What would you give up?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, good morning, my friend. Good morning to our listeners.

Chris Oh, good morning, Scott. It feels like it's been a few days too many since we've worked out in the Atlas gym.

Scott In the intellectual gymnasium. Yeah, it is. I'm here in the failed state. We have hit over 4 million cases now of COVID-19, and our death rate is over 140,000.

Chris It's stark that, what was the statistic? Something like one quarter of all deaths from COVID in the world, but only about 4 or 5% of the world population.

Scott Right, and we make up a quarter of the deaths. Yeah, I've heard that stat.

Chris Yeah.

Scott We're number one, USA.

Chris Sobering, sobering. I understand, obviously, you spend so much time paying attention to what's going on in the US. I mean, that's where you are. And I guess the rest of the world does by default just because, you know, your news is so interesting. That's one word for it. Well, yeah, to put a really insensitive word on it. But there is also so much happening here, you know, in the UK, in Europe, back in Asia, you know, in Africa and Latin America. It's, you know, like the kind of, you know, just giant events that people stare at in disbelief are happening all over the world right now. It's almost confusing to know where to look and what to pay attention to when there's so much that you could. And I always kind of have this fear around what aren't we paying attention to when our attention gets taken up by the big, bright, flashy objects in front of us.

Especially, I guess, one, because You know, we're in a moment where clearly one of the big, you know, sober lessons is, you know, big stuff was happening that we weren't paying attention to. We're also in a moment where because so many, you know, if you will, regular patterns have been interrupted for people, there is so much that we can see right now that you can look around and discover, you know, just because you can look at so many things with a new clarity. And so it just becomes that much more agonizing, this gap between what we could be paying attention to, what we probably should be paying attention to, and the little bit...

Scott But I mean, and you're an island and you can keep travel off and stuff. But I mean, you look, even the UK comparatively is not doing as well comparatively to some other, you know, advanced industrialized nations and stuff. So it's, you're right, it's a weird thing, but you're right. There are other countries that are, because they've dealt with this better, life is a little more normal. It's hard to reacclimate to figure out, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, they say that... I've heard pilots say this when they're learning to fly. When they're first in cloud cover and they're adjusting, adjusting, adjusting, and they're not kind of trusting their instruments, and they come out of a deep cloud cover and they're flying upside down and they didn't know it. Because they're making subtle adjustments. And I wonder about that analogy right now. Are we kind of flying upside down? We don't know. And also, I just think here, the media bias is, I don't think, as much as a liberal skew, it's biased toward laziness and sensationalism.

And so that's the other thing. I think that we're not very well equipped to deal with crises because we're not getting, because we're getting kind of sensationalized information in ways that sort of, you know, in this country, it just becomes so tribal and so partisan, which is remarkable to, again, my Canadian friends who, I mean, I count you as one of them, even though you're in the UK now. You are of Canadian origin. They are just astounded at how we can deal with a crisis in this sort of politicized tribal way, but we do. And it's a weird kind of time to be alive in the United States of America.

Chris I feel for you, man. We all do. There's something in what you described that also connects to... Why Basecamp? Why we gather at Basecamp? Why we're getting together on Saturday to ask a question that is deeper and richer than the media headlines? It goes to this basic insight that maybe we've been asking the media to do what it's not set up to do. So this presumption that the role of the media is to inform us and present to us the stuff that we should be paying attention to. But that is a very tiny part of its incentives to actually deliver on that objective. And we'd probably be kind of safer if we had a more critical view of the role of the media. The role of the media is not to help us pay attention to the stuff we should be paying attention to. The role of the media is to increase audience share. The practical incentives that drive what is in the news. are very different and very far from the question of, if we paid attention to these things, it would maximize our well-being. It would help us to flourish. It would help us to endure. And I think that's why we do need to create and hold whole new spaces for ourselves where there can be that kind of intention and that kind of incentive, that the reason that we're here in this space is to ask the questions that aren't being asked, is to consciously focus our attention where we think it would do us all some good rather than sort of wait for the next dumpster fire and then all look at that.

And I just think growing up, we do kind of grow into a naive sense that the role of the media is to do this stuff for us, when really it's not. Maybe that is the role of the public broadcaster, is to try to do that. But that's a small corner.

Scott Right, right, right. It does change it when you take the corporate interest out a little bit. Thank you for having me. Michael Garfield, Slavoj Žižek, Jordan Peterson. I just couldn't just take that and a little bit of bleach and you're fine. But, you know, but there's some studies that have come out saying that it is useful if you get it at a certain stage. Right. And so, of course, the left is outraged because, well, but Trump supported that. And, you know, like, you know, it's it's just like people are like not wearing masks because like I'm with Trump and I'm not wearing a mask because of that. Or the left is like. It doesn't want to play up this study because, well, Trump said that drug's reliable. We can't, you know, it's just kind of, it's just maddening. I mean, it's exhausting. I mean, it's kind of just even participating in that kind of culture is exhausting.

