What’s really real?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, good morning, my friend. Scott, it's been a while. Yeah, man, we've been doing a lot of stuff.

Chris Well, you've been moving house.

Scott Yes, moving is the worst.

Chris Yeah, I mean, the thing about moving is you discover everything that you possess.

Scott Everything. Like, for instance, I'm holding in my hand my 80-gig iPad. Thanks for watching. Yeah, I'm just wondering what's on there. Yeah. So what's going on in the UK?

Chris Well, it's raining hard at the moment, which is kind of typical for February. It's interesting. I mean, so the end of January was when Brexit formally happened. So that conversation that was taking place over three years about would they or wouldn't they actually leave the EU has happened. And in some ways, that was a kind of enormous relief for society here. I mean, it was almost something palpable, just that, okay, at least that question is answered, and now we can move on to the next crisis, which is really... So, not to go into the details of it, but basically, upon leaving the EU, the UK said, okay, so immediately upon leaving... We are just going to keep everything the same. So nothing changes, but now we have the power to make changes. And so they're spending most of this year basically having a conversation with the

EU about how much can we change the way we do things in the UK and still have access to some of the benefits of being inside the EU. But while they have that conversation, nothing has changed. And that makes people feel better.

Scott Yeah, this is the interesting thing. So is this kind of just a big thing of anxiety management? So we've said we don't like Brexit, and now we voted against it, and yet we're not really out of it. I mean, is this just like status quo?

Chris I suppose it's also just a good... It's a good example of how... I mean, we all inhabit the same world, but we don't. And our reality really is shaped by what we pay attention to. And so, you know, the average person... You know, say a company that is importing stuff from the EU and worried that if we set up new tariffs and import rules and stuff, then I'm going to have to figure out new sources of the materials that I've been buying. Now is actually when the uncertainty begins for you, because that's kind of... So I think for broader society, yeah, it's about kind of anxiety release. Okay, we know, we kind of know what the solution or what the outcome of that conversation is. And yet for so many people now is the beginning of the anxiety because they are, you know, paying attention to the new unknown, which is, you know, for the moment nothing has changed because Thanks for joining us. We'll be right back. Thank you very much.

Is that a permanent thing? Do I need to renew it? Can it be taken away? So yeah, for people who live in the UK, I guess now if you're European and you live in the UK, now the questions are kind of the same sort of questions that a foreigner living in the US asks themselves. How long am I allowed to stay here and how might that change and when might it change? And kind of the same thing the other way. If you're British and you're living in the EU, you now have these same uncertainties about your future.

Scott And couldn't it be like, I heard that like Northern Ireland and Ireland now, where it would just, you know, going back and forth was just like going back and forth between New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the United States. And now that could change, right? Because you'll have to have like a, it would be like more like going to Canada from Michigan.

Chris Yeah, that's right. So this is one of the big, you know, again, nothing has changed yet. But the UK now has the power to, you know, go in a different direction from the EU in terms of things like trade policy, or, you know, if we want to I don't know, make it harder to import dairy into the UK because we want to protect domestic dairy industry or things like that. You know, in Ireland, a lot has been made about how the completely kind of borderless flow of people and products across the Northern Irish and Irish borders is one of the things that just helps to stitch that island of people together. You know, there was, you know, over the last 20 years, and Bill Clinton was a part of this, right, like building the peace in Northern Ireland. And yeah, it's true that, you know, countries that trade together tend not to go to war together. There's a good reason to be And so there is a lot of anxiety. Again, talk about anxiety. On that island, are we going to be reintroducing barriers? I mean, if we're going to have differences in how goods are handled in Ireland and Northern Ireland, then you're going to need to have some kind of physical barrier to control the flow of goods that need to be handled differently. So you've got concerns like that.

And then, of course, you've got Scotland. And one of the interesting things about Scotland that's quite distinctive is that Scotland has throughout this whole Brexit debate been very strongly pro-EU. For the Scottish, there is a lot of Thank you very much.

Scott I take it you're like an anti-Brexit guy. I would guess, right? I mean, you're an internationalist type. I mean, I think you're more of a guy that seemingly would be suspicious of the Brexit move, right?

