B (3:35)

Mao had also been a teacher of Heidegger. And Heidegger was someone who was much more, although historical rather than racial reasoning, big supporter of the Third Reich. However, a lot of students were opponents of that. Opponents of totalitarianism generally drawing from the moral and spiritual traditions of Europe. How did they resist it? What did they draw from phenomenology? What did they draw from their teacher?

A (3:57)

So Husserl had in some ways been treated very badly by Heidegger. Husserl had reasons to believe that Heidegger, who had some influence, would take care of Husserl and help Husserl out. And Heidegger did not. And there are those who will defend Heidegger as more of an opportunist than someone whose thought is deeply entrenched in Nazi thinking. That's disputed of whether Heidegger was an accidental Nazi or a real one.

B (4:19)

The Black Diaries do not speak well of him.

A (4:21)

They do not. And his own actions were very weak. There's a period in Husserl sometimes divided into his later and early periods, and his students disputed. But many of those who were drawn especially to the early period of Husserl found not only a kind of realism about how we get to the world and know the world, even though our access to the world is mediated and can't, but be mediated through our own subjectivity. But there was a real sense that the subject, the human being, emerges into the forefront of what we're thinking. So early Husserl was not interested in a kind of Cartesian turn to the self, which gets trapped in the self, although the late Husserl can arguably be accused of doing so. But if you think that the human being, the self, the subject, is emerging as a main object of inquiry, I mean, even the term object there, right, to objectify the subject, to inquire about the subject. For some of his students, it's not too difficult to get to a domain of the value of the subject and the responsibility of the subject, of the human being, in knowing and doing so. We don't often think of Husserl as an ethical thinker. He's more of an epistemologist of sorts, in his own unique way. But he is interested in value. He has a famous book about the crisis of Europe and the argument he's making there is that what we would call technocratic thinking, in a sense removes value and removes responsibility from our range of concerns. Disciples of his early work were all interested in finding value and responsibility again.

B (5:52)

What I'm interested in is taking course on phenomenology and putting it in dialogue with your book, Lost in the Chaos book, published in 2023 and available at bookshops near you, or at least at online venues.

A (6:02)

The finer bookshops, we used to say.

B (6:04)

The finest, only the finest. You go through a three part structure in your book, which is a reference to Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos, which is you, modern man, are thinking you have the apex of knowledge and freedom and mastery over nature. But you yourself feel not at home at all. You are malaised, you are lost, you are an orphan. And you have no idea who you are or where you're supposed to be or why you're here, or what your destiny is, if you even have one. And so lost in the chaos is saying the dizziness and disarray of the modern world, how everything is present among us, how everything is imminent with our technology, our ideas, our social practices, our ways of living. As you're drawing from Charles Taylor, all this overwhelms us. And one of the things overwhelms us is secularity, a sort of an inability. Not just as the background of belief, whether it's religious faith or some sort of transcendent good or horizon, it's not just a backdrop against which that happens, but it is the very precondition. It infects everything, it changes everything that happens. And then after that, you say, what are the possible responses people have to this? These are false attempts at hope, false solutions to re enchant our place in the world today. And a more older alternative tradition of thinking about hope in the Judeo Christian texts and church fathers and theologians. And you use the right thing, we should be pointing to and practicing. So tell me first about imminence, then tell me about the false attempts. Then we can get into hope itself.

A (7:19)

Great. Yeah. Thank you. So I'm a big fan of Charles Taylor's Secular Age. And you can quibble with Taylor and people do that. Maybe the story is a little too neat and tidy. But I think in the main, there's something that's quite interesting in Taylor.

B (7:31)

This is for his book, Secular age. Mammoth, like 600 to 700 pages.

A (7:35)

Probably needed an editor. It's a little longer than it needs to be. But it's a story for Taylor of what he calls secularity or secularism. And he says that there's three varieties of secularity that we need to consider and that people tend to conflate them. One just is whether or not you live society in which church and state have been separated, so you have a secular government. And that's not really what he's interested in. The second, you might think of as rates of religious observance. How many people are in the shul or mass or church on a particular Saturday or Sunday. He's less interested in that. The third form is what he calls conditions of belief. So this is oversimplified. But he basically puts it this way. If you were a peasant in France of the 13th century, it's a lot easier to believe in God than if you are a sophisticated citizen of Paris in the 21st century. But it's not, he says, because of the secularization thesis, that insofar as we become smarter and get more science, we just leave superstition behind. He thinks that's false, actually. Instead, it's the conditions of belief are conditions of enchantment. So here's an example. There's a great word I learned from Taylor, apotropaic. So he uses the example of candle mass. So in early fiction. February. There's a custom in many churches to take a candle to church and you have it blessed with holy water, and you light it from the paschal candle. The paschal candle itself has been blessed and lit from the fire which was kindled on the Easter vigil the year before. This is magic fire. Right. There's even a tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church of the Fire coming from heaven. It springs forth without match or torch on the vigil as a gift of God.

B (9:05)

They have that in the Holy Land every year. I've seen the video.

A (9:07)

They do that in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Yep, that's right. So Taylor says, you go back to your house and in the middle of the night you hear a bump. Us good citizens of the 21st century assume that it's a burglar. Taylor says if you're in the 13th century domain of Paris, you might first think it's a demon. And so you get your candle, which has apotropaic powers, it's white magic, and you light your candle, which drives the demons away. Or to use another example, you're looking for a good crop. So you plant on the rogation days where the locusts are coming, so you beat the bonds of the field, you perhaps parade a statue of a virgin around the field. Those are conditions of belief where it's very easy to believe in God because the supernatural or magic effects of God are just everywhere. Instead, he says, what happens is the age of reform, which is not merely the Reformation, although the Reformation is caught up into his vision of the age of reform. He says that when you have an enchanted world, a world in which candles can have powers, you're going to have, he says, a hierarchy or two speeds of life. Now, in the west that look like the religious life and then the laity, where the religious life, right, priests, nuns, bishops and so on, they're operating in the Old west, we call this the councils of perfection. They're operating at a higher level of spiritual life compared to the laity. And it's decided in the west that's just not going to work. We want to bring everybody up to the same speed, right? We don't want to have a higher speed of the religious and a lower speed. So this is the great era of reform. This is where we have literacy and the Bible is translated. This is where the idea of the mundane can also be a place of sanctity, or the mundane can be a place of holiness. So everyone's brought up to the higher level. In Taylor's story, that's going to go hand in hand, though, with disenchantment, because it's not just that everyone can come up to the higher level. You're also, in a sense, going to have to remove the supernatural power of the higher. So you're going to have to get rid of the sense that the bishop's hands can do something magical to the priest or that the priest's hands and words can do something magical to the bread that he says leads to a kind of deism or providential theism. This is the clockwork universe. Now we're about page 150 in the book. I'm not going to keep going on.

B (11:12)

Well, we have time.

A (11:13)

Okay. In Taylor's mind though, what happens is a sense that the world loses its density. So he calls it the imminent frame. In the imminent frame. So imminent sense of non supernatural or non transcendent. The frame of reality is defined by the things that we can look at, touch and in principle look at and touch, even if we can't. Yet we can imagine there's instruments which would tell us or reveal these things to us. That's a flattened world, Taylor says It's a world in which there's no verticality, there's just a kind of horizontality. And the primary goal is what he calls exclusive humanism. Exclusive humanism is we're looking for the goods of the human defined while excluding anything which should be more than merely human. So we're not going to look at the good of the human in reference or relationship to God or the transcendent or the divine. This is the world of GDP and clean water. Those are fine things. Taylor's not against them. It's just that the world loses a sense of density or enchantment. Now here's why I'm interested in that. I myself am not convinced, and neither is Taylor, that the disenchanted world just of necessity results in secularity, in the sense of secularity to loss of religious belief.

B (12:22)

Secularism, we normally think of it, just

A (12:24)

non observance, non belief. There's more atheists and believers.

B (12:27)

That's the nuns, not the good nuns, the N U N S. Yeah.

