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The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
01:35:29
I have no earthly idea how to describe this conversation. It’s about religion and belief – at this moment in our politics, and in our lives more generally. My guest and I come from very different perspectives. Ross Douthat is a Catholic conservative, who wrote a book called “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” I’m a … Californian. But I think everyone would enjoy this conversation — believers, skeptics and seekers alike. Some questions touched on: Is the Trump administration Christian or pagan? How do Christian Trump supporters reconcile the cruelties of this administration with their faith? Can religious experiences be explained by misfiring neurons? Should organized religions embrace psychedelics? Can mystery provide more comfort than certainty? And if you do enjoy this episode, be sure to check out Douthat’s new New York Times Opinion Audio show “Interesting Times,” available wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube. Mentioned: Interesting Times with Ross Dout...
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- [00:01]
Ezra Klein
I'm Dane Brugler. I cover the NFL draft for the Athletic. Our draft guide picked up the name the Beast because of the crazy amount of information that's included. I'm looking at thousands of players putting together hundreds of scouting reports. I've been covering this year's draft since last year's draft. There is a lot in the Beast that you simply can't find anywhere else. This is the kind of in depth, unique journalism you get from the Athletic and the New York Times. You can subscribe@nytimes.com subscribe SA.
- [01:02]
Ross Douthat
I always enjoy conversations that I have no earthly idea how to describe, and today's is very much in that vein. My guest is my colleague Ross Douthit. He's the author of why Everyone Should Be Religious, a book I enjoyed very much, even though quite a bit of it I had some questions about. And he's the host of the new and really excellent New York Times opinion podcast, Interesting Times, where he has been interviewing people on the modern American right. This is a conversation about mysticism and the role it is playing in the Trump administration and this era in politics and belief and the role plays in society, in our lives. Ross's argument for why I should be more religious and you should be, too, and it also gets into some things I did not expect to be talking about today on the show. Just a note before we get into the conversation here. This was recorded on Monday, April 14. That was the day of the Trump Bukele meeting. So that's not going to be discussed in here. And also before the death of Pope Francis. So we also were not able to talk about that here. The conversation, as you'll hear, I think, stands on its own. But because those things might have fit into places, I wanted to mention why you won't hear them. Ross Douthit, welcome to the show.
- [02:21]
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein, it is a pleasure to be here.
- [02:23]
Ross Douthat
So last year, after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump, you wrote about Trump as a man of destiny, that he was, quote, a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics. How are you thinking about that now?
- [02:39]
Ezra Klein
Well, there were other passages in that column that are worth emphasizing, but yeah, I stand by that reading of the Trump phenomenon. I think one of the ways in which my sense of politics generally has changed over the course of the Trump era is just I have more appreciation for weird forces that are outside, certainly outside the control of people who write about politics. You can't have lived through the Trump era as a conservative columnist or newspaper writer and not have the sense of how fundamentally unimportant columnists are. What happens in American politics.
- [03:18]
Ross Douthat
It's a consistent theme. Exercise in humility.
- [03:21]
Ezra Klein
It is. Well. But even beyond that, you and I both grew up in a period that was, I think, reasonably described as a kind of timeout from grand historical dramas. It was not the end of history in a totalizing sense, but the kind of Francis Fukuyama view of the post Cold War era as one that had a certain kind of predictability and order and stability.
- [03:46]
Ross Douthat
History felt under control.
- [03:47]
Ezra Klein
History felt under control. Right. And the reality is that much of human history is just not under control in that way. And there are forces that move through history generally, forces that move through history that are sort of hard to predict and assess, but I do think often they are connected to specific personalities, and there is some kind of marriage between particular personalities and particular moments. And the idea of a man of destiny, a great man of history, is a useful way of thinking about that when it happens, as I think it has happened with Donald Trump, the rise of populism, the crack up of the liberal order, and so on. The reason I laughed at the outset is that it's important to stress that someone can be a man of destiny and be bad. Someone can be a great man of history and be worth opposing. You can look back at Napoleon and say, man, he was sort of above and beyond in terms of historical forces and also root for Wellington at Waterloo. That's okay.
- [04:52]
Ross Douthat
How does the sense that Trump is a man of destiny? Because I agree with you, and I think understanding the interpretation of Trump as somehow mystic is very important to understanding his relationship now with the right. But specifically, how do you think it has changed the way his staff and his allies treat him?
- [05:14]
Ezra Klein
I think that it is very hard to go through the kind of drama that Trump himself personally went through in. We can go back further, but let's just say the world that ran from January 6th through his return to power, and if you're on his side through that story, not come away with the feeling that you are sort of moving with the wave of history for people in Trump's circle, this sense of it doesn't matter what the polls say or the naysayers say, certainly doesn't matter what squishy New York Times conservatives say. Right. They saw the bottom. Trump was disgraced and ruined and persecuted, and he was gonna be sent to jail. And then the next thing you know, assassin's bullets were missing him by a hair's breadth, and he was making this incredible, unprecedented historical comeback. And having lived through that, I think it's hard to be swayed by people saying, hey, guys, your poll numbers are not looking so great. This tariff rollout, not that well thought out. What are the implications of sending people to El Salvador without due process? Those are sort of normal, quotidian sounding objections to administration policy. And I think, at least for some people caught up in the Trump phenomenon, they just seem sort of incommensurate to the reality that you're, like, riding a historical wave.
