Through the looking glass

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, welcome back. You've been traveling a bit and we're back. I'm back. I'm back. Hi. You're back in England.

Chris So let me first say, sorry, I cut into your initial intro. Hello. But so I carried all of my podcasting gear with me all the way around the world. Nice. We didn't do a podcast. We could have. It's my fault. I was really busy. I was in New Zealand. A lot of crazy stuff went down there. I think we'll talk about some of that. Then it was in Australia. A lot of really interesting exploratory work that I think everybody on this podcast would be interested in hearing about. World-changing stuff.

Scott Time zones are challenging, especially, like, you don't, like, I feel like, because I live in a country that's kind of continental-esque, like, you kind of, I know my own country's time zones, but, like, and I know England's, because we talk, and a couple of our friends in the UK, but it's tough once you get, it's tough to know time zones. There's a lot of them.

Chris And, boy, you know, the hard thing about flipping – the interesting – London to Australia, I mean, it is the other side of the planet. It's about 12 hours difference. You're flipping day and night. And – The thing that's hard if you're doing that kind of flipping regularly is you're trying to hold on to some semblance of your own routine. You know, just how you wake up and how you go to bed and what you think about and do and, you know, your rituals and habits and all the things that kind of give your life healthy structure or unhealthy structure, a bit of both. It does tend to go out the window unless you really scheduled and planned and organized about trying to impose some of yourself upon a new space that you're just visiting temporarily. And it's a very odd thing to do. But then when you're someone like me who you look at the year and I'm probably doing that half the year. Thank you very much.

Next time we'll succeed. And we'll have a chance to do it in a week because we're getting back on a plane to New Zealand next week, which will be really interesting. I should tell you more about that. So we'll have another chance to try. I will carry the gear. I will lug this crap. It's not crap. It's great. But I'll lug this stuff all the way around the world and we'll see if we can make use of it. I love it. Yeah, and then poof, two weeks goes by. So what's happened in your world?

Scott You know, my world is generally kind of, yeah, nothing much, you know, it's my normal kind of vibe, some podcasting, some church life, some exercising, some contemplation, and the Mueller Report came out, which is, you know.

Chris Oh, yeah, we got to talk about that. So you mentioned in a text that we shared a few days ago that you'd quoted our podcast in one of your sermons.

Scott I did, I did.

Chris What was going on there?

Scott The Anthropic Principle. I was talking about sort of speculation and, you know, like what, like, you know, the difference is what we can know and what we can't know. And I was talking about the Anthropic Principle.

Chris So, you know, this is cool. This just occurred to me. But we're both preachers. Exactly, of different stripes. Yeah, because I was just going to say that I quoted one of your sermons in a recent talk that I gave. Nice! I loved how, remember when we were talking about optimism and pessimism, and you talked about, well, that's really kind of the, that's not the, that's just not the dichotomy that matters. We shouldn't look at it that way. It's about hope. Hope, absolutely. Yeah, and... Did people like that? Yeah. People love that stuff. Nice. Nice. You want more of that, then you gotta go to Scotch Church. That puts the asses in the seats, baby. Hmm.

Scott Yeah. It's interesting. I'm curious, like, I mean, it's funny because the Mueller report came to the Attorney General, William Barr, on a Friday. And so all weekend on American News, it was like, breaking speculation, breaking speculation, because nobody knew anything, right? So we just got all these people to talk about. A collective, oh, new breaking speculation. So it's like, nobody knows anything. Like, why are we, like, but I'm curious. Is it? And then, of course, they turned the summary of the report around. Now we know the report is over 300 pages long, and so there was a four-page summary which 80 words of Mueller's were in it. I wonder though, in the UK, do people care about this? Or do your countrymen and women from Canada that you're in touch with, do people... Are people following this outside of the United States?

Chris Well, so, I mean, the last thing that the rest of the world needs to do is inflate Americans' ego. Exactly. But the honest reality is that everyone is following this. Some people are following it because it matters to them, like the policy direction of the United States, but most people are following it just because it's, you know, the same reason that you slow down when you pass, you know, a burning car on the other side of the highway. I mean, it's just the spectacle of the carnage is... Totally fascinating.

Scott I mean, people here are dialed into Brexit that way. I mean, I feel like... Are they? Yeah, I've never seen... And I would say, too, at least I'm dialed into it, at least it's somewhat in the news, like Netanyahu's troubles in Israel. I mean, that is on the radar here, certainly. I mean, it's interesting.

