Does democracy need religion?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, good to see you again. We are edging toward Christmas, and I don't know if this is your influence or not, but I'm becoming—well, it's not an explicit influence, but I've been drinking tea a little bit of late. And it always— Good man.

Chris Good man.

Scott I think it generally happens when we're talking— When we get on the pot.

Chris You're like, you know what, Chris, England— Yeah. Yeah, I should get into the tea thing. Do you think that's subliminal? Well, if it would be, how would we know?

Scott That's true. That's true.

Chris That's true.

Scott That's, yeah, it's unknowable. But yeah, it's, but you know, it's funny. I drink coffee black. Like, just, yeah, I don't ever put anything in it.

Chris Okay, that's hardcore.

Scott And I take espresso black. Like, I mean, the only thing I will drink with anything other, with a little milk in it, is I tried this flat white a couple weeks ago. It's like a kind of frothy espresso drink.

Chris The flat white is my go-to.

Scott Yeah, this is fantastic. I don't know where this was all my life. And I did like that.

Chris It was in Australia and New Zealand.

Scott Exactly.

Chris We're finally catching up.

Scott We are catching up. And so with tea, though, I'm drinking the tea with cream and sugar. Well, cream and Truvia.

Chris Okay. No, I don't do sugar in either my tea or my coffee. But I can't do black coffee. That's my mother's business. I need my frothed-up milk. As a writer, I've got quite a coffee machine. I put in the whole beans, I grind it, I tamp it down, I pour my espresso, and I froth my milk, and I add it together, and it's this wonderful, it takes a good 10 minutes. It's a nice procrastination ritual. You feel like, oh, I've done a couple hours of writing, and I can rework myself and go over to the kitchen and make myself a coffee. Having for a lot of my life felt that I'm absolutely not a caffeine person, I came to it through the ritual of writing. And then it seemed like a kind of an indispensable component of that side of my personality. But it's interesting, the

flat white has kind of, over the last couple of years, it's now come out of the market. I'm heading home for Christmas in, well, a day or two. Once Starbucks has it, it's no longer cool.

Scott No, no. Although I like Starbucks. I don't know. It is commodification in the worst of probably the McDonaldization of the world. But the thing is, they're nice places to spend a little time.

Chris Well, that's true. They do that well, right? They've identified that there's this niche of people who are in between places at the moment and want a nice place to spend a little time. And they serve that audience really well. The niche. You need the niche. What about you for Christmas? Are you going to be local?

Scott I will be in one of my other hats and robes. I will be celebrating. Wow. Come back here, and we might, you know, we might host some people for Christmas who kind of don't have a place to go. Neither of us are going home to immediate or extended family, so we'll be here in the Philadelphia area, and I'll be doing religious duties. And it's been a while since I've been in a traditional church context like this. I've been a more start-up kind of thing, so I really enjoy it because we're wearing, like, it's like there's a...

Chris Oh, you get to go full vestments.

Scott Some vestments, a church musician who's excellent in lessons and carols. So it's kind of a hallmark Christmassy... It's not a hipster Christmas. And I kind of like that. The church has a graveyard. There are people buried there from the early 18th century. It's on a hilly kind of topographical spot in New Jersey. It's lovely. I will be doing things Christmassy.

Chris So it's all starting to fall into place now. It makes sense to me why you said, like, look, you know, I really want to spend the podcast, the run up to Christmas talking about the relationship between religion and democracy. And when you suggested that, I thought, OK, OK, I feel like I'm going to be at a disadvantage this whole conversation because now we're on sort of this is your core intellectual turf. I'm going to try to hold my own. But you're gonna have to pick me up a couple of times.

Scott I feel like my core intellectual turf is the Wrath of Khan, my favorite Star Trek thing. But that's really where I... We've actually talked about this before, but... Yeah, I like the Ricardo Montalbanos. Khan, I've done far... Kirk, I've done far worse than kill you. I've hurt you. Ricardo Montalbanos did great in that. Not a tall guy, by the way.