- [06:37]
Ross Douthat
But I don't think it's just the external world and its judgment of Donald Trump. And you can tell me if you think this is wrong. But I think one of the biggest differences between Trump 1 and Trump 2 is it in Trump 1, his own staff, the people who surrounded him, were perfectly comfortable thinking President Donald Trump is very wrong about this, that his judgment is bad, his impulses need to be foiled. We are the resistance inside the Trump administration and in Trump, too. I don't think people around him are comfortable thinking that. I think there is both a sense that they are there to serve him, but also a sense that there is something in. In Trump to them, not to me, that exists beyond argumentation. The fact that the tariff policy doesn't make sense on its face, the fact that what he's doing seems like a bad idea. Well, if you knew better, then you'd be in the chair. And so the unwillingness to question him because there's a belief in either a mystic purpose to him or that he has a mystic, beyond argumentation, intuition about things, I think it's really changed the nature of the constraints around him or the absence of constraints around him.
- [07:52]
Ezra Klein
Yeah. I think there's also a way in which the kind of mystic drama of his return to power is also sort of projected back onto his first term, where the experience of Trump's first term, not just for liberals and Democrats, but for a lot of Republicans, was obviously sort of chaotic and bizarre and difficult and so on. But there were ways in which the results of that term were better than people anticipated. I think certainly they were better than I anticipated. I expected as like a columnist observer economic crisis and foreign policy crisis to sort of define Trump's first four years in office. And prior to Covid, they didn't. The economy was in good shape. I think you can make a case that his foreign policy in the first term worked better than Biden's. You can make a strong case, actually, that it worked better than Biden's foreign policy. And I think what's happened now is that not just people around him in the White House, but also congressional Republicans, people who, you know, would have doubts about the tariffs and so on, have sort of combined the mystical drama with the surprisingly successful first term record, put them together and said it's both that Trump has some sort of mystic intuition about what to do, and it's also that we doubted him before, but it all worked out okay. Now, obviously, the problem with that is that one of the reasons it worked out okay was precisely that there were a bunch of people in the White House the first time around who didn't have a mystical sense of Trump's perspective or his goals or anything like that. And that is, I think, very clearly what is missing this time around. There are people in the White House who could play that role. I think a lot of people expected Scott Besant, the Secretary of the treasury, or Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, to play the kind of role that Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and H.R. mcMaster played in the first term. But no one is actually playing that role as far as anyone can sort of see. And so, in an odd way, the very success of sort of Trump as man of destiny is unmaking the conditions that made his first term a success. But that is itself a dramatic arc. You know, if you're writing the novel of the story of sort of hubris and nemesis, that would be a characteristic way that hubris and nemesis would manifest themselves.
- [10:13]
Ross Douthat
Well, we tend to think of fortune as synonymous with luck. But you go back to Greek mythology, and when you are touched by fortune, when you get a fortune, when you speak to the oracle, it often doesn't work out that well. You get a clear prophecy that seems like it foretells your success.
- [10:31]
Ezra Klein
Right.
- [10:32]
Ross Douthat
And laced inside of that is your downfall, I think. What kind of story, what kind of mystic structure you believe we're in, is it one that is providential, or is it one where the gods often laugh at human design?
- [10:48]
Ezra Klein
Right. Well, I mean, I think a mistake that I think some religious people make is to see a kind of force of destiny at work in a particular figure and assume that that force of destiny must mean that God, the author of history, wants you to be on that person's side directly. But in fact, if you read, let's say, the Old Testament, there's all kinds of moments when God is working through figures to accomplish something in the world or sort of to move history or the drama, the drama of salvation history, to put it in Christian terms. Right. In a particular direction. But it doesn't mean that the instrument that God is working through is, in fact the Messiah or the chosen one. Right. Like, if God sends the Babylonians to chastise the wicked kings of Israel, doesn't mean that you're supposed to necessarily say, oh, hail, Nebuchadnezzar, you know, you are the chosen one. Sometimes I think you can see Trump in several different lights. You could say he's a man of destiny, and therefore he is bringing about, in some weird way that we didn't see coming, the new American golden age. And this is obviously what a lot of people on the center right wanted to believe, especially when it became clear that he was returning to power. Or you could say he's a great man of history who's unlocking some sort of change that was necessary, but bringing chaos in order to do it. I wrote a lot about the concept of decadence, this idea that the west, the developed world, was sort of stuck in these kind of cycles and needed to break out somehow. But the reality is you often can't break out of decadence without a big, big mess. So maybe Trump is the agent of that mess. Doesn't mean he's a good person. Or finally, it could just be chastisement for everyone. All are punished, as Shakespeare said. I think all of those possibilities have to be taken seriously as readings of the Trump phenomenon.
