A lot of people are talking about things like “systemic change.” People feel an urgent need to “fix things in the world.” But there is a tendency to talk about societal realities that we long to change as if we’re not a part of them. It’s a lot like how people in participatory democracies talk about the need to change the dysfunctional government, failing to realize that they themselves are not completely separate from the governments they are bemoaning. Things like capitalism, the economy, government, societal infrastructure aren’t things “out there.” They are realities we’re embedded in; they exist in an ecosystem of relationships of which we are all a part. Do we need a radical change in thinking and speaking before we understand the things we want to change? Do we need something like a religious conversion before we move forward?
Transcript
Transcribed by machine from the recording.
Scott Chris, good day to you, my friend.
Chris We need entrance music for you. I would love entrance. Wouldn't that be like, yeah, is that a certain, like, does one have to achieve a certain status in society before society decides that, you know, we got to give this person entrance music?
Scott There was a movie where James Gardner and Jack Lemmon played ex-presidents of different parties. They were like lost or something. It's like some kidnapping. It's a wild sort of film, but it's a comedy. But they talk about how they both had this experience of hearing Thanks for watching!
Chris Kind of grim. I guess whatever kind of gets you blood pumping, I guess. Yeah.
Scott I wonder if Trump has things that he's thought of. I don't know.
Chris I'm pretty sure. But I doubt it rhymes or kind of keeps the beat or anything like that.
Scott It's probably just huge. What's he been up to this year? So, my friend, we want to talk about conversion today a little bit.
Chris You know, so interesting, because you are much more steeped in and actively participating in the world of faith and religion. And I actually come at the world from a... In some ways, ironically, given that my father was a Catholic priest, but I come at the world from a bit of a more secular mindset. And yet what's been interesting for me, the journey that I've been on the last, I guess, couple of years, thinking about how the world is changing and how society needs to change in response to all of these drivers of some pretty fundamental shifts in information and economy and politics and society. That, you know, the more I think about it and talk to people about it, the more I realize that, you know, all of those kind of systems out there that people talk about fixing are also embedded, you know, inside us in our ways of seeing the world, in what we pay attention to, in our values and habits and behaviors. And so, ultimately, we are upholding them all. And any kind of You know, dramatic transformation in the system. Anybody who wants to change the world, really... Who was it? Was it Gandhi who said, you know, be the change you want to see in the world? I feel like I've finally come to... Michael Jackson said you got to start with a man in the mirror, although...
So maybe it is... You might have needed to do a little more... Maybe Gandhi did get it from Michael Jackson. You know, sometimes we're confused about the source of these quotations. Like, what was it, Marianne Williamson? And it came out that there was this quote that was classically ascribed to Nelson Mandela that, you know, our greatest fear is not that we're powerless, but that we're powerful beyond measure. And apparently that was her. So I didn't... Maybe the whole be the change you want to see... Yeah, maybe Gandhi ripped that off from Michael Jackson. Could be. But anyway, I get it now. I like it. And so for me, you know, what's shifted in my mind, or at least what I'm, you know, chewing on, is whenever I hear out in society, people use the word transformation, which is like, become the word, right? Because I guess change isn't big enough a word. It's not enough syllables to really capture the scale of change that people feel is happening. So we need to... We need to, you know, glam it off a bit. So we don't say change anymore. We say transformation. But, you know, this last week, every time I've been hearing that word, I've, in my mind, I've been wondering, but is it more, would it be closer to conversion? What needs to happen? What ought to happen?
And as soon as that clicked in my head that, oh. I thought, well, I got to ask Scott about this because I feel like this is your territory much more than it is mine. I mean, you've clearly been through a few.
Scott Ryan Green and Tommy Bachman. And Tommy was like the smartest kid I knew. He was pretty good at baseball. He could throw a curveball. He knew algebra. They both went to middle school, so they had like, what, you have seven teachers in your own locker? That just doesn't exist. I mean, like, it was so, these were like men of the world to me, especially Tommy. And one day we were like playing Army or something on an October afternoon, like we had our little toy guns in the woods or something. And Tommy, in a kind of a judgmental way or something, but he was part of a fundamentalist Bible church in the next town over, which, I mean, all of this was exotic to me. And when I say fundamentalist, I don't mean it in a, I'm using it in the technical term.