A (12:31)

None. No religion. They check in the box. Taylor in fact says that what you find is the supernova effect. It's not as if religiosity goes away, it just takes new forms. There's kind of an explosion in religiosity of various sorts. So you get Age of Aquarius stuff, New Age stuff. Syncretism of different religious traditions being blended together in a sort of bespoke form.

B (12:54)

Psychedelics is very psychedelics.

A (12:56)

Transhumanism, you could think of the religion of Silicon Valley.

B (12:59)

AI Mars.

A (13:01)

Yep, going to Mars.

B (13:03)

Although there are some things to be said for its own sake about going

A (13:06)

to Mars, just because we want to see it be cool. That, he says, is an explosion of religiosity. And one of the things that I've seen not exclusively from religious thinkers and not exclusively from people on the right. But that's where I've been paying most attention are attempts to reinvent the world. And I myself am not convinced that these are all great ideas or that they're all reasonable and rational to do. There is a sense of vertigo or having lost something when things are disenchanted. The world's just a little less magical, it's a little less dense. One can have despair in a very easy way, Taylor thinks, but I'm not convinced that we just need to convince ourselves that the world is enchanting if the metaphysics isn't true, if the ontology isn't true, and if in a sense the politics is untrue, which is what I'm interested in, is in a sense false attempts at re enchantment and why I'm less enthused about them than some of my friends are.

B (14:02)

So just dealing with first the disenchantment, then we can deal with the re enchantment in the disenchantment. There's a question of imminence, a sense of the world is too much with us, to quote Wordsworth. But is this something that's purely an intellectual and ideological problem, or is this something having to do with technology, having to do with our physical conditions or ways of living? Growing up in the suburbs where I did everything was cookie cutter spread apart. There was no integrated towns. You know, Phil and Best would have

A (14:25)

a problem with the great Philip Bess.

B (14:27)

You didn't have things in which life was intimate, that kind of social reality and physical reality that lent itself to certain ideas about how all different levels of the chain of being are integrated together, the social and the religious and the transcendent and the corporeal. Is that something that is purely on a mental horizon, or is it also in ways of living and practicing on a day by day, boring by boring basis?

A (14:48)

Yeah, I would say it's probably all playing a role. And it's unclear what comes first and what's a consequence, but there's certainly symphonic. They mutually reinforce each other. Even Taylor doesn't think that disenchantment happened because of the rise of science. It's not as if it's inevitable. Taylor seems to think that disenchantment happened as a result of choice. We wanted to disenchant the world so as to have more freedom and to have more power. If there are powers which can enter into you, like the hex or the evil eye, and if there are powers which can save you, baptism, holy water, A magic formula. You have permeable self, he says, powers, good or bad, can come into you. Powers, good or bad, can come out of you. He seems to think that it was a choice for freedom to create what he calls the buffered self, or somewhat impervious and impermeable to forces in and out. So that's a political choice in some sense, or a choice for freedom. So he certainly thinks that there's no accident that technology plays a role in that. I think Somebody like Ian McGilchrist, in his analysis of the left brain, Right brain, were so devoted to logic and analysis and technology, as opposed to the poetic or the intuitive, that for us, the world really is what's quantifiable and only what's quantifiable. That's a kind of technocratic thinking that's certainly going to play a role. You have a change of language. I'm a big fan of the long epic poem by Davy Jones called Anathemata. His famous introduction to it notes what he and his friends called the break. His friends are people like Ruskin and Morris. He's a little after them. That's the world that he's inhabiting. The break, he says, is where poetic language can no longer mean because a culture and society's deposit or reservoir of images are broken from the metaphors or poetic powers of the language. So he says, in older poetry, you could refer to the sea, and everyone knew the sea. What would come to mind is the Epic of Gilgamesh, Genesis 1, Homer. Right. And if you have a community or a culture which doesn't have that deposit of literature, when you poetically refer to the sea, people think just the sea. And at that point, he says, poetry is done.

B (16:50)

Or a wood, and you think of

A (16:51)

the cross wood or a tree. You could think of cross or the tree of life or the tree of knowledge, of good and evil. And now you appeal to wood, and it's just wood and nothing but wood.

B (17:01)

The dilution of the common stock of stories and illusions and symbolic references. Although David Jones is creating an Christian fused epic about his experience during World War I. But you think of the kind of dilution that's happening. Compare it to the dilution that we have of references. Just trying to say to my nephews, have you seen Die Hard?

A (17:19)

There's no comments.

B (17:20)

No, I have to drag them to the movies. So, like Quiet man and John Ford and Hitchcock films, actually relatively successful when you actually show them the good things. But the idea that you can just grow up inheriting it, the loss of religion in the Bible and church as something that forms us. There's some similar kind of problem in pretty much anything involving high read and middle brow culture these days.

A (17:38)

The causes can explode. So throw in Neil Postman, amusing ourselves

B (17:42)

to death, Marshall McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan, the

A (17:44)

whole media theorist, throw all that in there, right? So throw in the profusion of images that we have now. Throw in the loss of gatekeepers. So it used to be that of course everyone had seen this film and of course everyone knew these songs and that's long gone.

B (17:59)

It's a much wider culture, but it's so much thinner, so much thinner.

A (18:02)

I've been reading a lot lately of the Korean German philosopher Bill Hahn and he has a great articulation of how if you combine busyness or a sense of entrepreneurial life, what he calls the performance subject, where we're no longer in the disciplinary society, but performance society, and so there's no sense that comes to rest and you throw information on top of that. He says that our lives will expand horizontally in an almost infinite way and our perception will be merely episodic. We pay attention to this and now this, but there's no depth to the perception and there's no verticality. We don't go into the text and we don't go above the text to the divine. So we can keep going. McIntyre has his theory on this. Philip, A whole conversation has a sense that something has been lost from Western society, either for the best or for ill. But something has changed in our psychic experience of the world's density. It's a thin world for us where our ancestors had a world that was sometimes almost fearsome in the density of meaning that could attach to it.

B (19:06)

There is the argument, Bruno Latour, that we have never been modern.

A (19:09)

Yeah.

B (19:10)

In every age, whenever time was present for a group of living people, there's always a moving demarcation of what counts as pre modern, what counts as modern. It's always this sort of filter. Everything that you're given is shifted. There's always new material sort of being put through the furnace. Yeah, it's something that. It's a crisis that has been going on for 500 years, almost like it's traditional. What's happened to the modern world? It's like it itself is never going to stop being renewed again and again as a reform experience. But okay, so we have some sense of imminent, some sense of disenchantment. Now, to put this in a very basic phenomenological example, if I hear a bark in the night, it Is not a lack of faith for me. Think that was likely a dog. Right. For me to go through certain natural causes before I attribute things to some sort of larger providential or supernatural happening. If that's the case, but say I get a cancer diagnosis and I go see my doctor. Right. That's not to say that I shouldn't go see a priest, but if I should go see my priest, I should then also still see my doctor. You can have these things happening at the same time. And within religious traditions there is a strong, robust intellectual way of discerning and keeping in balance and harmony between the profane and the sacred.

A (20:19)

Yeah. And certainly Taylor does not think that disenchantment is the same thing or an inevitable, necessary cause of the loss of faith. The way he articulates it, though, I think is interesting, which is even for the religious believer, the orthodox Jew, the observant Catholic, the practicing evangelical, what have you, the default position, if they're citizens of modernity, citizens of the modern west, is the imminent frame. So they hear the bark in the night and they think, oh, it's a dog. Now, perhaps they're afraid, perhaps they can't find the dog. Perhaps they don't own a dog. They may very well, in the end conclude it's a demon, but it's not where they begin, or if they do begin with the sense that it's a demon, they're statistically unusual and they don't tend to admit it in the first place. We know that it's odd to think, first it's the demon. Now, here's the sort of evidence of this. Compare the practice of exorcism in the 21st century compared to centuries prior. It's actually pretty hard to get an exorcism now. I was reading recently that there's more exorcisms being practiced in the last four or five years than there were really for decades.

