Well, I'm pleased today to be talking to Ben Shapiro
Ben I think really doesn't need an introduction at least not to most of you who will be there watching or listening to this given
That he's now one of the most recognized individuals on the american political
journalism scene in any case
Ben's an American Lawyer writer journalist and political commentator. He's written 10 books
The latest of which is the right side of history a reason and moral purpose made the West great
Which has become a number one New York Times bestseller. I think it's at number four right now
I
think Ben just mentioned to me that he sold about a hundred and fifty thousand copies since it was released and that was only a
Couple of weeks ago so that's going very well. He became the youngest nationally syndicated column in the u.s. At age 17
he's also one of the most recognized current commentators on the new media YouTube and
Podcasts serves as editor in chief for The Daily wire which he founded and is the host of the Ben Shapiro show
which runs daily on podcast and radio
He's managed to transform himself into a one-man media empire and it's quite the accomplishment done
He's also an extraordinarily interesting person
I think to fall Omaha to watch in his interactions with people publicly because he's an unbelievably sharp debater and one of the
Fastest verbally fastest people that I've ever met. So it's good. We're gonna talk about his book today
That's the right side of history. How reason and moral purpose made the West great and I can tell you right there
there's four reasons for social justice types to be irritated just if the
Just at there
What would you call it the daring of the title? So let's talk about it
Tell me about your book
The reason that I wrote the book is because in 2016, I kind of looked around and
For the record I didn't vote for either of the presidential candidates in 2016
Neither of them met my minimum standard to be President based on the evidence and I looked at
The sort of attitude that had changed in America used to be that we'd have elections and they were really fraught people were angry
Other people were upset each other but the rage seemed almost out of control in the last election cycle in 2016
I was personally receiving enormous number of death threats for my positions on
Politics I was receiving enormous amount of hatred from the the alt-right
I know that there are some of the media like the economists who have falsely labeled me outright
Which is hilarious to me since I've been their most outspoken critic for several years at this point and that year in 2016
I was their number one target according to the anti-defamation league
One of those tricky enough to be part of the alt-right and also their enemy, right? No we Jews man
Various
Yeah
In any case. Yeah, I was receiving all sorts of blowback for that at the same time
I was going on college campuses and being protested to the extent that I was requiring hundreds of police officers to accompany me on
At certain college campuses and I started to think
There is something deeply wrong here and it's not just that we are disagreeing with each other
it's that there's a certain level of hatred and tribalism that's building up in American politics that I hadn't really seen before there was a
feeling like
Even back as late as 2009 that America was moving in the right direction. You post Obama's election
There was a feeling like, okay. Well, we have the same fundamental principles. We're trying to perfect those principles
We may disagree over the ramifications of those principles. Some of us may want more government involved in health care
So must want less some of us may want more regulations in markets
Some of us may want less or redistribution ism or non or non redistribution ISM
But the the fundamental principles things like free speech things like the inherent value of the individual
Things like the idea that I'm supposed to
Generally respect your right to your own labor
these these were all things that we sort of agreed on and then we were trying to broaden that out to encompass further groups and
As time moved on it seemed like we were moving away from a lot of those fundamental assumptions
He started to see rises in the opioid epidemic in suicide rates
He started to see a general level of unhappiness crop up that was reflected in the political tribalism
I was feeling but wasn't reflected more general as more generally in
actual lowered life
Expectancy in the United States for the first time in decades and I started to think there's an actual deeper problem wrong here
Than just we disagree on politics. There's something deeply wrong here. We don't trust our institutions anymore by poll data
Most of us don't know or trust all of our neighbors all of this stuff speaks to a dissolution of the social fabric
So why is that happening? What's and this is nearly unjustifiable. I mean if you look at us just from a material prosperity level
It's unjustifiable. If you look at us from a political freedom level it's unjustifiable
We are the freest most prosperous people in the history of the world and yet we're totally pissed off at each other all the time
and we're filling that that hole with anger and with social mobbing on online and with woke scolding and
And where's all this coming from?
and that led me to to write the book which
essentially argues that
We've forgotten the foundations of our civilization the principles we used to holding calm and have deep roots
and when we forget those roots we tend to move away from the principles themselves, and this is
Manifested in what I think is the great debate over Western civilization right now one side
Which says Western civilization was rooted in good eternal immutable truths that were not always perfectly realized and that over time
We have we have moved toward greater realization of and that's why the West is great
That's why the West has provided material prosperity to the vast majority of the globe
It's why 80 percent of people have been raised from abject poverty since 1980
It's why you've seen this this massive increase in the number of people who are living in decent conditions
It's also why you see a rise in democracy a rise in political liberalism. Small small-l kind of classical liberalism
all of this is the results of the West and so we ought to thank the West and we got to look back to the
roots and see what is there worth preserving and then there's a that seems I would say to be a viewpoint that would have broadly
characterized both
Conservatives and classic liberals as far as I'm concerned no research. That's right
and
then there's the second point of view and the second point of view has cropped up and become very prominent in the West in the
last
couple of decades
Particularly since the 1960s and that perspective is that Western civilization is really just a mask for hierarchy that basically there's a bunch of power
Hierarchies and subjugate sub and not natural hierarchies
forcible oppressive hierarchies white people against black people rich people against poor people
the powerful against the non powerful the 1% against the 99% and all of these institutions things like the
Things like the things like free speech itself things like free markets
These are actually just excuses for domination and subjugation. They're not actual principles. We hold to they're not important principles
in fact
those principles have to be
rooted out so that we can have a better humanity bloom in the wake of all of this now in my perspective this takes for
granted all of the prosperity
It seems to assume that the natural state of man is
Prosperity and freedom when in fact the natural state of man is misery and short life
Okay, so that's an interesting thing right there that I've been thinking about quite a bit. It's as if the radical left I
mean there's denial on the radical left of let's say
Biological differences between men and women right? Everything's socio-culturally constructed that seems to me to be rooted in an even deeper
denial of biology and nature in a more fundamental sense
I mean the left worships nature as something intrinsically positive
you see that reflected in the more radical forms of
environmentalism and some of the more toxic anti humanism that goes along with that like the idea that
We're a cancer on the face of the planet or that the world would be better off if there weren't human beings on it
but what seems to not be part of that which is quite surprising to me is any recognition that although
Nature is let's call it at least or inspiring
Which also includes the positive it's also now unbelievably deadly force and the the truth of the matter
is that the natural state of human beings is privation and want right from birth and
to blame
What and what seems to happen so often on the radical left is that that's ignored entirely
it's as if the natural state of human beings is
Plenty and delight delight in existence and that all of
The terrible things that happen to people in their lives are actually can be laid at the feet of faulty social institutions
it's like three is such a strange position given that the
evidence that nature is trying to do us in on a regular basis is
Overwhelming I don't know if the if the left is so
positively inclined in a romantic manner
towards the idea of nature because that strengthens their position that all of the pathology that
characterizes the world can be laid at the feet of
institutions and particularly capitalist institutions
But it still seems to me to be
It's a strange phenomenon. Well, it's it's strange and it's and it's obviously
Ignorant, but I think there's something else that that really is going on here. The Marxist of today are
Arguing many of them are arguing that what they're really wanting is greater shared material prosperity
I don't think that that's actually what's capturing the minds of people right now
I think what's actually capturing the lines of people was the spiritual promise of Marxism the idea that Marx lays out
even in the communist manifesto
When he is talking about the transformation of man in his initial argument is that markets war people that people who have become?