Chris Like, there's a... What is the technical term?
Scott Well, there's a footnote in a book, a 600-page book about epistemology and warranted belief by... Alvin Plantinga, and he uses the term fundamentalist early in the introduction. It's a pretty big Oxford Press book, and there's a footnote, and he says, I use this in the technical term, not the academic term. When you call someone a fundamentalist in the academy, it usually means something akin to ignorant sumbitch. S-U-M-B-I. So I don't mean that. Yeah, that is much more of an academic term, isn't it? He probably was part of a very conservative North American Christian church, which was kind of separatistic. It was not, you know, it was sort of, it believed in sort of the imminent return of Christ and a sort of particular way of reading the Bible that is not the sort of majority tradition in the West or something. But it's become very popular the past 200 years or so in certain circles. And he told me that I would be saved if I accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. And if Tommy told me anything, I would have done it. And I remember I ran home. Oh, boy. Like three doors down. And my mom stops me, you know, boy running in the door. What are you doing? And I'm like, we didn't really go to church much. We were members of this Methodist church, but we didn't really go very often.
So I'm just like, how did you know Tommy Bachman told me if you accept Jesus Christ, your personal Lord and Savior, go to heaven when you die? And my mom goes, yeah, I knew that. And I was like, why didn't you tell me? And I ran up. I really said that. And I ran up and I... Don't you think this is important information to me? Exactly. I was like, why are you on it? So I thought this isn't personal enough. So I closed my door and then I got in my closet and I prayed. And I had this kind of weird, almost mystical experience. And I'm not akin to those kinds of things. I know people that I really believe in from several traditions have those. It's not, but something happened to me. And it was a long time developing that. And I, you know, the faith I developed was nothing like Tommy's. I mean, I'm sure we're, I mean, I think he went to a fundamentalist college and I think became an accountant and stuff. And I mean, I...
So we're just not, you know, I know some people that still know him. But that was something real. And there have been multiple sort of smaller conversions that have been emotional, intellectual, subsequent to that, like that charred my path. But that's sort of like, I wasn't raised in a family where religious faith and a kind of vibrant religious faith that interpreted your life was expected or prized or encouraged. So there was a different... But I think, though, that for any conversion, significant conversion, religious or otherwise, I think at least three things happen, right? Whatever you're converting to has to be intellectually plausible. It has to either fit into your existing sort of plausibility structure, or you have to be willing to change your plausibility structure to accommodate the new beliefs, right? So there's one part that's intellectual.
Chris Okay, so this is already really interesting. And you list it first. So part of it... Because I think that right there, people are like, oh, that's interesting. Tell me more about that. Because, again, for me who, and I admit, I don't think I've used the word aloud yet in my life. Until this week, I started to feel like this connects to some issues. But so you, and I think that if I... You know, if you asked people to kind of, you know, come up with a word cloud of, you know, free association with the word conversion, I doubt that many would start with words like intellectual or rational. And so it's interesting that you start with that.
Scott Yeah, well, I just think it has to, like, your plausibility structure, which... Just as many people brought to faith through suffering and tragedy and evil as turned away from it. It depends on how you hit it. So I think there's an intellectual and existential. And the third thing, I think, is the sociology of knowledge thing. You become like, we know this from a lot of 20th century social science, you become like the people you like hang around within your tribe. And so, oftentimes, there's this social commitment to the people that you admire or connect with have these ideas or are part of this way of being or way of thinking or way of walking in the world. And because of those relationships, actually, the conversion can be fostered. It's funny because people say, like, sometimes they say, well, you know, if you weren't born in the United States, you know, if you were born in Tibet or something, you probably wouldn't be a Christian. Yeah, well, if you were born in Madagascar, you probably wouldn't be an atheist. Thank you very much.