Chris Yeah, I think so. You know, I've been thinking a lot about... I suppose one thing that I am is anti-reductionist, right? And so I guess in part because I have... I will then assume the pro-reductionist position. I think definitely my bias is towards integration, and I think that there's a lot about the European project. We are obviously all these different nations, we are these different cultures, but is there some kind of If Europe can work it out, then it's not crazy to imagine. You know, in the relationships between states, you know, between North America and Africa and Europe and South America and Asia, that we can get better as a species at kind of recognizing what we share in one another. And on the flip side, if Europe can't figure it out, then what hope is there? So yeah, in the big picture, I think that it's an important project to be trying to work out, even though we're different, what are the ways that we can move together. So that's kind of my fundamental, I suppose, pro-Europe bias, if I think about the whole Brexit question. But I'm also open to, you know, and I really, I feel like although it's been really badly articulated and it hasn't been directed in any sort of positive way, there is something real and important in some of the intuitions. That underlie things like Brexit or underlie things like the Trump presidency. And, you know, I think some of those things are, you know, deep felt senses. I guess it's sort of, you know, some of those things are kind of the postmodern ills, right? Senses of alienation, of fragmentation, of a kind of incoherence to the world that creates a longing for Michael Garfield, Jordan Peterson.

Here, let me make sense of it for you. Let me simplify the chaos. Let me give some validity to these feelings of unease you have. Let me identify a cause for them and then empower me to make things right.

Scott Yeah, I think Andrew Yang, who was running for president, he just dropped out of the race, but he was one of the more compelling candidates, I thought, because he is a guy who's an entrepreneur and from the tech world, and his response, his sense of why Trump...

Chris We have a connection with Andrew Yang. I'll tell you about it in a moment.

Scott I love it. I love it.

Chris Yeah, one degree of separation.

Scott He is somebody that I think was diagnosing, like, hey, look, there are all these jobs that are going away and they're not coming back, right? And this is part of the populist backlash. You know, I mean, his big thing is, like, wait till we get driverless tractor trailers and the kind of, like, populist back, because that's still one of the jobs in America where you can actually support a family, right? Like, driving a truck is, you can make good money, and, you know, you don't need to go to college to do it. You don't need to master, you know, like, you don't need no coding or anything. And you actually, it's still a really good job. When these things keep going away, and there's not a kind of... You know, there's not, none of the other Democrats have talked as much as he did about some of these economic realities that aren't changing, right? Like, I mean, this is the populism on the right and the left, both sort of, whether it's Trump or Sanders, we're going to manufacture again, or we're going to, the American workers going to like, you know, we'll get the workers' rights back, and we're all going to get, like... No, it's supposed to be Bernie Sanders.

I don't even have a super pack. I don't even have a backpack. I just carry my things under my arm like a college professor. But, you know, like these, yeah, I think that populist thing, it's like Yang, what's compelling about Yang is he's actually talking about these kind of realities. And the thing that scares me, and we've probably talked about this before, but the thing that like scares me most is like... Hillary Clinton won one-sixth of the counties in the United States in the 2016 election. Trump won five-sixth, so 80% of the counties. The one-sixth of the counties she won has 70% of the GDP. And so those other 80% of the counties in the country have 30% of the GDP. So all of the economic opportunities and development are happening. And this is the other thing Yang's talking about, trying to, in other parts of the country, develop economic...

What do you do about that? Because I think that's one of the challenging things. This is what you write about in the Age of Discovery, that Renaissance was the best time to be alive at the time, and yet the aggregate is different than the particular, and there's still lots of people left behind and struggling. The global economy sounds great if you're in one sixth of those counties in the United States where it's thriving.

Chris I feel like there's kind of... I'm going to grope with this aloud, so it's not going to maybe come out. Please grope me. Okay, thanks. I mean, you said I could. But so, I mean, obviously, you know, these are kind of the classic splits, right? The left versus right. And the left is saying, you know, look at the inequality and the distribution of winners and losers. And I think that whole analysis you gave is right. I think, you know, kind of back to your question of, you know, so am I kind of pro-anti-Brexit? And back to my response around what fascinates me is I think that it's surfacing some deeper questions. We need to take this opportunity now that they're kind of coming to the surface to really grasp them and pick them up and stare at them. I don't really think that, for example, the Democratic candidates in the 2020 debates have really grasped this yet. A lot of the analysis, including Andrew Yang, is looking at the economic and what's wrong with the economics. And I feel like there is a kind of a deeper blind spot in the whole spectrum of what they are debating about in the inability to really see past the economics to some deeper things at stake. I told you I'm going to be groping, right? So I'm thinking in my mind at the moment of, I'm actually thinking about Marx and scientific materialism and this kind of, you know, almost like the bad part of enlightenment thinking, which was that sort of, you know, that we can optimize the world, that, you know, with perfect data and the best science, we can optimize the world as if the world is this kind of machine.

