TRIGGERnometry - Why We Have a Crisis of Meaning - Stephen Blackwood

Episode Date: September 22, 2024

Stephen Blackwood is the founding President of Ralston College, a new university in Savannah, Georgia, dedicated to freedom of thought and enquiry. He grew up on a small farm in Canada, was educated in Classics (BA, MA) and Religion (PhD), and has held visiting positions at Harvard University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Cambridge. His book on the Roman poet-philosopher-statesman, Boethius, was published by Oxford University Press. Find out more about Ralston College: https://www.ralston.ac/ Check out Stephen's website: https://www.stephenjblackwood.com/ Follow Stephen on X: https://x.com/stephenblackwd Sponsors: Discover the foundations of Western civilization with 321—a free online course on God, the world, and your place in it. Explore at https://321course.com/trigger Protect your home with 20% off any new SimpliSafe system when you sign up for Fast Protect Monitoring. Go to https://SIMPLISAFE.COM/TRIGGER Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Browse securely. Connect with confidence. Right now, save 83% off the two-year plan. Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVVAN. vanish. So I am myself, I'm tired of hearing conservatives who say they believe in transmitting the wisdom of the past to the next generation, criticize as if simply this is the case that we don't know, look what the progressive left or whatever has done to us. I mean, that's just a

victimhood mentality that they're supposed to say that they don't like. And I think that what we see on the ground is that that is an inherently and profoundly alienating, depressing, degrading worldview and we see that. We see it play out in social media. We see a play out in the collapse of our communities. What is the life that you want? And if we're not building from the answers that people given those moments, you know, we've got it wrong. Stephen Blackwood, finally, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's a pleasure. We've been talking for a long time. I've seen, we actually had a chance to chat in America when I was on talk with Jordan. You're one of the people working closely with him on Arc and many other things. And we had the most fascinating

conversations, which is one of the things we'd like to do today. And the first question, really, you are someone who's thought a lot and talked a lot about what we call the crisis of meaning in the West. What does that mean exactly? And how would you describe it? Well, I think when I start with the question of, you know, what is meaning? And, you know, we're living in a kind of age that thinks that, you know, we can individually define everything and kind of, you know, make ourselves up as we go, define ourselves whoever we like. And there's a certain kind of truth to that. But it also runs up into a hard limit. And that is, you know, if meeting were something you could just generate on your own, you know, you could just kind of go home one weekend and

make a whole bunch of it. And you just say, I've got so much meaning now and never going to worry about meaning again for the rest of my life. That's just patently, you know, ridiculous. We know that's not how it works. You know, it's as if you could, you know, just go home and, you know, you were having a cash crisis. You're going to print a bunch of money. Turns out that doesn't work, right? But the point is, is that, you know, why doesn't that work? You know, Why isn't meaning something that we can just, you know, you're feeling a bit low or down or depressed or, or, you know, like a vacant life you're living? Why can't you just, you know, go create a bunch of it?

Can I be the impatient student that jumps in? You know, you're president of Ralston College. I'll be the student for the purposes of this. I would say, and this is I'm sure something we'll talk about. The reason you can't just go and create a bunch of meaning is that there's such a thing as human nature. And so human beings will derive meaning from a little. limited range of things that is defined by the fact that we're human.

Well, I think that is no doubt true. We should get into talking about, you know, what is a human being and why are we constituted in such a way such that we can only, we can, we only recognize as meaningful certain kinds of things, but I would say that the characteristic of meaning that is most fundamental is it has to be something that transcends you, that you think transcends you. That is to say, you know, love of family or country or beauty or truth or whatever. So it can't be something that's simply self-generated. And this is something that actually Victor Frankel talks about, very powerful in Man's Search for Meaning.

He uses the word self-transcendence. That the way to fulfill the self, paradoxically, is to transcend the self. And so you become more and more yourself in a way that you think is worth living, the more and more you are consecrating yourself to things you consider, high-order transcendent things. And so I think that the meaning crisis is fundamental. about, you know, people feeling alienated from the things that would enable them to live lives worth living. And so the question is, well, what does that look like? And I think it's actually not that complicated, is that to live a life that's meaningful is to be able to day by

day, not just in one big, you know, oomph of a decision, although sometimes those are required, but day by day to have your horizon, one of which you're in touch with things that, and again, I'm not preaching to someone, you should find this meaningful or that meaningful, that you yourself regard as worth living for. I think one of the things we have to, except, you know, of course we can talk about these things from various angles, you know, philosophical and theological and all these things. But there is a simple evolutionary biological fact here, and that is that human beings are evolved as self-conscious creatures. That means that the fact that they think about themselves and whether they are living as they should or whether they think that they are doing the things that are worth doing with the little time they have on this earth, that's a feature not a bug. It's a non-negotiable fact of human existence.

And so I would argue that any culture that doesn't, let's say, enable human beings to live lives that they themselves regard as worth living has failed by the most basic standard of human evolution. And so the meaning crisis, you might say, is, I think, you know, we could say it's consequent on a kind of widespread, you know, ideological nihilism. We could give any number of different reasons for this. There's ideological ones. there's material cultural and technological reasons. We should talk about them all in a sense. But one of them is, from the universities and elsewhere, is a very prominent neo-Marxist view that there is no there there.

There is no such thing as truth or beauty or goodness or forgiveness or justice or reconciliation. These are all just constructs of the will to power, right? There is no real there there. And what that leads to is a situation in which human beings are alienated one from another. there is no high purpose left to live for. And I think that what we see on the ground is that that is an inherently and profoundly alienating, depressing, degrading worldview.