B (21:20)

It's on the up everywhere.

A (21:22)

It's on the up in North America. But if you show up for an exorcist in a sort of mainstream religious environment, they don't give it to you right away. You have to, in a sense, earn the exorcism. You have to demonstrate that it's not a health concern, it's not a psychological concern. It can't be treated with medication. It doesn't have another explanation which is more reductive, more natural, more quote, unquote, normal, whereas in an earlier period you would have shown up with a disease and been told it was time for the exorcism. That's a substantial shift. Now, again, some of that's for the better. Sometimes it really just is a migraine and not a demon. But the whole position for us now is disenchantment.

B (21:58)

Remember Father Gabriel Amorth, a priest who was featured in the William Friedkin documentary the Devil? And Father Amorth, he was known and famous in Italy for you want an exorcism? Okay, here you go. And just doing an exorcism was proof of whether an exorcism was needed or not.

A (22:11)

Oh, interesting.

B (22:12)

So, yeah, why he did 10,000 exorcisms in his life in 30 years. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't also go see the doctor.

A (22:17)

But note our need to say that. Right, because the default position is one

B (22:21)

should go to the doctor. Although in reaction to disenchantment, I have met people where a religious framework was often really bound up in their own mental foibles, their own personal issues within different religious traditions, Jewish, Christian, or even Muslim and other religions. There are ways of filtering all this out, of course, but to your argument, however, is not just specifically for a Christian or Catholic. And this is obviously a very ecumenical Princeton University based podcast. This is some. Your argument can apply to any specific religious tradition in terms of. Or is it specifically a Catholic argument about what is the right hope versus the false forms of it?

A (22:58)

As the book goes on, it becomes less philosophical and more theological, and the theology goes from some more general theology to drawing upon the particular resources of Catholicism in its account of what hope is. So I think there's a natural account of hope and a theological account of hope. And certainly my resources for articulating a theological account of hope in the book are peculiarly Catholic.

B (23:21)

But I'm guessing the principles can be applied for someone else in their own walk of life.

A (23:25)

So they're not meant to be exclusively Catholic. Jeremy Kagan has a book, the Courage to Be. He's a Jewish philosopher and he's dealing a lot with Descartes and the implications of Cartesianism for the world. His argument there, it's not identical to Taylor, but it maps along pretty clearly. And Kagan makes the argument that what in the kind of Cartesian technocratic world is the replacement of being with the replacement of doing. Boy, that sounds a lot like John Paul II's account. If you remove the name and you read them side by side, they'd seem pretty familiar and you'd have a hard time distinguishing which was which.

B (24:02)

It's like you mentioned, all the phenomenologists for Hannah Arendt and Eric of Oglund and Carol Waitia, also St. John Paul II. Different people responded in different ways. Oglund was a syncretist of different Greek and Christian Jewish traditions. Hannah Arendt, more secular, but drawing from Jewish upbringing. John Paul ii, obviously the Pope. Now these are positive attempts at re enchantment or authentic attempts at looking to some sort of spiritual transcendent horizon. But what about the bad attempts, the false attempts? What are some examples?

A (24:31)

Yeah, good. So when I think of there being good enchantment, I'll be very quick here. I think what you 10 mind in those sorts of thinkers, people like Vogelin and Arendt and Voitsiwa, whatever their metaphysics are, I think they believe that you must turn to the human person and you have to have an anthropology or that anthropology itself is pretty robust and pretty thick. Where I tend to be somewhat suspicious is where either if the person is set aside or if you're trying to find or reinvent a kind of magic which isn't discoverable in and of the person. So here's a few examples. So in the middle section of the text with false versions. I'm interested in acts activism as a false attempt to re enchant. I am interested in rationalism as a false attempt to re enchant. And then what I call like enchanting sirens or where you really are just trying to make the world magical again. I think that's also a mistake. Rationalism in politics and here I'm drawing a lot on Michael Oakeshott. I think rationalism in politics is the sense that we can fundamentally control the world. The world is open to our dominance. Reason is fundamentally a tool of power to predict and control. And that allows for an Oakeshott's interpretation, a kind of totalism or totalizing aspect of politics. Reason is geometrical. It's universal in this view. And so the idea that politics is about muddling along or that politics gives us principles which then need to be specified in determinatios which are quite flexible and somewhat fluid. The rationalist finds that incredibly annoying. Oakeshott is a great phrase about the. I can't remember if it's the irritable need for order or the irritated need for order. The rationalist wants the answers and they want the answers now. They want the answers to be true for all people. And so there's a kind of. There's a sense that politics, like geometry, is as necessary truths that are universal and are applied through a kind of technocratic know how so as to allow us to dominate the world. Tain Our desires accomplish our dreams, and in a sense we enchant the world through our power. I'm pretty convinced that's bad politics. I'm a non rationalist in politics. I think politics has principles, but those principles are applied differently in a wide variety of ways. Pluralism, I think, is drenched in political form and it really oughtn't to be otherwise. And I don't think it really can be otherwise. Because the truth of human action is concrete rather than abstract. The truth of human action is contingent rather than necessary. That doesn't mean that there's not a truth, it's just the truth of action as opposed to the truth of theory or the truth of geometry.

B (27:01)

To give a concrete example, what would be an image of something that a rationalist attempt at politics.

A (27:06)

Anytime you see that someone has a five year plan to solve problem X, or anytime that you see that there's a technique to solve the human condition in some fashion. So you see this a lot in education. We'll solve the problems of the world if we just have education in a particular way. But you almost invariably are treating human beings not as free, not as self governed and not really as human beings. You're treating them as if they are cogs or pieces in an educational apparatus. Where the apparatus predetermines and over determines the way the those being educated will turn out. The cognitional machinery turns and out pops good citizens or good people or good, good agents. I just think that's fundamentally not how human beings are. I think it's false to the way we are, and I think it's wrong to treat us in that fashion. Persons are always ends in themselves, never merely means. They're always to be respected, I think as ends in themselves. And so in education, the tools we have available to us are not the tools of technique. The tools we have are the tools of persuasion. Books, conversation, atmosphere and example. That's what we have. Anytime where someone promises that the educational system will deliver some outcomes, you can count me to be pretty skeptical.

B (28:23)

So if I want to ameliorate problems in education, ban all smartphones, get rid of Chromebooks, get rid of computers as much as possible, no zoom meetings, things in person, returning to pen and paper, would that be a technique or would that be a prudential decision?

A (28:37)

So the argument here is not that there are better and worse ways. So if we have good reason to believe, and I think there is good reason to believe, that the use of technology in the classroom, especially for younger students, is detrimental to education, like I think the stats are in on this. The more that the Chromebook came into the classroom in elementary school, the worse the outcomes were for the kids. That's just a concrete judgment about what's good based on the data we know. What I tend to be hesitant of is where we universalize that to we will attain some desired educational utopia if we provide every child the Chromebook or if we provide no child the Chromebook. On the whole, it seems to me that it'd be better for pen and paper and real books. But. But if this child has dyslexia, or that child is a difficulty hearing, or if that child lacks fine motor skills to use the pen, technology steps in and it's a wonderful addition. So I think prudence allows us to make judgments which are true for the most part. And it doesn't mean they're not true. It means they are true for the most part.

B (29:35)

In this example, technocratic way of thinking and doing education policy would be giving an absolutist zero sum. It must all be this way or all be that way. When you're saying that a prudential reason would involve generalities that have exceptions and also incremental changes.

A (29:50)

So either both the universality to it and the over promise. You get this a lot politics. If only X then desired outcome Y. X may be a great idea. X may ameliorate all sorts of problems or may better the human lot. But that if only language tends to make me pause. Because humans are giddy things and they resist and they are sometimes irrational and they're always free. And so that all needs to be taken into consideration. Where we don't. We can't corral people into a technique in order to bring about the outcomes. Or at least we oughtn't to corral them by technique to bring about the outcome.