Chris Did you ever see the original series episode Space Seed?

Scott Of course! I've seen it dozens and dozens of times.

Chris Okay, so, I mean, this distinguishes the, you know, the true Trekkie like yourself from the wannabe like me, because I've never seen... Oh, gosh, you can get it on iTunes.

Scott You could get it on Pirate Barber. It's amazing. I mean, Ricardo Montalban is just a... He's the force of nature on the screen. I mean, he really is. I mean, it's an amazing episode. I can't say enough good about it.

Chris Okay, well, I'll go away and watch it, and then I'll be able to have an intelligent conversation with you about it. It reminds me of several months ago, and I was chatting with a friend in Toronto who is an AI researcher and executive. I mean, at a senior level, he had been headhunted at that time most recently by one of the big global handset manufacturers to set up one of their five global AI research labs. And, you know, we're talking about it because obviously I'm interested in this issue, like one of these big issues that everyone in the world is talking about, so I'm interested in it too. And we talked for about five minutes and he kind of looked at me skeptically and he said, you know what, Chris, you just need to go away and learn a bit more about how to do programming and stuff and then we can have a conversation with you. And I feel the same thing now. I just need to go away and spend a bit more time watching Space Seed a few times.

Scott Such a good episode. Such a good episode. Such a good episode. So, yeah, you know, it's interesting. I will say this. So I sent you some articles this weekend that I came across through various places. People sent them and just in my own reading and stuff. And I, I, there are, I, I, although, you know, I, it's like the, there was this kind of commercials, I mean, I guess they had them in the Northeast in the United States, I don't know, I guess they had them other places too, in the 80s, the Hair Club for Men, and the guy said, I'm not also, at the end of the commercial, the guy said, I'm not also the president of Hair Club for Men, also, and he pulled off his toupee. Right, so I'm not just, you know, the president, I'm also a client. I mean, I would check a religious box and a census of a Christian. I wasn't raised in the most observant home, but I feel like I had a coming-to-faith sort of journey in adolescence, which, you know, matured and developed into adulthood. But that being said, I have never been on the side of people that...

I've never been sympathetic to those arguments, and I'm still generally not, but I am picking up on critiques that are not quite the same as people like McIntyre's. McIntyre in general is a modernity skeptic. But people like Andrew Sullivan, who is a sort of gay, Catholic, used to be a Thatcherite conservative, voted for Obama, as moderate as you can get, wrote this piece in his Intelligencer column, really talking about America's new religion and talking about how basically, in the absence of a great tradition, Trump disciples on one hand and the social justice warriors on the other.

Chris Right, and the social justice on the other side, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which I thought was, you know, I agree it was a great article and everybody should read it. And part of the intellectual strength of it is that he was able to kind of say, look, so here's what I'm starting to question. Here's what I'm wondering is, can, like, is there just this impulse? Is there this human need for a kind of... An answer to the meaning questions in society and if we are kind of moving into this postmodern era, then how are we satisfying that need? But I thought what was great about the article is that in the US context, he kind of looks to You know, the cult of Trump, which is sort of, I guess, the obvious place people go to, to, you know, looking for an explanation of what's going on in society. But he also looks to the left and to what, as you point out, what he calls the cult of social justice.

And so I think that makes his argument stronger, that he said, actually, this is happening everywhere. And so it suggests that this is some kind of deep-seated need that we all have. And if that's true then what are the implications for that? I thought that was interesting.

Scott Yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's an assumption, right? And it's a debatable assumption, right? I mean, you could, you know, and even if you granted it, you could say, well, we'll evolve out of it. I mean, you could, the kind of homo religioso or homo religious, you know, like, I mean, homo economist, I shop, you know, I shop, therefore I am. I mean, we're consumers and that will be, you know, for the future. But it does seem, you know,

Chris No, no, no, so hold on. So the homo-religious is, I pray therefore I am?