And we see that. We see it play out in social media. We see it play out in the collapse of our communities and so on. And so, you know, what would it mean to answer, to make an answer to the meaning crisis? Well, it can only ever be fundamentally something that enables particular individuals,

Because human life can't be lived at the level of abstract humanity. That's just not how it works. There's only ever real human beings with names and histories and families and so on. What it fundamentally means is to foster a culture that provides a sufficiently diverse range of pathways for people to be in touch with the things that really make life count. And again, I don't think these are the big words we keep coming back to. you know, beauty, love, truth, family, country, you know, the place you're from, home. These words have purchased in our self-understanding precisely because they're the things that connect us

with a world that we believe is worth laying our lives down for. Isn't what we're also talking about here that we've lost religion and as a result of that, we have no way to deal with the fact that we are mortal, which is why you see so many of these crises happening, I think, a crisis of meaning. Well, what does my life mean if I don't have religion to explain my life to me? What does my life mean if I don't have something bigger than me to sacrifice myself for? Well, I certainly think that's a huge aspect of the dynamic. You might say what religion does at its best, you may say the great world religions, the ones that have proven themselves to work. It's kind of like there's an evolutionary facticity to this that,

you know, some have sustained over time. Why is that? Because they appear to have helped people answer precisely those questions. And I think what religion does in a way that, say, philosophy can't do, let's say, for the masses, is it gives you, in the form of images or stories, a connection to that realm of the transcendent. And once you, you, you know, you've, you know, I often use the metaphor of closing the horizon or darkening the horizon. You know, that's, you know, you think about opening up of a horizon. It's a, it's a, it's a, you're able to see yourself on a plane or in relation to a future, to a history, to a hereafter, to a goal that then gives your today meaning that makes all the difference in the world. I mean,

you know, there's the, there's the famous, uh, uh, example of, you know, you ask a, you ask a person who's carving a stone that's going to go into a cathedral, you know, what they are doing and in a way there's two answers they can give. You know, one is, oh, I'm just, you know, hitting this rock. And the other is, I'm making a cathedral. And, you know, it's the same activity. You know, but when I said, I had the opportunity to have a conversation once with the American author Wendell Berry. And he said to me, he said, that's not quite right. He said, because it has to be both of those at once, right? It has to be both the craftsmanship of the here, that right here, this anger.

this just so. You know, and that's true in all of our relationships. You know, it's, it's not, all of our relationships and in the immediate fabric of our lives, like they matter in their particularity. But also, they matter in their particularity because we understand them in relation to, to a wider expanse. And so I think, Francis, what you're saying about the loss of religion is that that's one of the symptoms and one of the causes of this overall dislocation or unweaving this, you know, unraveling of, but it's not only that. I mean, you can say the same thing about architecture. You know, the difference between, you know, a beautiful building, maybe it's your town hall or whatever the case. Maybe it's, it's a country house near you or a cathedral

that you hear the bells ringing from, or whatever. It could be a very simple structure. In fact, it's a one of the things we need to remember is that for all of human history, people generally built until about 80 years ago, buildings that were beautiful. Transcultural, trans-historically. It's just a fact. And now, I'd say that's why I think architecture is such a good example of the ideology, because, you know, as Marwell-Sabuni says, buildings don't lie. They have their ideas right there. And so if you compare the difference between a beautiful building that somehow speaks to you about human scale and proportion and harmony, and somehow in relation to that, you see those things in yourself, as you walk towards and you encounter and you see reflected, you might

say those same ideals that you hope to live by or somehow they reveal to you a certain kind of way of being in the world versus, on the other hand, a big, you know, horrific, brutalist, stone, you know, formless thing that is essentially telling you, you know, you don't matter, you know, beauty is a construct. There's only this ugly, this ugly and oppressive reality. So what I'm saying is that architecture is another way of, It's another way into understanding the difference between something that opens you up versus closing you down. And so I think religion's example, architecture, we can go all the way through any of the many aspects of human culture is an ultimately infinitely complex dynamic. It's not as if you can say, well, there's just this ingredient and that ingredient.

But what we're seeing is that far too many of the ingredients in our current culture are unfriendly to human. human beings. But come back to me on the point about mortality, because I think this is something people don't talk about enough. So let's take your point about architecture, where you were talking about carving. You're talking about a stone mason who spends years and years and years in order to master this particular skill set, who will then be part of building a cathedral that will take maybe even centuries to build if we use the example of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. why would you do that?

Why would you dedicate yourself to that? Why would you be part of something that you are not going to see the results of if you think that once you die, that's it? It doesn't make logical sense. I think that what we're really talking about here is how do you deal with the fact that you are mortal? And I think when you see a lot of what is happening in our society,

I think it's where that is a fundamental part of the crisis. Would you not agree? I wholeheartedly agree. I think that, you know, the question of mortality in some sense connected with our awareness of that mortality, right? If you don't know you're mortal, it makes a big difference, right? You're not, you don't have the, so that's why human self-conscious, our human awareness of our mortality is one of the defining features, maybe the most defining feature of human

existence. That's why all of, in a sense, all of art and music and love and all the things that we give our lives to in a way are premised in relation to that question, to making the time we do have count. And I think if you remove that horizon, you do end up with meaninglessness. And so I think what you're saying, Francis, is, and this is what the ancients would say and what, you know, all the religions teach in a sense is that, you know, paradoxically, the meaning in human life emerges in our awareness of the relation of our finitude, you might say our mortal, the fixed nature of it, in relation to what is not fixed, what is eternal, what abides. And so, you know, I think you see that in, you know, the love that parents have and the sacrifices they make for their children. That is a

kind of investment in something that transcends you, even temporally, because your children in the normal course of things outlive you. And so, too. I think your example of the cathedral, is a beautiful one, that's true of most of the great, you know, the really great edifices like that, from the Middle Ages up to the more recent ones like you were mentioning in Portugal. And sorry, yeah, in Spain, what am I saying in Barcelona? The point is that, that, you know, those who started those buildings knew they would not finish them, and those who completed them knew they had not started it. And I actually think this is a very, you know, what is the last thing that we have done culturally

that, you know, what can you point to here in London or around the UK or where I live in the United States? What are the things that we can point to that have that character? And I would actually say that there's very little that is undertaken in that spirit. And that's one of the reasons I think people feel so fundamentally alienated from each other, from their past. They have a hard time finding themselves both in time and place. Because we've, it's imagine as if you just shut the lights off. You know, you actually do have a map and you have a pattern and these things are all there, but you shut the lights off and you can no longer see it. It's something like that where we are living now. It's so interesting your point about architecture as well because I can, my self-conception is I'm someone who's incredibly uninterested in aesthetics. But when I was traveling around America, I was so relieved to spend like half a day in the French quarter of New Orleans because you're going, and I love America. I.