Meaner and cruder and ruder and more terrible because of markets because they are self-interested in that the markets emphasize
Self-interest as opposed to altruism and therefore if you got rid of markets
Then you could exist in greater peace and prosperity and plenty
Because human beings themselves would transform so it's not that the system itself would create greater material prosperity
It's that in the initial run. It probably would create more privation
It's that in the long run
Human beings would be transformed in their souls by all of this and then they would feel greater
Bonds to the people around them. That was the spiritual promise of Marxism
I think that that's I at root what a lot of people in the West are resonating
ok, so that's that's a hope for something like
Well, it's almost like a religious Redemption. Yes
It's a strange thing to you know, I'm preparing for this debate that I'm going to have with Slava g-shock on April 19th
and I've been trying to think it through and one of the things that's really struck me is that
Not only are the solutions that Marxist
Marxism offers
Error ridden to say the least given the historical evidence and and I just don't see how anybody can deny that
Although people certainly do but that the problem that the Marxists originally identified seems to actually to be vanishing
I mean as you already pointed out
There's unparalleled increase in material prosperity among
Not only among the rich which you could complain about if you were concerned about inequality
but among the poorest people in the world like we have
absolute material privation based on UN standards by 50% between the year 2000 and
2012 and the cynics say that's because we set the standard for material privation too low, which is dollar ninety a day
But if you look at the curves
that you can generate at
Levels of three dollars and 80 cents a day or seven dollars and sixty cents a day
You see exactly the same thing happening and you see rapid increases in
Economic growth in sub-saharan Africa, like, you know 7% growth rates
which are more typically characteristic say of China or India and and
And that's manifested in
unbelievably positive
statistical evidence such as not suggesting that now the
Child mortality rate in Africa is the same as it was in Europe in 1952
And so the Marxists original complaint was that you know
the rich were going to get richer and the poor were going to get poorer and
that that would that could be laid at the feet of
capitalism just like the fact of hierarchy itself could be laid at the feet of capitalism and a
It's clear that capitalism although it does produce
Hierarchical inequality just like every other system that we know of it also produces wealth and that wealth is actually being very effectively
distributed to the people
You know, perhaps not primarily to the people who most need it
But to the people who most need it in ways that are truly mattering and so to me the entire the entire
Structure of Marxism is is it's it's an anachronistic. The problem is no longer
appropriately formulated and the solution tends to be deadly if
Counterproductive if not deadly. So it's it's
Maybe here here's something I've been thinking about too. You tell me what you think about this
You know
Some of it still has to do with the
Innate human emotional response to inequality, you know
When you walk down the street, you see a runed alcoholic schizophrenic who's obviously suffering in 50 different dimensions
It's very difficult to feel positive about the state of humanity in the world, and it's very easy for a reflexive
Compassion to take over and say well wouldn't it be something if we could just retool society so that none of that was necessary
It must be someone's fault
It must be something that we're not doing right and you know
There's some truth in that because of course our systems could be better than they are and and it seems to me to be that
unreflective
Compassion that drives whatever residual attractiveness that Marxism still has apart also from the darker
possibility which is that it really does appeal to the jealousy that's characteristic of people in the envy and
Which manifests itself as hatred for hierarchy on the basis that some people are doing better than me
You know
so I
think there's also there's also a
Failure on the part of advocates of the free-market to point out that free markets are good for what they are good for meaning that
the two things that are important to recognize about free markets 1
Free markets are there to create a generalized level of cheaper goods and better products at cheaper prices more widely available
That's what markets do and they do it brilliantly
Well, that doesn't mean that that that markets are there to take care of the person who is unable to work
I mean that's not something that markets are there to do it's something I talked about in the book the need for a social fabric
If you want a free market
You also have to have a social fabric that helps pick people up
Now people on the Left have said the government should be the air SATs social fabric
the government should pick those people up and in large-scale cases, maybe that needs to be the case, but
Usually it was religious communities and informal social fabrics that actually filled those gaps beyond that
there is a
Second problem and that is I hear a lot of populist on both left and right make the statement that we just need to
Make markets work for us and all I can think when I hear that is your funder Lima. You have fundamentally misunderstood
What a market is so Marxism is a set of values and then a system of economics crafted atop the set of values
so the set of values as you said before is that
Equality should trump prosperity and equality should from freedom that equality should trump everything
So if equality Trump said then the only way to make everyone equal is to turn them into in
Indistinguishable widgets controlled from above until we create an economic system to do that
There are principles that undergird free markets free markets are not a human
Construction free markets are a recognition that you are an individual human being in control of your own labor
That's simple understanding means that you cannot support any other form of a market now
You can support some form of redistribution ISM at the local level
You can try and urge people to be more moral by giving to their fellow man
But markets themselves are a recognition of a basic truth that Marxism rejects
Which is that freedom and individualism ought to trump and indeed need to trump the the need for equality
So the freedom versus equality battle is very much alive in our time
And because we have such freedom people tend toward equality
I think when you have we should talk about a little bit about equality - because there's two
important but there's two important modes of equality that are
that that have to be segregated and discussed separately because
people tend to confuse
Equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, right? I think that it's perfectly reasonable to be a free-market champion
let's say or at least an appreciator of
the utility of free markets and to be strongly in favor of equality of opportunity, which means that you try to
remove from the market system any
impediments to people
manifesting those talents that would make them effective and competent players in the
productive market itself
Not on the basis of the fact that that's counterproductive for everyone the individuals but also for everyone who could be benefiting from their talent
Yeah, that's absolutely true. And I think that's inherent in the idea of markets
It's why when people use terms like crony capitalism, I always think there's no such thing. There's there's corporate there
There's corporate corporate ISM, which is a better description of it
crony capitalism is a self refuting proposition capitalism and free markets are based on exactly what you're talking about because again,
The fundamental principle is I own my own labor
Which means that if you impede my ability to alienate that labor you are now interfering with my labor
So free markets are predicated on an idea of equality and rights and the idea of every human being
Made at is why I say there's a judeo-christian heritage to free markets
Every human being made in the in the image of God
Which I think is the single most important sentence written in the history of humanity
When you abandon the the we tend to think that these things naturally occurred
This is where you get into the Enlightenment argument. The Enlightenment argument is that you can just reason your way to these things
Well, you can reason your way to these things there
Also a lot of other things you can reason your way to including communism and fascism
The question is where what are your starting points?