Chris Right. So, you know, so that's interesting. But I mean, what you're basically saying is that, you know, a lot of the mediascape is, especially if we're talking about news, quote unquote, the news, it's a contest for power. The terrain where power is being contested. Social media is a contest for audience. It's a terrain where eyeballs are being attracted. And just fundamentally, not judging those purposes, but the mistake I think is to And so it's not their role. Their role is to get our attention. Not to help us to pay attention somewhere. And so it's fundamentally different, serving that interest rather than serving mine. And somewhere we do need to have, I think for all of ourselves, the place that we know we go to attend to what is gonna be helpful. What is going to be nourishing? What is going to help me to flourish? Because you just sort of, I don't know, in my head, and I know at previous Basecamps we've kind of even drawn the picture, like there just seems to be this sort of basic truth of the human condition that the world is infinitely complex. You know, my capacity to make sense of that complexity, to pay attention to it, is finite. And so there's going to be a gap. There's always going to be a gap.

You know, you see it anytime, you know, any scientist, social scientist makes a model of something. You know, the model is always missing something. And generally, when the model doesn't work, it's because it's missing something out there in reality that was relevant but wasn't put in the model. Right? And it's always what happens with models. It's the same thing with our attention, right? We can't attend to it all. We're paying attention to something. And the question is, is that something? The thing that is going to help us to make the right choices, be prepared, stuff like that. And probably it's no more than by coincidence if it happens to be the media that I'm consuming.

Scott Yeah, and I think the thing about those spaces is it's interesting. I mean, there's a purpose behind them, right? I mean, there's a book that came out, oh gosh, not that long, two years ago. It was by Alan Jacobs, who's a pretty prominent public intellectual here, teaches at Baylor University. And it's called The Year of Our Lord, 1943, Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. And basically what he was writing about is people like these people, like Jacques Mar... Maritain, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, W.H. Alden, Simone Weil, all these people. They had this sense that as the war was coming to an end that the culture needed to be rebuilt. And they took this very seriously and they had these kind of fellowships with people like, you know, Meeting together and contemplating this sort of stuff and thinking about how to have a flourishing human culture in light of the post-war period. And this was something, again, that they were attending to with real deliberation. And they were really, again, some of the best minds of their time. And I think, again, these are people that were floating way above the headlines.

We're trying to figure out how to reshape democratic society. And they saw that as this kind of something that they had to steward. They had a stewarding role. And I think that that's something that, you're right, is important that you, if you care about flourishing. And again, this is what I think is the beauty of Basecamp. But if you're listening for the first time... I'll put some info about Basecamp in the show notes, but it's a kind of community that convenes right now. We're convening online and although the group has met in person twice, but it's a global kind of interdisciplinary community of people from all over the world and doing all sorts of things that are concerned about the big questions that would help us negotiate a rapidly complex world. It's a group that's kind of convinced that through intentional kind of conversation and listening... And asking questions together, and again, doing it in community, that will make new maps that will help us navigate the world, especially in these kind of rapidly changing and troubling times. So it's a great community, and I think it's one of those things that it's hard to find, right? It's something, I mean, that's...

This is one of the reasons you had to help create it, right? Because, again, a lot of people would like to have a community like that in their lives, but don't have one. Because you can't just kind of go on a personals ad and say, hey, I'm looking for some questers to ask questions and help make maps. It doesn't really work that way for some reason.

Chris Yeah, and I think just what became clear to me listening to you was, so if you can't rely upon somebody else to make meaning for you, I can't just consume what you give me. by saying, well, you don't have to do it by yourself. Actually, we can make meaning together. And leading up to this Basecamp on Saturday, I don't know if you saw the video. We should put a link to it on the Facebook page. But I provided just like a kind of three-minute video on essentially how to have an original thought and how to make meaning for yourself. And he said there are really three steps. Step one is have a good question because that's how you kind of focus your attention. Step two is to have a conversation with somebody. And to me, there just seems to be kind of something fundamental there in the art of conversation that probably isn't fully appreciated, how important conversation is for each of us as a sense-making, as a meaning-making device, as a tool to create connections that help us. Even though I can only make sense of a tiny part of the world, if we've all got a piece of the whole, And we are able to meaningfully connect.

Then I think that's how we how we manage to, if you will, cover more territory by covering it together and just, you know, coming together in a way like we all understand that none of us sort of has the privileged position. We've all got a piece and it's hard to know in advance who's got the most important piece. You kind of only tend to know that in hindsight. So you come into a space, you know, really looking to connect in order to help one another assemble the pieces. And then I think you come out of those spaces with a bit more sense of sovereignty over what you're paying attention to. And that it's not just coming from what is in the headlines, what is at the top of the newsfeed. It's also coming from, if you will, kind of from below, from the human layer of intelligence that I'm surrounding myself in, that is kind of saying like, oh, yeah, I do need to pay more attention to that.