Scott I guess, yeah, I pray therefore I am.

Chris Or now, these days, I download my meditation app.

Scott Meditation app, right, right, exactly, exactly. You know, that's, yeah, but, you know, I think that, at least for most of world history, and today, I mean, that's... Phenomena, at least it seems like for the foreseeable future, there is some transcendent thing or desire for transcendence in meaning that people seek. And the absence of something truly transcendent, you know, in Western or Eastern kind of flavor, that people, you know, turn to the imminent realm and try to make it transcendent, to try to reach for what's around them and try to sort of deify it.

Chris So I guess... So there are many directions we can go here. I suppose one that kind of connects a lot of the current urgent headlines to this deep searching question is, you know, do we need to have a kind of ba-dum-dum, come to Jesus moment, you know, with ourselves about this is the reality? That we are meaning-seeking beings and that one way or another we're going to try to find a practice of seeking meaning. And that we need to recognize that and serve that in some healthy way, otherwise it might express itself in society in some unhealthy ways. And I think that's kind of part of the argument that Andrew Sullivan was proposing.

Scott Absolutely. You know, and who's the guy who runs the School of Life? You know him in England.

Chris Yeah, yeah. Alain de Botton.

Scott Alain de Botton. He's interesting because he's an atheist, but he's a guy that, like, one of the best defenses of original sin I've ever heard was from him on a Krista Tippett show in the States. He was saying, you know, like, I don't believe in God, but I see this idea of original sin. It bears out an experience. What a more charitable way to live life. But ones that still do tend to be good repositories of observance of the human condition, right? I mean, just because they're evolving traditions. And so is there something that can... And I think Sullivan is saying when you jettison them, it often would become more base and devolve.

Chris So it's really interesting this, because it seems that, you know, whether we're talking about... And a recognition of irrational elements of our nature. I mean, that might not be the right way to frame it, but there is this kind of – we tend to seem to look to human nature as something that maybe in the present we've been – we've gone too far in defiance of some truths about ourselves that we need to be – Yeah, more honest about and more in alignment with if we want to build a healthy society that actually works, that actually delivers to people some of the needs they have, like for belonging, like for being a part of a practice of finding meaning.

Scott Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, because what—and I would say, rather than irrational, I'd want to almost say non-rational, or things that are— Right, irrational is the wrong word, yeah. Because what does Pascal say? Like, the heart has reasons that only—that reason doesn't understand. You know, there's multi-levels, multiple levels of—because, you know, Sullivan gets at this. He says, you know, in the article, he says, this is why science can't replace it. Science does not tell you how to live or what life is about.

Chris I think it's stronger than that.

Scott I think we need there to be meaning. We need the meaning. Listen to the person that tells you they're an atheist. The moment they use ought language, the moment you make a distinction between is and ought, you're speaking in metaphysical capital letters. You're saying that there's a norm outside of experience that experience ought to conform to.

Chris Right, right. No, I think that you're right. The denial of religion, I suppose, it also has many of the aspects of religion. There's a cultish aspect of it, like we are of this belief, this creed, that we don't believe these things. There's kind of a set of devotions around it, around the kind of practice of denying.

Scott Yeah, yeah, envisions transcendence really differently, non-personally, which I think is, yeah, and there's a beauty, a deep beauty in that tradition.