Chris So what is, just talking to theatre for a moment, what is wonderful about British politics and the theatre of it is, one, so the chamber is, and I'm sure now everybody's seen sort of recent images on television, it's a very packed chamber, right? It's like 600 people and it's like a standing room only place that is deliberately small so there is a sense... of jostling in the political arena. That was a deliberate design decision of the chamber itself. But also, I mean, you have all of these Brits who, and frankly, there is a real social stratification in the UK still. I mean, most of these people have gone to Oxford and Cambridge, and so they're eloquent. That's called Oxbridge, right? Yeah, that's right. So there's this kind of Oxbridge eloquence in the kind of witty repartee that they do back and forth. And I mean, probably now everybody has seen the speaker of the House of Commons. And he's like, no, no, there will be order, order. And it's just this cast of wonderful rumpled characters with bow ties. I mean, I'm stereotyping it, but there is still that element. And, you know, you shake your head and you think, oh, my goodness. Yesterday, there was this conservative member of parliament stood up and his introductory remarks, he's Sir something or other, in his introductory remarks, he says, now, I've never considered myself a man of the people.

Like, as if to say... I mean, the reality is that there are all these riffraff in society, and I don't fraternize among them. I would never be seen in their presence. But nonetheless, I'm going to speak on their behalf, because I am a knighted person in the realm. You know, that these characters continue to lord over British society.

Scott Have you seen The Crown, the show The Crown?

Chris I mean, dude, everybody here has seen the crowd.

Scott I love that one scene where she gives that speech. She's like, it's really you people with your boring lives that make England strong. With your boring lives. Oh, it's so great.

Chris So, yeah, so I love the theatre of British politics. And it is very different. You know, parliamentary democracy... Where the executive isn't in a White House, but is in effectively the House of Representatives and has to execute from there. It brings it all into a much more theatrical realm. It also requires that the head of government be a good debater.

Scott Yeah, I read a piece in The Guardian like last week or two weeks ago. It was one of the Brexit kind of related votes or whatever. And they were saying that if Theresa May doesn't prevail this time around, she just needs to resign because they're reflecting on how British parliamentary stuff works. And one party comes in. And you need to have your government together to appoint a government, run a government. And internally, if you don't have the confidence of your own party, then the government's just not going to work. It's a system where you have to have a person that's strong of either party when they ascend to the prime minister because they've got to get the party functional to run the government. Again, the United States works slightly differently because of the branches of government and the competing branches and stuff. That's just an interesting point of how, like,

this Brexit thing has really, it's not just her on this, but the system's not designed to have a kind of embattled prime minister that's disembattled, right? Where it's tough for the system to function well like that. Of either part, it doesn't matter what party they're in, right?

Chris So, I mean, depending when people listen to this podcast, this will be old news, but the latest, as we're recording this, the latest pageantry was yesterday. And so, effectively, the House took, it would be as if the executive branch said, well, we don't know what to do, what do you guys want to do? And the House took over government, effectively, for a night, and they ran a series of what they called indicative votes. Which is just to say, if all of you are voting freely, forget about your party allegiance. Here are eight options of how we could do Brexit. And let's just do an indicative vote, doesn't bind, but let's see if any of these options would gain a parliamentary majority so that we could do it this way. And the beautiful dumpster fire of it all was that every one of these options got voted on.

And none of them, they were all voted down. None of them achieved a majority. But if you look at them, what people effectively voted down is they said, they voted both that, no, we don't want to Brexit without a deal, and we don't accept any deal.

Scott Which the irony of this whole thing, it's like, okay, we want... The European Union has more control over terms than they had before. It's just crazy.

Chris And I suppose, I mean, where my head starts to go is, you know, there are many, I guess, bigger themes, bigger lessons to draw out of what we're seeing taking place. With Brexit, with the Mueller report and the aftermath of that. And I think that really is sort of part of the task. No collusion. Full exoneration. I'm fully exonerated. This report does not exonerate the president. It even says I never grabbed women where I said and that all my business is great. A full exoneration. How does he know that? He's never read the book.

Scott He's never read anything longer than 12 pages. 12 pages is a stretch.

Chris I thought it was also interesting and something to hum about that apparently in immediate polls after Barr's report on the report came out, effectively people were split on whether the report meant that they were more or less likely to support the president, which is to say that You know, the public discourse is so fragmented that the content of the report is really irrelevant to public opinion. We're always going to take it and believe what we wanted out of it. And I think that was why. So what is interesting is that, you know, as an outsider on another continent, And given the failure to present that, it seems like the Democrats and a lot of the media that was looking for that smoking gun has just moved on. Said, oh, okay, well, that was embarrassing because we really thought we were gearing up for a big story there and there's no story there, so we're going to move on and try to move on to the next thing. And it just, you know, it indicates that there is this sense that it is going to be a meaningless thing, a meaningless exercise, unless there is some kind of Undeniable reality that is put in front of us in a way that cannot be unseen once we see it.

And so if I can sort of move this conversation a bit out of just the gossipy news of the day and think about the bigger questions, it seems that It seems that it is like the expectations of the report were the kind of the last hope, the last gasp of people who wanted a return to politics as they felt it used to be practiced, wanted a return to Thank you very much. That master fact that can still work as facts used to work. And I'm telling you that you're not going to get that. And if we can't get that, then there's no point getting into the details of this document. Because it's going to be full of facts. But unless it's somehow a master fact, then it won't have any power. Because the ability to assemble and debate and discourse and all this stuff just doesn't...