don't want anyone to get the wrong impression, but you're going from place to place to place where the buildings are fairly functional, let's say, and uninspiring in many ways. And then you turn up in this place where it actually looks appealing. You actually physically, even despite the fact that what's happening in those buildings and around, it may not be exactly what you want to take part in. But just that experience of being in a place that's, that has some kind of sense of history and beauty. And it was really revealing to me that that was the case. Well, I think the thing is that we need to keep in mind about this is this is not this is not in the remotely pretentious or some kind of haughty or just for the elites kind of idea. I really do think this is fundamental

to human nature. And you can look at, and the reason that this, that we know this to be so, is that it's the case with those who are the poorest of the poor also throughout all of history. So you can look at 17th century day laborers' cottages in the Netherlands, and they're beautiful, simple structures. On my mother's side, my own ancestors who came to Canada from the Ukraine. I mean, the first year, and this was to Western Canada, there was very hard, inhospitable environment in the winter. In the first year, those sorts immigrants in that period built sort of grass mud huts. But in the second years, they could cut down some trees. They built very simple but beautiful and simple structures.

And what does that mean? I mean, I think it means that we understand ourselves in relation to certain realities, proportions, truths, and that we make every effort we can to build our environment. It's true of the, not only of the physical, but also of the relational. I mean, what does it mean to live in a functional home? You know, one where there's some reciprocity and you can make mistakes and forgive each other. and laugh. I mean, I mean, these are simple things, but, you know, versus one that isn't that's inhospitable and angry and unforgiving and abusive or whatever. And so I'm just saying that's another good example of what, you know, you know, why, for example, Plato would say that there's an ontological difference, you know, unity, truth, beauty, goodness. These things are actually just more real, more generative, more powerful than they're opposites. And I think, you know, you can put that as I just have tried to do in an abstract sentence, say, well, what does that mean? But we all know what it means in our day-to-day lives. Like, what are the stakes? What kind of home life? You might

ask all of our listeners, what do you want your home to be like? What do you want your relationships to be like? What do you, what would you consider? That's it. That's the life I want to live. And that, you know, I think if we're not asking those kinds of very simple bedrock, like not some kind of, well, what is this philosopher to say about this? I mean, I've given a lot of my life to asking those questions, but ultimately those questions have to be fundamentally connected to this very most basic, like, let's call it empirical, to use the scientist's word, let's say, empirical realities, you know, just with a gun to your head, what is the life that you want? And if we're not building from the answers that people give in those moments, you know, we've got it wrong.

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If you're going to take vitamins, they should actually work. Healthy Cell. Reach your potential. Do you think sticking with architecture just for a moment, but I think it's an interesting window into everything else, do you think that part of the reason that we have what we have is urbanization, that we've got way more people living way more on top of each other. You know, the guy I always quote, there's a guy called Desmond Morris, who wrote a book called The Human Zoo.

And his central thesis was essentially when you put animals in the conditions that human beings now live in, you get exactly the same pathologies, you know, violence, mental disease, lack of reproduction, something we talk about a lot nowadays, et cetera. Do you think we've just got too many people living on top of each other? Do you think this is a bigger thing than that? Well, you know, on the one hand, you know, cities are very important.

There are places of exchange of ideas and often they're on ports, their chases of exchange of goods and so on. So, you know, I'll be the last person to say that cities are not wonderful or places that are great achievement, can be great achievements in like Alexandria or Paris or whatever throughout the centuries, great achievements of human civilization and of the human spirit. On the one hand. On the other hand, precisely because the city is abstracted from, you might say, the more fundamental or natural conditions of survival, it can be, it is, and I mean the framers of the American Constitution understood this very clearly. You might say it's abstracted, it's abstract. And so you can have this kind of world in which, well, and we see this in the West writ large now. There's a sense in which everyone's living on the accumulation.

wealth of certain habits and of the past. You know, we're not having a caloric deficit in a way that we did. I mean, just beyond living memory, like in the late 19th century, people died of starvation over the winter in Sweden. Okay? That's like 1970, 1880. It's not very long ago that people, you know, just a few hundred miles from here could not make it through the winter. Okay. So, you know, what am I saying? I'm saying that that we need to keep in mind that human beings, you know, if you want to look at the, you know, the upper late Paleolithic, I mean, the long history of what we are, right, is constituted in relation to, you know, needing to provide for ourselves, needing to have small communities that were actually the framework

in which we could, you know, want to hunt the wildebeest or the mammoth or whatever, and, you know, tell our stories in the cave and so on. And so what I think we see in this abstraction is a loss of contact with realities that are not negotiable. Now, you can survive that for a few generations, right? Like if you have lots of wood in your shed, you might be able to get through a winter or a few winters or whatever, but a certain point, it runs out. And if you've forgotten where to find the wood

or where to find the calories or whatever, you're in serious trouble. And so I think that, you know, one thing we see is this leads to, what I would say is the presumption and kind of idiocy of certain, we call them elites, but I don't like using that word because they're so not elite. There's no sense of which they're elites in the true sense of the word, like say, people chosen for rare talent to serve high purpose. That's what I'd say a positive vision of what an elite could be. But the point is that right now, for example, in America, most of the people making those kinds of

decisions, they've never slaughtered an animal, they've never had to cook for a large family, they've never had to deliver a package, they've never had to grow their own food, And so, you know, what I think we have is a moment, we're at a moment in time where people making decisions, in a sense for everyone, are radically out of touch with the basic terms and conditions of human survival, let alone thriving. Essentially, we've become a victim of our own success, which therefore means that in order for us to reconnect with what made us successful, we have. to become less successful?

That's a... Typically depressing. Well, let's put it this way. That may in fact be inevitable. Let's hope that it's not true. But that, of course, is one of the ways of understanding certain kind of cycles that, you know, that the very virtues that produce wealth are lost with wealth because you don't have to have those virtues anymore, and then you end up in a crisis in which you have to rediscover the virtues.