Chris So I think, you know, for me as the political scientist, one of the concerns I then have is, okay, because, so what do we... What do we do with that? And, you know, standing here in Europe, it's very interesting because one of the things that I know a lot of politicians in Europe struggle with, maybe more kind of, you know, politicians who have been in this game for the last sort of 20 years, they're not newly come to office, they've got a longer time horizon for this. And what they see that has clearly changed, and it's not just Brexit and recent phenomenon, but more of a longer term thing, is An increasing role of religion in the politics of Europe. And there has been for a long time an ocean. We're trying to separate those things, right? We're trying to separate church and state on this continent. And we have the role of religion kind of fits uncomfortably into our political processes. We don't really know how to... How to navigate it very skillfully and what happens when the moral argument is made in a debate, in a political debate culture where at least nominally what we think we're doing is having some kind of rational argument and we're looking for evidence and we're looking for facts and it's kind of... You know, more objective, positivist evaluation of what's best rather than having a notion of the right or the good that comes from a faith tradition that might be at odds with other faith traditions, right? And given that we're a plural society or a plural democracy, how would we possibly mediate that?

I'm sort of working this out loud as I think about it. So democracy is kind of predicated on this idea that if we all just sort of talk and listen to one another, we can find some common ground. Whereas religion often, at least, and maybe this is the concept we need to contest a bit, around this idea, well, there are things where there can't be common ground. Because I believe this and it's different from what you believe. And we can't both be right. And I think that the layman's understanding of why we need to get religion out of politics is precisely because religion has these uncompromising senses of right and wrong that eliminate the overlap, eliminate the space for some kind of political consensus to emerge.

Scott Well, yeah, and I think just on a pragmatic level, the absolutism, the idea that if you get God out of the public square or something, that people become less absolutist and consensus becomes easier. I mean, you look at the political intractability on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm just thinking of North America, or the United States, rather, and little I know of Europe's politics. The other thing that's interesting, I think, there's a book that's come out last year or something, I think, maybe this year, called Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen, who's a political scientist at, I think, Notre Dame. And he basically... ...control over the government, right? But you survey most people, most people feel completely alienated from the government. It's supposed to foster liberty, but, you know, a lot of people, most people don't feel particularly free.

You've got sort of megacorporations and things like this, you know, people's data gets sold, all this stuff. Most people don't feel... I create a sort of skepticism about the liberal project that I think that, you know, that is raising some of the questions back about, well, maybe democracy without a soul doesn't function as well.

Chris You know, it's interesting because where my mind is going is thinking about how, you know, at some level we kind of divide reality into these spheres, right? There's sort of religious life over there, there's political life over here. But oftentimes those divisions are artificial. And if we're looking at kind of, you know, engagement, As a sort of search for meaning, there is maybe a sense that sometimes whether that meaning comes from the political or from the religious or from some other wellspring of meaning, it can vary where it's coming from. Like in times of war, in times of national crisis, in times of nation building, there can be... Enormous meaning and satisfaction of that search for meaning in the political project with one another and a sense of community and all of that. And then in times of relative political stability, where politics doesn't emotionally draw people in, or it doesn't spiritually draw people in,

then there are other dimensions of society, of reality, that play that role. So I think there's another dimension to The other wellsprings of meaning in society really weren't offering much. And so we need to go back and find some other resource.

Scott Yeah, I think that's the case. And I think that actually what Sullivan argues, and I think he's right about this, that actually it's much healthier when politics doesn't give you that kind of meaning. Because then you can kind of be procedural about it, and you can... Right. Right. Somebody the other day that said, like, basically, the founding fathers of the United States designed a system where you really had to realize there's checks and balances, and you're going to be on the losing side regularly, and you accept that's the cost of having a thing where there's kind of...

Chris But not to be too tied up in that.

Scott Right, right, exactly.

Chris Not to be too invested in being the loser in the political process.

Scott Yeah, the real flourishing of the society will come from the civil society and things like that. The government will have a function in it, but its function will be limited so that... It gives other spaces room to flourish.

Chris So that's interesting. That completely makes sense. And then one starts to wonder, like, if you look at the context today, was that a naivete of the founding fathers? Was that a kind of, you know, a very Enlightenment thinking that we're just going to build this sort of whole rational political framework over here? It's going to be boring and it's going to be quite deliberative and it's going to function. But we're not going to get invested in the way that we get religiously invested. That's something that happens over here and it's very clearly a separate sphere. And I mean, a lot of the, if you call it the political entrepreneurship of the present, is to just explode that kind of dividing of the roles of different institutions of society to play the meaning role. And let's inject a whole big dose of tribalism into our political discourse.