What are the actual fundamental assumptions that you make about human beings and the nature of the world?
That you then apply reason to to arrive at something great
and
this is why I'm
not a fan of the the Enlightenment view that just if we start tabula rasa we can come up with exactly the system that we've
built today, I don't think that that's either historically accurate or philosophically accurate because
We see that human beings reach a wide variety of conclusions based on different premises
Well, it's also the case that it assumes that reason in fact in some sense can be complete in
Its ability to generate its own
Comprehensive axioms which can also be justified on rational grounds and it's not obvious to me that that's the case
I think that's why that founders of the Declaration of Independence were forced to say we find these truths to be self-evident
right, you have to have a starting point and this is something that I do believe that people like Steven Pinker who I have a
great amount of admiration for
are
make an error in their over valuation of the Enlightenment and and their
devaluation of the historical
What the vast historical epochs that produced the works of imagination?
that produced the axioms on which the Enlightenment could originally emerge and and you and I seem to agree I think very
Precisely on especially that phrase that you just used. I mean, I think there's two
statements in
The in genesis that are of equivalent importance actually
one of them maybe there's three one of them is that
What God used to create?
order Oh of
potential and chaos was something approximating a
process that was characterized by truth and courage and so there's a
There's an idea there and which is why I think God continually repeats after he creates day after day
That the creation was good
And so the idea is that if you face the potential of the world
Which is I think something that human beings do with their consciousness
I think that's what consciousness is for if you face the world with truth and courage then what you generate out of that field of
Possibilities is in fact good even though the price the print you may pay a price for the truth in the short term
it's an act of faith even in some sense, which
reflects that axiomatic presupposition that there's nothing that's going to improve the world more than
Forthright confrontation with the structure of reality and an attempt to abide by the truth and then you have that second statement
Which is a miraculous statement, I believe it's hard to see it as anything else
That both men and women are made in the image of God
We've we've already had gone established as the Creator and the Creator who creates in a certain
ethical manner and then that power or ability or virtue or privilege or
responsibility is
transferred to
human beings and it's transferred to men and women and I also find out actually quite stunning, you know, because there's no shortage of
postmodern
feminist criticism of the judeo-christian tradition
Claiming that it's fundamentally oppressive and patriarchal and yet right at the beginning you have this
incredible statement which which seems to fly in the face of its of the
Anachronistic nature of the document stating that it's not just men that are made in the image of God
it's men and women and that's and that's
It isn't obvious to me how that conclusion was reached so long ago
Yep, that's that's exactly right and it's also important to note that historically speaking if you look at surrounding documents documents for Mesopotamia typically
The the actual language that was used the image of God language is actually not unique to the Bible exist in other cultures
But it was always the king who was made in the image of God, right?
So the people who are most powerful who are mainly that extension of that to all human beings is a unique moment in in philosophical
History and as you say the idea that God has created an orderly universe and that we have the capacity to act out within that
Universe and to see God from behind so to speak that we can't necessarily see his face
but we can see sort of the general outline of what he is intending and then
Another verse from Genesis that I think is deeply important is from the Cain and Abel story the verse where God says to Cain Tim
Shell that you have the ability to do better than this
Stephanie says, you know I why didn't you accept my sacrifice and God says well 10 your control
you know go out and do something about it and then of course came rejects that and it's
That story is so deep and I think it really is the story of what's happening right now
Exactly you have
God's reaction. The Cain is that I rejected you because you could do better
Right, and that's actually a kind of compliment even though you know
If you're not offering up the proper sacrifices and things aren't working out for you
It might not be the kind of compliment that you want to hear but it is a testament to the potential of the human
Spirit and so you're making the case in your book
And and this is the this isn't what would you call an injunction an encouragement to the Enlightenment types?
to look to their
Axioms and to think hard about how it could be that the idea of individual democratic freedom. For example
and all of the wonderful explicit political
ideas that came out of the Enlightenment could have possibly
emerged and I do agree that
you have to have that initial conception of the individual as sovereign and that that sovereignty has to be associated with something akin to
recognition of divinity at least
insofar as what's regarded as divine is regarded as the highest of all possible values and then it is absolutely
Surprising as you pointed out that not only is the idea of the image of God extended to men and women
But that it is not
Explicitly not the domain of kings
Who in fact might be more at risk for?