- [12:48]
Ross Douthat
How well do you remember Batman Begins?
- [12:51]
Ezra Klein
I remember it, but the League of Shadows, Right. Destroying Gotham.
- [12:56]
Ross Douthat
I've had this joke in my head often in the past couple of months. As somebody whose mythic analogies tend to come from the Marvel or DC universe more than the Old or the New Testament, that's just convinced me we're not being governed by the League of Shadows. And I went back and I rewatched the piece where Ra's al Ghul sort of reveals the whole plan, and he says, look, we've infiltrated every layer of Gotham's power structure. We tried to do this through financial engineering and destroy Gotham's economy. It didn't quite work. Now we're back for number two. And the fact that we are here is proof of your decadence. The fact that we could do this, get this close, shows that you deserve what we are about to do to you.
- [13:40]
Ezra Klein
Yes.
- [13:40]
Ross Douthat
And I'm not saying we are actually being governed by the League of Shadows, but when you brought up the decadence, there is a dimension of that to me, when you think about this in those almost like narrative twist terms, a sort of reflection of very dark sides of Our own society.
- [13:58]
Ezra Klein
Well, and I've carried on a couple of different running arguments throughout the Trump era that are going to continue, I guess. And one is with people on the right who have a sort of league of shadows view of the overall situation. Right. It's like things are so bad that you might as well unleash chaos. You saw a lot of this in response to the tariffs. People mostly on social media, real politicians don't say this, but people on social media who are like, fine, we need a 10 year reset of the whole global economy because things are so bad, and so on. And I've spent a lot of time disagreeing with those people. I would prefer not to take the black pill. But I've also spent time disagreeing with the kind of liberals and sometimes never Trump, Republican critics of Trump who I feel like don't quite grasp why he's successful and what you need to do in response, because I don't think he could be this successful if it were enough to just elect Joe Biden to fix our problems.
- [15:01]
Ross Douthat
Well, clearly that didn't work.
- [15:03]
Ezra Klein
That didn't work, right? It didn't work.
- [15:04]
Ross Douthat
We tried that. And definitely trying to elect him twice to fix our problems was not the winning move. I, I was listening a couple months ago to Bari Weiss's podcast, and she had Louise Perry, who's a sort of British conservative gender and sexuality writer. And Perry made this argument that I've been thinking about where she said that the difference between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate is that Peterson is a Christian and Tate is a pagan. And I think this might be unfair to historic pagans. But the argument she was making depends on the pagans, but also depends on the Christians. But the argument she was making is that Peterson is, at least in his ethics, somebody who thinks a lot about the weak, who cherishes women. Kate is more interested in power, in dominance, in sort of driving his enemies before him and sort of fathering a lot of children for a lot of people potentially. And I've thought about that question, that sort of war between, again, sort of crude paganism and Christianity as really playing out right now on the right. And in the Trump administration, there are ways in which those strands seem braided through everything. The sort of drive for power, for sort of renewed 19th century masculinity versus the sort of more Christian dimensions of it. There's, in a way, like Vance as a emblem of the Christian side of the administration. You know, Musk is an emblem of its pagan side with his many kids, for many different women. Trump is Somebody who, in his both traditionalism, like, as a person, and also his brashness and will to power as a person, sort of has both threads inside himself at the same time, maybe.
- [16:47]
Ezra Klein
I mean, honestly, I think Trump may have come to some conception of belief in God after the assassination attempt, just sort of observing his comments a little bit. But I think of Trump as just sort of persistently as a kind of pagan or heathen figure, much more than he is a Christian figure, notwithstanding the attempts to sort of claim him as a kind of King David or Emperor Constantine. Right. Like, there's sort of an idea that you get from religious conservative supporters of Trump that you have these figures in the Bible or Christian history who are rulers, who are sinful in various ways, but maybe, in a way like I've been describing, sort of advance God's cause despite their sins and failings. I don't really think of Trump that way, but he is committed in an explicit way to Christianity. And to me, the bargain with Trump has always been for religious conservatives, some mix of protection and support, a transactional bargain, and then more recently, a kind of hope that some kind of renewal of American dynamism can sort of bring religion itself back with it, which I will say is a hope that I have indulged in myself. That it's like, okay, you have different varieties of post Christianity out there, and you don't want to ally with the Andrew Tates, but you do want to ally with the people who have sort of big hopes for the future, rather than a woke progressivism that just seems sort of inflected with cultural despair. That would be an argument that I think a Christian who was trying to sort of explain to themselves how they find themselves in alliance with Elon Musk might say, you know, better. Elon, who has some good desires and believes that humanity is good in some way and wants a sort of more dynamic future. Better that than pure pessimism that climate change is going to kill us all and structural racism means we deserve it kind of perspective. That would be the argument.