Let's inject a whole big dose of sort of religiosity into our political discourse because That's actually far more intuitive for people, I think, than to hold on to a division that says, okay, this is going to be coldly rational and boring over here, and the rest of my life I'm going to be passionate about things.

Scott I mean, I'm sort of thinking just to build on that.

Chris So it seems that there is an incongruity in all of this, because if... Thanks for watching. There are so many instances in the practice of our democracy where it seems that we've completely forgotten this rather Enlightenment ideal that, yeah, this is all great and it's wonderful, but we also want to keep it a bit boring.

Scott Yeah, yeah, and I think it's interesting, because the dualism strikes me as interesting, because the Founding Fathers of the United States set up this system that seems to take original sin very seriously in the political sphere. Like, hey, people will be selfish, people will be adversarial, and let's build all that into the system, and let's make checks and balances, and that kind of thing. But then they kind of have this almost... We'll then produce the educated citizenry to go then participate in these decisions in the system that's set up with all these checks and balances. But that's like – I mean that's the first thing that strikes me. I mean the second thing is like I think – oh, go ahead. Yeah.

Chris No, all I was going to say is – so where this all takes me is to a kind of appreciation that probably the way – The way this all works out practically, I mean, there's no kind of game masters who set the board and they put borders around different aspects of our social reality and say, okay, when you're in a political sphere, we want you to behave that way and this is our anthropology. When you're in a civil society sphere, we want you to do that. Because that's not going to work. It seems that the way that democracy has to function is that rather you've got a really healthy kind of separation of powers in society. And maybe, so nowadays when we think of separation of powers, we think kind of in the Constitution. There's a legislature and a judiciary and an executive over there. But in an even bigger sense, right, you need a healthy democracy. So you've got a religion over here that has its own set of, it's like a value factory of a certain way of looking at the world.

But you also need an academy, healthy academics over there that have a very different way of looking at the world and they're a very different value factory. You've got a thriving private sector that is a value factory over here. You've got a political class that's a value factory, professionals. And if you really did have separated value factories in society, Then I think, you know, messy or chaotic, if from time to time one sort of seems to invade the space of another, I think that we would weather all of that. Where it gets maybe more dangerous is if one value factory tends to kind of become dominant. Absolutely, yeah. And it's sort of winning the war over the others. I think that, yeah.

Scott Yeah, no, I, you know, it's interesting. I was listening to some discussions this week about, you know, the Weekly Standard, which was kind of a famous conservative intellectual outlet, one of those intellectual magazines that loses money, you know, like, but, you know, but, you know, they were talking about its demise and a lot of conservative intellectual publications in this country have taken some heat in the age of Trump because a lot of the never Trumpers had been located in them to various degrees. And they were saying, look, it's never been the job of intellectual publications to tow party lines. It's been their role to critique ideas, to hold its own intellectual compatriots, to keep them honest. It's not to be an extension of political parties, even if you're a conservative or liberal. You know, they talked about the New Republic. It was good at this, too. I mean, the New Republic was always a check on the left as well as a liberal magazine. It always kept the left honest. And this is part of what you're talking about, I think.

Chris Yeah, what was the big publication on the right? The Weekly Standard. The Weekly Standard, right? So, yeah, this is what I'm talking about, kind of the erosion of these independent value factories. I mean, as someone who is very close to the academy, I mean, I can look at the academy, which is sort of, say, you know, universities and researchers and academics. No, I think that is far less value independent than it used to be. And you can see whether it's organized capital interests, whether it's sort of how the funding environment has changed and the academy is more a client of government and therefore has to appease its sort of policymaker clientele. The political economy of this gets kind of deep and thorny, but I think that it is less of a – I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say among academics that the academy, capital A, is less of an independent – Michael Sandel writes about this, right? Thank you very much.

