing – so I'm a total genealogy geek, and I actually was jealous that you were getting to do this spot because I wanted to do it, which is why I'm now butting into your spot. You have to stop being – you're such a wallflower. When are you going to learn to stand up and assert yourself, Bethany, and actually get somewhere in life instead of just sitting back and let everybody walk all over you? You do a mean ad read, sir. You do a mean ad read, and there's no standing up to that. But I am such a genealogy geek that I've done all of these things. And Ancestry, in like 15 clicks or something crazy, I was able to go back like eight generations on my on my mom's

side um like very not as much on my dad's side because my dad was jewish and they just burned everything and sort of called it a day um but it was really cool because the ancestry test so i've done all these dna tests i've done the 23andme test too and the ancestry test um narrows down not just i'm irish but they they narrow down the area in ireland ulster apparently and on my dad's side they narrowed down where in where in europe and it was like ukraine moldova speaking of ukraine maybe that's how i get my ukrainian money could be yeah i can say you burnt you killed all my ancestors give me some of your swamp cash that's it that's my ticket there you go hold the door there you go absolutely no doubt and if you have any chernobyl

any relatives near you know chernobyl area then then you're pretty good speaking of which are we just are we just shooting the breeze now have you seen? We're free-forming in the desperate attempt that we'll come up with something that interests the people who are listening to the podcast. And it has to be Chernobyl. Before they conclude that actually, no, that we're not, and that all we're going to do is lift off the sponsors. The thing is, no, we're not done. We are not done, and we're going to talk about Chernobyl. But before I do that, I need to tell you about something else here in a second um no i take that back because it's too soon for another spot and bethany wants to talk about chernobyl as you can tell we're really just all over the place here today so go chernobyl

what do you think lady brains is rubbing off on you this is what we do all we do on lady brains which is the show on the rickshay network that i am generally on um is we just sort of free flow from thing to thing and everyone either hates it or loves it and it's it's it's very much your own personal preference but chernobyl was amazing have you watched it all five episodes and you know i i don't know it's you know it's not great it's not terrible what are you kidding me did you hear what i just said what did i just say you said it's not great. It's not terrible. What? Are you kidding me? Did you hear what I just said? What did I just say? You said it's not great. It's not terrible. That's Dyatlov's line in the very first piece. It's when they learn that there's only three, that they have 3.6 is what the meters are reading. And he says, not great, not terrible.

And that's, you know, that's the whole line. A million memes have flowed from the show, Bethany. I just gave you one opportunity. If I just said to you, you like that show, you're delusional. What would that mean? That's what he tells the guy who says he saw the graphite. You can't have seen graphite because it's the best television show I've seen in about seven years since Deadwood went off the air. It's fantastic.

No, it's really good. So my favorite meme from that show was when they were giving the readings of when the Soviet government was lying about sort of how much radiation was in the air. And they're giving these readings in like some sort of metric that I don't understand. Just x-rays, I believe. No, no, no. It was like inches, da-da-da-da-da, but it was radiation. Groguers, groggers, groggers rogers i don't know yeah remkins yeah yeah and so you don't know what that means i don't know what that means we're not scientists but when they say on the show it's not five it's five thousand rogers you're like what but you don't actually know what that means and this is this could just be like so there's a there's an instrument on purim which is like

jewish halloween kind of every jew that's listening to this that knows what purim is it's like that's not what it is actually but for all intents and purposes let's just call it jewish halloween and there's an instrument called a grogger. And so I always think of it as a grogger. A grogger counter. Yeah, it's like using a grogger as a metric to measure something. And so there was a meme that said, you know, five seconds ago you had no idea what this was. But now you're like, your head is exploding.

And so there was a funny meme about it. Oh, that's it. Everybody, when they started the show, was, well, I knew it kind of blew up. And after about two episodes, it's – you know, the RBMK design was fatally flawed, absolutely from the start. There's absolutely – the idea that the very insertion of the graphic rod should cause an uncontrolled explosion when you hit the scram button is ridiculous. You're like, yeah, of course. I know. This is how people are sitting around talking, saying, well, you know, it really was – it was a fault of the containment yeah, of course. I know. This is how people are sitting around talking, saying, well, you know, it really was a fault of the containment facility, of course. I mean, if you have graphite out there, that obviously means you've got a problem because that's not itself.