Scott Yeah, it's the difference also between information and imagination, right? Because I think that we're overwhelmed with information. And again, the amount of data, sheer data through things like the internet, it just exponentially is increasing all the time. So, I mean, the challenge isn't so much information, right? Because anybody with a smartphone or something can get information. The question, I think, is imagination, right? How do you have the lenses to see reality in imaginative ways where you can chart new maps and new ways forward and get out of sort of cul-de-sacs and sinkholes and things like that? And again, It's the imagination aspect where I think people coming together asking intentional questions, like asking how we make our way together. I mean, it's the imaginative thing that's so powerful. It allows us to then go and revisit information in more constructive and healthy ways.

Chris And maybe that is kind of part of the... Back to your reference to the year of our Lord, 1943.

Scott 1943, yeah.

Chris And this kind of the work of cultural evolution that is in front of us. There is so much work in front of us right now. And it feels like that could be the work, is to There is this, I think, opportunity to really turn to one another through this pandemic event and to recognize how much work we can do to imagine how we can do better than we did getting into this. Which I guess is also why it brings me right back to the importance of consciously asking the questions that together we feel are important. Because if we're not doing that, then instead of imagining the future, the future is just going to become the conversations that are being shoveled at us right now. The conversations happening now become baked in. And to go back to your world, you can clearly see it, right? The way that because of the political stakes this year, the population is being drawn into, like, this is the conversation we want you to have, or this is the debate that we want you to have. Okay, everybody having that debate. And now that you're having that debate, you can almost see the future unfolding.

You get people saying like, you know, if we don't fix this, then people are going to start seceding from the union. And then you get people saying, oh, yeah, maybe we will secede from the union. And then you secede from the union. We can either bake in the future by what... What we are told to pay attention to and are manipulated to pay attention to. Or we can try to gain our own leverage in that and step away from that and more consciously attend.

Scott Yeah, and I think that's absolutely right. I mean, that is the challenge. You hit the nail on the head, right? That's the challenge. It's the gravitational pull factor, right? The gravitational pull towards the kind of, I think... Description events that's largely unhelpful and largely polarizing and not constructive. I mean, the pull, it's just so powerful. And that's, again, this is where something, the communities like Basecamp are helpful because when you're not alone, you know, like you've got a better chance for survival, right? Like when you're... Thank you for having me. In Western culture and beyond, in global culture, it's a strange sequence of events where you have the pandemic and then an American eruption around race relations and police brutality that's actually gone global. It's become a world concern. You know, I've seen protests all over Europe and stuff like that. And so, and in Canada. So, I mean, I think there's this rare time to like, so it's almost like we've seen an x-ray of some things in the culture that the confluence of these events has brought out. And you ask, like, well, you know, what could we give up? What are some things that, because we all had to give up some things because of stay-at-home shelter orders, like, you know, gyms or pubs or these things, you know, religious services and things like that. But then it's a question of what if we didn't do it simply because there's a pandemic and we're trying to slow the spread of the virus, but what if we actually intentionally sort of said, what could we give up for the flourishing of the whole? And I think that's just such an interesting pregnant question, right?

Because it affects everyone, and everyone can do it. Everyone has that kind of agency. Everyone has... I have to go in a couple of minutes, but I agree that one of the things that we're learning as we sort of try to reclaim our own attention through good questions is what counts as a good question.

Chris I think a couple things are coming clear. One is it's timely. Now is a very timely moment to be stepping back and thinking about our consumption habits because we live in a consumer society and so much of our life is about consumption. And here is this pretty extraordinary moment where so many consumption habits have been interrupted. And so now is a timely moment to ask a question about like, well, what are those habits and what do they do for me? And what are the trade-offs that I haven't been aware of? And all of that, right? It's timely, it's relevant. And then I think the other thing about a good question is, as you said, it invites many layers or many levels. I mean, if the question is, what will I give up? There's a personal dimension to that question around what nourishes me and what actually leaves me feeling tired. I can explore it on a personal level. There's also kind of a moral question there. Why should we give anything up? Isn't abundance a good? Is the question of what will I give up a kind of exclusive or elite question? What about those who live in scarcity? There are all sorts of moral dimensions for people who are strongly attending to those things. There's also a kind of big society question around there is this latent Thank you for having me.

You know, and so I think a good question helps us to connect with people who are, you know, are sitting around that fire and have a very different perspective on it. But we can all offer something to that question. In a way that makes the conversation richer. You know, some questions are very kind of one-dimensional.

Scott It's interesting to note, this is why Plato wrote in dialogues, right? I mean, this is not an accidental choice. He preferred conversation to just the written word. Because there's a dynamism in conversation he thought that you could really embrace and get at. You know, so you look at somebody like, you know, just a basic question in the Republic, what is justice? And then the thing unfolds. So it's like the dialogue has a capacity to do some things like that for us. So I'm looking forward to Saturday's dialogue, my friend. Oh, so am I. Thanks for this conversation.

Chris Sorry, I had to break it off fast, but glad we could just connect. Yeah, this is excellent. And I will see you soon. Little great style of thinking. Talk to you soon. Yeah, man. Bye.