Oh, the early church. If you look at the early church, yeah, it grew like... But some of it was just like they, you know, the plagues would hit, right? And even like one of the big plagues, Galen, the physician, is leaving town. And you see Galen leave. Oh, shit, you know, this must really be bad. But actually, it wasn't that bad. And if people just got taken care of, it was like severe flu sometimes. If they just got taken care of, they would recover. And then the Christians often stayed to care for the sick when everybody else fled. And so then when they got better, the plague ended. There were all these new Christians just because they were the people that were around and were taking care of them. All right, well, why'd you do this? So I think that those three things, and they interplay differently for different people. I think for some people, the social thing is more determinative. Other people, the existential. Other people, the intellectual. There's always an interplay of all three, but often one is at the forefront or something. So I think that's how conversions tend to happen. Right? Like, that's how it shifts. And then, like, I'll just say one more thing, because I was thinking about this, because you primed the pump for me. So, this one last story I'll tell from history of Western civilization. So, in, you know, when the Roman Empire gets sacked, right, in the, I guess, like, we're talking, like, turn of the fourth, fifth century, there's some, like, reactions to this. There's, as, you know, in the early fourth century, when Christianity becomes mainstream and Constantine... Right, kind of the state religion.
Right. He enfranchises it. In a century, it goes from being a marginal kind of thing that was odd to something that's the mainstream normative thing. And there were a lot of people that were really critical of that because they're like, well, it really took something to be a Christian before. And now, you know, we don't have enough priests to even baptize everybody. You know, they thought, well, the church is becoming kind of watered down. And there's this one guy, Silvanus. So when the empire started to teeter and when Rome gets back, this one priest, Silvanus, says, because a lot of people said, well, see, when we weren't Christians, Rome was impregnable. But now, because we turn to Christianity, the gods judged us. And Silvanus is like, no, no, no, no, no. It's not that because of that, it's because we weren't good enough Christians. And so had we been a lot more stringent and more moral and more pure, this wouldn't have happened, right? And so there's this sort of dialogue about why this happened. Then you have people like St. Jerome, famous translator of the Latin Vulgate. He just sees, he doesn't think like that we can sort of preach, get holy again and fix the empire. He thinks, oh no, the fact that the empire is teetering is a sign that Christ is returning. So he just goes to Jerusalem. He's like, well, I'm going to see Christ first and just, frankly, divulgate and stuff like that and just translate the Bible. So you have this sort of fight-or-flight response, right, that if Rome falls, the world's over.
And so it's either we've got to stop Rome from decaying or we've got to— Or this is the sign we've been looking for. Or this is—yeah. Right. So St. Augustine, in the wake of this, writes one of the most important books in the history of Western thought, The City of God. And his thought is, no, there's two cities. There's the city of man, the city of the world, and there's the city of God, which is on a pilgrimage. And so the citizens of the city of God exist in the city of the world, and we commingle and we co-work on projects like fixing aqueducts and farming and all these things, but we do it for different reasons, because we see the ultimate peace is the peace to come. And so no one empire is really the city of God. That can only be brought at the fullness of time, the end of history.
So he kind of thought we're always in a pilgrimage in this life. And he thought, well, who knows what will happen? Maybe Rome will recover, maybe we won't. If we don't, then we'll have to Christianize our new masters. And so Augustine comes up with this philosophy of history that makes space for massive societal change, not shipwrecking the faith and not...
Chris And the spiritual one goes on and has to, you know, interact with the secular. But, you know, periods of collapse or flourishing in the secular world are, you know, I guess just change what the current emphasis of the project of the spiritual period is.
Scott Exactly. Yes. So he comes up with a sort of way of looking at history. That keeps the faith going to today. I mean, like, it wouldn't, I mean, Augustine is so, you know, Thomas Aquinas quotes in the Summa, quotes Augustine 2,240 times or something and never disagrees with him. Like, I mean, so, but Augustine laid so much of the seedbed for so much of Western intellectual history. And that's a conversion. Like, I mean, he had, it's funny because you can hear of Augustine's conversion in the Confessions. Which is amazing. But also, there's another kind of conversion that he brings societally, a different kind of understanding of history that clears the way for living beyond this catastrophic change of the decay of the Roman Empire and that sort of civilization. So I think that those kinds of conversions are key. And I think these are... But they're also hard,
and I think you can't ever force them. Oftentimes, they have to be more received than achieved, because there's this great saying that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And I think conversion is often like that.