We used to be able to do that. We don't know how to do it anymore. has been denied. And my sense is that sort of the mediascape and the commentariat who is sort of looking and waiting for the report was kind of deflated.

Scott Although it's kind of, they've gotten more energy. Am I overstating the case? Well, I mean, I don't think that... It's interesting. I don't think they're as deflated as you think. I mean, I've just been following the news and it's still Mueller most days. And how this editorial decision by Barr and all this, you know, it's interesting. There's a book that came out several years ago. Yeah, maybe... I'm trying to think what the date was on, but it was called When Prophecy Fails. It was by social psychologists. They looked at messianic movements and prophetic movements, and they did this one contemporary movement when there was a group that was expecting aliens to come in the state to judge humanity and everything, and the aliens didn't come. So what do you do, right? Well, they doubled down, and they said they came up with a reason why the aliens didn't come, and they proselytized more for the cause. Well, we've gotten a reprieve, and now if we get enough people, then, you know, the aliens may give us more of a reprieve, and we can, you know, more people can be vindicated. So, like, oftentimes, like, and Mueller was this messianic figure, right? And, you know, and Trump, I mean...

You know, if epistemology, if one model of epistemology, like critical realism, right, like you kind of, where, look, you realize that there is an external world to you, right, and yet there's nothing, there isn't a world that's out there outside of you, and yet your own lenses are the only way you can experience it, such that, you know, there's this dynamic interplay between the world that impinges on you and your lens, and they mutually shape each other. Well, I mean, on some level, you look at this cultural moment, it's like, well, that's just the lens, you know?

Chris The lens just shapes reality. I love this because, so I want to read to you, I'm working on the next essay, as I always am. It's actually an essay that I'm going to be delivering as a talk next week in New Zealand. So I want to tell you more about that too. But this idea of reason and rationalism and sort of being able to rationalize anything. So I want to read you this paragraph and just get your take on it. Because it's about the sort of seeing what we want to see. And I'm going to kind of jump in mid-paragraph, but the part we see began to outweigh the whole in our reality until eventually nowadays the part we see has become the whole. Magic pushed too far, declined into mere witchcraft. Myth pushed too far, declined into mere superstition. Reason pushed beyond our ability to see what's actually there, declined into mere rationalism. Or rationalization, maybe. Rationalization, yeah. And it seems that there's something there, right? That our power of reason, which, you know, since sort of Plato and Socrates has given us this power of directed thought.

So to not just drift into a kind of, you know, a labyrinth of mental tricks where we can seem to manufacture fake truths. So what do you think about that, I guess, is one question. And then I guess what I really want to know is... What was the anchor that sort of kept reason, sort of a healthy, moderate reason? You know, I think back to the ancient Greeks, I mean, there was this Aristotelian golden mean, right? There was a moderation there. And I don't know if that was just because... Sort of at the origin of the age of the mind, there was still a kind of strong shadow of the age of myth, where so much of our understanding of reality was about balance, about cycles, about sort of planting and the harvest and heaven and earth. And so it just seemed natural then that as we deploy these new powers of reason, that they would somehow be bounded by a sense of moderation.

Or is there something more elemental that we've lost connection with, that we're no longer interested in anchoring our reason to things that are actually there? We're only interested in anchoring our reason to sort of the previous idea that was...

Scott Do you understand what I'm... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's interesting because you say that about the age of myth and the age of reason because you look at like Plato and like the Timaeus where he, you know, early Plato seems to have a pretty low opinion of the physical order and it's distorted and, you know, like it's the realm of forms, the abstract ethereal realm, non-material realm of forms where all the truth is. Then probably some people, scholars of Plato, think maybe under the influence of Aristotle, he tries to kind of have a, as student Aristotle, he tries to sort of clean that view up a little bit, and he has this view of the Timaeus, and the Timaeus where there's almost an artisan, this demiurge that's like a craftsman that is looking at the forms and then is shaping this preexistent matter. But even then, Plato goes to myth. I mean, he kind of, he needs a mythical allegory to kind of

And yet winds up making new myths that seem to serve rationality. But then again, you could, I mean, I don't know, someone like Nietzsche would say, there was, I mean, the age of reason is always rationalization, right? We're always, I mean, like, it's just, it's kind of the ones that we all agree on become kind of the ones that aren't rationalizations, right? Because we agree they're all not rationalizations. But then what happens when, you know, they're... And I'm not saying I agree with Nietzsche on that, but there's a significant grain of truth in that. And then what happens when you're in a really fractured society and you can't agree on any of the rationalizations for the shared purpose of... And so then everything should be... It's not even contestation, it's just combat.

Chris So we've got to get Nietzsche on this podcast. Exactly. Because he said, what's real is whatever we all agree on. I guess the comeback or the question, especially in the world we live in now, where it does seem that reality Thank you very much. You kind of want to ask Nietzsche, but is it really that as long as we all agree on it, then that's a rational truth, that that can be real for us? Is there not some kind of other reality, an anchor that comes outside of our capacity to create these mazes of thought? That's what they were hoping somehow the Mueller report would be, right? It would be this... Anchoring piece of reality that our rationalizations would be unable to, you know, make disappear if they wanted to.