So I think there is a, there is, you know, we see this in family histories and cycles. You know, so interesting you mentioned that because that's something I've thought about recently and talked a little bit about, which is that people are very wary and suspicious of families that have been able to preserve wealth and influence over several generations because of just how hard it is to do. And it seems like the question for us now, very much speaking to your point, Francis, is how do we find a way to be the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds and the whoever's instead of being like most families where the first generation earner, the second manager? the third squander it. How do we do that? I think that's the, so to speak, you know, a million dollar question of our time. I think it's a lot more money than that. It's a lot more money than that. Exactly. After COVID, a million ain't a lot anymore. Exactly. We're in the deck of the deck of trillions now. Yeah. Well, let me say, give you a couple of possible answers to that question. And I think the first is is very important, the first that your observation, Francis, that there's a, there's a sense in which, you know,

either we're going to come up against a very hard reality, you know, war, famine, whatever, that's one option. Or is there another way? Is there another way? And, well, that other way would have to have a kind of voluntary character to it, right? Because you have the involuntary, you know, the crisis. And then the other is you see and you understand, you look down the horizon, and you see what's coming, and you say, well, how can we adapt to this massive tsunami of your crisis

meaning or of Western civilization, how we want to put it. And I think that's where we come around to another kind of necessity. And that's the necessity of human meaning itself. And I think that when, given that we are, I think living in a massive crisis of meaning, it's a bit like if we were to understand the crisis of meaning by the metaphor of hunger. And if you imagine that you have a group of a controlled population and you give them, you know, just exactly the number of calories they need to live, you know, on day one. But every day thereafter, you reduce it by one cap rate. Well, weeks go by and no one even notices, right? Like, what's a few dozen calories? But after a few months, you're starting to think, you know, I feel a little bit hungry. Maybe I won't

get something to eat tonight, but I'll just eat in the morning. I'm not that hungry. But, you know, after a couple of years of this, as you can start, you get to the point where you're so hungry, You'll do anything to get something to eat. Now, most of us have never been in that situation. But the point of making is that I think that's what's happening with the crisis of meaning. It's gone from a kind of, you know, dull, you know, throbbing in the background to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a more and more people are noticing it. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. And once that's the case, you know, when people get to the point where they're awakened, they think, no, the most important thing to me is, it's a It's not that I have a fancy house. It's not that I get the right internship at the right law firm or whatever. The most important thing to me is that I live a life that I regard is worth having been lived. Then once you get to that point, I think there are all kinds of opportunities that come into view because you have hundreds of millions of people wanting to do precisely the things that would answer the crisis of our time.

And so in a way, the crisis is also an opportunity and the opportunity. and the opportunity is the answer to the crisis. Do you not think as well that we talk about meaning, but meaning and self-sacrifice are linked? Like, take this show. The reason this show works is because when we interview people, we accept that we are not the most interesting person in these chairs. It's the person we're inviting onto the show.

But if we were going to be one of those people who are going to be like, well, actually, it's all about me. The show wouldn't work. The interviews would be unwatchable. No, it would be terrible. And actually what we're seeing more and more is people going, well, no, it's all about me. Well, then if it's all about you, then you're never going to create anything of value or worth because you can't work in a team.

And that's what you need to do in order to create cathedrals or businesses or sports. The best teams aren't necessarily the ones with the best players. They're the ones who play as a team. We're very, very shortly after England losing in the finals. But, mate, just please, still. Breathe. Too soon, too soon. Too soon, mate.

Yeah. But I think Francis' point about sacrifice is exactly what Jordan was talking about on the tour and continues to talk about, right? Well, I can only say that I think that's completely right. That, that, I mean, this comes back to what, you know, Victor Frankel says about self-transcendence. I mean, self-transcendence is inherently a sacrifice. I mean, you're sacrificing, you know, the short term or the momentary

the now or whatever, to something that you regard is higher. And I think that's one of the reasons. You talked about religion earlier, France. I think that's one of the reasons that it is actually, you know, some people who don't grow up with robust, you know, religious traditions think, well, you know, we'll just let our children decide for themselves when they get to be 18 or whatever. I do think that does a fundamental disservice to children because it's very important early on that you are able to locate yourself relative to that horizon of the transcendent, to something

worth living for. And, you know, whether that's in this form of a story or the love of your parents or, you know, beauty or music or community or whatever the case may be. And so, so I think that, that, you know, very, very early on, I mean, you know, children, you know, I was with a family with a young, sort of three and a half year old over the weekend. And it's very interesting to see the girl wanted to imitate her mother and want to help her mother and was worried, you know, was her mother not been feeling well or, you know, are you okay and so on and so forth? I think, you know, very, very deep in us is a longing to find our purpose through, because that finding the purpose requires the sacrifice only through which you're able to

give yourself to that which is highest and best. And so that all forms of reciprocity. I mean, what could you point to that was meaningful that didn't at some level have a kind of sacrifice, but we don't always regard it as sacrifice because we know that in that we're finding a meaning that transcends ourselves. And it's why you see, you know, you see it with great bands, you know, and as a collective, they are incredible. But when you break them apart and they go, well, it's all about me now, I'm going to have this amazing solo career. most of the time they fail, because what they don't understand is when you have a collective, it helps you to transcend, and it helps you to balance out the things in yourself that maybe prevent you from transcending.

So it's so well said, because you might say at the simplest level, what does this mean? Like what advice would you give someone who, and this is, I think, actually true. If you're depressed or lonely or whatever, you can spend all day. You can spend all day thinking about. yourself. You can spend all day thinking, oh, you know, what are my real problems? And we're going to go a little deeper into my history and a little more, you know, excavation of my childhood. And I'm not, I'm not saying we shouldn't think about ourselves. But you can spend all day and just feel worse at the end. I mean, try go, try, you know, just look around you and think of one thing you can do for

someone else. I don't know what it is. Go to an old folks home. Go, go volunteer to shelter. Maybe it's actually very simple. It's go do something for the person you're living with that you're too goddamn selfish to think of in this moment and then see how you feel. Spend just one or two days doing two or three things a day and then see how you feel. And I think what that does is it not only illustrates what the fundamental limits of a self-oriented selfish view, but it also practically provides you with the beginnings of habit that can open the world up for you in the way that you're saying. I think that sports analogy is in fact very good.