Chris Hmm. Because it's interesting. I mean, so I've got a thousand questions now. And I don't know in what order to ask them. I mean, one, I guess on this last note about, you know, do you receive it? Do you achieve it? And the question I had written in my mind, well, no, I'd written it down in my notebook about five minutes ago is, You know, how do you convert people? Because there is also this kind of, you know, it's a pilgrimage of my own making, or is it a project upon people? And I mean, it sounds like... My starting point would be to assume that the only true conversion is one that we make ourselves. A forced conversion, to be converted to something, may be about the adoption of the trappings of it, of the wrapping of it. But the conversion is somehow a profoundly inner process as well. And so, I don't know, that's just a thought.
Scott Yeah, it has to be because so much, I mean, because I think conversions are so often disorienting, right? And so you don't usually undergo them completely willfully. Although not in constraint. I mean, not that someone converts, forces you to, but I'm saying your life is such that... The ground starts shifting.
Chris Right, you said there's this existential aspect to it.
Scott Yeah, yeah, and you can't force that on somebody. Like, they have to, for real deep conversions, again, they're more received. They can't, you know, you often, it's hard to account for it. It almost feels like you were, you know, like Stanley Harawas, the great ethicist at Duke, says, great traditions, you don't feel like you chose them, you feel like they chose you. And I think there's something to that.
Chris I suppose then the next question that I have is – so I know – so I've never read Augustine, the City of God. Sounds like I need to. You might have to – It's a very long book.
Scott I would say you could skip the first at least 12 chapters and be okay because the first 12 chapters are like – he's basically going through all the sort of deficiencies of the ancient religions and philosophies and why they're not – it's amazing because a lot of the stuff – like there's this guy, Varro, who chronicled all these ancient religions. And Varro, we don't have Varro's work. We just know Varro from Augustine. There's a lot of that. It's a political scientist. Book 19 is where you want to start.
Chris Okay, good. Thanks very much. Put that in the show notes for me because I'm only going to have time to read that. So now I'm fascinated with this move, this philosophical move that he makes in the history of Western thought to kind of almost give us another dimension in which to play in. And to release sort of our entire psyche and our soul's fate from what happens in the political realm. So it sounds like you're saying that nowadays I might talk quite freely about sort of the secular and the other. But that it was, in Western thought, it was really Augustine who made that break for us and said that there are these separate spheres, or at least sort of gave each sphere some freedom to go its own way. And now I suppose then the question for me that arises from that is, but what's the relationship between them?
And to what extent is conversion involved in In helping us, I think maybe to, because you talk about this existential priming of the pump that needs to happen and the intellectual plausibility of it and the social influence. And it seems to me that there is something in the tension between these two that conversion almost tries to be like the radical reconciliation of the tension between sort of what is happening in the world, in my world. And what is happening in my inner world, right? Sort of the outer world of the inner world.
Scott Yeah, and I mean, I think for Augustine, what he offers, which I think is still something I think is helpful, and I find it orienting. He thinks that, you know, because you're on this pilgrimage, you participate. You're neither a sort of withdrawal person, like the sort of Amish or the sectarian fundamentalist, and sort of, hey, the world's going to hell in a handbasket, right? Nor are you the kind of crusading evangelical Yeah, because the thing is, if a friendship or a dating relationship, if it becomes more than it possibly can, you lose not only deep transcendent things, but you lose the penultimate good that friendship itself can be when you try to make it an ultimate good. And so for Augustine, one minimizes the world too much and its significance, and the other sort of makes everything an ultimate good rather than a penultimate good. So Augustine sort of... There's no peace that torture preserves That's worth doing because the cost to our soul to do it is too ultimate, right? So security is not an ultimate good. It's a penultimate good, but there are things we ought not to do for security to secure our well-being. And so, yeah, I think that's really been helpful to me.