- [18:53]
Ross Douthat
Let me ask about the idea that what you just described, though, is pure pessimism. Putting aside the idea that climate change will kill us all. I don't believe. I think most people, even on the left, don't believe. They believe there's a way out. You just have to really work for it. You give, at the end of your book an account of why you're a Christian and why you're a Catholic and why you find it persuasive. And I find your account of it. Very moving. It's a thing that appeals to me about Christianity. And the account you give is about both the strangeness and the radicalism of Jesus Christ as a figure. How uncomfortable it is to read him, how challenging, how it's a religion about meekness, all of the camels, a better chance of fitting through the eye of the needle than the rich man of getting into heaven. That there's always been a radicalism in that.
- [19:40]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, I mean, I know the meek will inherit the earth is a famous, I would say renunciation more than meekness. Probably.
- [19:46]
Ross Douthat
But there's a godliness of those who do not have power.
- [19:49]
Ezra Klein
Yes.
- [19:50]
Ross Douthat
And at the same time, then there is this administration, I think is very self consciously tries to frame itself as Christian. But people in it are like JD.
- [19:59]
Ezra Klein
Vance, many people in the administration.
- [20:02]
Ross Douthat
And I do not see in them in the way they act in this world, this love of those who do not have power. There's the kind of putting out of memes where they've made a Studio Ghibli meme out of an immigrant crying. It's something about the interplay here of a self conscious Christianity and a self conscious mimetic cruelty that both feels like very appalling to me, but also unchristian as I understand it.
- [20:32]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, I mean, I think the aspect of populism, conservative populism, right wing populism, whatever you want to call it, that does see itself in clear continuity with Christian ideas and Christian views basically holds that it is speaking on behalf of the weak and the oppressed, people who don't have a voice in society. And those people are the native born working class of the Western world who have been asked to bear inappropriate burdens, beginning with economic. I'm just framing the case, beginning with the economic burdens imposed by free trade regimes that sent their jobs overseas and continuing with the burden of. Again, this is the argument of sort of social disorder and breakdown associated with the drug trade in a globalized world. The free movement of peoples that sort of transforms cities and neighborhoods and in ways that again fall most heavily on lower middle class Americans and are sort of avoided and evaded by the upper class. The narrative is basically that the beneficiaries of globalization are the equivalent of the rich person in various of Jesus's parables. And certainly Jesus does not hesitate at various moments in the Gospels to say pretty harsh things about people who have betrayed their leadership role. So one reason I pushed back on meekness is yes, Jesus uses the word meek, but. But Jesus himself is not a meek Figure. And you can go through the New Testament and find plenty of cases where Jesus says incredibly harsh things, mostly about powerful people, about sinners, where Jesus cleanses the temple and drives the money lenders out and curses the fig tree that doesn't bear fruit. You can go on. Right.
- [22:27]
Ross Douthat
Is powerful here. What I'm asking about is the treatment of the powerless, which even if you believe, and I don't contest this point, that many, many, many people in this country have borne undue burdens, like, I understand that as central to liberal politics, too, it is the cruelty with which poor immigrants are treated. The kind of laughing about it, that it's fine if you want to say they should be unkind to Ezra Klein like a New York Times columnist. I more mean that there is an embrace of mimetic cruelty, not aimed at the powerful, but aimed at other forms of the powerless, where, as I sort of understand the radicalism of this ethic, it is, whatever your border policy, there should be a profound compassion for, you know, Haitians who came here fleeing some of the most desperate poverty in the world to work hard at jobs, to build up a life for their families. There's something about the weaponization of cruelty against the powerless. It is what I'm trying to get at.
- [23:32]
Ezra Klein
No, and I think, as I said before, you have what you're describing as Christian and pagan tendencies braided together in the Trump administration. And I think that not all, but many of the things that you describe absolutely reflect more of a pagan sensibility than a Christian one. But I agree with you that particular steps the Trump administration has taken in this term are not Christian, anti Christian. And I think the forces, you know, I mean, I think it started with the cuts to foreign aid. I think you can completely justify some kind of renovation of the foreign aid program. Christians are not bound to support any particular set of programs, but I think the way in which the foreign aid programs were reshuffled and cut off and so on was a failure of Christian duty in a pretty obvious way. That and, and the, the core motivations there were just different from the motivations, the evangelical motivations of the Bush era and reflected, frankly, just overall the decline of Christianity in American life since then. I will just say, though, since we're taking a pretty hard line of critique, I think you watch this happen all the time on the left in different ways over the last five or 10 years, where people who I considered sensible, good, well meaning, moderate people were in a coalition with people who had more intensity, more passion, more zeal, who made a certain set of demands on them that led again, people I knew and admired and respected to, I think, compromise their own values in ways that also had sort of real world material consequences. I don't want to like, re litigate. I don't want to relitigate wokeness. But part of the nature of politics in a landscape where there's no kind of religious consensus, there's some kind of moral consensus. Right. Is that forces that appear to have energy behind them again, to go back to where we started, world historical energy perhaps will sort of draw people who have convictions that should put them in tension with those views into certain kinds of compromises. But I agree, I absolutely think, I do not admire the way that the Trump administration approaches any of the policies that you're talking about, from humanitarian aid to the deportations to El Salvador.