It's not like the nuclear. It's not like plutonium got out, but the graphite was so copper. I mean, just, yeah. But it wasn't that. It's not just, it's the relationship between the main character, the Jared Harris character, who, and everyone has British accents, which I found a mistake. Thank you. Seth, it really bothered Seth and I, too. I would have changed that. The director said that he gave a series of podcast interviews. The director said that he did that because everybody, when they started,

was doing a Russian-Slavic accent, and they were acting the accent more than they acted. Right, it was terrible. Yeah, it was terrible. And I get that. I understand that. But it still, to me, would be I would rather hear squirrel in the moose than hear Russian accent. I wanted to see how the Gorbachev guy sounded. Because from what I understand, Gorbachev's accent was sort of

kind of like a hee-haw accent. Really, I mean it's Georgian. It may not have been the most sophisticated accent and i and i heard that people were sort of mocking him a bit because it was a bit too country and so if he to come up if that was true then shouldn't gorbachev have been speaking like something that the british associate with a rural accent to be accurate but i mean the gorbachev character i thought was an interestingly played new because it seemed to me that the British associate with a rural accent to be accurate. But I mean, the Gorbachev character, I thought, was an interestingly played new because it seemed to me that the guy who played him, that Gorbachev was holding back the largest freak out any man has ever had in his in his position in 20 years. And he's trying to hold it together and he's trying to be reasonable and he's trying to

figure out what needs to be done. But there's a did you get the same sense that I did? I've never seen an actor portray something roiling at the back of his head like that guy did. Yeah, I thought that that was really well done. So I have a question for you actually because you're old and I'm not. Are you going to laugh or just silently do it? Thank you, everybody, who's listening to the Ricochet podcast.

I'm James Lanix. Next week, Bethany won't be with us. We'll be back to Peter. She'll be fired. Go on. So here's my question. I was talking about the show with one of my friends

who's around my age. She's like six years older, so she actually remembers Chernobyl somewhat like that time period a little bit. I was still in utero um i was born two months after chernobyl happened how much of how much of all of these things were americans contemporaneously aware of at the time so we we know that like gorbachev was told like you're all pretty dead. How much of that came over here and were people freaking out at the time? Or did this sort of get eaten up in the news cycle because of Challenger?

Because that was, those were also right at the same time, right? Challenger and Chernobyl? Right. It was a great year. It was the year I was born! Fantastic year. No, it was news right away. We didn't freak out about it because it was happening to Europe. And we just figured it'll take, by the time it gets over here, eh. But I went back and looked at our newspapers. I have access to all the newspapers in the world, practically, at least those that my company, the Star Tribune has. And it's like, I watched Deadwood and went right back to the Deadwood papers, of which there are so many. I watched Chernobyl, went right back to 86 and looked. And sure enough, I mean, the day after, it was in the news. It was top stories. It was headlines.

It was it. It was big. And it was something big. It was Chernobyl. Essentially, it was Chernobyl blew up, which got a lot of, which all of this is something people forget. There was 86. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of worrying and fussing and fretting going on still. You still have a culture convinced that Ronald Reagan is a madman who wants to start World War III and that Gorbachev is a peaceable fellow though he is. He may be undermined by that crazy Soviet military and all it's going to take is one revolt in the barracks in Poland somewhere, and the next thing you know, it's off. We go into the folder gap. But at the time, it was still unnerving when people started looking at revelations because revelations had a line in there about the wormwood falling into the water and poisoning it.

And Chernobyl, Chernobyl means wormwood. It's wormwood. So all the people who are biblically minded and looking for late great planet Earth style stuff are just losing it when they look at this. But then it was eclipsed by other things and it didn't seem to be a problem.

Not great, not terrible. And on we moved. Only later did we find out what had happened. Now listen to the podcast that they did about this, I think it was an NPR guy who was doing it. My favorite part may have been in one episode, first or second, where he says, he's talking to the director about the portrayal of Gorbachev. And he says, you know, over here, we see Gorbachev as something of a hero. What? I'm going to let you stew on that for a second. Think about that.