B (30:27)

Would you think that advances in digital technology would be a faux attempt at reinstatement from the smartphone to currently AI? The building of the infrastructure and the distribution throughout the economy is being foisted on everyone. Would that be technocratic way of reasoning? It's not really small incremental changes or prudential decisions. It's like by necessity you must adapt,

A (30:44)

by necessity you must adapt. And if you read the real boosters of tech, there's a quasi religious tone to what they're doing. This is not here's a great tool which would be helpful. There is a sense of we are introducing in a Promethean experiment a new vision of humanity. That old sense of Bacon that we were in the new Atlantic, Francis Bacon that We were going to better man's estate. Up until now we've tried to understand the world. Now we're going to try to change it. You get this in Bacon, you get this in Richard Rorty, you get this in Marx. You get this in all sorts of people have a technocratic mind. Technology can bring about all sorts of good things. Things. The quasi religious tone that we are going to in a Promethean mode, invent a new sort of human being that's technocratic rationality is at its core. And I think it's false to the human condition. And the sort of tones of piety that can go along with that, I think is a sense of false re. Enchantment. There's magic to the machine.

B (31:37)

Would this be things like the boosterism around neural networks and creating a new bionic man or futurisms a la Ray Kurzweil as representative of that tradition?

A (31:45)

I remember in the 90s reading about nanobots, right, the sort of miniature little robots. And it was magical what they were going to do. They were going to cure cancer and send us to Mars and we would have endless energy and there would never be disease yet ever again. I'm skeptical that could happen or that could happen justly or in the wilder days of the singularity and the uploading of consciousness such that we would live have eternal lives in the cloud. That's a religious impulse.

B (32:11)

Would the other faux attempts you mentioned surrounding activism include attempts more concerns about social justice or concerns of what's usually called woke? Perhaps in a kind of crass way. Is that an attempt at re enchantment?

A (32:22)

I think so. It's an attempt to find in ersatz orientation to our life and an alternative to transcendence and other options. So here I'm drawing on the French theorist Pierre Menente, who I admire enormously.

B (32:35)

I always said Manon.

A (32:36)

Ah, you're probably right. I'm not disagreeing. Who this is how I do it, how I pronounce it. You're probably correct.

B (32:41)

You're from Canada and they actually speak French there.

A (32:43)

Yeah, but I grew up in western Canada, so we didn't. We. It made it a point of pride to not learn French.

B (32:48)

No comment.

A (32:49)

No comment. In Canada the tensions are east, west, not north, south. He makes the argument that the. One of the hopes of modernity was a kind of perpetual peace if we were able to rid ourselves of difference and the allegiance of difference. So I love my children. I love my children more than I love my neighbor's children. And I value religious freedom. But I really value religious freedom for myself. I believe in patriotism, but I really am patriotic for my country. That can be a source obviously of tension. You can think of the dream of the Enlightenment is in some fashion to remove difference so that we have a universal humanity. What sorts of difference do you need to remove? Well, it seems like you need to in the end remove all difference which gives real content to ourselves. This is by analogy, like Rawls's original position or the veil of ignorance. The dream is to not know whether I'm male or female, to not know my religion, to not know whether I'm smart or dumb, going to be a winner in the social race or a loser in the social race because I'm athletic or not athletic or my society values that or doesn't value that.

B (33:54)

This is what Manal calls the religion of humanity, Capital H, humanity humanitarianism as a sort of the natural consequence of ideas from Francis Bacon and the early modern thinkers that we can create an all encompassing humanity, however that gets gets rid of all the content that makes us distinct and particular and different from

A (34:11)

one another, but insofar as it removes all the content. Michael Sandel calls these encumbrances the things which make me and you you. Once we remove all of that, there's nothing left except a category of humanity devoid of any real content. And yet a master idle image that we are going to use to justify our actions and which is also the terminus or quasi eschatological goal. So we're moving towards a perfected humanity, our reasons for so our humanity. But humanity has no content to it. So it's very difficult to articulate why we should love humanity or why humanity is good. So Manoat at that point becomes pretty funny where he says he's just starting to cite Nietzsche. We have invented happiness, we have solved all evil. But we have also removed the motivating power, the force by which we would really wish to operate. Because humanity is too general, too empty of a category to move us the love.

B (35:08)

This is different from how the ancients would look at each other of the Greeks versus barbarians, similar to say, those who live in the polis and those who live according to other social forms. But that's recognizing that they are still good and bad among everyone. Harada to speak. So I shall sing of the deeds, great and base, of both the Persians and the Greeks alike.

A (35:28)

And it's also different from an account which tries to show a universal equality of people. So if you have an account of the Imago dei, for instance, there's a universal claim there. All humans are persons. All persons are equal in dignity and value, whatever their condition or state. But note the argument there is. Well, they're equal in a value, whatever their condition or state, because of a genuine property which they hold, which is the image of God. So it's not that universalism is per se devoid of content. Manant's argument is the religion of humanity is devoid of content. And it's the best that we have and it motivates a lot of people to their actions.

B (36:06)

Now, as I understand in your account, there are attempts at re enchantment that respect difference or even exalt difference. Tell me about some of those other attempts at re enchantment. Talk about the fantasy genre. There are psychedelics. The psychedelics gives a feeling of oneness with the world. But there are attempts and going back to orthodox and Catholic sources and tell me about some of these.

A (36:24)

Sure. Wrote about this somewhere. There's a podcast called Haunted Cosmos. It's an interesting podcast, and in it they're looking for enchantment again. And so it's all about vampires and werewolves and Loch Ness Monster and these sorts of things.

B (36:38)

Cryptids.

A (36:39)

Yeah, you name it, it's there a lot of UFOs and things.

B (36:42)

The New Jersey Devil.

A (36:43)

The New Jersey Devil lives in the

B (36:44)

southern part of the state.

A (36:45)

That's right, in the Pine Barrens. This account is trying to, in a sense, make the world weird again at the moment. Rod Dreher, in his new book on Is it the Recovery of Wonder is a pretty good example. The book begins with aliens and time travel and these sorts of things. Rud's someone who's interested in this.

B (37:00)

Ross St also writes about.

A (37:02)

Yeah, that's right. That's right, A haunted cosmos. Here's the argument that they make. So there are sea monsters. How do we know there are sea monsters? Well, we have accounts from ancient mariners of unexplained phenomena in the sea. Good. Disenchanted people think that's a whale. They just didn't know that a narwhale had a tusk. But then also the Bible talks about the Leviathan and don't, you know, we barely map the ocean floor. Of course there are monsters in the sea. And they literally say. If you respond by saying there's no evidence to that, the response is, you're boring. You're the sort of person who needs to close thought off into something natural, physical, and we are going to lose enchantment and you're going to lose weirdness. Now, this is like a disposition to Believe the weird rather than the natural. It is absurd, therefore I believe it. They're using this not only as the a guiding principle for thought, but then in a nice wraparound, as a reason to believe. It's circular.

B (37:56)

I imagine that the kind of thing you're talking about, this phenomenon, could also describe conspiracy theories, could also describe cryptids or ancient monsters, but also UFOs. There's a lot of content out there that's ancient aliens, very boisterous and noisy and ultimately after a certain point, boring. Yeah, but how is this distinct from, say, a form of folklore? These ancient stories about seeing these things? You would find them in Herodotus, you'd find them and other sources. It's the kind of thing that sailors would talk to each other about. Kind of thing you'd find in the books of Moby Dick or Conrad.

A (38:23)

Well, in part because it's trying too hard. If you're in a condition, let's say you're a pre modern condition and you're unaware of the narwhal. When you see the narwhal, you're likely to think of it as a magical creature or it's the source of the unicorn or who knows what. I'm a big fan of the Patrick o' Brien seafaring novels and master and master and Commander. And in it there's a man, I can't remember his name, who continues to tell all of his friends that he has a unicorn horn and he really believes it. They all know it's an narwhal horn because they've been to the North Atlantic, they've seen a narwhal. He hasn't seen a narwhal and so is committed it's a unicorn, he's convinced it's unicorn. If in 2026 you want to argue that there are unicorns and you bring in a narwhal tusk and you wink at me and say it's a unicorn. I think you are larping. I think you're doing a live action role play that is not reasonable to believe at this point. And the idea that belief in unicorns or sea monsters or vampires is somehow going to remember back to Taylor, the conditions of belief change the conditions of belief so that we can once again believe in God seems to me to be special pleading of the worst sort.