That, you know, you can have the best basketball or football player in the world who can't win the title because, you know, one man can't take on five or whatever the, whatever sport we're talking of. And one of the things we've talked a lot about in this conversation and more broadly is Western civilization. What is that, Steve? What is Western civilization? You do have an act for asking the impossible questions. Well, you know, I would give you two answers. On the one hand, I think, you know, it's a very, it's a very broad phenomenon that that encompasses in a certain sense it starts with the Greeks and that it goes through, it takes up very much Christian culture and Jewish, in certain places in times Islamic, it's a certain sense in which

it then becomes a kind of worldwide phenomenon in a way. But why is that? And what is it really about such that it is able to do that? And that's the second thing I want to say. And that is, I think at its most fundamental, you can put this different ways, you could say that What civilization is about the individual? But what does that mean? Because what does it mean to be about the individual? What it is really premised on is the idea that the human individual, by his or her own nature,

is connected with reality in a way that, so you could take rationality, for example. What does it mean that we are able to think for ourselves? It means that we are able to connect by our own natural faculties, our own abilities, our own what's in us, is able to help us unlock what's really out there. And so, you know, we see this in some sense, one of the most, to give you two examples of this. You see this in the Greeks, and for example, in Homer, you have this sense that Odysseus, the hero, as he's finding his way through all the difficulties and challenges and through his own

stupidity and pride and so on, that the principle of his homecoming, his being, able to come home, is being able to, to, as you might, putting it earlier, Francis, to be able to subordinate himself to a wider whole or good. That is to say, he starts out very proud and very much, you know, disdainful of Poseidon. He's a rationalist. He might say he's not quite fair to he does he call him a rationalist, but he's confident in his own abilities, let's say. and he's disdainful of Poseidon, which is kind of like brute necessity or nature or whatever. And it's a long story, but fundamentally,

he can only, the principle of his homecoming is needing to recognize the opposite of what he starts with. And so he has to, in a way, come to contain the whole of the cosmos in principle in his own subjectivity. So what you see in Homer is this relation between, between Odessius and Athena, and Athena, the goddess Athena, and Athena as participating in, you might say, the council of Zeus. You might say an account of the cosmos that in which all of the disparate parts or powers are reconciled into dynamic unity. And something very similar is going

on in the first words of the Gospel of John. You know, in the beginning was the word. And the word was God, and there was nothing made except through the word. What does that mean? It means that the cosmos, everything is inherently intelligible. That doesn't mean that we understand everything. But what it means is that in principle, the world is understandable, and we are understanding agents. So I think fundamentally, this is the premise of Western civilization,

that the individual matters because the individual is connected with what is most real. And we can put that in terms of truth or beauty or the sacrifices we make to get there. But you have to ask yourself, you know, what are fundamental human rights premised on? I mean, if you don't have the ability to make, like, actually the ability to navigate and decide for yourself, we shouldn't have any rights. You shouldn't have any, you know, let's put it, you should not be delegated the choices for yourself if you do not have the choice-making faculty within you. And so, you know, at its most fundamental, you know, the Western Civilization,

is based on something like the idea that human beings are made in the image of God. And you can put that in a theological framework. We can also put it in a philosophical one or in an economic or market-based one. It really fundamentally means that we, ourselves, by our own nature, have within us a connection to the principles that govern the entire cosmos. And why has this idea of what I call the sanctity of the individual? Why has this idea allowed the West to be as successful as a husband? Because it feels to me that whenever we talk about the West, when I was in Australia,

they asked me to talk about this and I was feeling my way towards some kind of answer. That what we've lost is the ability to know deep down why the idea that you do, just described is directly connected to the outcomes that we experience and would hope to preserve. So how does that work? Why is the idea that you and I and Francis and everybody listened to this has worth and value in and of themselves? How does that translate into economic success, military success, geographical, in all of that? Well, I said, quickly, I said two reasons fundamentally. The first is that, you know, if you treat people in a degrading way, you know, you coerce them, you take away their agency, you enslave them, whatever.

Well, they don't like it very much, you know? And, you know, I mean, I'm not trying to be cute here. I mean, that, just what that does to your own psyche, to your own sense of yourself, I mean, of course it's going to make you less productive, either because you don't have the choices that you would otherwise make if you were free, or because you've been abused and demeaned in such a way that you no longer can realize that agency. So that's one reason. And then, you know, to put it positively, you know, it's simply a fact. I mean, this is why, you know, complex systems can't be centrally managed. It's why, you know,

free markets are ultimately, you know, broadly speaking within the rule of law and so on with certain incentive structures and so on, why they are far more efficient, why they produce far more wealth. And that has fundamentally to do with the fact that you are you are delegating or you are distributing the decision-making power at the level that the information is. And that's just how reality works. I mean, you know, you can take, give a number of kinds of examples, but it's the principle that enables the maximum discovery and creation of value at every level. It's true economically, but it's also true relationally. I mean, what? Someone who lives over there is going to tell me, you know, whether I should get married into whom,

or whether I should pray and how, or what kind of a house I want to live in, or what kind of music I want to make, or what kind of world I want my children to grow up in. What I'm trying to say is that this isn't just a kind of ideal or kind of, well, it's one way of doing things among others. I'm saying this idea is powerful because it's true, because it's actually representative of the fundamental nature of human beings and their relation to the world. And it's not just human beings. I mean, you can take other examples.