- [25:51]
Ross Douthat
I guess to me, one of the things I'm getting at in life broadly, but in the policies specifically, or in the rhetoric, in the comportment, I think a lot about J.D. vance, who's a person in many ways, I think should have had some protection from this. I think he is Christian. I think he does think a lot about virtue and ethics. And you brought up the tariffs. I don't think there's anything unchristian about the tariffs. I think they're bad economics, not bad religion. And a lot of these policies, I actually believe that about. I think people can have very mistaken views on policy because they are just wrong about what the policy will do in the world. I have had mistaken views on policies because I was wrong about what the policies would do in the world or the way they would be carried out. It's more the compatibility between what I think has become a dominant tone. And I think we're in a very unstable era in terms of what I might call our political manners. Matt Iglesias had a piece today about the way a lot of Hitler revisionism is beginning to happen out of a kind of feeling that we have over penalized questions about race, questions of anti Semitism, and that in order to widen the boundaries of debate, you have to have on World War II revisionists. And there's a sense that this sort of politics of manners didn't work. And so politics of no manners needs to be tried now. And I think Donald Trump has sort of been an innovator and a pioneer in that. And it's created a lot of mimetic imitators who on the one hand don't have some of his, I don't know, lightness or authenticity or funniness. But on the other, it's just that I think I am, weirdly, even though I'm not myself, religious, a little bit idealistic about religion and idealistic about my own religion, which I think should create very profound sympathy for refugees. And that has not been something I've seen in the past couple of years. And I think it's a Christianity where it feels to me like it should create a kind of buffer against greed and cruelty that I often see broken when it would be politically viable to break in.
- [27:56]
Ezra Klein
Right. So. Well, two things. One is that, yes, you are describing the story of both Judaism and Christianity's engagement with history and fallen human nature. And this is something that is, in fact advertised in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, in all of history since is that the story of the Jewish people in the Old Testament is not a story of people who were chosen by God and given a bunch of commandments and then obeyed them all. It's a story of people who remained the chosen people despite failing in every possible way, including to fit our conversation repeated flirtations with heathenism and paganism and idolatry. And then you can obviously tell a similar story. You know, the New Testament Christians don't have political power, but the apostles are always screwing up and messing up. And then, of course, the history of Christianity's entanglement with political power is filled with sins and failings that, again, like this era's set are, you know, are sort of not. Not atypical, I guess. But then the second point that I want to push you on is like, what kind of argument is this that you think you're going to win with religious believers who disagree with you? You're like, well, I don't believe in your religion, but I really wish that you would follow your religion so that your politics were more aligned with mine. Like, that's just not much of an argument at all. And to the extent that all of liberalism, the ideology that you subscribe to, trades on inherited ideas from Christianity about morality and equality and so on, while you've jettisoned the portrait of the universe, the metaphysical structure that gives them meaning, I think it's really hard from that point of view for you to get anywhere in arguments with people who still believe in that structure, because you're essentially saying, I've stripped away the conceptual framework that makes your moral ideas make sense, but now I'm going to complain that you're not living up to your moral ideas. I just think that's a really weak argument.
- [29:45]
Ross Douthat
Oh, but I'm not Arguing it.
- [29:46]
Ezra Klein
Well, you're saying it to me. I'm right here. I'm a Christian. I'm right here. You're arguing, you're expressing sorrowful disappointment that Christians are not living up to a worldview that you think is false.
- [29:58]
Ross Douthat
Well, I think parts of it are. I am unconvinced on parts of it. We'll talk about the view of the cosmos in a minute. And I'm not trying to offend you here. I'm actually asking.
- [30:08]
Ezra Klein
I'm not. Ezra, does anything about our long relationship suggest that you could possibly offend me?
- [30:14]
Ross Douthat
I've known you long enough to know when you're getting a bit heated.
- [30:16]
Ezra Klein
That's totally different heatedness. I mean, as I was saying, the New Testament is filled with heated encounters.
- [30:21]
Ross Douthat
Look, I don't think a thing I'm saying here is gonna convince somebody on the Christian right to turn around their view of Donald Trump. I am genuinely curious how somebody of your politics and your religious background interprets somebody like J.D.
- [30:34]
Ezra Klein
Vance.
- [30:35]
Ross Douthat
So I'm asking you questions about it.