But on a parallel kind of thing, I'm always interested in conversions of any kind. So when you listen to somebody like Charles Krauthammer, who died, blessed memory, recently, but... A sort of liberal sort of guy in the 70s psychiatrist who became a sort of neocon, you know, and became one of the leading sort of conservative voices in the commentariat. That fascinates me when that happens, right? When you see somebody switch.
Chris Right. And so I realized that I had my entire intellectual framework was just wrong. Yeah. And I'm going to flip this way because I really think that there's a greater good. Right, like what was the crisis there must have been to lead to that, especially when if you've been sort of on one side of an argument or a position for so long, then you have a society, you have like a social affirmation around you, people who share that view, who support it. That insulates you from the counter-arguments and that raises the personal cost to then change your view, change your politics because you're turning friends into enemies inevitably when you do that. So that's very interesting because as you think about A lot of, I think, the tensions in societal systems in the world today, you get a lot of fixed positions on things, right? I mean, to be very crude and sort of Marxist about it, you've got kind of, you know, labor's view on these things, like automation. And you've got capital's view on these things, right? Maybe you've got government's view. And, you know, if you're in one of those camps, right, if I'm sort of, you know, head of a large corporation or I'm head of a labor union or something like that, it's My position is pretty fixed and the cost of flipping as the CEO to say, you know what, these people are right. We've just got to stop replacing people with machines because the big picture, if we all do this, then no consumers are going to have any money to spend anymore and we're all going to be screwed.
Or for the union to say, you know what, those guys on the other side are right. I mean, the union model is stuck in the industrial age and it's an entirely new world and we've got to blow up the whole system and reconfigure where decent work is. Guaranteed in our society. And both of those, there's so much validity to explore on both sides of that. But there is so much cost associated with the kind of conversion, the ideological conversion, let's say, that that would represent. Me as a China scholar, I can think about within mainland China. I mean, you can imagine if you're You know, there, you know, to convert ideologically is the costs are so high, right? It's not just, I mean, for sure your job is over. You're probably going to be imprisoned, I mean, but also your family. There's all sorts of penalties and sanctions against you by the community that supports your perspective.
And yet we live in this moment where it seems that we do kind of need to take long, hard, honest, searching looks at the other perspectives on this world that we're in and look at it until we can say, what is the truth in there that maybe I need to bring back?
Scott Yeah, yeah, and I think one helpful metaphor for me about this is like, and I'll go back to something that I think, I generally think of it in religious terms, but I think it would apply to any kind of conversion, intellectual, you know, worldview kind of thing. Like, there are, and I'm thinking, this is usually fundamentalist Christians, but I guess not exclusively so, but most of the time I see this in pretty conservative Christians. Their worldview, their belief system is like a Jenga game. You know the game Jenga where... Any one peg, then, could topple the tower. A lot of conservative Christians I know, very, not, and that sounds stigmatizing, because a lot are very sophisticated intellectually and stuff, but there's a kind of fundamentalist, conservative sort of Christianity where the people, every single belief is like a peg in the jenga game, whether it's whether Jonah was literally swallowed by a whale, the age of the earth, the resurrection of Christ, love of neighbor, everything is- You pull any one of them and the whole thing topples down.
And the whole thing can topple, right? And as opposed to kind of like, I try to, I hope that sort of the way I put together stuff is a lot more like a wedding cake where like the stuff that like is the foundation is at the bottom, right? Some things I believe about God and Jesus. Then there's like other stuff like, you know, as you get further up, you know, the layers get smaller and less foundational so that you can play with those middle and higher layers and still remake the cake. As opposed to the Jenga game, one thing, you can't really change it very easily, right? And so I think that, And I think that that's the case for a lot of our ways of seeing in the world. What are things that we believe that are pretty core commitments that we could change, but we'd have to bake a new cake?
And what are things that we actually are not as essential and could be remade and still be a remade cake, but still have the same layers so we wouldn't have to scrap the whole thing? And that kind of indication, I think, that kind of sort of... And what are things that are a little more tangential that I can play around with and it's not the end of the world? I think knowing that kind of stuff is helpful.