Scott Here, we don't have state-run media.

Chris We have media-run states.

Scott Trump gets up and tweets out what Judge Jeanine or Sean Hannity said to tweet on Fox and Friends.

Chris Well, we can go there. I think it makes for wilder swings. It's a roller coaster where the peaks are higher and the valleys are lower and there's a few big loops now because there are so many engines that are aligned that we go big one way or maybe we go big the other way. And I think we can feel You know, people say that the US political system is dysfunctional and Congress can't get anything done. But that was what the framers intended. And the virtue of it is that it's really hard to make big changes. And there are all of these wonderful checks and balances. There's kind of gridlock by design because it should be really difficult to... To do big new things at a federal level. And, you know, kind of the received wisdom in political science was to have a grudging respect for a system that was built that way.

Now what we're seeing is a recognition of the opportunity. Well, you know, maybe we can just plow through the grid line. Get a really big, you know, a really big SUV. Hit the gas, you know, get a few friends behind you and you can just smash through the traffic.

Scott Or Trump's great quote after a couple months of presidency. Who knew healthcare could be so complicated?

Chris Oh, my God. Oh, my God. We've almost made it through two years.

Scott Almost.

Chris We're getting there.

Scott Yeah, no, I think that that's... You know, the other thing that's interesting to me is that... I'll put all these articles in the show notes, but in the Sullivan piece, where he's talking about these sort of virtues that are meant to... or values meant to sort of infuse the Democratic-Liberal project, that... You know, a religion like Christianity, and you say this about Judaism, too. Again, most great world traditions, this is probably a little too far, but I'll just speak from a particular point of view. And liberalism, the enlightenment and liberalism have in common is they're in non-tribal. You know, I think of this scene in the Book of Acts when Paul comes to Athens and he preaches the sermon to the Athenians, and they're in the Agora, all these, you know, the town, the hood of Socrates. And one of the first things he said, there was this tradition that Athenians came sprouted from the soil of Athens, and that they were different than everybody else. And Paul just says, no, everybody comes from the same human seed, and God is the maker of us all. And so that immediately undermines this kind of Athenian-centric narrative, right? So everybody... And, you know, this is, you know, Paul set rights to, I think, the Church of Galatia, you know, in Christ there's neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, that this new reality comes. I mean, philosophers like Žižek write about Paul like he was the original Marxist. I mean, he has this whole revolution going on around this, you know, and both Christianity and the Liberal Project come and say, no, these tribal...

Distinctions are artificial, and then we should have a more universal scope on the nature of our human predicament and how we can, you know, come to reason together and share things together. And I think the return of religion in a place like Europe and now in America and certain kinds of populism. It's actually a lot more like the paganism Paul confronts in Athens than what he's preaching to them. It doesn't call us to common realization of a universal shared humanity and universal source and universal empathy. It's sort of like it's blood, nation, and soil, which is absolutely what a religion like Christianity and a philosophical movement like the Enlightenment are kind of trying to move us beyond.

Chris And so it's interesting that we, you know, in this moment that we so often talk about it as, you know, postmodern, right? And all of everything, everything, every meaning is contested. That where we get to as we start to contest everything, is a recognition of how much work moral frameworks have done and do do to hold society together.

Scott Absolutely.

Chris And so I think that that's, maybe that's the sort of, you know, Andrew's big message that he's working with is. So, you know, so quite clearly, the big institutional religions have receded, you know, at least in American life, Catholicism, Protestantism. And in that place, there is – and what we discover is there is a need for some kind of moral framework to rush in and help to inform us in kind of a billion little everyday situations of how do I behave here? Because the market doesn't tell us how to do everything. And rationalism doesn't tell us how to do everything. We need some moral heuristics to help us navigate our reality. And it's interesting, so I had a great conversation with... Another place, and I agree with you in quibbling with the idea that art doesn't give us some introduction to morality in life. I think great literature is a rich reservoir of moral lessons. You can't read any book without receiving some kind of morality play through it. Good and evil, we often fall to the protagonist because they're the good people there.