- [30:38]
Ezra Klein
Christianity does not provide some kind of incredibly strong bulwark against powerful people doing the kinds of things that powerful people do, which means self interested conquest of various kinds and so on. What it does provide is an ongoing internal critique that those powerful people have to wrestle with and address in ways that are fairly unique in the historical relationship of power and piety. So if you look at something like to take the most famous example, maybe the Spanish conquest of the Americas, in terms of what is actually done in the course of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, you can find plenty of terrible crimes that you, Ezra Klein, would say, well, you know, what good is your religion if your civilization commits these kind of crimes? But from the very beginning in Spain itself, in the heart of super Catholic like, you know, Counter Reformation era Spain, there's an ongoing and agonizing and sometimes intensely legal and practical, sometimes high level philosophical theological debate that subjects the behavior of the Spanish conquistadors and others to this kind of sustained critique and leads to at various times, sometimes successful, mostly unsuccessful reform efforts driven by the Catholic monarchy of Spain and ultimately builds out and influences everything from the anti slavery movement in the 18th and 19th century that's ultimately successful, down to contemporary ideas about human rights and international law that again, today's secular liberals take for granted as a kind of scripture. All of that emerges out of the efforts of serious Christians in a context of profound historical temptation and constant sinfulness to sort of generate from within the resources of their religion. And I think if you take the Trump administration, for instance, it's not as though you cannot find Christian critiques of Trump administration cruelty. They just are not, at the moment, the primary thing I would expect. I mean, we'll find out, right? We're three months into a kind of shock and awe administration, and people have been sort of. I think people have been sort of baffled and surprised by some of the turns that things have taken. But certainly people I take seriously within conservative Christianity have spoken out against things like the cuts to humanitarian aid or anything like that. But again, I completely agree with you that history supplies constant tests of what your religion is for, and there's no end until the end to the testing. And sometimes, sometimes you succeed. More often you fail. But hopefully you do something that has good effects down the road, and sometimes you fail entirely, and then maybe God sifts you and finds you wanting. I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not kidding here, right? This is actually, like, it is important to see every moment as a potential moral test that you might well be failing as a, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a conservative Christian. You could say I'm a member of the Christian right for your purposes. Right. As Christianity has weakened in American life, a really hard question has become like, who is the most dangerous of your different enemies? Or who is, who is most threatening to the Christian view of the good society? Is it a woke progressivism that wants to, again, this would just be the narrative, right? I think it has, you know, wants to abolish basic ideas about differences between the sexes. It supports, you know, abortion at any stage in pregnancy. That's hostile to the basic religious liberties of Christians. Again, from the conservative Christian point of view, is it Donald Trump's populism with its heathen cruelties? Is it transhumanism, like, is the final boss of this era that religious believers will have to confront, actually, Silicon Valley? And if it is, like, can you make alliances within Silicon Valley? Is it better to be with Elon Musk and his 117 children than to be with some other people involved?
- [34:46]
Ross Douthat
So neuralink is it's pushing transhumanism forward very fast. If it can.
- [34:51]
Ezra Klein
Well, but there's also different transhumanisms, like, which, you know, what? Anyway, no, these are actually. These are things that I myself am profoundly uncertain about in this moment. Like, what is the greatest danger from a Christian perspective to the future of the human race? I'm not entirely sure. Brian. I'm Brian Rosenthal. I'm an investigative reporter at the New York Times. My dad is a scientist. My career has been devoted to scientific teaching and research. I remember growing up I didn't fully understand what he was doing every day. But now that I work as an investigative journalist, I do understand. So you have to start with facts. From those facts a hypothesis appears, and then you work on trying to test that hypothesis. I do the same thing, obtaining documents, crunching the data, and I talk to as many people as possible to get to the bottom of the story. The New York Times does not publish until we can prove that something is true. The best scientists are able to do that deep work because they receive funding from their university or from the government. We as journalists depend on funding from subscribers. You can support that type of work by subscribing to the New York Times. This podcast is supported by dsw. This season, let your shoes do the talking. Designer Shoe warehouse is packed with fresh.
- [36:44]
Ross Douthat
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Ezra Klein
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- [37:19]
Ross Douthat
So a big part of your book, as I read it, is about what happens when elite society becomes hostile in its view of the world to the human impulse to seek a picture of reality that runs deeper than materialism. What happens when the seekers have nowhere to go, when organized religion weakens when or not nowhere to go? What happens when they are not channeled into organized religion? And what happens when elite society becomes too materialistic? And I understand for you, and you can tell me if this is wrong, that one of the forces I think that you believe is driving the era is a kind of frustrated seeking, a sort of desire to re enchant the world. Like that has run into an elite culture, maybe its apex being the Obama administration and that sort of moment in American life.
- [38:11]
Ezra Klein
It's the Ezra Klein Show. Ezra, let's be honest here, although that.
- [38:17]
Ross Douthat
Well, we'll get into this. I always joke the difference between you and me is more that you're a Catholic and I'm a Californian than that I'm a materialist and you're not. Because.
- [38:26]
Ezra Klein
Well, one can use the word materialist in different ways too. Sure.
- [38:30]
Ross Douthat
When you use it in this context, what do you mean?