Chris Yeah, that's just as an aside. That's a fun metaphor to think of. So I like very clearly the metaphor of the Jenga game where the tower gets pretty high. And then the argument is, or the belief is that every block is critical. And so there is just no, there's no movement. And you have to protect every block. Yeah, you have to protect every block. And then, wedding cake, so I feel like we can work on that metaphor. That's not the metaphor that comes to mind for me, but I don't know a better metaphor at the moment. I mean, there's almost like, I'm sure if we had a physicist here, he would immediately start talking about, you know, the structure of an atom. Right, or something. You've got these electron shells. Like in the nucleus, this is like the cord. If you change that, then it's a different atom, or it's a different element, right? But you can have these sort of concentric spheres of electrons. And in the outer spheres, they're almost freely interchanging, and it's part of that ability to exchange. Thank you for your time.
And he talked about ideologies as exactly this, that there are some core commitments that make an ideology an ideology. And if you change that, then it's no longer liberalism or it's no longer conservativism. But then around that core – and he agrees too. It's a thick book, but it's the long project to kind of inventory what are these core commitments. And then outside of that core, there's a lot of kind of like adjacent concepts, right, which are kind of, they're related, you know, they're logically related to the core, but they're not necessary in the same way. And so, you know, that's where you tend to get a lot of evolution in, you know, what does it mean to be a liberal or what does it mean to be a conservative is in sort of some exchanging and evolution of the kind of the wider sphere of... of related commitments. And I think that logically that makes sense for people. And then what becomes really, really difficult, I think, is to see the difference. Okay, you're threatening me on something, but that's okay, because it doesn't threaten me in a deeper way.
In a very practical way, I see this a lot in business meetings. If you've got eight people around a table and you're trying to decide, so what do we do? And I think we're cultured into it to argue every point. And there's a kind of, you know, there's often a meeting culture. Well, if we just talk about it and argue about it long enough, then we'll all come to agreement. And, you know, what you find in practice is a lot of the time agreement is way too strong an objective for a meeting. Like if agreement is you and I need to have to assign the same priority to this list of things, we might never get there. And so, you know, when I get into these meetings that go on forever and ever and ever, I usually talk about, well, okay, let's clarify, what are we trying to get to here?
And I don't think we need to get to full agreement. I think that what we're trying to get to is alignment. And for me, alignment is, look, if I've got a list of things and you've got a list of things, as long as the list is the same, I'm pretty relaxed about what you've ranked number one and what I've ranked number one. As long as I know that you're not going to undercut me if I go and do three, four, and five, or if I do my number one first, as long as it's on your list, that's fine. So we don't have to have complete agreement in every respect. It's enough that... It's enough that we go out of this room willing to support one another in doing these things, and then we can kind of move on. But I think that there is just, and I
see it, like in that very practical example, we don't have... An instinct, a habit of asking ourselves, you know, how strongly do I need the world to agree with this versus how much am I happy to go along with?
Scott Do you know that book Good to Great by Jim Collins? I know it.
Chris I've probably read it at some point. Thanks for watching.
Scott And he found that one of the things they all had in common was that they were able to get this flywheel in the center of these three circles. One was, what are we passionate about? The other was, what can we be best in the world at? And the other was, what drives our resource engine? How do we make money? So they were able to sort of hone in on some things that were essential to who they were, and other stuff was adiaphora. Because then there's more room for disagreement when you have a smaller list of what the essence of the thing is. I love that book.
Chris I've got to reread it.
Scott It's great. It's so helpful. It's incredibly helpful.
Chris And what got me on to really wanting to spend an hour and talk to you about conversion is that I think that right now we're in a moment where there's just a lot of conversation in the world about what needs to change out there. And there's definitely some. I'm not saying there isn't. But I don't feel that enough of us, enough of the time, when we talk about a change that's needed out there, are also like, I think fully thinking and understanding that what I'm asking the world to change out there also implies a change in me. And I think that that's the helpful work, at least in my thinking about these issues right now, that talking about conversion maybe helps me to do is to recognize that there is this dualism in our reality. And I can't change the world without changing myself. So this Gandhi quote about, be the change you want to see in the world, it just sounds lovely. And it starts with you. And so you can model those changes.