Scott I think their rationalizations, it's like a group of people said that their rationalizations would not be able to overcome. Not because, because I think it actually, I mean, Bob Mueller is, you know, he was a Marine. He volunteered for Vietnam. I mean, everybody that worked for this guy. So this guy is just unbelievable. I mean, just a wonderful patriot and citizen. So he probably shot really straight, right? And that's probably what is frustrating to everybody. There are a lot of facts, right? But they're facts that are not very ideological. They're facts. They're part of a story that's not very ideological. He's really trying to tell what he's seen.

Chris And effectively say, you interpret.

Scott Right, and I think that's part of the frustration, that the opponents of Trump weren't looking for something that was a fact, because this might be that. This report does not apparently exonerate Trump. It just says that, especially on obstruction, this is kind of thorny because of intent and other things, and they didn't interview him, and yet it doesn't exonerate him. It seems very factual. It's just not a fact that is existentially compelling to Trump's critics, of which I've been one, to be honest.

Chris On a complete side note, and if we have any creatively inclined listeners, I really feel like we need some kind of jingle that we can play whenever you start quoting, like Plato and the Timaeus. Showing off your philosophical and theological thoughts.

Scott This is stuff I remember from, you know, I'm not a philosophical scholar by any means. Sure, sure, sure. I could send you this awesome thing I've used with undergrads, though, to explain Immanuel Kant. It's like somebody wrote a trance epistemology.

Chris It's the best thing ever. I need the jingle. Yeah, I know what I'm talking about undergrads, but Immanuel Kant. I want to have some kind of Scott dropping the mic sound effect or something like that.

Scott You know what's interesting? I was thinking about what you were talking about, like, all the stuff, like, there was a group in the early 20th century in Marburg, at the University of Marburg, they were the Marburg neocontients, I think Herman Cohen and some other people, but they were kind of like Kant with, like, for Kant, right, you have these categories of understanding, like space, time, all these things, but for Kant, they're not out there, they're in our mind. But they interpret phenomena, right? So we don't know what things are outside of human experience. Now, you see where this makes sense. A table was a bunch of moving atoms, right? But it doesn't look like that to us. It looks like a stable thing. And so Kant's trying to... But the Marburg neocontins were like... Oh no, there is no phenomenal world. The whole world's just made up by the categories of understanding. So people think they were like the most constructive epistemologists that ever lived.

But that's kind of like a more unrefined view of that. Like I think some of what we're describing here is like you just like, our lenses aren't trying often to interpret reality, but to shape it. Like to see what we want.

Chris Yeah, and maybe that is the kind of healthy mutation that the kind of struggles that, you know, and more and more people are kind of concentrating on, whether it's, you know, Brexit or the politics in the U.S. or climate change or, you know, kind of the problems that however we're However we're conceptualizing reality, don't seem to admit for solutions. You know, I wonder if that's the kind of healthy mutation that is underway of, you know, just evolving, just different ways of realizing, different ways of awaring. of the world and what's real and what are the forces at work and how we engage and shape with them. So to name drop, I think of kind of the classic pairing of, was it Heraclitus and Parmenides? Right, right, right. So Heraclitus, it's all about change. You'll never step in the same river twice. Right, or it's like you do but you don't, right? Because it is the same river but it's also changed.

And, you know, through the Industrial Revolution, you know, so many mechanistic metaphors entered into just our way of being conscious of the world. And so very much more sort of the Parmenides end of the spectrum. And I wonder if this is sort of part of what we're going to have to do. These convulsions are kind of challenging us to somehow come to Heraclitus' view of how reality is. There's a great book— There is no spoon, is what I'm trying to say.

Scott There's a great book by a guy, a theologian who used to teach at King's College, Colin Gunton, and he wrote a book called The One, the Three, and the Many. And he says in the beginning of it, it's like basically every, every, he says like every, almost every Western intellectual struggle can be traced back to Heraclitus versus Parmenides. And so he thinks of these areas where romanticism, or what we call postmodernity and fragmentation and stuff, the Heraclitian, like unity is an illusion, versus totalitarianism, right? Like, where the state, the one is the most important, right? And then everything else finds its meaning as it gets drawn into the one. And these kinds of tensions between, you know, where unity becomes... It's a great book.

Chris Put it in the show notes.

Scott Show notes.

Chris I'm going to add it to the list of books that I need to read because Scott has recommended them to me.

Scott It's so well-written. It's such a good book. So back to New Zealand, okay? Okay. You were there when the Christchurch shooting happened.

Chris I was there on the day, so I was... How far were you from? Well, to be fair, so I was on the North Island in a wonderful seaside town called New Plymouth. Christchurch is on the South Island and on the other coast.

Scott Do you know how many maps in the world don't have New Zealand on it? John Oliver did a whole thing on it. They just omit it.