And then there really is a vacuum. Where do we get the archetypical lessons that we can then apply to our particular – where do we get the universal lessons that we can apply to our particular moment-to-moment situations that we encounter in life?

Scott Yeah, G.K. Chesterton, great British thinker, said, you know, that democracy, tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. But he talked about the democracy of the dead and the ability... Oh, yeah, sorry. Democracy is the living faith... He said tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. So for him, traditionalism is when we do things... There's a great repository of wisdom and ancient spiritual traditions and literary traditions that we tend to be fat. I mean, you know, we tend to sort of in the age of social media and stuff, we tend to fetishize the novel, right? I mean, but novel by not, I don't mean the literary, I just mean what's new, you know, what's the latest thing. And that's important because, you know, without the new,

we slide into what he calls traditionalism, right? You know, that we become like sort of, you know, cul-de-sacs without new life. But there's important wisdom in those ancient receptacles. They become repositories of great things that ought to inform our conversation about the good life.

Chris So let's bring this back, if we can, to kind of, you know, personal levels. So when we, just before we kind of press play on this podcast, I said, you know, so there's just so many threads here. What for you is the, what's the guiding light? What's the question at the heart of everything we're talking about? And you gave me this great question, which is, you know, can we have democracy without religion? Which, whoa, dude, that's a good question. Heavy, dude, heavy. Yeah, yeah. Well, in Canada, I can smoke things now. It's legal. I love it. Yeah. We got to do the next podcast in Canada. So uploading everything we've just been talking about in this podcast, and next week you're going to put on the robes, get into a church and play, not play, but that's the wrong word, but... You know, enact your role as a minister.

Yeah, I go from Citizen Jones to Reverend Jones. Yeah, yeah, so exactly, yeah, which is very cool. And I got to sit in on one of your sermons one of these days. But I guess, so the question is, how do you understand that role? And what are the dimensions of that role?

Scott You know, it's interesting. I assume in that role, everybody is brokenhearted. Like, I think most people don't need instruction as much as they need imagination, because people's lives are full of pain, you know, all sorts of interpersonal pain and stress and anxiety. I mean, it's interesting, because we're in the safest age, like Pinker's new book, right? Like, we're in the safest age. It is good to contemplate these questions we are, because we want to steward the, you know, what does Shakespeare say? All of life's a stage, you know, you can contribute a verse. Like, what will our verse be? At the same time, I think being filled with gratitude, because it is a great time to be alive. I mean, you and I can do this podcast, right? Which is, even if no one listened, would be a lot of fun, just because I learn a lot from you.

It's fun. We have a good time. Like, so many things are possible. Now, that never have been possible for us. I think amidst all of our desire for the good life, being grateful for, gosh, what we have, it's a great time to be alive.

Chris So that's, I'm really happy I asked that question now because I think that it opens up a dimension of this whole question, this whole conversation that Andrew Sullivan doesn't talk about in his piece. He talks about how the institutions of religion are in decline, and so what we see now in our politics maybe is a way to try to serve that now underserved need for meaning, for a cultish practice, for a set of devotions, for ritual and prayer. But what I'm also hearing is part of that search for meaning and part of why it might be especially urgent now is widespread personal hurt or pain or anxiety or precariousness, and that that may be part of why there is a surge in the search for meaning.

Scott You know, people... There's a quote I came across yesterday by this brain researcher in Chicago, a renowned psychiatrist, saying that he thinks that, like, a lot of our neurosis comes from this, like, just nagging sense of undirected guilt and worry about meaning, that, like, it just manifests itself all these different ways, because we don't have a kind of story, a way to... What? Next you're going to tell me Santa Claus doesn't exist. There was a Saint. Saint Nicholas did give presents to children, and he punched somebody at the Council of Nicaea for denying the divinity of Christ. So denying the divinity of Christ puts you on the old Saint Nicholas' side.