Think about that for just a second while I posit something else. One of the great things about Chernobyl, incidentally, is the way it displays the computer technology of the Soviets of the 80s, which is clunky and huge. And it's got a retrofuturism Soviet charm to it, but it's ugly. Ugly as crap. Printouts, clattering stuff, bad cathode ray tubes. We're so much luckier today. We've got stuff that just sings to us from device to device over the internet. But sometimes your home internet gets a little clogged, right? And if you're paying for high-speed internet

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And now, could that possibly get any better? Yes. Yes, it can. Aero has introduced Aero Plus, which is designed to provide simple reliable security that defends all of your home's devices against a growing number of threats like malware, spyware, phishing attacks, and unsuitable content. May not protect you from when a kid picks up an Arrow unit and slams it up and down, as I hear one of Bethany's kids doing in the background, but I'm sure there'll be future battle hardened in the future. Arrow Plus, mind you, total network protection, the ability to block malicious and unwanted content across your entire network,

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Ricochet for $100 off and one year of Eero Plus included. Wow. Our thanks to Eero for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. So before we go, yes, we should testify to everybody that Chernobyl is absolutely harrowing. But, you know, it's all about Trump because of lies. Right? Right? I mean, I guess we're going to face a Chernobyl because we have a leader like it's incredible to me how they're able to bring everything back to Trump. It's it's a skill, really.

But it doesn't infect the show. If you listen to the director speaking on podcast and interviews and read his Twitter feed, it's pretty apparent that he's trying to make it happen. But at least that he would like us all to think that there's a parallel, but it's not in the show. No, thank God. It's as though the enormity of the Soviet horrors somehow humbled and humiliated the people who attempted to make this into a metaphor for anything in America because it stands apart, and it's an injustice to the people who live through it to say that us living here in this society are living under anything comparable to the ossified lies that comprised the Soviet Union for so many decades. But we have Soviet nostalgia, don't we?

Yeah, I mean, they sell the hats and the T-shirts now. It's retro. Everything that was old is new again, including the hammer and sickle. The hammer and sickle frightened me as a child. I thought, if you wanted to advance your cause and tell everybody what you were about, why would you choose these things? Here's a hammer to beat you over the head. Here's a sickle to slit your throat. I mean, it's the instruments of state violence imposed on a picture of the world, and I'm supposed to think they're the good guys. But it's the ideas that are coming back again too bernie gets up and talks about democratic socialism which is how he

is rebranding and but it's the same thing it's the panopticon of the state controlling every aspect of your life he'll tell you otherwise but that's exactly i mean bernie's line is no one's going to go to the gulag i love reassurances like that i mean nothing makes me go on and it's funny because they say nobody's going to the gulag under Bernie, but then they're also claiming that gulags exist now in America in internment camps. That when you actually look into it, you're like, oh, that's actually just a military base. Well, explain to people. It's unlikely that people who listen to this podcast didn't hear this, but The Hill came out and said that Obama, that Clinton, I'm sorry, long day. Trump was moving children to the same place where the Japanese were interned.

Yes, yes. And what were we supposed to think? Just kidding. The headlines all said, and it's funny, I know people who have families who were actually interred in these Japanese camps, which are, I think, one of the worst moral stains on our country's history. That and slavery. I'm not sure. I think those are the two worst things that we've ever done. um so the the press are comparing these these sort of centers where we're putting children who were brought here in very dangerous conditions and they need to be housed somewhere and so they're

put on military bases and it's very much not the same thing as the japanese internment camps but people are comparing the the conditions and the situation of these illegal immigrants who came illegally across the border with their children that they endangered in the process with Japanese internment camps and saying, oh, well, it's the same location. Yes, I guess so. I live in the same location as many Civil War battles. It doesn't mean that my little townhouse in Silver Spring is akin to a Civil War battlefield. But the press just decided to run with it. And the folks that I know that they had family

who were interred in these actual camps are furious that these comparisons are being made because they are very much not the same thing. No. And if you concentrate on the Japanese situation, as the press seem to want to do, that requires them also to explain an awful lot of things that they're uncomfortable explaining. It seems to me that they want to make this about race, which is just as we were racist to the Japanese. And by we, they mean all of us, everybody. Somehow FDR just woke up in the middle of the night, his eyes rolled back in his head and channeled the people's will. That's how that happened.