abandoning their actions as
Avatars of God so to speak then those who are in privation, you know
You see that consistently in the Old Testament where the Kings are being taken to task
Constantly by prophets who do appear to speak more in the language of God
let's say and then you see it also in the New Testament with thee with the insistence that
the wealthy and powerful have
impediments to
Proper ethical action that those who are less materially fortunate might not face
Ya and that sematic is is present obviously in the old testement
There's actually a passage where it's talking about the sacrifices. I believe it's in the Book of Leviticus where it talks about bringing
accidental sin sacrifices and it talks about the common man and says if you shall sin then you bring the sacrifice and then it says
With regard to the Prince the nasi it says with regards to the Prince. The Hebrew word is cost share
It says when you will sit
so the assumption is that if you have great power the
chances of your sinning are going to be greater because you are going to conceive of yourself as higher than others and this is going
to lead you down a pretty
dark path
The the point with regard to the Enlightenment is that we actually have some counter evidence of the Enlightenment being awesome
All the way through if it is predicated solely on
Reason and not on a historic understanding of of these principles and that is the French enlightenment
I mean this was one of my key points when it when I was looking at a Pinker's book enlightenment now
But you again you and I agree on this. I have great enlightenment for pinker
I took a class with him when I was at Harvard Law School. He did a joint class with Alan Dershowitz
I was kind of fun, but
Pinker goes a
450 page book about the Enlightenment and he never mentions the French Revolution once
And I thought I don't know how that's historically possible to do
The Enlightenment was not just David Hume and Adam Smith and the American Founding Fathers the Enlightenment
Also was Russo and Voltaire and Robespierre and it was the and it was the German progressive enlightenment
That had a real dark side in
its
Human reason can lead you to a lot of different very bad places the the metaphor that I like to use with regard to Western
Civilization is that Western civilization is a suspension bridge and then on one
and it's over a river of as you would say chaos and on the one end of the bridge the big pole is
These fundamental assumptions you have to make about the nature of the world that I don't believe could be arrived at other than through some
Form of divine revelation. This would be the judeo-christian tradition and those principles are things like we have free choice
That's an assumption you have to make and is not implicit in scientific materialism the idea that history has a progressive nature you can improve
The world around you again. That is not a that that is reliant on an assumption
You have to make the idea that human beings are held to a morality that they themselves do not
Subjectively create out of emotional mean and that is something that you have to make an assumption about
The thing that the idea of objective truth itself is something you have to make an assumption about and that's an assumption that I think
can be made most
Specifically by the idea that there is a mind outside of us that creates that objective truth and stands behind an ordered universe
all of those are some
Judeo-christian values. I think there's evidence for much of this, you know
One of the things that I've been discussing with my audiences is like, you know
It depends obviously on what you're willing to take as evidence
but it isn't obvious to me at all that you can establish a functional relationship with yourself unless
you hold yourself responsible for your actions and you regard yourself as a
Free agent in at least in some regards like obviously we're not omniscient
Omnipresent and omnipotent that's clearly the case. We're subject to stringent limitations and there are
situations in which our actions
devolve into
Determinism that's obvious. Neurophysiological II. It has to be the way the world works
Is that once you execute a decision there comes to a point where that decision is
manifested in something approximating a deterministic manner
I think the evidence for that is overwhelming
But that doesn't mean that when you're looking out into the future and you're contemplating the many paths that you could take that
What you do to make your decisions then is deterministic in a simple in a simple manner
I think if that was the case, there'd be no need for consciousness at all
And then I look at how people react to themselves is we hold ourselves responsible
despite our own
inclination
for the sins that we
Manifest for the manners in which we wander off the path people wake up at 4:00 in the morning and they berate
themselves for the actions
they took that they knew they shouldn't and the in action that they manifested when they knew they should have acted and
If we were masters in our own house without that central moral compass
There'd be no reason at all for us to wake up and torture ourselves to death with our moral
inequity and if you have a friend or a family member and you insist upon treating them as if they're a
deterministic agent with no
Effect on the future and no responsibility for their choices. It's actually impossible to have a relationship with them
You can't even have a relationship with a two or three year old if you insist upon
Infantilizing them in that manner and not attributing to them the choice that enables valid punishment
Let's say on the one hand you've done something wrong, and you need to be held accountable for it
but also valid accomplishment on the other which is that you've done something that you didn't have to do that was voluntary that's deserving of
approbation and
reinforcement and we act that out and then the next level of evidence seems to be that if you found your
quality on
Propositions. Other than that that the sovereignty of the individual and the responsibility of the individual the whole thing goes sideways
So rapidly that it's almost indescribable and it doesn't just go sideways. It goes sideways and down and so like I don't know exactly
What to make of that as a proof, you know?
It's a strange sort of proof the proof being that well, there doesn't seem to be any
reasonable way for human beings to organize their
social interactions at any level of social organization without
Accepting those initial I would say being Christian assumptions that this is right
And then this is where the main debate happens between me and sam Harris because Sam will
Reason himself to those assumptions and away from those assumptions and to those assumptions in a way
he'll use those assumptions in building other assumptions and
I've said to him before I feel like you're using bricks from a house that you just turned 40
So you can't really do that
This is why I say I'm the one hand you have to have those
judeo-christian assumptions and those by the way under guard even the very concept of reason because the idea of reason is that you are using
a willful process of thought
in order to convince someone else
Predicated on the notion that the other person's opinion is valuable and that you shouldn't just Club them over the head and take their stuff
I think that reason it has the value of reason has implicit moral biases and those moral biases
You can't reason your way to as I said, it's an evolutionary biology perspective
There's no reason for reason other than if you think that maybe you can convince unless especially in a world of non mass communication
What is the reason for reason right in a world that pre-exists mass communication?
What is the reason that you need reason wouldn't force be more effective for most of human history
It was it was significantly more effective than reason
Certainly, it's certainly what the radicals on the Left would argue even now I mean and the idea of reason seems to be predicated
so and that would go along with the idea of free speech which I think is also equally
Grounded in these underlying axioms is that you know, each of us as sovereign individuals have a valid mode of existence
about and there's something unique about that valid mode of existence and it's also something that can be communicated and
that part of the reason for rational discussion is that
the ability to share that unique and valuable element of
private experience with someone else is
salutary, but it's also so you tell it salutary in a manner that allows for the mutual spiritual transformation of both of the
people that are involved in the
Discussion it seems to me that you can't
If you're pro reason you've already bought that argument exactly
This is exactly right and so faith and reason to this
extent are not intention faith undergirds reason because you have to make us
Fundamental assumptions even to get to reason and this is why I think that one of the things that has happened and it's really unfortunate
I discuss it in the last chapters of the book is that when you take away the assumptions that undergoing reason reason itself?