And when we're talking about jobs and jobs being lost to automation and stuff like that, we're not thinking about sort of the full human dimensions of work. We're just thinking about the task. And can the task be done by a machine or by a human? And as I think about, you know, I think back to Brexit, for example. For me, it was so clear, rollback way to 2016, when this country is actually having the debate about should we be in Europe or should we be outside of Europe? Everyone who was arguing to stay in was making utilitarian arguments, was making economic arguments about how ultimately we'll be better off or worse off in this kind of material understanding of reality by being in Europe. When so much The image of what people who voted for Brexit were feeling was the realities of something else. It was things like identity and maybe, whether false or real, an imagined community,

a nostalgia for empire, a sense of maybe we're not stronger together, maybe we are stronger standing on our own. And just because it flies in the face of economic data doesn't mean that there's not something real there, that mythology is really powerful, powerful stuff.

Scott Yeah, I mean, this is where Donald Trump is a really effective candidate because he gives you an identity, like you're one of his guys and you're at the rally. Lock her up! And it's kind of like a sporting event and yet you're on the team and everyone's got a MAGA jersey. And it does create a sort of connection and a sense of... National identity and pride. Even if it's very thin, I think that there might not be much to it. What does he do? He goes to parts of the country. He goes to non-urban centers and gets these big venues and fills them up. It's like pro wrestling.

Chris Given the arguments they're making, what are they presupposing is real and what is just unreal and doesn't matter? Job statistics are real. Apparently, income statistics are real. Is the spiritual real? Is national identity real? I don't know, but I think that there's a lot that is real for voters that is not being represented in the discourse. I think fundamentally, for me, that's the lesson of Brexit.

Scott What Trump does is he makes something real or connects in his base a sense of values and identity that will convince them to vote against their economic interests. So, like, you know, they'll give these tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the people in Hillary Clinton counties and stuff. And yet there's a loyalty because there is something he's tapping into. And they will, again, vote against their interest for the connection and identity and the idea that, you know, you're part of a movement here.

Chris And so, you know, it's interesting that, you know, we talk about politics, but it really is, I think, a philosophical contest about what is real and what isn't. I think that there is, and so this is kind of, as I say, this is the Marxist, this is the scientific materialism, this is the kind of utilitarian outlook on the world. There is a kind of a skepticism that these aspects of, you know, of feeling, of intuition that people are responding to are unreal, and so we discount them. And I think we need to go the other way, not to validate it, but to say we are too reductionist in our thinking of what exists, not just in the minds of voters, but what exists as social realities.

Scott Yeah, there is a piece that Jonah Goldberg wrote in Commentary Magazine. He's a center-right kind of American commentator and a very bright guy. He wrote a book called The Suicide of the West and talking about sort of how this sort of, you know, what he thinks is liberal enlightenment democracy and free markets and stuff is a very unique accomplishment and it might implode. But he wrote about against socialism, and he wasn't talking about socialist economic policy. He was talking about basically national populist, like, if people don't have identity, let's find something in a social, like a socialism, like, you know, if we just get together as a tribe or a group or an identity, we'll feel better. And he was very skeptical of this, like he's thinking, no, like, you know, this is the kind of thing where people can't kind of handle the, you know, the independence of the liberal democratic project.

And it's kind of pejorative. I mean, his argument, again, you can hear somebody make this from the left or the right, this kind of discounting this desire for a kind of traditional connection that you lose from the transition to modern to modernity and late modernity.

Chris And I think for me, I think what we're doing is we're developing our agenda for the next year or so, because that's how big these questions are. But for me, it just identifies—I mean, we are so unpracticed and uncomfortable exploring these questions that we just run from them. I think the immediate—so, you know, a lot of people, you know, listening to this, or I can imagine coming on this, would be like, Unable to explore is that there is the possibility of truth that is not objective and yet exists in a kind of a shared context. That you can't just make anything true, and yet it's possible that some things are true for me and not for you. I don't know if it's a middle ground, but there is something richer than just that kind of objective truth, and that this whole dichotomy between objective

and subjective. Thank you very much. Maybe if I can move it to a bit more familiar territory for you, it's like spirituality, right? Now, does God exist, right? You're a minister, but is the Christian story true? Is it real?

Scott I don't know.

Chris But as a mythology, I think that it is. You know, not just fascinating, but really important. You know, some of the aspects of it, that here is the divine made human, right? And like the idea of participating in and sharing our suffering. Like there are some aspects of that myth that provide a pretty unusual opportunity to sort of connect Thank you for having me.