B (39:31)

Would someone with a pre modern worldview have believed in not specifically these sorts of things, but also inclusive of these sorts of things? There's a lot of folk religions, their understanding of the shape of the cosmos, what Are the stars in Iceland? I think they still very much believe in fairies, but that's also more of an inherited tradition rather than necessarily a LARP. It's like 90% or something in the polls.

A (39:49)

It's kind of twee though. There aren't fairies. We shouldn't believe in them.

B (39:53)

The good people. The good.

A (39:54)

The good people. The good people. I think what some of these religious believers, and I'm especially interested in Christians here. Being a Christian, I can examine and critique my own people in a way that I don't examine and critique others. It seems to me that one of the things they don't want to admit is that one of certainly not the only but one of the reasons or motivating forces behind disenchantment is that Jewish and Christian thought is disenchanting in some ways. I can never keep my Elisha and my Elijah correct. But to the prophets of BAAL are calling for fire from heaven and no fire is coming from heaven. And the prophet says, perhaps he's in the bathroom. Or St. Patrick, I'm not allowed to light a fire because of your great deities. Watch my fire.

B (40:35)

And St. Patty's Day, as we're recording

A (40:37)

was just a couple days ago, just yesterday. There is a sense that in Jewish and Christian thinking, yeah, your holy mountain is not a holy mountain.

B (40:45)

Saint Boniface chopping down the Germanic tree.

A (40:48)

Your holy oak is not really a holy oak. That those sorts of things do not possess the power that you think they do. Now, of course there's all sorts of claims of miracles and power and if you want to call it magic in Jewish and Christian thought that. But notice that it's limited and controlled. It's not just free flowing in the universe out there, it's ordered in some way.

B (41:08)

Or going back to our discussion of exorcism, happens by the use of dark

A (41:12)

powers or power is controlled and limited to hierarchical authority or a particular sacrament or a particular sacramental. And superstition is frowned on quite significantly in Jewish and Christian thought. I think Haunted Cosmos is trying to create a mood of what is enchanting so as to change our dispositions so as to make us more pruned to belief in God. And I think that's a mistake and a dead end. Here's an example. There was some really great essays by Julia Yost and Tara Isabel Burton on Dime Square Catholicism. Fascinating ideas like punk Catholicism in New York. But one of the things that's interesting is in the accounting. You have a lot of young people, they only go to the Latin Mass they believe in Gregorian chant. They have head coverings. Some of them don't believe in God if there's not a God. The Latin Mass, as opposed to the New Mass doesn't seem to matter very much unless you just really like Latin. A head covering doesn't seem to matter very much if you don't buy what St. Paul's account of the ordering of creation of men and women are in Ephesians and elsewhere. The notion that you should have Gregorian chant as if the Holy Spirit really did whisper in the form of a dove into Gregory's ear and give Gregory these tones. If you don't believe in the divine or the supernatural. The sense that the Latin Mass or Gregory chant or head covering for women is somehow a profound source of meaning, I'm not convinced by. I think that's trying to construct a mood which is different than enchantment, but is a mood of being enchanted or feeling the enchantedness of the world, which is different from a genuine ontology which would allow for divine participation or the presence of God in the world or the presence of sacraments or what have you. I think those are different realities and the mood shouldn't be confused with the reality.

B (42:59)

I agree. Although there's probably in sort of chain of being kind of way of thinking. There's probably everything has its place, but in the proper proportion. Yeah, go from the universal to the particular. Christianity within that tradition is ultimately a form of disenchantment with the Fall, but also re enchantment with the Incarnation. Humanity has been through the Ascension or speaking during Lent, so Holy Week is coming up, has been taken up into the divine life. And then that means the human life here on earth has been infused, but specifically, as you make the argument, in specific distinct ways, not in some sort of general woo y way, but in the sense of no, there is the sacraments, there is specific rituals. There are things that have been given to us to sanctify mankind. Speaking for myself, I have found Gregorian Chant, specifically the Latin Mass, as something that was very extremely helpful for me in my spiritual formation as I came back to the faith in college. I previously left in high school. And so that's something where without gotten into Saitamasm or the larger metaphysical picture, in the larger intellectual tradition, that was the first way of being ingratiated through beauty. I wonder if that is good as an entryway and it's also good as a formative way. But it's not. Maybe is the problem that you're saying is that people stop there instead of going for the Old enchilada.

A (44:11)

Yeah. So this is not a critique of the Latin mass or Gregory enchant. I'm all for them.

B (44:16)

It's the fetishization.

A (44:17)

Yeah, it's the fetish of it, but it's also, I think, a misunderstanding. So I have a certain ontological view of the world. I still believe in the unity of the transcendentals. The true, the good, the beautiful and the one are all the same thing. Right. So being is the first object of the intellect. One is just being as itself. The good is just being as it's desired and beauty is just being as it causes delight. Like I'm an old school Thomas about that stuff, because I think that's true about the world. I'm not surprised. In fact, I find it deeply fitting that people experience beauty in a certain fashion and experience beauty as making demands on them of attention. It's proper to have a certain mood or effective response to beauty. That's fitting. It's proper. What I'm suspicious of is an attempt to start with the mood. And if we do the mood enough, we might come to believe that to me, seems like I once told a friend, that's like going to a Renaissance fair and you have a good time and so you really get into it and so you end up buying a lance to joust and you start to convince yourself because you have the lance and you operate in a world of Renaissance fair and you've got the clothes and so on, that you create a kind of identity around the Renaissance Faire and suddenly you think that it's in fact the case that you live in the late medieval period or people who like Tolkien too much. I like Tolkien well enough. But you know, people who like Tolkien too much and pretty soon they have a replica of Gandalf's staff and they're teaching themselves Elvish and they are more at home in Middle Earth than they are in Middle America because they prefer to be in Middle Earth and Middle America. Tolkien himself is quite explicit in a great essay on fairy stories. That is not the point of fairy stories. That is not the point of fantasy. We're not trying to remove ourselves from reality into a different kind of fantasy land or a different kind of mood, which is more satisfying than this one. We're trying to, he says, more deeply inhabit the way things are in this world. We're trying to see the truth of this world.

B (46:16)

Although there is an escape from imminence. He specifically would say fairy stories are like escape or escapism. Yes, but who are the people who object to escape. It's the jailers who object to escape.

A (46:27)

Yeah. Yeah.

B (46:28)

Although John Escanis makes the point that you can try to imagine yourself escaping, and the jailers don't actually object to escapism, they just object to actually trying to escape.

A (46:37)

Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, that's nice. I like that a lot.

B (46:40)

If there's a way in which the characters in, say, Fantasties by George McDonald or also in Lilith, they come back to the actual world, to the real world, but they're able to see a deeper moral and spiritual unity and recognize the true object of their longings. This was CS Lewis's experience reading fantasies on a train at 16 that ultimately baptized his imagination and which ultimately then saved Eastern everlasting Man. And the experience were after World War I, being at Oxford, talking with Tolkien and Nolan Barfield and others led him back to Christianity. Does seem to be pointing in a certain direction, I guess. Would a correct way of restating your argument is that certain people stop at this point in which there's a natural propulsion that's moving them towards the deeper spiritual and religious and moral traditions of the west, and instead they're cutting themselves off from that too early, and thus they take something that is unnecessary or perhaps a very helpful entryway, and are instead turning into some performative thing, especially for digital content, instead of using that and connecting it to the larger organic whole of that tradition.