Collapses in it's not that reason the stains appear on top of the structure
Once the structure Falls reason falls that too and we returned to our sort of tribal
naturalistic roots that are quite dangerous
this is why I say that you need Jerusalem on one end of the bridge the other end of that suspension bridge is
Reason meaning that we can't be theocrats. We can't look at
fundamentalist religious texts and take them as
As complete literal is completely literal and then hope to develop as a civilization on the basis of that complete literalism
So you have to look to which of these Commandments for example in the Torah are directed toward human
Eternal human nature so I would suggest that
Commandments that are directed toward reining in certain appetites are directed toward God's understanding of human nature that certain
Injunctions with regards how we behave in the Ten Commandments. These are predicated on a on an understanding of human nature
That is truly profound and worthwhile preserving
it's also worth noting that the story of Western civilization is the expansion of
These principles out from the tribal and toward a broader range of humanity. And that's why the book is not just an argument
Here's how I interpret the Bible and here's why that's right. It's an argument that
Historical development was necessary after the Bible. So it is not just that the Bible solves all your problems
It's that God
Understands even from a religious perspective in Judaism and I think in Christianity too that we are going to apply human reason to these texts
That's from a religious perspective from a non religious perspective
the point I'm making is that you have to take these fundamental assumptions whether you like them or not that are religiously rooted and then
apply your reason to
Develop from the fundamental assumptions that we have already stated and that tension is what allows the suspension bridge to
Continue to function that doesn't mean that it is always equally solid throughout time
It isn't because the tension sometimes wavers sometimes reason takes dominance. Sometimes judeo-christian values or Judaic biblical literalism
Takes dominance. And if your bottom line is you collapse the reason you end up with theocracy
You collapse judeo-christian values you end up with nihilism is sort of the basic argument. Okay, okay
so so so, you know, one of the things that that Sam is afraid of and you know
There's some validity in this fear
And I think he tends to apply this more to is to the the state of an Islamic fundamentalism
But her same argument can be made with the other religious traditions
You know
Evangelical Christianity for example and maybe Orthodox Judaism who knows that the danger is that we'll take these
revealed truths which differ and
that
Holding them as absolute revealed truths will make us parochial tribal and the consequence of that will be all sorts of
catastrophe and horror
right and you know one of the things I learned when I was studying the Old Testament, this was very interesting a
Jewish friend of mine or monoid sort of clued me into this because one of the things he told me was that
Christians who emphasized the New Testament tend to
Parody the Old Testament God - odd somewhat unfair degree casting him as much more
Tyrannical in some sense the god of Wrath. Yeah
Justice versus mercy. Yep, right exactly exactly
So I took that seriously and especially when I was reading the Abrahamic stories and you know
You see you see throughout the earliest writings the idea that in some bizarre sense
God can be bargained with
right
and and and so you see that even in the Cain and Abel story because Cain actually faces God with his complaints and
Says well, you know, here's how I look at the world and go on
Excoriates and because he believes that he's looking at the world
improperly and I think for good reason but there is the implication that you could have a conversation with God and
Hypothetically learn something and but then it that transforms even more
when you see the that the stories that follow so Abraham directly intercedes with God on on
in in favor of Sodom right right because and and he makes a pretty
What would you say extreme case for redeeming Sodom which seems to have degenerated into quite thee?
They did quite the state of Hell
Trying to entice God into not being more destructive than necessary if there's any goodness to be found
And he actually does that successfully and so that's very interesting
So even though God is absolute in his judgment in some fundamental sense
there is this Kapow Seifer dialogue which seems to be an
analogy to the idea that reason and revelation can coexist and and and and and
Bolster each other in some sort of upward development
Well, then this is exactly right and then the idea of natural law which the seeds are there in the Judaic value system
I think natural laws more fully fleshed out in sort of Greek
teleological sense when when they talk about the idea that the
Aristotle Plato when they talk about the idea that you can look at the world around you and discover the purposes of the world around
You simply by using reason well in the in the genetic sense
There's the idea that God abides by the moral code that he himself created and you can ask him questions about it
In fact, the very name Israel is in in Hebrew Sorrell. Yes, sir. I'll literally means struggle with God. Yes
That there is this and that's a remarkable that's a remarkable
Story that it's it's it's Jacob. I always get Jacob and Joseph confess
It's Jacob
The other side of the river so he hasn't crossed back to his homeland right he hasn't returned home after his hero's journey
He sent his wife and his children and his belongings
ahead to try to make peace with the brother that he's seriously betrayed and
And he's had his adventures and maybe he's learned his lessons
But then he's on the bank the river and he's visited by an angel who appears to be gone and he wrestles with him all
night, and he comes out damaged, right which is an indication that this sort of like the the
Egyptian idea when Horus encounters Seth and has his eye torn out that there's some high
Probability of damage that if you encounter the divine even even in some positive sense
but he wrestles with him all night and then defeats God apparently in some sense and
and is allowed to move forward with his adventure and then is given this new name and
The name really struck me when I started thinking about it because what it does imply
I think this is such a positive message and I don't know how to reconcile it precisely with it Jewish claim of
chosen us as a people because my reading of the of that particular text seemed to imply that
The chosen people are precisely those who do in fact wrestle with God and so that they take these ethical questions
Seriously, they're not
Accepting them without question and without thought because there's no wrestling there
right, but the real morality comes in the in this struggle between the revelation and
And and and and and the freedom for thought and choice
I mean
I think that it's a beautiful idea and one of the things that's fascinating about that is if you read the rest of the book
Of Genesis every time in Genesis somebody's name is changed because there are several name changes right aber Abram it becomes Abraham
Sir, I becomes Sarah there there are several points at which there are angels who come and basically change the name or God changes somebody's
Name that's their name going forward when Jacob is returned Israel. He is not called Israel consistently from there to the end of
Death he the names are used at different times. So sometimes he's Israel. And sometimes he's Jacob
So the idea there is that
Sometimes he is
The best version of himself that the version of self who struggles with morality who struggles with God who tries to come up with proper
Solutions and sometimes he's still the old Jacob the old Jacob who ran away from Esau and who served seven years
Unjustly under Laban and all the rest of it
so
It's really fascinating one of my favorites home eunuch stories that this has been deeply embedded in Judaea tradition for a long time the idea
of struggling with God and struggling with the dictates of morality because
Part of Jewish tradition is of course the idea of the oral tradition the idea that we were given a written document on Sinai
But then there was an oral tradition that was also passed along to Moses. That was the interpretation of the written tradition
Which in some ways maybe a backfilled justification, but I think that there's a fundamental truth to it
There's there's a segment that I quote in the book from the Talmud
It's a really
amazing story where
It's it's part of these sort of apocryphal stories what they call the Agha Tata and tell me you to in tome you to parlance
There's there's a story where there's a rabbi who is in an argument with a bunch of other rabbis about a particular point of Halawa
Of Jewish law and this rabbi is arguing
He said the rabbi's and the other rabbis vote one way and he votes the other way
So he loses and the rabbi who loses says listen, I know I'm right not only do I know
I'm right if I'm right let the walls of this the walls of this this synagogue
close in around us so the walls starts to lean in and then the rabbi said
You know what? That's not evidence. That doesn't show that you're right. It just shows that the walls were closing it
He says well, you know if I'm right then let the river outside start to flow backwards
So the river starts to flow backwards and the rabbi's insights. It's still not evidence. We're not gonna take that
he says well if I'm right let there be a Bott call that there be the voice of God literally come down from heaven and
say that I'm right and
sure enough a voice from heaven comes down and says that he's right and the and the other members of the
Parliament the other members of the Sanhedrin they say to him