You can take, you know, imagine it's tending a plant, an apple tree or whatever. I mean, you know, that can't be done remotely. It's only here, right? It's only here. You have to feed this one in this way in order for it to grow with the right kind of sunlight and so on. So what I'm trying to say is that there's no one-size-fits-all solution for human beings other than to affirm their particularity in their own. realization of themselves. Of course, there's a universal human nature in the sense that all human

beings have that in them, but it can only be, by definition, realized in free in particular ways. Do you think that's part of the reason as well why our civilization and our culture appears far more stable than communist societies, for example, totalitarian societies, authoritarian societies, where they broadcast the appearance of stability and strength, but deep down they're fundamentally unstable. I think that's well said, and I think that brings out two points. And one is that this is why the rule of law is so important to financial stability, for example, people don't trust that their banks, the money they put in their bank is still going to be there tomorrow.

you know, a lot follows from that. Like the entire society begins to crumble in any kind of complex way. And so on the one hand, you need that kind of bedrock stability, I would say, which the tradition of free agency of individual rights and freedoms and common law here in England and so on,

everything, all of that follows from that. But there's another sense in which Western civilization is way less stable. And that's in a mostly good sense, And that is that, you know, free and independent human beings, they're always creating, they're always destabilized, and they're always asking why. They're always saying, oh, you know, we've done it this way in the past, but maybe we could do it this way. And so, you know, one of the amazing things about Western civilization is how unbelievably productive

and in that sense, unstable it has been. So if I go back, it's only 2,500 years ago that, you know, the ancient Greeks, you know, we're talking about Plato and so on, from now to here, I mean, look at what has happened in that. There were millennia in Egypt, from what I can tell, in which it was fundamentally stable, right? I mean, how can you tell this year apart from that year? Now, I'm not an Egyptologist, so I'm very ignorant about this. But there is a sense of which you have thousands of years of stability. What we've had in the West is a very short period, fundamentally in terms of the human species,

a very short period that has been unbelievably dynamic. an unbelievably dynamic precisely because it has unlocked the power of that free agency in relation to the kind of stability that enables that unlocking to take place. And I think the dangerous moment that we're in is that there is now this accepted narrative that this Western civilization is evil and disgusting and it must be dismantled Without actually understanding the ramifications of what it means to dismantle our civilization. Completely right. I mean, what the hell do people mean when they say that?

I mean, what do they really mean? Let me give you an example. When I was a boy, my family moved from Western Canada. We lived in the frontier, you might say, in Alberta, to all the way to the Far East, to Prince Edward Island, and about an old fixer upper house that had been a farmhouse built in 1867, I think it was, and there had been a modern porch added to the house and wasn't very well done. And so my dad wanted to make that part of the house. And so it was Mother's Day, 1984, I think.

He was a big six-foot-five guy. He took out his sledgehammer. He just, you know, he was huge and strong. He just went to town on this wall and, you know, wood and, you know, debris flying everywhere and got everything clear. out and there was this one post and he just started hammering on this post. And as the post began to come out, the entire roof of the house began to sag. And, you know, it's a simple metaphor. But the fact of the matter is, if you don't know what the load-bearing structures are, you shouldn't take a sledgehammer to them. And I think what we see in our own, in our own period is people

thinking, oh, well, you know, protection of property rights. Oh, well, and you can go down through the list. What does this matter? Let's knock that one out. Not that at a certain point. the house falls down. And I think we're actually at a point in which the assault on things that are holding up the entire edifice, our trust in each other, our ability to provide for ourselves, our ability to live in safety, our ability to navigate complex geopolitical environments, those very things are, I would say, existentially at risk. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story.

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It's joinbleve.com, spelled B-L-I-V. So if you've been curious about G-L-P-1's, joinBleave.com might be a good place to start. But I would put it to, Stephen, in your father's case, he, I am sure, would have noticed a roof sagging and stopped hammering at the pole. The problem is, I think, that when we live in a large society, there are different agents with different motivations. And quite a lot of the people who've been allowed to be knocking down some of these poles, they're not motivated, as your father was, by their desire for improvement. They're motivated by a sense of deep nihilism and self-loathing. It feels to me, just as an outside observer who came here from a different society, when I see people gleefully ripping down things that, and it's not just like, look,

I think the contemporary examples we might give is, you know, statues of slave owners, let's say, it's a contentious history. We're sitting here in Westminster a hundred yards away from the statue of Winston Churchill, which was dogged with the words was a racist. Like, these are, if you want to think about the core, belief structure of what it is to be English or what it is to be British, most people would view Winston Churchill as like the bedrock of that. And to see that happen. And then, this is the more important bit, the police response, which was just to board it up. There was no real defense.

It was more like, oh, police don't hurt us. That, to me, is telling of something completely different. This is not well-motivated people trying to, you know, build a new porch. This is people. This is people who just don't like the house at all. I think that's well said, and you're right, I should have added to the story that my father stopped hammering and called in a contractor, and they had a steel beam put in to replace that one. And they beautifully and slowly and painstakingly

renovated this old farmhouse over many years. So you're right to say there was a responsible and positive ethic present there. And I do think that with the iconoclasm or destruction of the moment, there is, you know, there's something very evil. I mean, let's use the word at work. I mean, it's inert, it's impotent, it's destructive, it leads to only net loss. Can I stop you there?

You use the word evil. First of all, what do you mean by that word? And why do you use it? Because that's a very strong word to use, because there'd be other people who go, well, this is misguided or this is just, you know, kids being kids or whatever else. Why did you use the word evil? Well, I think that it's important to use words carefully, and, you know, one could have a very interesting conversation about what the statute, what is evil, you know, what is evil versus good? What do we mean by those words? And we should have that, the word time is limited today. But I suppose I want to use that word for a very simple reason, and that is to register the net destructive character of what is being done. You know, there are, there are, there are, times when you say, well, you know, someone meant well and so on, and that is true. And I think

it's actually very important to be sympathetic with people whose motives, frankly, we don't, we don't understand. But it is also possible. I mean, if you see someone, I don't know, the abuse of a child, for example, to take somebody that's just incontestably evil, it's important to call that by its name. It's important to acknowledge the stakes of the moment rather than being caught up in, an endless kind of, you know, quibbling of nuance. Oh, well, this. And I love thinking. I love nuance. I love trying to get to the complexity of, it's not just two sides, it's often 20 sides of an issue. Let's get into that. It's the only way we can get an adequate answer to any real problem. But we should never let that desire to grasp the details and the complexity of things

to close us off from fundamental, you might say, existential. reality. Like, you know, you get this kind of way in which you can, you can end up equivocating about something and you end up sort of saying, well, I guess that's true too and that's true there. And you have to end up assenting to something that's just wrong and that you know is wrong. And so you have to let your thinking be in touch with that. And let me say one other thing about this. And that is that on the one hand, I think we have to be very clear about things we think are really profoundly destructive. Because if we're not, well, you know, you do end up, you can burn it all down. You can knock out all the pillars holding everything up. What are we going to have left?