A (47:38)

Yeah, I agree. I agree with all of that. I don't disagree. I think there's something more to it as well. Please. The mood or the disposition is used in some fashion as evidence to believe. So go back to Haunted Cosmos. We're going to pretend that there are unicorns so as to create a disposition in ourselves to believe in magic and the supernatural. Having created in ourselves the disposition to believe in magical creatures, we're primed to believe in God. So the producers of Haunted Cosmos are pretty, pretty committed Christians, and it seems to me they're actually pretty explicit. It they're trying to get you to take aliens seriously so you can take God seriously. I don't know. I'm an old Thomist. I think things. I think the world's intelligible. I don't think that we would believe in God because there are aliens. I think we would believe in God because the world is ordered and the world has an intelligibility, and that intelligibility is best, has its best account in one way as opposed to another. So I do think there is sometimes a kind of performativity to This, I do think sometimes there is the sort of taking pictures of yourself or Instagram as you're doing these things. But those are just ordinary human foibles. Right? We're all vain. I have my own versions of that. My deeper gripe about it is I think it's attempting to replace intelligibility with a mood.

B (48:51)

There's some line somewhere in St. Augustine where he says that when someone is converting, the motive for the conversion is less important than the actual conversion itself. And if we do believe in the objective reality of sacraments, use Catholics as an example. But you can apply this to the importance of the Torah and Judaism, of the Quran and Islam, that putting yourself in some kind of way that interfaces you directly with God and God's presence here on earth, that will take care of itself. You say, let the Holy Spirit work it out what's going on truly in their hearts and souls. So if someone does convert, performatively speaking, from my own tradition, I would say grab them while you can and then keep them habituated to it. Friend of mine Peter Wick had this point of where he's applying Alistair McIntyre's thinking to the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. The harold Ramis from 93, which Bill Murray relives the same day over and over again, expecting a different result, so to speak. He starts out in despair, then hedonism, and then he tries to seduce his girl, played by Anne McDowell. Despair again, suicides he can never escape no matter what he does. And then, after having exhausted every single possible thing, he starts doing little daily practices out of no other alternative. He starts learning the piano. He starts actually trying to be a good person and helping feeding this homeless guy. There's different things that start habituating because he has tried everything else, but he's faking it until he makes it. And then he actually starts making it. And then decades later, who knows how long, he actually has become a different person by the time we see him on the final day of this whole saga.

A (50:12)

Yeah, it's a great analysis. So I've had several friends who disagree with me and suggest that I'm too uncharitable and just unwise in my criticism here. Uncharitable in the sense of you should let people have what they have, and unwise of you should get people to have the best they can have. My sense is the following. I have no criticism of someone who is entertaining religion out of fear and trembling, a lack of certainty. They're struggling to believe. They're not sure if they really believe, but they're doing the best they can. It's just incomplete. I have no criticism, how could I, of someone who commits to a religious tradition, but it's not like morally pristine or holy on day one. How could I have a criticism of this? Where I tend to be more resistant or even, I guess, flat out skeptical is a sense of entertaining a religious ideal without simultaneously beginning with the possibility that this is true, as opposed to the possibility that this solves our meaning question. If something is true. I'm an old school realist about this. If something is true, it's not true. As my invention, I am noting the data in its intelligibility and have reasons for the patterns of intelligibility that I've given, that I've discovered. I think that's different. Then I need meaning and so I will act as if this is true in order to obtain meaning. I think that's a kind of idolatry, that meaning itself is idolatry and some meaning can provide real meaning and be utterly false and even nonsensical. I can concoct a life for myself full of meaning. It be quite dangerous for myself or others. That's what ideology is. That's what totalitarianism is.

B (51:52)

Marxism.

A (51:52)

That's what Marxism is. That's the communist a rinse account of ideology. The ideology takes up all the space, so there's nowhere to think except along the pathways that have already been taken over by the ideology. It gives an enormous amount of meaning, but it's not true and it's not rational. I would hesitate to think that the purpose of religion is to create a kind of quasi ideology to satisfy the itch of meaning. It's either true or it's not true. And that's where my suspicion is.

B (52:20)

I remember St. Bernard in his treatise Unloving God says that one should not try every single partial good in the world and make it a totality of one's life because there is limited time and that would be a waste and also possibly involve some sin instead. However, works of fiction can do that. Right? But I think you can also say works of philosophy where you examine the array of possible goods, some basic, some composites of those basics and see how none of them are sufficient for the full flourishing of a human life. And then you think those alternatives are exhausted. What's left? What's the good thing? You mention in the beginning of your book as an example of this sort of futility of imminence, the exhaustion, that fatigue that come from trying to live according to a purely horizontal Vision of life in the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante. Elena Ferrante. And these are characters, often women, who have been embittered and exploited by the world, who respond in a dark and pessimistic way. And use the end of your book. Transpose that with the example of the Virgin Mary, who, when she says the Annunciation, the yes to God, the angel Gabriel, and to bearing God, and to bearing Christ is an example of saying yes to a transcendent infusion into the horizontal level. With these two examples, tell me how one has no hope and one has hope. And then she used that to say, what exactly is hope? Sure.

A (53:37)

So the Ferrante novels, both the famous Neapolitan series and some of the shorter novellas, are pretty glum. So there. There is very little sense of hope in the Neapolitan novels. All the options are, in a sense, tried and then rejected. They just don't work. You're left, in a sense, alone, just alone. The one main character, her dream is to disappear and to have all traces of her existence removed from the earth. So her friend shows up at her house, and not only this woman gone, all the photographs are gone, the clothing is gone, everything's gone, and she doesn't appear again. That's a sense of disappearance or deep despair, lack of hope. Hope in its most generic sense is confidence about the arduous good. So there's something good. One wants it, one seeks it, but some difficulty emerges. One can't just attain this good, but there's a confidence that it can be accomplished. Now there's both. I'm trying to channel Thomas Aquinas here. There's both a sort of natural version of this and a theological version of this. For Thomas, in the natural version for this, the confidence that we have that we can obtain this arduous good is either a sense of our own capacities or the capacities of our community and our friends to obtain this. And in the theological sense of hope, it is rooted in, for Thomas, confidence of divine assistance. And even the confidence itself is divine assistance. So we're confident that God will help, but our confidence is itself a gift of God's. That's what hope is. A theological virtue is in the in. For Thomas, it's a gift of the Holy Spirit, not an. Not an obtained or natural virtue. One is not habituate yourself into the theological virtue of hope. It's a gift in its most theological forms. Here I'm thinking of Benedict xvi, who I use in the book. Hope is a sense that we not that we are waiting for a future good. It's not a sense of oh, in the eschaton, things will be fine. In the utopian future, things will be fine. In Benedict XVI's account, Hope is the recognition. This is an explicitly theological account. If one doesn't believe the theology, this wouldn't make much sense. It's an explicit belief that the kingdom of God is present even now, and that through the acts of grace of God, there's a sense in which the already not yet of the eschaton is present in our life now. And we are not waiting for it to arrive. It has arrived and now we are waiting for its full instantiation or to put flesh on the skeleton. But that's a confidence not for the future. That's a confidence that the reality has been given and now we wait for its full end.

B (56:10)

McIntyre makes the point that certain virtues depend upon the virtue of hope, like patience. I'm to endure without getting aggravated, without getting irritable, but quietly, devotedly, diligently, some present evil. That's because there is some future hope upon which I'm expecting, upon which I'm channeling and basing all my energy and focus. But does the virtue of hope depend upon some affirmation of revelation? Is it something that can happen according to a natural virtue, or is it simply a supernatural gift?

A (56:39)

So again, using Thomas, the theological virtue, narrowly understood, that's a theological account, Thomas, that requires a gift of God, but there's natural virtue. So one can have patience out of merely natural motivations and through one's own willpower, through one's own confidence, to suffer through the momentary slings and arrows, to arrive at the hoped for good. And that doesn't require either the content of revelation or divine agency. That can just be a natural, ordinary, acquired virtue.

B (57:07)

But can that be called hope?