- [38:32]
Ezra Klein
I mean the view that all of existence, life, the universe and everything is finely reducible to matter in motion that matter is primary and mind is secondary, rather than the other way around. I don't mean materialism in terms of Madonna's Material Girl or something like that, although the two can be connected. So one of the various arguments in my book is that disenchantment is fake. Fundamentally, the idea that you can enter a secular age where once upon a time people had wild religious experiences, but now we inhabit the iron cage of modernity and all of those are off the table. That just doesn't describe reality. Mystical experience, religious experience. It's not just the impulse. Like I think secular liberals are very comfortable saying, oh well, there's always a religious impulse. But it's more than that. It's that people have encounters with God, whatever God may be, some kind of higher reality that enters them and transforms them and gives them visions and gives them intense experiences. Or maybe they have them on the verge of death and come back to tell about them. You know, this is just a feature of human life. It's a very profound and important feature of human life. Maybe it can be explained in non religious terms, maybe there's some reductive explanation, but there isn't a good one on offer right now. And so the persistence of that means that religion always regenerates itself. Because even under conditions where almost nobody is committed to a particular church or creed, people are going to go on having dramatic encounters. Right. Like someone like, you know, Barbara Aaron Reich, who's famous, I had her on for this book. Right. Famous left liberal writer, wrote a whole book called.
- [40:09]
Ross Douthat
And a Famous atheist.
- [40:10]
Ezra Klein
Yes, famous atheist called Living with a Wild God. Right. And it was just a book about a very secular person who had a lot of religious experiences, like experiences that if you went and read William James or read like a medieval Catholic mystic or something, would be totally familiar. And she, you know, didn't have sort of a framework, a conceptual framework to fully process them, and wrote a great book, really interesting book about it.
- [40:32]
Ross Douthat
Tell the story that you tell in your book. I don't remember the man's name, but he's the editor of Skeptics magazine or something like that.
- [40:40]
Ezra Klein
Right. So this is Michael Shermer, who is one of the more famous professional skeptical debunkers of religious claims, supernatural things and so on, and in one of his books. But he's told this story several times to his great credit. He was getting married and his wife had. I'm gonna butcher this slightly, but had a great uncle who had been very close to her and was the kind of person who would have given her away at the wedding, but had passed away. So she was feeling sort of lonely and isolated. And they had a radio that had come from him and the radio was broken, didn't work, had never worked. Shermer had tried to fix it. It didn't. It just didn't work. It was broken, right. And at the end of the wedding, during the reception, they heard music from the back of the house and went back into a back room and there was the radio playing a love song. And I think it like transitioned from that to some kind of classical music for the later in the evening and then shut off and never worked again. And this experience, you know, affected Schirmer again, to his credit, right? It was like evidence against interest. And I think again, you have to sort of trust, as always with these stories, right? You have to sort of trust his general reliability and so on, that it wasn't just that like there was a battery that was jiggled or something. The radio really didn't work and really never worked again. There really was no obvious material way that this could have happened. Schirmer in the end, works out a theory of the multiverse where in some different timeline, much like in the movie Interstellar, his wife's great uncle is capable of accessing our timeline. And to Schirmer, this is sort of an escape from like supernatural explanations. But one reason to just tell that story is that as I think you know, because I was joking about your show being the epitome of. Of secularization, the apogee, whatever, people have experiences like this all the time.
- [42:31]
Ross Douthat
That's why I'm not materialist.
- [42:32]
Ezra Klein
Right. This is a very commonplace kind of experience. Not super commonplace, you're not going to have one tomorrow probably. But like this stuff just is part of the warp and woof of reality. And so to finally long windedly answer your original question, I think what happens in conditions when you have weak institutional religions and a secular expert class that is not militantly atheistic, but sort of says, you know, officially these things don't happen, is that people feel like they can't really go all the way up to the Creator God, Yahweh, Jehovah, outside of time and space, and they start looking for sort of intermediate powers to become a kind of locus for their own spiritual impulses. You know, stuff with psychedelics, stuff with literal paganism, including stuff on the right. And then the interesting zone in a way is AI, which is the place where sort of scientific ideas meet a kind of, you know, slightly supernaturalist sense of like the machine God as this power that is into which we are going to commend ourselves. But yeah, and I think that tendency, again, this is what Christians would say, but that tendency is bad. It's not that secondary spiritual powers don't exist in the universe. There are in fact, angels and demons and things like that, saints and other powers, perhaps more mysterious still. But not all those powers have human good in mind. And it's better to approach them through one of the big old traditional religions that tries to subject them to a kind of higher ordering.
- [44:12]
Ross Douthat
Let me hold you there because we'll get to this. I want to distinguish two arguments that the book could make and that you take one path in particular. So I am somebody who believes deeply in mystery. I'm that kind of agnostic, where I'm Californian. I'm a Californian. Exactly. And the sort of first half of the book, or a third of the book, is sort of about this. It's an argument that you. I would call it an argument that you should believe that a kind of new atheist materialism is incompatible with any kind of reasonable understanding of the world in its complexity, in its unruliness, in the experiences people have, in the things that it now increasingly requires you to believe. Like either human consciousness is somehow having some profound effect on quantum physics, or if you're going to take a much more straightforward view of the math, we're splitting into uncountable new realities at all times. The implications are getting weirder and weirder.