And people in the future, too. You are responsible and I'm responsible. Yeah, well, I'm not. My kids are responsible, too. And when it comes to the internment of the children, they're regarding this as racist as well because Trump hates brown people and doesn't want brown people in the country. And ergo, he's going to do to them what we all did to the people with the yellow skin, to be very, very crude in these analyses. And I don't think I that's really not the dynamic at all. What happened in World War Two were citizens, citizens of the United States, people who actually were citizens deprived of all of their rights. All of them. Rounded up for no reason.

And shoved into camps by a state that required this to be done because the state, frankly, had the power to do it. And Bernie Sanders would like to give that state more power. That's exactly right. John Stewart can get up. It's a great idea. John Stewart can complain about what's happened to the 9-11 responders, and he's absolutely right to do so. But the idea then is that they always turn around and say, well, then this entity, which has failed us so spectacularly, let's empower it more and give it control over more people. That's exactly what I was thinking, too, with that whole John Stewart 9-11 thing.

Like, this is the state. When the state is responsible for your care, this is what happens. They don't show up. They don't care because it's the state. When the state is responsible for your care, this is what happens. They don't show up. They don't care because it's the state. But they believe that the state as constituted now is not the state that they would have because theirs would have more money. It would be run by better people and all the kinks would be worked out. And essentially, once we get rid of the private things that compete with it and drain away energy, I mean, to hear tell, we spend $1.97 a year on education and every school is a threadbare institution that is falling apart because we as a society,

as a society, it's hard to say, have decided that we're not going to fund education when we lavish enormous, inordinate amounts of money on it. But we can't even conceive of moving outside of the public option. Everybody sends their kids to public school, right? If you got the scratch, maybe you'll send them to private, but that's the default option. And people want the default option for transportation to be the bus, the train, and not your car. The default option for healthcare to be, well, of course, the government. The default option for retirement to be, well, of course, I'm going to give them control of my 401 and the rest of it.

Bernie wants the default option in every life to be your state, which is why he's a stinking red. I'm sorry. Did I say that? Which why democratic socialism is just another idea of this preposterous thing that ends up in internment camps. Lincoln, a Republican, freed the slaves. FDR, a progressive, put them back again. I'm James Lilacs. Bethany Mandela has been my guest today. It's been a really cheerful hour. Thank you.

No, it's cheerful only if you think that we don't have to give in to Chinese technology. We don't have to believe that statism and paternal statism is the secret and the answer. And we continue to use reason and faith to guide this great country on to even more and better things. We've had rough patches before. We'll have them again. It's an up. It's down.

It's like you said, I'm old. I remember the 70s when it was we had no more energy to come and it was a big glaciers pushing down from Canada. So I'm kind of happy now with fracking and a little bit warmer temps. So when you get here to me by age, you'll see. Nothing matters. Let them fry. I don't give a... You're saving it. You're picking it up right here at the end. Yeah, I am. Lending Club folks, Ancestry.com, Arrow, go to them, get stuff. Your life will be better

for it. And support them for supporting us. And also, you know that thing about iTunes that I always say about going there and giving us reviews, some more people find us and that's great. I'm not going to say it this time, but I do tell you to go listen to lady brains, subscribe and Bethany and all of her pals. Uh,

it's not Manny petty time, is it? No, it's a, it's hammer and tongs with the uses of the day, right? She's already tongs. I said,

hammering tongs. I, is this trying to like connect with the female side and it's just, She's already... Hammer and Tongues? Tongues, I said. Hammer and Tongues. Is this you trying to connect with the female side and it's crashing and burning? No, Hammer and Tongues is not a female-specific reference. What are you talking about? It is a phrase that has been in use for some time. By old people? If I can pick a B-T-dub, I think that you might reach back into the mists of history and realize that Hammer and Tongs

has a certain industrial application that made this country straight. God, kids today. See you in the comments, everybody, at Ricochet 4.0. Really? Do I have to explain Hammer and Tongs? Early. When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now,

will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine? If I'd been out till quarter to three, would you lock the door? Will you still need me? Will you still feed me when I'm 64? Ricochet! me will you still feed me when I'm 64 ricochet join the conversation you'll be And if you say the word, I could stay with you. I could be handy, mending a fuse when your lights have gone. You can knit a sweater by the fireside sunday mornings go for a ride doing the garden digging the weeds who could ask for more will you still need me will you still

feed me when i'm 64 every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle Of Wight if it's not too dear