Chris And didn't he say, or did they do it on last week tonight? They provided some downloadable... Yeah, it's awesome. You can print it off and stick it on your map if it's missing a map in New Zealand. Kiwis get a bit touchy about that. And yet I think they're kind of conflicted. I mean, people who live in New Zealand... Aren't necessarily eager for the whole rest of the world to find them. Part of the bliss... It's Middle Earth. Yeah, it's a country, I think, like about the size of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom has, you know, somewhere around 70 million people on these aisles, and New Zealand has five. So, you know, it's space. It's big sky country. It's beautiful. I was there speaking at an energy sector forum, which that in itself was really interesting because this was basically the New Zealand energy industry talking about moving I'm a geek, so I find the details of implementing that endlessly fascinating.

New Zealand has a lot of renewable resources. It has hydropower and stuff like that. But their hydro is mainly snowmelt. So it snows in the winter, it melts, and that drives the hydro dams, right? Which is great, but what do you do for the dry winter?

Scott You put in a couple nuclear power plants.

Chris Like Sweden. That's right, exactly.

Scott Sweden?

Chris Just do everything that Sweden does. So stuff like that. How do you make this work? And all the ins and outs of that.

Scott Sweden has it perfect, because they have hydro stuff, and they have really efficient nuclear stuff, whereas Germany has all this renewable stuff that they celebrate, right? But what do they do when it's not sunny or windy? Coal, right? So they just screw their... I mean, Germany kind of screws their... What they gain carbon-wise, or what they lose in the renewables, they put back with all the coal stuff. That's why Sweden's awesome.

Chris I mean, every country has its own basket of challenges dealing with, you know, how do we, you know, assuming you believe the science, I mean, assuming you live in a country where it's required to believe the science, like some kind of faith-based thing on climate change, then every country kind of has its own sort of kettle of challenges to deal with. Anyway, that's all just context for it. So, you know, we're doing this wonderful workshop and it's about 3 p.m. and I've been in this sort of boardroom for the whole day. And so I just stepped out to get some air. And I come back and that's when I see a guy just outside the meeting hall. He's on his phone. He's just put it down and he clearly looks distraught. And I said, what's up? And he said, oh, that was my daughter. Their school is in lockdown. I'm like, what? What do you mean? And he said, no, there's been apparently some shooting in Christchurch. That was as it was happening, maybe within five minutes of the event. At that point, I didn't even know that there had been fatalities. And then the next thing I knew about a few hours later was at a music festival.

In the same city, big annual global music festival called WOMAD, which actually Peter Gabriel started. And he's now got them going all over the world. But they do, their anchor event is in New Zealand and sort of over there in sort of the VIP section. And that's when the fatalities counts started to come out. And it was really interesting. I mean, so many dimensions of the story were... Really impactful. But I happened to be hanging out with Peter Gabriel's business partner. So they'd founded this music festival together. And he and Peter were texting in real time at that moment, basically, what do we do in response to this? Because here we are at a music festival, which is supposed to be this happy, playful event. And there is this tragedy unfolding right now. And I thought they did something brilliant, and they got all the artists together, and they said, look, the reason that we founded this music festival in 80-something, I forget, it was 30 years, it was the 25th or 30th anniversary of the festival, that the reason that we founded this was that, on the firm belief that the only thing that can conquer hate is love.

And that's why we're here, and that's why you're here, and that's why your art is important. And every act, every artist who went on stage the whole weekend basically reiterated that message, that this is how we conquer. It was really quite moving. And quite beautiful. I mean, we can talk about the particular politics in New Zealand and how they've moved very quickly in response to that politically.

Scott That's unbelievable as an American to hear the Prime Minister say, hey, we're going to change our government. That's just unfathomable for an American. Not just on the gun thing because of the Second Amendment and stuff. I mean, if we didn't have the Second Amendment, you'd still have... It's not like we'd have no guns in this country or anything like that, but any kind of gun... The problem is any... The Overton Window

Chris So gun violence has become completely normalized in the United States and so a mass shooting happens and there is no kind of visceral rejection of that to say this is not us. Whereas in New Zealand, this event was clearly outside of their, quote-unquote, Overton window. And in fact, I think that was sort of the big theme in reaction, that this is not us. This does not happen here. And I think that that... The kind of universal acceptance of that sort of, you know, truth that everyone agreed on is what enabled the government to say, you know, and therefore, so now let's just formalize that rejection of this behavior that we all agree has no place here. We'll just formalize that in law. But given that there was already a very clear and more or less universal sense that this is not us, this doesn't belong here, formalizing it wasn't, I think, such a big...

So it really helps to illuminate what the issue is in the United States. And arguably, it's not sort of the Constitution or the arrangement of political forces. It is the normalization of something. That's just part of American life. If you don't like it, get a gun.

Scott Yeah, right, right. And even people that don't like gun control. ...that want gun control, like Bill Maher. He's like, look, but I have a gun, because everybody else has one. So it's one of these things, even if you don't like guns, and you want gun control, because everybody's got a gun. It's crazy.