You know what none of that counts because God gave us a rule and the rule is that we have a majority rule in this
Body right here. And so our interpretation is correct, and yours is wrong
It doesn't matter what miracles you bring to to show that your side is right and the conclusion of the story is that God says
One of the Angels asked God about it
And God says my children have defeated me and the idea is that God is happy about this
God wants us to use our reason to take those fundamental principles that he gave us and then develop those across time
That's how you get development. I
Would also interpret this to some degree from a psychological perspective, you know, because and this this might be
Far-fetched speculation, but I don't think that it precisely is. I mean, I do believe that our cognitive
structures our cognitive function are
Embedded in narrative that seems to be a right hemisphere function and that the right hemisphere is the source of intuitive
Revelation now whatever
Metaphysical implications that have that has I have no idea. I also know that you know many
religious experiences seem to be characterized by
Preferential activity in the right hemisphere. So there's something very strange going on in the right hemisphere and then we have a left hemisphere. That's
argumentative and parliamentary and logical and
Obviously in order for us to make our way in the world
We have to have a continual dialogue between the intuitive axioms that are offered to
spontaneously in our
imagination by the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere who does a critical analysis and tries to lay that out in some logical and
And and let's say logical and algorithmic manner
but the left can collapse into a kind of unthinking tyranny as a consequence of that and the right without that corrective can
what would you say stray too far down imaginative paths and no longer be applicable to the to the
fundamental day-to-day problems of the world
so we need that balance and
and it is a strange thing that we have these two hemispheres which implies that we need two ways of looking at the world and
I don't think that it's unreasonable to
Look at the relationship between that and then assess atif or something like the revelation of intuition and the corrective power of rationality
But you can't dispense with the intuition
It seems to do something like ground you in the world and to provide you with your fundamental axioms. I
Think that's right
and by the way
that seems to me how an enormous amount of scientific discovery takes place is you people have a flash of intuition and then it's a
Question of them and that's how you come up with a hypothesis. Right? Well
They often backfield too, you know like right
scientific journal
Outlines how you came to your hypothesis through a
process of rational deduction
Step by step, right, but that isn't what happens. What happens is you have a hunch of some sort and often
I've seen this especially with intuitive scientists. They have a hunch that actually sounds
Irrational when they first put it forward and sometimes it takes them months or even years to backfill that
Intuition with the rationality that's necessary to communicate its integrity to other scientists
And so the the narrative that's written in the scientific document is actually a kind of well
It's a kind of formal. I wouldn't call it a deception
It's a formalization but it's also predicated on the assumption that it's linear rational thinking that leads to these
Intuitive hypotheses, and sometimes that's the case, especially if it's incremental change
But those major leaps forward are like the introduction of new alternative axioms
And then they have to be tested by rationality
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think that's also the story of history that you have these intuitive leaps
And yeah
There's a history to those intuitive leaps and you do have to have both
You'd have to understand the history of those intuitive leaps and you also have to understand what an intuitive leap has actually taken place
I think he make that argument about revelation
I think frankly you can make that argument maybe about the Enlightenment that there's some intuitive leaps going on
But those intuitive leaps have a history and don't exist in the absence of the backstory
so the intuitive leap of the enlightenment at large part at least politically seemed to me to be the the
full
articulation of the idea that the human being made in the image of God
had
intrinsic worth that transcended that which was being
Allowed under the feudal system. You see that first. I would say in the transformation of
Renaissance art
Because what you see is the divine figures for example marry in Christ to take a single example or to take two
Particular examples start to remove themselves from their iconic
representation and become genuine individuals and so that's uh, that's a bringing down of the divine to earth, but it's also an
Elevation of the individual right is that these were real people they were like us and at the same time you see this
spread of the idea that well
Each individual is sovereign and worthwhile
And I do think it's out of that that comes eventually the powerful anti-slavery movies
movements and the demand for
Universal suffrage
Yeah
That's exactly right
I mean and this is the part where I become rather perturbed when people suggest that the the
Evils of Western civilization are unique while the goods are Universal. This is this is the part of the argument
I've never understood from people who are highly critical of Western civilization. They point out correctly that
Western civilization has been responsible for an immense amount of evil there. There's tremendous racism endemic in Western civilization
There's there's religious persecution. Obviously, there's genocide against you know, my extended family
I mean this sort of stuff was part Western civilization it is but here's what makes Western civilization different
All of those things exist in virtually every other culture throughout the vast span of time
the good stuff is the part that we don't have a really good explanation for
The good stuff is the part where we have to say. Okay, what drove all the good stuff to happen? Because
Unlikely well like one of the things I can't understand this is a real mystery to meat man, and I can't explain it except
And maybe this is an intuitive idea
because I haven't laid it out as well as I might have but one of the things I cannot understand is how any
Countries escaped absolute corruption because most of the countries in the world are absolutely corrupt. The police are corrupt
The politicians are corrupt. The unions are corrupt. The corporations are corrupt. The currency is corrupt
The day-to-day interactions between people are corrupt and and in the really corrupt countries
The interactions between family members are corrupt, you know, so you get situations like well East Germany
Which is a bit anachronistic now where you know one out of three people were government informers. It's like and corruption is easy, man
It's it's it's it's the Hobbesian way of the world
but then there's a handful of countries and I would include Japan and South Korea among those that where
Corruption isn't the fundamental rule where Trust is the fundamental rule, right?
I can't see how that could have manifested itself
except within the confines of a religious
belief system that insisted above all on
The enactment of a higher moral ethic right something outside of politics something outside of self-interest
It's a weak argument because I still don't understand it
I don't I don't see how a country can make that transition from fundamental corruption to honesty
It's it's an absolute miracle as far as I'm concerned and a number of countries have managed that and they are
Almost all are either West Western countries or highly westernized countries
yeah, I mean, I I think that's exactly right and it's also when you examine different places on earth what you see
Is that the social fabric is going to decide the character of the country?
And this is why when people start saying well
We should apply nordic solutions in the united states and say well is our culture the same as the Nordic culture
Because maybe that solution is not going to work. I mean these sort of one-size-fits-all
Attempt in terms of political policy to just apply things randomly everywhere and then assume they will go exactly the same
it's obviously untrue most famously in sort of the
classical
Neoconservative foreign policy conception that you could plop democracy down in the middle of the Gaza Strip and suddenly then
suddenly everybody would be in favor of free markets and and peace with your neighbors and this sort of
institutions tend to be successful when people are when people
Teach their kids the right things
well
Well, that's also part of the reason that I made the argument constantly to Harris and other atheists that I've talked to that
They're judeo-christian whether they know it or not, right?
And the reason for that is that all of their embodied actions presuppose the judeo-christian ethic. The only thing that isn't
Religious about them is they're
articulated
post-enlightenment
Rational representation of the world and I do think you see that in Harris quite frequently because he does believe in evil
He does really good
he believes that the proper way of proceeding in the world is to move from evil towards good and I
can't
You know
I've had the exactly the same conversation with Sam in and he it was it's been a bizarre
Conversation even on the notion of objective truth so Sam, it's it's kind of weird
so you and Sam and I I would say that I'm as a
Religious person more closely aligned with Sam's vision of what objective truth is and you're sort of American pragmatist Perce
Version of what objective truth is and with that said, I don't know where Sam is getting his version, right?