A (57:08)

So it's by analogy. So what makes it hope for Thomas is it is confidence about the arduous good. The question is, what's what good are you seeking? In the theological virtue, it's community with God. In the natural virtue, it's whatever hope, whatever good one is seeking.

B (57:23)

Here two examples that come to mind, one Christian, one pagan Christian, would be when St. Paul talks about in Hebrews, that many of the Old Testament heroes from Abraham onwards faced the mouths of lions, they went through fire, they were persecuted, outcasted, scourged, beaten, and they did that all in the expectation, alongside miracles, coming with their tribulations, a future hope, future country that they would inherit, although it wasn't present in this life. And that was the same thing that he's then applying to the Christian of the church, the way at that time,

A (57:55)

these slight momentary afflictions kind of thing.

B (57:57)

Yeah, yeah. That, however, depends upon the revelation of God to the Jewish people and then through them, the church. However, there are examples, I think, of Greek and Norse mythology in which there's a sense of heroic self sacrifice or doing the right thing, no matter what the value. In fact, the absolute brilliant light that comes from doing the just cause, the lost cause, as the only one worth fighting, especially when you know you're going to lose. So someone like Leonidas, when he takes his last stand with the 300 at the battle of Thermopylae against the Persian invaders, knows that he is holding them off long enough, even though they're all going to die. In fact, they actually want to die. And the two Spartans who don't get to die with them are always feeling ashamed until they can die. Yeah. In the National Geographic Museum, I remember seeing a bust called the Head of Leonidas. And the head is just smiling. So imagine the happy warrior smiling as death was coming. It is happening, but that is with an expectation of some specific survival for my people. There is another kind of example, and this is why Tolkien favored Northern mythology over more of the southern Mediterranean mythos. In Norse mythology, the gods do die. The only God who dies is Pan in Greek mythology, but all of them are wiped out. Yet the heroes and gods with Father Odin, when they're fighting the bastard children of Loki and the Frost Giants, they know they're going to lose and the world's going to be destroyed in Ragnarok. But it's still worth doing. There's no compromise. There's nothing that can be done with evil. You have to take this stand. I remember specifically from the Battle of Maldon. These Anglo Saxons are Christians, but the thing that they're speaking to typifies very well this heroic mythos, which is our hearts must grow resolute, our courage more valiant, our spirits must be greater, though our strength diminishes. Here lies our Lord hewn down. And thus the man who's speaking this knows he's old, he doesn't want to die. But he sees his leech lord on the ground and he goes out fighting in the front and then eventually slain in defense of his lord. The Angle Saxons lose the Battle of Maldon. There is no expectation of some actual victory. There's maybe a tiny chance, but it's like, guys, we are just doing this because we know this is all that we got left. We're leaving it all on the field. Something in the performance, the love of the game.

A (60:01)

Yeah.

B (60:01)

That doesn't necessarily have hope to it, but it feels very hopeful, as if there's some sort of intuition in different pagan civilizations or non Christian civilizations of some expectation that they themselves do not know of what they have. Almost like they're being inspired without knowing it. That they could be assisted without knowing it.

A (60:19)

It's still a sense that this good, which in this case would be honor, integrity, love of the game, dying well,

B (60:27)

duty to my people.

A (60:28)

Duty to my people.

B (60:29)

The common good.

A (60:30)

The common good. That those goods are real good and that they ought to be sought and there is a sense in acquiring them, is there not? So you go into the battle, there's very little confidence that you're going to win. In fact, you don't win, you lose. But you have obtained a good death. You have obtained an honorable death. You didn't win the victory. Many of your people are slaughtered and removed from the face of the earth. But the good that you really cared for, you attained, even though it was arduous. That seems to be, in my mind a perfect, perfectly good analog to the confidence for the arduous good. It's not a confidence for a good over and above that good that you're seeking or in addition, or some further good like the survival of people. One in that case doesn't appear to have hope for that, for the survival of your people, but you have hope for the honorable death.

B (61:12)

I think in Norse mythology, once in a while you get to something where there is no, no real chance of your name continuing. There's no real chance of this fame that's going to be attributed to you. You don't even know about the fate of your own soul when there's such a thing exists in the hereafter, as you imagine Achilles's line, although obviously switching mythologies again in the Odyssey, it's better to be the slave of a landless lord than to be king of all the underworld. See notes among non Christian sources where they get to the point of absolute futility, but doing it for its own sake, as in service to the good, as you were saying, not for some exterior benefit, but for the intrinsic worthwhileness of the thing. And that is where the intensity of doing it doesn't have a corresponding object outside of service for the good. But it is still so worthwhile that one wonders. It feels disproportionate, the intensity and devotion, which to us seems admirable, beautiful, in which Nobility and beauty, like the Greek word, are the same thing. Feels like an echo and intuition of hope, even without having the revelation to

A (62:07)

base it upon, makes sense to me.

B (62:09)

But to move from very different examples, however, with very drastic conditions, going from an Anglo Saxon battle that is lost to those who are stuck behind the Iron Curtain, also facing an insurmountable enemy and with no sense of actual victory or great change. We have a few people I'd like to talk about who are part of this distant movement. Figures who were featured in your course, including some of the writings. Vaclav Havel, and correct me on my pronunciation for these people. Can we talk about First Vaclav Havel, Charter 77 and the power of the Powerless.

A (62:45)

So the background character there is Jan Patocka, who was first forbidden to teach by the Nazis and then also by the Communists and essentially tortured to death by the Communists. He was a symbol for Charter 77 and especially for Hodl. He was the teacher. And the reason he was the teacher was there just for Patocka, was a sense that you had to have utter allegiance to the philosophical project. Excuse me, the philosophical project of asking the question to its end, that ideology was a crime against our own intellect, against our own integrity and our own personal. Though there was a sense in Patocka that the nature of reality was such that if you had integrity, somehow you'd win. But when they signed Charter 77, this relatively powerless group of academics, musicians, artists, there was very little reason to think that they were going to win. And their demands were relatively simple. They didn't call for the sudden end of the Soviet Empire. They just wanted basic, fundamental freedom. But if you look at the Velvet Revolution in Ben Czechoslovakia, it's pretty remarkable how quickly the regime folds and with how little violence or stratagem of war used by the people. They demand freedom, they demand play. There's this sort of funny sense of rock and roll playing a significant part of the Velvet Revolution in Prague, where they just demanded, in a sense, to not lie and to do as they wish. Those aren't quite the same thing. So perhaps Havel's most famous essay, the Power of the Powerless, which is all

B (64:20)

about the failure of the movement after Charter 77. Yeah, and begins with that anecdote of a grocer who refuses to put up a simple sign in his window that says, workers of the world unite. Kramer not wearing the AIDS ribbon, even though he's doing the AIDS walk and not putting it up. He has to sacrifice everything. Children's education, his business, his whole livelihood. Future of his family, something. But he gets something in return.

A (64:41)

So he doesn't put it up. And why does it matter? So he puts up a sign in the window, workers of the world unite. He doesn't believe in it, but nobody else believes in it either. It's just background noise. It's just there. But if you don't put it up. Sorry, let me rephrase. If you do put it up, the lie of the ideology, in the end of the day has as its source of power. You're the one who grants power to the ideology by conforming to the lie and by speaking the lie. The power of the powerless is that even if you have no temporal power, you lack the tanks, you lack the guns, you lack the position. If you don't lie. Solzhenitsyn was big on this, too. If you don't lie, the lie is exposed as having very little power to begin with because it was dependent upon you imprisoning yourselves and contributing to the imprisonment of others through the power of the lie. So if you don't lie, they were convinced the regime would fall pretty quickly, and it turns out it does.

B (65:36)

By simply not repeating a lie, you are powerless materially, politically. But by simply saying, I am going to accord with the truth, or at least I will not deny it actively, that gives you some sort of spiritual power.