Chris So I feel like this is a good question to ask you.

Scott I do not have a gun.

Chris I grew up in a home— You know, that does make me feel a bit better, actually. That wasn't my question, but it makes me feel better.

Scott I grew up in a home with a lot of guns. I mean, my dad had a lot of guns and stuff. I'm not a gun guy. I don't like guns.

Chris So my question to you, and I suppose it's a question to not just you, an American, but you who has a community of parishioners and listeners that you talk to about these things. How does one purge the unhelpful normalization? How does one restore a kind of innocence? Or a sense of what shouldn't be, such that if it does occur, there is a strong reaction against it that can mobilize people. How do I express what I'm trying to express? I think you know what I'm trying to express.

Scott Yeah, I don't know. It's challenging in America because, you know, again, we have, you see shootings in schools that happen so often. People are horrified. And yet the people, it's funny because you have basic things like increased background checks, right? Like 80% of NRA members are for that. Like, and yet the gun lobby. It's one of those things where you feel like, well, if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. So you fight tooth and nail on everything to preserve your own kind of political square footage or square mileage so that you don't lose any of your territory. It's a difficult thing in the United States because I think that that's not kind of how we process stuff.

Chris And I mean, I remember last year when there was the shooting at, and I don't remember the name, Stonewall, Douglas?

Scott The one in Florida?

Chris The big one in Florida, yeah. And then the students there sort of mobilized. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I thought then, like, oh, maybe this is going to be it. Like, maybe it is the power of youth telling the adults that somehow this needs to change, that might create, I don't know how, but some, you know, at least be a new voice. And a new force of influence that might lead to a different result. But in hindsight, I suppose that was quite naive of me.

Scott On a different kind of, somewhat related, I don't know, I mean kind of related, but like I found this piece in The Atlantic by a guy named Graham Wood, who's an interesting commentator, staff writer at The Atlantic. And he said, after Christchurch, commentators are imitating Sebastian Gorka, who was a Trump advisor and is a Fox News guy. And he opens this way. He says, after the 2015 Paris attacks by ISIS commandos, Donald Trump's counterterrorism advisor, Sebastian Gorka... wrote these notorious lines, blaming the ideology of radical Islam for the atrocity. These attacks are the latest manifestation of a growing and globalized ideology of radical Islam that must be addressed at its source, which includes the mainstream imams and media personalities who nurture, promote, and excuse it. They were inspired by a thriving online ideological structure that recruits and radicalizes mostly men to save the caliphate from the kufar infidels. The threat we're facing isn't just individual terrorists, it's the global ideology of radical Islam. We have to take it seriously and call out imams, academics, and media personalities who give it a platform under the guise of exploring both sides, fostering debate, or avoiding political correctness. Now he says, except these words weren't by Sebastian Gorka at all. They were written in the New York Times by Wajat Ali hours after the massacre of 50 Muslims at Prayer and Christ Church New Zealand on March 15th. I swapped white nationalism for radical Islam. Politicians for Imams and Western Civilization for the Caliphate. So it's very interesting that this is on the cover. He's like, look, look, most New York Times people were horrified at the kind of rhetoric Sebastian Gorka used. And yet, hey, you're lumping everybody together. You're not nuanced enough.

And then he talked about how in this tragedy, commentators were contorting themselves He says that, you know, after Christchurch, everyone discovered at once that ideology matters. Four years ago, commentators were contorting themselves to attribute jihadism to politics, social conditions, abnormal psychology, anything but the spread of wicked beliefs that lead more or less directly to violence. And he just talks about how nobody says that... This guy who committed this awful act of violence, what if he was mistreated by Pakistanis on a business trip overseas and was radicalized that way? It's very interesting because he talks about how some people were blaming everyone from Trump to Sam Harris to Jordan Peterson for sharing the blame in this attack because they use Islamophobic statements. And he's kind of like, if we can't tell the difference between this shooter, Richard Spencer, another white supremacist guy who was involved in the Charlottesville stuff in the United States, who, to his knowledge, has never advocated violence, Sam Harris, you know, Trump and Jordan Peterson, we've got a problem. Just like, rightly so, after Islamic attacks by radical extremists, we're careful to say, look, this isn't all of Islam. It's not even all of... Very traditionalist kind of Islamic communities across the world that have a tenuous and sometimes antagonistic relationship with the West. We try to look at things particularly and how basically it's a pretty interesting piece. He points that somebody said... Who was it, the commentator, that said... Okay, there's this... C.J. Wellerman, a columnist for Middle East Eye, tweeted last weekend that ISIS appeals to roughly 0.0001% of Muslims.

Whereas the whitewing extremism represents the views and attitudes of roughly 30-40% of white people. So one of the problems is that if you got .0000001% of the world's 1.8 billion Muslims, you'd have 1.8 Muslims. A substantial undercount of ISIS adherents. Then he says, you know, but people like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson seem to think the Obama America was, you know, a good place in getting better so that you can't say that they're fascists and white nationalists and that we have this kind of problem that when we're... That people thought was overgeneralizing in the Paris attacks was done and extolled by some of the same press that condemned the kind of overgeneralizing, rightly, that was done in 2015. I thought that's an interesting argument.