I'm getting my version from the idea that God created an objective truth that the mind of man can ferret out from time to time
and Sam's version is
What like I just don't understand how evolutionary biology results in anything remotely approaching the idea that an objective truth is possible
I see evolutionarily beneficial stuff happening right that if you if you come up with an idea that makes your species more likely to predominate
Then you hold by that but that doesn't make it objectively true. It makes it objectively useful which is a different thing
I also don't see how it's a straightforward matter to get from reliance on evolutionary biology
say as your fundamental way of orienting yourself with regards to reality the world and something like
The primacy of rationality and the ability to extract out from that rationality something
Approximating a universal morality. I can't see most these three things fitting together at all
This is right. And even even Sam's moral standard, which is generalized to man flourishing. There's a lot of play in those joints
I mean I've asked him several times
I was on my Sunday special and I asked him to define human flourishing and I was pointing out to him that the vast majority
Of human beings disagree on the very nature of what bets firm constitutes
If you if you talk to religious people about what human flourishing constitutes
They're not going to tell you about all of the nice stuff they have in their house
They're gonna tell you about their ability to teach the religious precepts to their kids
if you're talking about human flourishing on an evolutionary level and
Presumably that would assume us having more kids rather than fewer kids and in developed countries, we have fewer kids rather than more kids
So what exactly is the standard for human flourishing other than sort of what sim likes I?
Think part of the way that he
Circumvents that problem is that is by pointing out that it might be possible for us to agree on what constitutes
Unnecessary human suffering and to work for the opposite of that like it it makes it kind of right and we agree on cruelty
I think
And that's why we even agree on that is the trouble
I'm not sure that we agree on that either because it's not like there's been any shortage of
high cruelty warrior cultures in the past
I mean it was certainly the case with Rome
Right or or cruelty on behalf of a greater good right. You could easily make the case for cruelty on behalf of human flourishing
I mean Hitler did it's it's it's an evil case. That's the whole point
Okay, that's the that was the case of communism that you break a few eggs to make an omelet
That is the higher human flourishing is the root is the interest of the majority. It's
Not rational, I mean one of the things I really liked about the Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago was that you know
He makes this he makes an anti enlightenment case in a very matter because he says well look
Here's four or five axioms or six or seven axioms. They're derived directly from Marxism and
If you accept those and then you act rationally as a consequence of your excite those
axioms and of course the Marxists would claim that those axioms were derived by rational means that all you get is something
approximating all hell breaking loose and
So what's to be the case is that there is a necessary set of underlying axioms
And I do believe they're coded properly in the judeo-christian ethic that if you then act upon rationally you get something approximating
Whatever progress we've managed to make and a promise is substantive
Yep, totally agree. And this is effectively the case that I'm making in the book
I think that the big difference we have right now in civilization is the difference that was first articulated
I think beautifully by GK Chesterton in in his sort of contrast between left and right his
Analogy and it's a beautiful metaphor is that you're walking through a forest and you come across a wall
It's just this old archaic wall old stone wall. You don't know why it's there
If you're on the left, your first instinct is I don't know why this wall is here
Probably I should tear this wall out because why is the wall here?
I don't know the person on the right the kind of conservative or traditional person the traditionally minded person their first instinct is I
Don't know why this wall is here. I'm gonna go try and find out why the wall is here
And then maybe I'll think about tearing it out. Mm-hmm. And that's and that's
The case I'm making I think with regard to what our civilization there are
Foundational things in our civilization that maybe it's possible to remove that particular Jenga block and everything stands
But I'm not gonna pretend that just because I don't understand
the reason for this particular revelatory principle at the revelatory principle isn't important and
Undergirding and therefore a reason and put there by people who are just as smart as I was there's a certain arrogance to two people
Who are living now that they were much smarter than people who came before?
No, it's just that you're standing on those people's shoulders so you can see a little bit further
But the truth is that they were probably seven-foot. You're probably a 4-footer. Yeah
well, it's definitely the case that my intellectual attitude changed quite substantially when I decided that I was going to
risk
Taking the religious texts that I was studying with some degree of seriousness
Mike and I came to that through Solzhenitsyn and young I would say fundamentally because they made a strong case for
things
Let's say they made a strong case that there were
Presuppositions
Encoded in those narratives in a dreamlike manner
Same way that Piaget did that we couldn't do without and that we should be very careful in
dispensing with them in that a
arrogant rational manner so that you you treat you start by treating the text with a certain amount of reverence and
You with a certain amount of ignorance, right?
It's it's there's something here that you don't understand and you
should probably assume that it's worthwhile because it's being being kept rather than to leap to the
Proposition that you and your ignorance can clearly see why it's unnecessary
Yeah, and and I think that the greatest impact the the saddest part of this. Is that the greatest impact in terms of throwing away
the the stories of
our heritage basically is that that impact is generally not going to be felt in the
urban centers with people who go to Sam's lectures or listen to his podcast those people have a
worldview that they have shaped by listening to stuff like Sam's or or Steven Pinker's or Richard Dawkins and
That worldview. Well, I think it may not be fully coherent it coheres for them
but the problem is that you apply that to people whose main draw to
to
morality is not going to come from listening to these particular sources the people who got their social fabric from churches in the middle of
The country in the United States the people who have built a social fabric along with their neighbors because they have a commonly oriented goal
And then you take that away from them and you offer them go find your own purpose. Good luck with that. Yeah
That's right. They're not going to turn into fully fledged
humanistic
Positively thinking enlightenment types merely as a consequence of abandoning
The religious superstitions is exactly the thing that that the Enlightenment types I think are
naive about
Its now and then to build up is is is sort of the way that I put it to see em
Yes, you can tear apart my religious tradition and you can probably do so in an entertaining way
I mean you do obviously and then how are you gonna build? What exactly are you building?
You know and and I can do the same thing to to your worldview
But then what am I building the question is going to be?