A (65:49)

I think for Hubble, he thinks that they're so souls and eats. It's pretty clear he thinks that's a kind of spiritual power. I think Hovel thinks that there's actually a political power there as well. The regime has its legitimacy and its power in the ideology. The ideology has its legitimacy and power in the lie. And so if you don't lie about the ideology, the regime as well, loses its legitimacy and its power. I think this is in Romania with Ceausescu. I'm not sure about this. There's a famous story, and there's a couple pictures, I don't know if it's true or not, of mass rally. Everyone is looking at Ceausescu. Everyone is clapping furiously as he speaks. Weeks, except there's this one guy in the back who's not clapping. And then others start to not clap, and others start to not clap. And within weeks, Ceausescu is done. Because what keeps people in obedience? Fear, of course. They have the tanks and the bombs. But what keeps people in obedience and what keeps the illegitimate ruler in rule is often the fact that we obey. And the claim seems to be that if we don't obey, and this is not civil disobedience, it's just the disobedience of not lying. The power, as it were, dissipates of almost necessity. Electricity false. But Havel has that sense, I think

B (67:00)

like no one believes in the propaganda anymore.

A (67:02)

It's empire, the Emperor. So they'll close and suddenly everyone knows the propaganda loses its force and the legitimacy disappears. And with the legitimacy the power.

B (67:10)

Although in the Hans Christian Anderson it's a child who says the emperor is naked. The child, not because he's some big truth teller, but because the child just says whatever is it he thinks because child is a child. For the grocer to not actively say the emperor is naked, but to simply say the emperor has clothes. Did not put up the sign in the window that says the Emperor has the greatest clothes ever made.

A (67:30)

Yeah.

B (67:31)

To not do that comes up with a deep cost. The child almost has no cost. The emperor is just embarrassed. But his invisible clothes were actually non existent clothes. As much as he thought that was a way to re enchant the world. What about that initial cost to speak the truth and to not live by a light. What was the cost for shoes? Polish playwright who is most famous for having written in the west the Captive Mind.

A (67:49)

Well, he wasn't in Poland for a good deal of his life.

B (67:52)

Self exile.

A (67:52)

Exile. He, I think Milas for a long time did not have a nation. He was not a citizen.

B (67:59)

Stateless.

A (67:59)

He was stateless.

B (68:00)

He was an attache with the Polish or Soviet embassy and then slowly broke away and was stateless until finding refuge in the United States, then eventually returned to Poland, but only in the 90s.

A (68:09)

You have quite, quite some time later. I love his poetry. He has this poem, the title which escapes me. It's very short and it goes something like this. Even if there is no God, man is still his brother's keeper and is not allowed to sadden his brother by saying there is no God. That's Milosh. You get a sense of that, of who he is. That's in a collection called Second Space, where he bemoans the loss of belief in heaven because we lack the second space to go. No hell below, no heaven above. There's costs. Patocka is essentially tortured to deathlin barely escapes arrest. Kroll is betrayed by Heidegger. John Pauliston goes to a secret underground seminary or the people. When he's. For a long time there's the new city in Poland that's built the workers paradise and there's no parish in it. The people celebrate mass outside in the Polish winter for years that's suffering. Solzhenitsyn is in the camps. There's very little sense from those thinkers that this is a magical approach to inevitable political victory that will not require enormous suffering. There's just simply the sense in them. Solzhenitsyn is a great example of this, that for souls in Eaton, spiritual wisdom and depth is not per se hostile to suffering and that there is more to life than the avoidance of suffering and comfort. Solzhenitsyn is relentless about this. You think when Solzhenitsyn falls out of favor in the west, it's because it becomes he starts to critique the West? Right? Everybody likes Solzhenitsyn in the United States and Britain. When he's critiquing the Communists, the world

B (69:43)

torn apart, his 1978 Harvard address, the

A (69:48)

Templeton address and others. His criticisms are pretty intense against the United States. And a lot of it is he thinks that we are in the west are. Are spiritually immature and have incredibly thin souls because we are comfort seekers. Solzhenitsyn is intense about this. In some of the fiction in the accounts of the camps, some of the most profound people are those who are suffering the most. He has a mystical sense of suffering and he thinks that the people of the west are pretty, pretty thin soul without it.

B (70:20)

Havel quotes Heidegger at one point in Power of the Powerless, where he says that the materialist, capitalist, free Western bloc is simply showing the inward spiritual form of the pathology that is late modernity, while the the Eastern Communist bloc is simply showing the outward hardness of it. Havel and same with Milos. They would see a kind of conformity in the West. Everyone has to sort of work as a world, unite. It's more necessarily wearing the AIDS ribbon. It's accepting a thin gruel. It's just being okay with this kind of imminence, this sort of secularity. I could just deal with the enoa. Take some shrooms. You'll get through it. Just rise and grind. Not some deep spiritual commitment or larp. A little bit, yeah, go to Comic Con. But instead of learning an ancient language, learning how to read Old English or learning medieval romances, what were the stories that inspired Tolkien? Read all of them, modern and premodern. These are the things that one can do. WH Auden has this line, and for the time being, which I've quoted before on this podcast, that there are calculus or trigonometric equations to solve, there are bills to be paid, there are passive verbs to be learned, sort of soothing things like that. You talk about hope near the End of your book where you talk about how it is not an avoidance of responsibility from daily life, but it's dealing with the nitty gritty, the boringness of it. Hope is not the alternative to dealing with boring things, but it's the spiritual transformation that happens with us, how we're sanctified by going through that, going through our daily labors and daily sufferings. Can you tell me a bit about that?

A (71:41)

I'm a religious believer and I tend to think that the most profound bits of religion in most people's lives are in the quotidian. That day after day, one learns the passive verbs, does the dishes, tends the children, pays the bills, goes to work, but that one eventually sees that in the pain of the bills and the doing of the dishes and the tending of the children. This is the drama of existence of your life. This is where one's character is made. This is where one will find or not find God. This is where one will become holy and just and righteousness, or unholy and unjust and unrighteous. That's where it's at. When I was young, I remember thinking how easy it would have been to be a religious believer at a time of great persecution or great war. You march into the coliseum to demonstrate your fidelity, or you grab your sword to defend the way of life or whatever. And how difficult it was to believe in boring. 1995 North America. That may be true. On the other hand, boring 2025, 2026 United States in the sense of. Of. Here it is. It's flat, it's relatively mundane. There's another episode on Apple tv. The way that we respond to that, whatever it might be, however boring and mundane it might be, that is the human being who I am, the self that I am responding to, the opportunities. And if there is a providential God, the providence of my life that God has provided to me just now, everything's at stake in how I respond to this. This is where I become sanctified, or this is where I lose my soul, even though there doesn't appear to be some grand temptation. In Descent into Hell by Charles Williams, the scene where the. Where it's been a long time since I've read it, where the scholar in the end is taken to hell, kicking and screaming. And it's all because he cheated just a little bit in his initial research. Just a little bit in his initial research. And he got used to it, and he succeeded as a result. And so he did it some more. And he did it some more.

B (73:34)

So much success depended upon that one vice. That vice got habituated by all that success.

A (73:38)

But boy, that first vice was really small. It was really small. It was utterly inconsequential from an objective point of view, but not really. That's the drama of our life. And if one's religious, I think it's heightened if one adds the notion of Providence, that God has either brought this about or at least permitted this to be brought about, and is thus it is for my good.

B (73:58)

There is a last paragraph from your book. Would you be willing to read it?

A (74:02)

Last paragraph we act as the sons and daughters of God, knowing that all that is his is ours. We are free to play those serious games that happy children play, knowing that they must play as well as they can, as hard as they can, for as long as they can. But in the end, a father will lead them home, unlock the door which was never stuck to begin with, and keep us under his care far fonder than we would have ever had for ourselves.

B (74:26)

And with that we shall conclude. Dr. R.J. snell, thank you for showing us examples of how to be hopeful in the dizzying array of modern times. A transcript for this interview will be made available on the new Madison's Notes substack page, along with a copy of the audio recording. If you desire further Madison's Notes content, please check our episode catalog and subscribe to receive future ones. We are always grateful for any likes and positive ratings. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time on the Madison's Notes podcast.

A (75:03)

Sam.