Chris Yeah, that's really good. I mean, that's really good. Commentary, you know, helping us to see, you know, to some extent the inconsistencies in how we frame things and the biases that it reveals. I got a couple of thoughts. I mean, one is just... This question of a faculty of reason and rationalization that allows us to see what we want to see. That's got to be, I think, one of the sort of big questions of our generation to figure out how do we get past that, because I don't think that's going to work long term. Just on a much more practical or gossipy level, so Jordan Peterson, he was supposed to speak at Cambridge University. And this is recent news, made the headlines here. And then Cambridge University withdrew the invitation. No, no, no. He was going to come on a one-month visiting fellowship. And then the university withdrew it because there was, I guess, just too much pushback or controversy from some faculty and some students.

I haven't yet, you know, ever had a chance to sit down with Jordan and really kind of see where he's at, but I was I was surprised that, well, I mean, I don't know what went into the decision to offer him an invitation to come hang around for a month, but I was kind of surprised that they would then rescind that invitation.

Scott And he's not out of the sort of British-Canadian-American mainstream. Like, I mean, you might not, one individual A, B, or C might not like that he's in the mainstream, right? Like... And that's fair. But it's not as though he represents extremists. I mean, he represents a center-right-to-right part of the ideological spectrum that a lot of people identify with. I think he also represents...

Chris I mean, I tend to think of things, you know, more in sort of historical dimensions rather than sort of present-day political dimensions. And I think that, you know, historically he represents a reaction of And you've got men who are displaced and feel they don't know how to be men. I'm talking about people that use the men's room.

Scott Guys that, you know, are having a tough way navigating certain aspects of late modernity. And he speaks on that. Again, it's not the prescriptions, you know, I would resonate with or offer, but he's not a dumb... I mean, I saw him on Bill Maher. He was intriguing. Like, he was very... Bill Maher had some substantial points of agreement. I mean, he's a complicated enough thinker that he's worth engaging in a place like Cambridge. You know, that's... Totally what the university's for.

Chris And so engaging is the word. I think of the whole discourse on radical Islam, and it even came up in Canadian political news. I know that you don't get any headlines out of Canada, but the leader of the Conservative Party, he got some blowback for not naming what was going on in Christchurch, for not naming Islamophobia. And I just feel like there is just very weak engagement in society, certainly in Western society, with Islam. And the only time it tends to sort of pop up in conversation is when there is some kind of violent event. And that is because people aren't forming enough friendships and relationships. Do you remember at Basecamp Toronto, Nadia Ouidat? I don't know if you had a chance to meet her. I did, I did, yeah. Fabulously interesting Jordanian woman. She's now a professor at University of Kansas. She teaches on Islam. She has a fellowship at New America. She does research exploring secular Arabic movements and ecumenical Islam. Totally, totally fascinating stuff.

And me being here in London, there is just so much contact with the Middle East, actually. So much Middle Eastern wealth is here in the city. I'm often on business trips or speaking trips in Oman or the UAE. I haven't yet been to Saudi Arabia. Looking forward to going to Jordan. It's just another rich, fascinating part of the world. And when a civilization is that to you, then I think it's easier to put violent events in a healthier perspective as part of what every civilization has to work with and how do we work those parts of our civilization out. But it is just so easy to... Dehumanize whole sectors of the human experience into, you know, those are terrorists or those are victims because we just don't have a thick encounter in our lives.

Scott This guy, Graham Wood, concludes this piece by saying, To differentiate on an ideological spectrum is hard, but to fail to differentiate leads to catastrophic blunders. If you blindly swat at enemies and blindly extend courtesy to friends, the predictable result is that your friends get swatted and your enemies indulged. They may not send you thank you notes, but I promise they are grateful. I thought that's an interesting point, that nuance is important. And yeah, you're right, probably in a context like the UK, where you're just dealing relationally more with... Islamic citizens and immigrants, you just, you know, I mean, well, I mean, I guess it could cut one of two ways. Anxiety could lead you to not differentiate. But I think that it also probably offers many the possibility to differentiate and be nuanced and have a subtle appreciation of who is in front of you rather than who your lenses are showing or presenting to you, you know, letting that person present to you.

Chris There you go, man. We're both, like, stunned into silence by each other's reflections. But I think you're right.

Scott I mean... But I think that it all comes circle to fact. I mean, because in the beginning we were talking about these facts, like, how, like, basically... Again, we ought to want to have lenses on reality that are shaped by reality. I mean, everything is subjective, right? If our lenses through experience are our lenses and we can't experience things other than through our own subjectivity, But we ought to hope that there is an objective out there enough that shapes our lenses and makes them more amenable to not just being rationalizing, but actually helping us rationally engage what's out there, as opposed to just turning it into a sort of closed-circuit reality.