I mean, this isn't a moment for endless equivocation or pacification of elements of contemporary life that are profoundly destructive. I also want to say that it is nonetheless precisely because the stakes are so high, it is nonetheless very important to understand what is going on. And being a reactionary is not understanding them. You actually, if you cannot account for why someone is taking down that statue, like really figure out, because people don't do things without motives. I mean, is it just self-interest or cynicism or whatever or, or masquerading in the public sphere or getting clicks or likes? The point I'm making is if you can't really understand it, you can't possibly hope to have an answer that will transcend it. And, you know, maybe this is appropriate just to quickly say that

I was once on a, there's a story that I think is illustrative. I was once in an airplane sitting next to a woman who had, as we've got to talking, had adopted two children from a very profoundly dysfunctional home in which the, just a very sad story, which the mother was unable to care for her children at all. And she would say, well, no, baby doesn't want to be picked up. You can tell her doesn't like being picked up. So it was a very sad and dysfunctional home. And so they adopted both a girl and a boy from this home. And the two children exhibited, you might say, opposite forms of a kind of a detachment disorder. And, you know, that's to say, they had grown up in a situation profoundly alienated from the kinds of human connection that are

like the bedrock of being a human being. And in the girls case, it took the form of wanting to be like constantly, even inappropriately, always in physical touch with her parents, right? Because she was so hungry for that. And that's, it's very sad to see. I'm glad to say that both of these children sort of stabilized over the years of stable and functional love that their parents gave them. But in the boys' case, it took the opposite form.

And that was of saying, no, no, I don't need, I don't need, I don't need, I don't need, I don't I need your affection. I don't need your love, which in a sense is even sadder. And the reason I tell the story is because I think that in a way we have both of these responses to the crisis of meaning at present today. And the one hand, you have the sense of immediacy. Like, I will create myself. I will change my gender. I will do. I can, I can, through my own existential will bring about any, you know, I can, I want it and I want it now. But in the other hand, you have this profound iconoclasm or dyscynicism saying, no, I don't need

these things. And so I think at a 50,000 foot level, when you see people tearing things down, you know, things of beauty or you know, whether it's First Amendment or sculptures or statues or you think you have to stop and ask why.

Like what is really going on here? And I think that we can say for sure one thing about that. That you don't have young people lighting your cities on fire and tearing them down and saying they hate your fundamental political structures if they have come to love them. And so I think that we need to take a hard look at ourselves and say, you know, how did we get here? Because this is a fundamental failure of stewardship of our civilization. I mean, if your parents, if your children end up hating you

and hating your home and hating anything you can come from, they're going to say, well, where did I go wrong? I mean, I have these great inheritances and whether it's wealth or religion or customs or tradition or whatever, and I completely failed to give them to the next generation. You might say if the mama bears don't teach the baby bears how to hunt and be a bear, there's no more bears.

And at a fundamental level, that's where we are. So I am myself, I'm tired of hearing conservatives act, small-see conservatives, I'm not a political person, but small-see people who say they believe in transmitting the wisdom of the past to the next generation, criticize as if simply this is the case that we don't know, look what the progressive left or whatever has done to us. I mean, that's just a victimhood mentality that they're supposed to say that they don't like. I'm tired of this idea that somehow there's not a deeper architectonic responsibility. for the transmission of culture that we as a society as a West have radically failed to fulfill. Well, you would say that as president of Ralston College that does the exact opposite of the thing you're criticizing and the very thing that you advocate for and very well too. I have said many times that if I ever retire, which is highly unlikely, I would definitely

love to take a course with you guys because they look so interesting. However, the question I want to ask you is, is it possible? that this is something that isn't about the West? Is it possible that when I look around at the world and I see that there's a population crisis in non-Western countries? They're not reproducing themselves either. Is it possible that this is just the material conditions of humanity for many, many people as such that we're just too, we've got it too good now and it's literally too good.

and that if life is suffering and we're no longer suffering, then we invent mental suffering that prevents us from doing the physical suffering, which actually prevents us from moving forward. And so the only places that are replenishing themselves are places where people are still struggling, Africa and others developing parts of the world. And this isn't, I mean, the Western story is part of it, but actually just as humanity, we've just got it so good. It's too good now. Well, I think that's a powerful analysis.

I think it's probably largely right. And I think we need to be alert to the fact that though, on the one hand, we can give this genealogy of an ideological analysis of our present day. That's by no means the only reality. There are huge material, cultural, and technological realities that are like tsunamis, sweeping across the entire world. I mean, one of them is a good thing. It's plenty.

It's technology that has enabled us to feed us. ourselves more readily than just a hundred years ago. There are other forms of material cultural change that ease with which people can move around. I got over here from the United States in just a few hours compared to what that would have been a very dangerous and months-long journey that very few people would ever have undertaken. And what that means is that my great grandfather grew up not too far from here in a town in death. Anyway, the point is that for most of human history, though of course, of course, there was a global economy in some way, even in the ancient world. Of course, of course, people could travel and make long journeys to other cities and travel across Europe and so on.

It is actually the case that for most of human history, people lived within a circumference, you know, a radius that they could easily walk there and back in a day. And what is that? You know, an hour this way and an hour back? I mean, what is that three miles out? And so what that means is that, you're just as a fact of all times and places in human history until recently, our lives were constituted in relation to a more local reality of people, of places, of climate, of foods, of language, of metaphor, and so on. And that's been, I mean, just think about this.