Scott Did a podcast called The New American Paganism. And several social conservatives, intellectuals, religious intellectuals have sort of legitimized Trump's support by saying that, you know, we've got to sort of, even though he's crass and boorish and, you know, doesn't seem to exhibit traditional Christian virtues, he's staving off this pagan, secular society, the godlessness, and with, you know, judges and other things. And, you know, a lot of them quote T.S. Eliot, this idea, his essay, The Idea of a Christian Society. But this one scholar said, actually, they haven't seemed to have read the Eliot piece, because Eliot wrote this piece in 1938 when he wrote this piece called The Idea of a Christian Society. And in it, he warned against this. He says, it is not enthusiasm, but dogma that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society. And he says these enthusiastic sort of populist religious nationalist sort of stuff engender nothing better than the disguised and peculiarly sanctimonious nationalism accelerating our progress toward the paganism we abhor. And then when he defines what he thinks of the paganism,

And he even thinks, he says, you know, it will have this like puritanical morality that doesn't allow, he wants a Christian British society that allows pluralism, individual freedom, and he says, and he thinks that this paganism, which might even dress itself up in Christian rhetoric, will seek to erode individual freedom and dignity. It's a really interesting piece, because Eliot, people think of him as this kind of conservative figure, and in many ways he is, but sometimes you read him, it's like he's so far right, he's left. So something that became very clear for me, thinking about, is Trump good for religion in America?

Chris And I guess my argument would be no, because Yep. All is the contest for power and nothing other than the pursuit of power in a contest of me versus you is real. And so what is actually shocking to people is how he is turning things that it was imagined were somehow... Thank you very much. Thank you. How I would articulate the fear of what's being lost is the reduction of things that could possibly be about some broader purpose, a shared social purpose, being reduced to that same kind of materialistic thing that we were talking about before. Just at a personal level, I think about it in terms of meditation. Meditation, which is supposed to be kind of the The original sort of where did meditation come from is a tradition of spirituality. How do we connect with the intuition that we are part of something larger than ourselves? How do we articulate and spend time in an awareness of this?

Right? So it is similarly the kind of the reduction of something that is meant to be a gateway to something larger into the same sort of just simplified and kind of dead materialism. You know, another example, by the way, on this rant. You know, the body, you know, our bodies are like, it is the embodiment of life. This is the vessel through which I, you know, encounter what life is. And we have really, you know, tried to shut that down as well. And instead, the body is something that we are hostile to. You know, we have, my body is, I'm not thin enough, I'm not fit enough. It is a kind of machine that we try to optimize and put into the same service of these utilitarian objectives, right? So the body, you know, spirituality, everything is part of the same pursuit. And then, you know, religion and justice and everything is just collapsing down into... Sorry, I don't know where that came from.

Scott I had this woman, no, I'm telling you, I had this interview yesterday on this Give and Take podcast with a woman, Catherine Rowland, and she wrote a book called The Pleasure Gap, which is all about how women, it's all this deeply researched book about how basically women are having much less sexual satisfaction than men, even though we have much more... We talk more about sex. There's seemingly more sexualized culture. And all these things that she says, you know, all these things, whether it's the female Viagra or the, you know, like sex coaching and all this. She says, look, real eroticism comes from self-acceptance, feeling at home in your own skin. And all these things are like anxiety-producing. I got to have better sex, better this, better that. And I think the same thing, you know, my friend David Zoll wrote a book called Secularity, where he basically says, look, we may think we're a more secular culture, but we're just as religious. And now the religion is parenting or being a foodie or eroticism or the gym.

And he said, this is all of the guilt and shame of the dark sides of the worst forms of religion without the transcendence or the mercy. And it is, it's a very, I mean, I think it's exhausting. I mean, like, late modern life is just, yeah, as you say, it's atomizing, can be fragmenting and exhausting.

Chris So, yeah, so here's my summary. Full circle again. You know, so, you know, what side of Brexit am I on or what? I think where I'm at is so much more is real than we know how to talk about. For me, that's the big lesson. Thank you very much. I think what was refreshing about someone like Andrew Yang on the stage, people thought, oh, he just doesn't talk like a politician. Why? Because to some degree, in some way, he's just talking about things that the people who are practiced in that ritual of politics, and here's what's real in the political realm. He was bringing up things that they don't know how to talk about. And rightly or wrongly, and probably my view would be wrongly, that was what Trump's magic was too. He was talking about things that people just didn't know how to talk about.