Chris Exactly. So this is why, I don't know, we've got to get Aristotle, or ideally Plato, I can get myself to believe anything. With my powers of reason and my rationalizations and the mental mazes that I can construct in my head. Is that what you do, Plato? Or like, what is the anchor for you? And if we get Aristotle, like, so this golden mean thing, like, okay, but like, where, why? Why does that weigh? Where is the authority of a kind of balance, of a boundary for what we can reason come from? Is it because you are, by virtue of kind of being 2,500 years closer to sort of our prehistoric cave origins, that you're just closer to nature and that we've spent sort of 2,500 years Segmenting the whole into measurable parts that we can no longer see the whole. That at one time, before we had religion, before we had myth, before we had any capacity to break the whole into measurable pieces, it was just obvious. That there was a kind of a unity, a connectedness that we were a part of. And so we've been extricating ourselves from that hole pretty much since we walked out of the cave. And you, Plato and Aristotle, you gave us this powerful new way to kind of step out of myth.

And to see all of that is that these are just ideas, guys. These are just concepts, constructs, and we can question them and we can direct our thinking kind of wherever we want it to go. We don't have to be locked into these mythical cycles of life. We can step out of that and just

Scott But you know what I think Plato and Aristotle had one advantage is there was not a distinction between, or I mean, okay, that there was integration between the pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful. And I think we have lost that.

Chris Ooh, say that again. Say that again.

Scott For Aristotle and Plato both, even though they have different routes to it, the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful are integrated pursuits, and they're all real, right? So I think for us, the true is sketchy because of fake news, facts, or anything. And then the good and the beautiful are just matters of taste, right? So I think that leads to a kind of nihilism.

Chris So you say it's matters of taste, which is to say we've internalized that into kind of our personal aesthetic, whereas for them, that was a public aesthetic.

Scott Yeah, this is A.O. Scott, the New York Times film. It's a great book on criticism. And in it, he talks about how criticism at its best is trying to sort of be a bridge between the objective and subjective poles. Because beauty is something that... Of course, you can't ever have just objective aesthetics because there's subjective dimension, but you can broaden and have a wider... You can bridge that gap some with criticism. But by and large, again, in a kind of... I mean, we bracket off the good and the beautiful as, you know, as as matters of value, not like truth or preference. And now even truth is getting that way. You know, so I think that's that's right.

Chris Right. So, yeah, that's exactly it. So now, you know, like the the good and the beautiful have become this personal aesthetic. And now truth has become a personal aesthetic. And so that's what kind of leads me to – so my hunch is that what's happening here is that we've taken sort of the mental age, we've taken the power of reason too far, that there is a kind of a moderation of the power of the mind, and beyond that, Thank you very much. There is this anxiety that we no longer know how to navigate it. We're kind of... Who is it? Name-dropping again. I think it was Gramsci. What was his first name? Gramsci, this famous sort of, I guess, political theorist on ideology. But Gramsci... Do you ever hear his definition of crisis? Gramsci said that crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. Yeah, yeah. Doesn't that kind of feel like that's the sense that the old is dying? It doesn't work anymore. And we've kind of reached an exhaustion point of our way of working and our way of Awaring, if I can create that verb, of the world, but also we can't get out of it. And so the new cannot be born. And so we're in this crisis, and I think that we just feel it everywhere. And it's kind of the underlying theme of so much of the surface stuff that we're grappling with in the world today, and that that's the task, actually, of our time, is to figure out how can a new be born?

And my sense is that the answer somehow is going to be like a pretty fundamental mutation in just the way that we frame the problem. Because we framed it in a way that, yeah, it's crisis. There's no way out of this. It's paradox. It's just intractable conflict. And there's got to be a sort of... As Einstein said, at a higher level of thinking, we kind of see the way of navigating through the paradox that we've navigated into. Dude, we got a lot of work to do.

Scott Yeah, Gramsci also came up with the term organic intellectual, which is what we're trying to be right here.

Chris The Atlas Project, dude. That's it, man. We've got some serious mapping work. You know what? Last thing, and we've got to let each other go, and probably our listeners, but I was reading about the motif of the journey, and the myth of journey, and think about, what was his name, the hero's journey? Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell, thank you.

Scott Beto O'Rourke is reading that right now, he said.

Chris It's on a journey, dude. Good for Beto. But so interesting thing, and I know Joseph Campbell talks about this, but it wasn't what I was reading at the time, but the idea that the motif of the sea journey, the journey out to sea, is consistent across virtually every culture. And the reason why is that every culture needed a way, needed a story about investigating the soul. That every journey is ultimately a journey of the self. That we go out and we come back somehow changed. And dude, not to get all sappy, but I feel like that's the journey that we're on together.

Scott Amen to that, brother. I love it.

Chris I love it. I love it, too. This is good stuff. Ahoy, matey. And so any listeners out there, if you've got some good jingles that I can drop whenever a name drops, I want them. Send them, please. Yeah, yeah. Peace out.