And I don't know how to complete the sentence, but I feel like even, there was probably a time when that was in my signature line, like 20 years ago or something like that. And at the time, I don't think I fully appreciated that that was actually a pretty deep statement about What reality is. And I mean, there's a lot of, I think, you know, sort of righteous warriors in society today. And I think that that's an important archetype and does all sorts of things to create energy and useful mutation in society. And that's wonderful. But I think a lot of it, too, is very externally oriented. And, you know, you need to change and you need to fix and, you know, you guys are all doing this wrong. And I think that there is, I think that the next evolution that has to happen is a kind of...
Now I'm going to say things I don't know that I really think, but, you know, like an equal violence upon ourselves. And maybe that's way too strong a word, but, you know, some of the stuff that you talked about in sort of what are the criteria for conversion and how, you know, you almost, you don't do it willfully. It sounds like you're kind of suggesting that in a way it is a violent act upon the self, maybe not in a masochistic way, but in a, you know, you were probably happier before you realized you needed to undergo a conversion.
Scott Yeah, it's really interesting. There's this great quote by Carl Jung. It's from Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, of course, the great Swiss psychoanalyst. He says, the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ, all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself, that these are all within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved. What then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed. There is no longer any question of love or long-suffering.
We say to the brother within us, raka, which means kind of anger, and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world. We refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves. I think that is so profound, because I think if you, it's funny, I was recently talking to a lawyer who's an atheist, and we were, you know, fond of each other.
Chris I was just going to say, what did you talk about?
Scott Well, we're talking about what we both think is sort of so important is two lessons that really change reality when you realize there's almost nothing you can control in this life and when you can forgive and accept yourself. And those two things, if somebody realizes there's very little they can control, because most, I think the opposite of love is control. And most of our anxiety, a lot of our anxiety is managed by attempting to control things. So if I tell a story where they're the people that are wrong and we're the people that are right, automatically I've gotten some control over... It's a false and superficial kind of control, but I've created a story where I'm kind of important and control the players. And that... You know, so show me somebody that really fights that tendency, and show me somebody that can accept themselves, not in narcissism, but really accept themselves, warts and all, right? Seize themselves in their frailty, fragility, the good, the bad, the ugly. I don't care what their ideology is, they'll probably be somebody that is a blessing in the world to be around, right?
Like, show me somebody that needs to control things and can't accept themselves for, you know, something like who they really are. That's probably a tough person to be around, even if I agree with them on a bunch of issues. Very interesting. This is coming from someone who generally doesn't meet a situation that they don't, or at least not tempted to control. Although I'm not super type A. But all of us do it. It's just so react. It's just part of our DNA, right? Because the world's complicated. And it...
Chris It's interesting you talk about Carl Jung because you realize how, to some extent, every generation needs to figure it all out. You can't just read it and receive it and know it. Most knowledge just cannot be codified and transferred through books and letters and documentaries and TV specials. That when all we're consuming is the output, in some ways we're kind of just eating the scraps left over from the banquet. And the banquet is the experience and the journey and the production of the knowledge and the insights. So, you know, we've all got to kind of go through these journeys to discover some truths that, you know, maybe have, you know, that have been discovered millions of times before already, but they aren't yet our truths. And I feel like, you know, listening to you quote Carl Jung, that, you know, once again, I think what becomes obvious in our own time is that sort of the next big step is some kind of integration of our consciousness. That, you know, we still really do live in a world where, you know, some people are doing, like, real practical stuff.
And then there is all this other stuff around what is going on in our bodies, in our minds, in our soul that ultimately expresses in the stuff that everybody recognizes as real, but it isn't conferred the status of reality in the same way until it is expressed and codified and all that other stuff. And especially in a moment like now where so much of the conversation and attention seems to be changing the stuff out there, you know, somehow achieving an integration between the two. I mean, that's got to be one of the big, big, big, big, big projects. Just in human consciousness over the next, you know, like not 10 years, more like probably a couple of hundred years. Like that I think is sort of our renaissance project that right now we're kind of, you know, it still is disintegrated, right? Like so we're getting, like people are into yoga and into meditation and mindfulness and all this stuff.