And I think that the tragedy is that rather than having the genius, and I think it is genius to recognize what we need to talk about but aren't talking about. It's very hard to do. It's like, what is the blind spot? Very hard question to answer, but having the genius to do it, and then you can go in one of two ways. You can leverage the sense of alienation and fragmentation and incoherence to lift yourself up. I am the strong leader, follow me. Or you can help people to connect to, now I've shown you that now let's come together and let's all talk about this stuff to lift everyone else up. And that's, I guess that's what I'm waiting for, you know, in this country and kind of the aftermath of Brexit in the Democratic primaries. I'm waiting for somebody to get that, to see what we're not talking about, and by really touching it, lifting people up. Now, I think that, you know...

Bernie Sanders is sort of the most populist person on that stage. He's maybe closer to it in terms of satisfying some kind of emotional hunger for coherence, for a context that makes sense. But I do think he's still kind of stuck in this very materialistic world.

Scott Right, right. Basically, if we just get more, if we just have a flatter society, everything will be, you know, these existential problems will be, yeah, it is reductionistic and sort of, you know, it's a panacea. I mean, if we just distribute the wealth and the income of the billionaires. If that's going to, like, solve the existential ills of late modernity.

Chris Like immigration, for example. Immigration and where I would tell people to start looking for the stuff that we don't know how to talk about would be immigration in the sense that there are a lot of deeply felt intuitions that it is a good thing. There is something about the reaching past surface and touching something common in all of us that is more significant than surface differences. And yet it seems that really the only way that sort of pro-immigration voices have to talk about it is the material utilitarian arguments, the job creation, the innovation. And I think, you know, part of the challenge is when we have stripped so much mythology out of life, there just isn't, there aren't as many big shared hooks, not just of idea, but of feeling, of purpose to connect to. Everybody can relate that I guess the economy is a good thing and we want economic progress. So we keep hooking everything onto that, you know, which is...

In a way, stupid, because there is so much economic data that says one thing that is pretty clear is there's virtually no correlation between income growth and happiness. I mean, Japan was a happier society back in the 1960s.

Scott Yeah, I mean, Weber talked about the iron cage, right, that traps individuals and systems which are based on, you know, only teleological efficiency and rational calculation and control. And he described this like the bureaucratization of social order as the polar night of icy darkness. And I do think, like, I mean, for all the great things of, you know, enlightenment, rationality, and technology, and these things, this is the hard thing. It's a big trade-off, right? And how do you deal with life in the iron cage? And you're right. I think that, like, it seems like our politics and our rhetoric is constrained to the iron cage. And people want to be more than atomistic reductions.

Chris So I think the point is, and this is the last that I'll say on this, and I think we found our topic for the year, but the Industrial Revolution was the triumph of efficiency, of mechanistic metaphor, of organization. of the system determining the life of the individual. And I think a lot of what's going on in this moment culturally is, you know, there's certainly some kind of evolution past it, and it's happening in places, but it is a fitful process of birthing kind of the next stage and set of values and culture. And there's just so much evidence. Thanks for watching. The blind spots in the reality that we recognize and work with and the genius of people who are going to be able to make it possible for us to integrate a much fuller sense of what's true, of what's real, of what's meaningful, of what's significant in a world where there is such a strong economic lens on reality.

Is it the same as the whole? And then Mary Shelley is like, no, making a whole that is just the sum of the parts is an abomination. The whole, the live being is something that transcends that. And that gap between Frankenstein and the human being, that's the space that we need to figure out.

Scott It's the reuniting of the true, the good, and the beautiful, man. Dude, did Augustine say that? No, no, but that is, I mean, I think that is, like, there is this connection, right, in, you know, the Platonic tradition, the Judeo-Christian tradition, this idea that the true, the good, and the beautiful are inseparable. And now we've sort of made, we have a reductionistic view of the truth, and the good and the beautiful are just sort of, you know, those are, you know, whatever you think they are, they're not the things of public discourse, you know, so it leaves for starving souls.

Chris Yeah, so I mean, I think that's a great way. So to sum it up, the true, the good, and the beautiful. I think that for the most part, we now live in a society where those are just like, I don't know, words or philosophers or something like that. But they're not significant words. That's rhetoric. And what's rhetoric? It's air. And so the journey that we have to get on is one to where, no, those are culturally significant invocations of what this is all about.

Scott So instead of MAGA, we could be like, Thanks, my friend. Great conversation.