Chris But I will take your cool Christmas fact and add one more. So did you know that all the reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh were female?

Scott I did not know that.

Chris Even Rudolph? Because male reindeer lose their antlers in the winter.

Scott Oh.

Chris And it's just a female reindeer who have their smaller antlers all year round. Is that why Rudolph had the little nubs? That's all I know.

Scott All right.

Chris I like that. I'm trying to, you know... I like that. I see your Christmas fact and raise you one more, but I've got less intellectual horsepower to work with, so I'm doing that.

Scott Do you ever see the Ali G where he interviews all the religious figures? And he's like, I think you're, you know, he's like, well, Jesus, he was born like in one of those, like in a barn, right? A stable, yes, manger or something like that, the priest says. He's like, that's because there was no room, right? Because it was Christmas. The church just adopted winter solstice because they thought, gosh, if this is the feast where we celebrate the light of the world coming into the world, what better time to do it at the darkest time of the year? It's a beautiful thing. As you're heading into the deep dark of winter, it's like, we hope we make it kind of thing. It's a great hopeful celebration in the midst of that.

Chris Right. Right. And it's also, I mean, it's an older pagan ritual, right? Right, right, right. There's always been the celebration of this is the day conquering the night is the winter solstice. Absolutely. Where we stop to lose that battle and we start to win that battle again. Absolutely. I was actually, so this is not a great segue. It's a bit unrelated to the more intellectual conversation we've been having here. But I had a phone call earlier today with a friend, Australian woman. And, you know, it just so happened we were on the phone and she'd just gone through a difficult situation, breakup with her relationship and things like that. And we were talking about, and they broke up over Christmas. They've got this, you know, they're both international, flying around the world, and she's based in New York, and he's based back in Australia, and he wasn't willing to make it to spend Christmas with her, and for her that was a relationship breaker, because there is something so meaningful for her about Christmas. And we kind of stopped there and talked about it a bit, and You know, there is so much about this time of year. It does feel different. And, you know, I am one of those people who I really strongly believe that, you know, the older ancient phases of human consciousness, when we lived in a magical world and we lived in a mythical world before we entered this mental phase that we live in now,

Augment the obvious realities that there's just less work to do and more people have time to pause and reflect. And it does relate to what's happening at a celestial level. And it does relate to what's happening in the turning of the seasons. And why do we have such a difficult time just accepting that, that there is something more? about this time of year and whatever particular religion we dress it up in.

Scott And I feel like that kind of relates back to... There's more in the world to understand than in your philosophy, Horatio, or whatever that line from Hamlet.

Chris Exactly. Yeah, no, I mean... So, yes, you caught me. I'm plagiarizing Shakespeare. But good man to plagiarize. But I think that that's kind of maybe where we also need to come to terms with this question of the relationship between democracy and religion, is recognizing that there are dimensions to our healthy society that reach far deeper than citizenship. And somewhere in society and in our lives, we need to have a place for that.

Scott Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Chris And if we don't create a place for it, then people are going to find one.

Scott Yeah, and I hope this podcast can sort of, you know, be part of that process for people that, you know, a space where our conversations can help people find a piece of that meaning, you know, in pursuit.

Chris Well, I think we've successfully not found any answers, but... Good questions.

Scott Life is in the questions.

Chris But good questions. I'm going to have to go away and think about this one for a while.

Scott Well, you'll have time.

Chris Over Christmas, we got time. There we go. All right, my friend. Things are slowing down.

Scott This was fantastic.

Chris Scott, have a Merry Christmas. And a Happy New Year to you. And a Happy New Year. All right, my friend. Talk to you in the New Year. Take care, my friend.