But, you know, at most kind of work on ourselves and to change our reality, not really seriously because, you know, very few people I think do it with the belief that if I'm doing this, you know, this meditation, I'm... I'm fixing the world's problems out there. We just don't have any kind of belief framework or even conceptual framework to understand how those two things are really related.
Scott I think we know a lot more about the world data-wise, but we're more alienated. I mean, you look at Aristotle. He knew a lot less. I've never seen the original, but I just didn't know.
Chris Yeah, no, I've been there. I've stood in front of it. It's fantastic.
Scott Oh, man. But that's, you know, Aristotle's pointing down, right? Like, at the world. Aristotle's at home in the world largely because he wants the whole. Like, there's something about the whole. And I think you're right. Like, so many people feel alienated and disintegrated in the world we live in, even though we know so much. We have so much access to so much data that it doesn't make us feel more at home in the world.
Chris So data, this will have to be another big conversation. So I've been doing more and more work with a friend of mine who is an AI scientist. We do a number of workshops with the Ministry of Defense here in the UK, just helping them wrap their head around artificial intelligence and what it means and stuff like that. But at the core, he's a data scientist. And so we have these long philosophical conversations about data. I think any educated person knows or at least has heard this trope that data is biased and so we can't just rely upon data, but there's a reality beyond the data. And he has a very concise way of describing it. He says that, you know, data, anytime you're producing data, you are simplifying reality. That any collection of data, any production of data is a simplification. You're capturing a piece of something and saying, I'm going to pay attention to that. So it's a simplification. And then what we do with that data is we generalize. So anything that's data-driven is a process of simplification and then generalization. Now, what is that process? That's basically stereotyping, right? What is stereotyping? It's you simplify, you know, all white people. So he's a white person, Scott, and then you generalize. So all white people are podcasters, I guess.
And so, you know, to the extent that we're a data-driven world, we're a stereotypical world. We're a stereotypical world. And so I think that that's really helpful. Like, wow, okay. So, you know, all of the kind of thinking and being that society is doing to try to sort of get out of its own stereotypes can be applied to our data-driven reality as well. And it also kind of helps one to think about to the extent that we are data-driven and that we're using sort of artificial intelligence and algorithms more and more. We are reinforcing stereotypes because it ultimately derives from a process that is first simplify and second generalize. And so how do we kind of reach beyond the simplification? And to drink from the fire hydrant of life in all its complexity, I think, is a really big question in itself. And I want to make some kind of eloquent tie-a-bow in how that relates back to conversion. But maybe part of, I think, the process of conversion that I guess we all need to think about is really just this kind of fundamental question of how do I integrate sort of what is going on in my inner world and what is going on in the outer world? And how do I be present to kind of the full awesome enormity of that question?
And then I think, like, two questions follow from that. Like, one is, so if I'm a person who's strongly oriented about, like, the outer world has to change, what am I implying about the corresponding change in my inner world? And kind of vice versa. If that's like, you know, my inner world has to completely change, well, then, you know, maybe there's an implication, positive or negative, for what that implies for the rest of us, for the outer world. Anyway, things to think about.
Scott Yeah, man, it's interesting. Richard Rohr, he's a Franciscan who writes all sorts of interesting stuff on spirituality, psychology. But he runs a center in New Mexico, I think, called the Center for Action and Contemplation. And so the idea is that a lot of religious orders at the time of the Franciscans, when they were started, were either action-oriented or contemplative, right? So they were either doing a lot of stuff in the world or they were sort of praying, reflecting, thinking. Interesting, yeah. And so much of it is in the interplay of action and contemplation.
Chris Right. You're either, I don't know, as a monk you're either sort of making war for the glory of God or making beer, I suppose.
Scott Yeah, I'd be for making beer.
Chris Well, I don't know, bit of both.
Scott Well, my friend, it's always a pleasure. And, you know, I hope that our listeners are experiencing the fullness of life and its complexity and beauty.
Chris I like it. I mean, I never know where these conversations are going to go. And I think that's the point, because now my head is buzzing. Me too. Take it easy, my friend.