What are the foundational we're not we're not standing. We're not standing up. We're not standing on the first floor of the building
We are standing on the top floor of a building
you can't go at the bottom floor with jackhammers and then expected the top story is just gonna
Stay there. It said that's not how this works. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. So, all right. All right
Well, look, um, I promised that I'd let you be at 1:15, and it's 1:25
And so I don't want to take up any more of your time
I'm
Very pleased that your book is doing well
I hope that it does accomplish what you set out to accomplish with it is to
Make the case that it's much more appropriate for us in the modern world to continue to to
consider the Enlightenment
First of all in its faults as well as its virtues. It's a very important issue
but also to continue to consider it as a
continuation of a process that started thousands of years before and that can't be just casually dismissed on
The presupposition that the Enlightenment was drawn out of a hat by a magician, you know four hundred years ago with no
Developmental precursor. I think that's an it's you know, the only thing that's remarkable to me about that
is that the people so many of the people who are
Enlightenment types like Pinker and Hitchens and Harris are also evolutionary
biologists and
Jesus they should know better man. It's like
even people like Fran's de Waal, you know, it's been studied chimpanzee behavior has shown very clearly the
Evolutionary origins of a rather profound proto morality. So even you're not
Looking at this from the perspective of divine revelation, whatever that might be and that's a great mystery, you know
Because I think often divine revelation is the revelation of our true nature to ourselves and you know
That might be metaphysically mediated god only knows
But there's a lengthy developmental history
preceding the development of anything like
Fundamental moral assumptions and the evolutionary biology seems to support that presupposition
powerfully, and so that's another
contradiction in the Enlightenment viewpoint that I just don't get it's like well as far as you're concerned as an evolutionary biologist
Everything has a history. That should be
Marked off in the hundreds of millions or at least the tens of millions of years and yet this radically important
Transformation in the manner in which human beings conducted themselves. Well, that was just something that emerged
Out of nothing, right? It's like it's it's it's it's it's so funny because it's a it's a
ex nihilo
I don't think
Argument it's like well we were ignorant
Feudalistic
Christians squabbling among each other in this
superstitious morass and all of a sudden out of nowhere
in some sense came this brilliant new way of looking at the world, and I don't
See how that's in keeping with that deeper view of history that's necessary if you're an evolutionary biologist
Yeah, I obviously agree totally with that and I find it kind of hilarious. So a lot of the presuppositions that are made are
fundamentally at odds with a lot of the other presuppositions that are that are that undergird the system of thought when you see
You know, I was talking to Pinker just recently really like two weeks ago and I broke this topic, you know
he did agree, by the way to have a three-way discussion with you and I
Yeah, I mean I'd totally be interested in that
Yes
talk to the CA people and we're gonna try to set it up because I centigrate I think that would be great and we could
We could we could see what you see. We'll have an all right festival. That's
Is now everybody's all right if you
To Jews to Jews in a self-help in Canadian
It would be C because one of the things that struck me so interestingly about
the last time I talked to him was as soon as I broached the argument that
these Enlightenment ideas were
founded in something that looked like a
metaphysical religious narrative, whatever its origins
All he did was point to all the negative examples of what religious structures have
Managed and right that seems to be to be such an unfair argument because it's an avoidance argument again
Then that's also stuff that
Non religious structures have created like that's that's the the question is not why bad stuff happens in religious society
The question is why good stuff at all?
Yes, that is the question is specially given that it's it's inappropriate to conflate
religious structures with tribalism, correct, you know
Especially because you can you can look I mean you might want to blame
Human evil on the proclivity for us to gather together in groups under a religious hierarchy
But then you're stuck with the problem of chimpanzees who do exactly the same thing with the equivalent degree of brutality
With no religious thinking whatsoever
And so I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that religious thinking can become a variant of tribalism
but it's no more fair to
blame
human social
conflict on religion than it is to blame the existence of
hierarchy on
Capitalism the greatest tribalism that I'm seeing it in today's world has not only nothing to do with religion
But is actively anti religion or the greatest tribalism that I'm seeing right now whether you're talking about the intersection or left that creates
Hierarchies of value based on your group membership or whether you're talking about the white supremacists
All right
which is militantly anti-christian and sees Christianity and Judaism by extension as as a weakness that that
That's pure tribalism white supremacy has nothing to do with overarching religious instincts
In fact, it says that overarching religious instinct is quite bad
one of the great anti tribal forces in human history has been the presence of
Religion is a point that Robert Putnam makes in Bowling Alone
he were pretty supposed that diversity was our strength as the as the Nostrum goes and
He then found that ethnic diversity in a vacuum doesn't actually create strength it creates
diversity
What he said is the only two things you get with pure ethnic diversity
Are increased protests marches and increased television watching but if you have a common purpose if you have a common purpose a common
Reason for being together then ethnic diversity and experiential diversity is our strength and it's really great, right?
there you go to a church and you see diverse group of people all of whom came from different places and they all care for
each other and they're all taking care of each other and they all have different stories to tell and enriching stories to tell
That's how you build the society
To play the same axiomatic game exam is predicated on these underlying
Revelatory truths the most important of which as you pointed out is the notion that human beings are made in the image of God
which which you know, it's one of the things because I'm
You know, I tend never to take a religious view if I could take a scientific view I
Never take a metaphysical view if I could take a reductionist view, you know, it's a form of Mental Hygiene in some sense
but there are statements there are biblical statements that are so
Unlikely that it's very difficult for me to account for them
reductionistic aliy or even biologically even though I've done my best to do so and that
Well the idea that you extract the best out of the chaos of potential with truth
That's one man
Because that is one daring metaphysical statement and that requires a tremendous amount of courage to even attempt and I do believe that it's true
I'm not sure. It's not the most true thing. That's ever been written
But then a close contender would be the one that you identified which is well men and women are made in the image of God
It's like who the hell would have thought that up? But as much it's such a it's it's it's so crazily
Irrational in a sense it flies in the face of
Everything that you see about human beings are virtually everything that you see about them. They're hierarchical arrangement their relative weakness their mortality
They're flawed nature their sinful nature
You know their their their their innumerable
Inadequacies and then to say in spite of all that so long ago
And at the beginning of this civilizing tradition that well. Yeah, despite all that
self-evident
Pathology and radical individual difference in power and ability that each of us has a divine spark
It's like ha
It isn't it's an amazing thought and it's an inspiring thought and I hope that at the end of the day
that's that's if we're gonna take away one message from I think this
Conversation and in general if loons had one message out to the world the idea that you're made in the image of God
And so is everybody else if we build on that? I think we can build something. That's an excellent place to end
Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate it Orden
it's really good to talk to you Ben and get with your book and I hope it has the effect that you're
you're hoping for I hope that we can that we can make a
Strong case especially with the Enlightenment types and and even the atheists to some degree. I hope so
I think that in the end we can all be on the same page
But I think they're gonna have to recognize the the value of tradition just as we respect the value of reason great
Right. Awesome. It's a sword. Okay, man, II love to see it. I see