It's been radically changed in the last seven or 80 years. And so the sense of dislocation, that people have, that's not simply, you can't simply blame, I don't know, Marx or Freud or Nietzsche or something for this, though they are articulators of that in a way. You have to say, well, hold on, we're living in situations that human beings have actually never on a global scale faced before. Let's take another quick example of technology, and that's the devices we all have in our pockets. And the ways in which these devices are algorithmically optimized, to exploit our dopaminergic cycles such that, you know, they do things to our brains,

that we are effectively powerless to resist, except by a radical act of consciousness, say, no, I'm just going off the phone, I'm deleting all these apps, whatever. But otherwise, you end up in a situation in which, you know, it's constantly out of your pocket. This is the whole business proposition of these, of these, you know, multi-billion-dollar companies, is the exploitation of your attention. The point I'm making is that nothing in human history, nothing has prepared us evolutionarily for devices that are designed to co-opt our attention in so powerful a way. And of course, this is clearly related to the meaning crisis because, you know, people are trying to live through phones rather than in relation to the persons that are across the table from them. And so I'm simply trying to say that there are very, there are material, cultural, and economic forces that have nothing obvious to do with ideology,

that are vastly determining our present moment and the challenges and opportunities of it. And they are not remotely limited to any kind of crisis in Western civilization. But I would say that the remedy to the crisis of meaning in China is similar to the remedy for the crisis of meaning in the United States or in the UK or wherever. Coming back to the point about human nature, you know, the thing about ideologies, it seems to me that, if you look at certain very influential ideologies that we've already mentioned, you know, communism, fashion, etc., they were obviously a response to the industrial and revolution and technological changes that caused all sorts of processes within society. So I remember thinking of this a long time ago when I used to do stand-up. The reason that joke works is not only that it's a good joke and it's well-written,

there has to be something in the person that you're speaking to that recognizes the joke, right? If you write a great joke about something that the person doesn't know about, it's not going to work. And ideology seems to me to be working in the same way. The reason that, you know, neo-people have talked a lot about neo-Marxism, but the reason that it's having an impact must be something to do with where we are materially and so societally and culturally. It can't, it's not just, it's not like, There's this narrative on the right, which is like, you know, these evil Marxists have taken

over the university and they've brainwashed our kids, which I agree with. Like, that has happened, but that isn't what's caused. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. No, no, I think that's very, it's very well put. I mean, you can look at long stretches in the late Roman Empire, where what you have is a kind of, you know, massive regime that is very, that is very hard for an individual on the ground to find a meaningful life within, right? So it's a huge kind of like behemoth. There's no care for the individuals. So it's very interesting at that time. Broadly speaking, you have these Hellenistic philosophies emerging of stoicism and Epicureanism and skepticism. You know, because what those really are are ways of individuals trying to navigate this huge

unfriendly reality and say, well, wait, how can I find some self-possession or peace or or or atorexia that is one of the words they use, you know, a kind of freedom from all of this contingency and the madness of the world. So, of course, I think it makes sense that in an age in which these larger structures or vehicles of meaning have been deconstructed, that you should have people,

I mean, can you blame people for thinking, I'm just trying to figure out where the meaning is here? And this is one, you know, of course we all know there's a sense in which, you know, some of these movements or they are, you know, cynical, totalitarian, you know, neo-Marxist, whatever. But that doesn't mean that the people who are finding, thinking that there's truth in them, that they are that way.

It may be that, you know, say, you know, BLM, for example, it may be, and I think it actually is the case, that there were millions of people who were moved by that because they thought, it actually isn't right. These, you know, that there were kids in this inner city who are, you know, being shot up by gang violence. There's something wrong there. anyone with a modicum of an appreciation or love or desire for justice can recognize that. And if no one else is talking about justice in a way that is adequate or powerful, then the ones who are making some point, however, you know, problematically or cynically

or whatever that it may be taken to be, well, then of course that's where someone is going to say, well, hold on, there's a real point here. And so, you know, I think what's important is that is that we acknowledge that underneath, here's another example, you know, there's a way with some of the woke stuff that, you know, it's always a, it's giving an account of why you feel like a victim or why you feel that you've been, you, and well, so, of course, I mean, you, everyone, in count, everyone has at some point been damaged or hurt by others or, you know, that's the, that's the sad truth of a finite world. I mean, we all grow up with wounds and some, some of us with terrible ones. And, and, and then, the question is, well, how do we understand those? And if we don't have, as you were saying earlier, Francis, a framework that actually allows us to understand this in a big sense, and tries a story of suffering and redemption and of triumph over adversity and love for others and forgiveness and your big things, well, then of course, you might end up with a much shallower account. Like, I'm a victim and these people should be destroyed. And so I think that the sympathy,

we need to step back so we can actually understand the mechanism. of how these ideologies are unfolding, the reasons people are taking them up. And only then could we provide, you might say, a more substantial and adequate alternative that would transcend the very problematic and destructive outcomes those ideologies are having on the ground. Stephen, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much. Before we go over to locals, where our supporters get to our supporters get to our

ask you their questions, we always end the show in the same way, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Before Stephen answers, when the interview is over, make sure you head on over to locals, click the link in the description to see this. Is religion the only true lifelong solution to the crisis of meaning, or are there secular alternatives? And if so, what are they? I think there's a very important moment that we're living in culturally, historically,

right now, and that's artificial intelligence. Do you think one can simply choose to believe in God in a kind of Christian utilitarianism, or must we inherently be believers of the divine for it to fulfill us and lead us to a meaningful life? I'm going to go with human nature. What is a human being? We don't even answer, a real answer to that question. We don't have a hope and hell of fostering or building a culture that can be adequate

to those things we call human beings. What is a human being? A human being is on the one side an animal that has material needs and so on. We can never neglect that reality. We're not the brains and a bat. But it is an animal that is self-conscious and that needs to understand itself in relation to this horizon of the transcendentals we've been talking about, truth, beauty, goodness, and so on. And so I'll just say quickly that, you know, I live in Savannah where

We have these beautiful oak trees, live oak trees, and every year in the season, the oaks put off these acorns, hundreds of thousands of acorns around the city. Well, every single one of those acorns is potentially a magnificent oak tree, but almost none of them become oak trees. And why is that? Well, because they don't have the conditions for the realization of that potential. They don't get in the right place in the ground with the light water and sunlight and so on. Now, by extension, human beings have a nature, right? They have a potential.

Each individual has a potentiality to become something great. And that could be great at any number of different ways. And I don't mean that they're all going to be Bach or Churchill or something. It can be people who love, people who live lives that are meaningful. But that potentiality is not inevitable that it will be realized. And if we don't have a robust sense of, let's call it, the nature, the spiritual nature of the human being as an entity that needs to understand itself on a horizon of beauty and truth and goodness and so on, then we can't possibly foster a culture that enables that realization. Stephen, thank you so much. Join us on locals where you get to ask Stephen your questions.

How did Aristotle manage to be right about almost everything? Thank you.