- [45:10]
Ezra Klein
So many podcasts.
- [45:11]
Ross Douthat
So many podcasts. Podcasts. I love all that stuff. But. So there's an argument for belief and then there's an argument for channeling that belief. And I understand the book to really be about the second argument. I actually think the first argument is pretty straightforward, but it's about channeling this belief into organized religion. So given the strangeness of everything you just described, and then also given that the big organized religions disagree on many things.
- [45:38]
Ezra Klein
A few. Yep.
- [45:39]
Ross Douthat
Why go there? Why is it not enough to just say you should believe that this world is not something we understand how to explain, and you should be open to all these things that violate a materialist intuition about it. What's the argument for going into organized religion as the answer for such profound unruliness?
- [46:00]
Ezra Klein
Well, a couple things. So, first of all, I don't think that the case for not being a materialist is a case for sort of total unruliness. To the contrary, I think part of the case for not being a materialist is precisely the order of the universe. One of the problems that materialism has that you sort of gestured at is accounting for the specific ways in which the universe is ordered, the beauty and precision and symmetry involved, and also, as far as we can tell, the extreme unlikeliness that this particular order would be selected for unless whoever selected it were interested in listening to lots of podcasts. No creating planets, stars and conscious beings. So you have the religious argument is an argument for overarching structure. And then the ways in which it is weird are not themselves entirely random. Like there are patterns in spiritual experience. There's no sort of predictability to it overall. But the kinds of experiences that people have have a certain kind of consistency. You can track different kinds of spiritual experiences across different cultures. You can track them in near death experiences. You can track them in terms of like, studies of what appear to be miraculous healings and so on. And again, there just seems to be a way in which you have this overarching order. You have some sort of mysterious relationship between our consciousness and that overarching order. And then you have a lot of religious experiences that seem like higher forces trying to be in touch with us and have some kind of relationship with us. That's the basic picture that again, most of the big religions offer. Allowing for all their differences, Buddhism and Christianity have pretty substantial differences, but they each describe a universe that's generally like that.
- [47:56]
Ross Douthat
So I wanna be careful because when I say I'm a Californian, I'm being jokey about it. There are of course, many Orthodox Jews in California and committed Catholic Christians in California and so on. Absolutely, absolutely. But I am very familiar with a kind of California seeker mentality. And I think the answer from that perspective to what you just said is yes, there are patterns, yes, there are buckets. There is a consistency to, or a couple maybe consistencies to near death experiences or to memories that young kids have of what at least some people take to be past lives or things like the radio turning on or, or, or, or, or. But none of these really fit, at least not all of them into any of the big religions. They don't. I, I've read enough of the religions to say that what I describe as the unruliness when I say that, I mean un. Enough things that don't fit a kind of simplified view of reality that it would make me wonder about materialism. But also, I don't think Judaism explains them all. I don't think that Catholicism explains them all. I'm not saying I know what does. Hinduism.
- [49:05]
Ezra Klein
Well, Hinduism is big enough.
- [49:07]
Ross Douthat
It's quite big, actually.
- [49:07]
Ezra Klein
Maybe it explains a small.
- [49:09]
Ross Douthat
I'm not saying that I know what it does.
- [49:11]
Ezra Klein
Arguably from your premises you should probably be.
- [49:15]
Ross Douthat
I'm not saying that I know what does. What I'm saying is that I'm very sympathetic to how it can kind of spin you into a profound openness. I know many people who have gone there where. What it seems to me now is having come to believe in these kinds of things, it's very hard for them to say where to stop believing. And they now believe a lot of things that are maybe contradictory or they're gurus who are all saying different things. But once you open yourself, it's hard. It can become hard to close back down. But for them, you know, some of them grew up in a faith tradition. For them, the faith tradition didn't explain too much of what they then began to see or experience or come to believe in. I don't think any of the traditions have a really good explanation for why we have sort of weirdly consistent alien abduction experiences, which I don't believe to be alien abductions, but I'm not sure what to make of them. What is your response to someone like that?
- [50:13]
Ezra Klein
I think that there's a balance that you have to strike in looking for a particular religious tradition as opposed to just being a kind of open ended seeker. And you want, I think, a religious tradition that has a set of sort of core views that make sense of a lot of what you've described and also a certain degree of flexibility and uncertainty about some of the things that don't fit into exactly its world picture. But yeah, the wide array of religious experiences, the data on its own should. Would make you a kind of like. The term I use in the book is perennialist. Right? This is the theory that all the great religions encode some of the truth about reality. You kind of can't go wrong with any of them as long as they're big enough and old enough. But none of them are like the. The fullness of truth. I would say, though, just as a Roman Catholic, that Roman Catholicism, again, one of the things that I appreciate about it is that it has a certain kind of supernatural capaciousness. Not in terms of all its formal doctrines. It's not like you open up the catechism of the Catholic Church and they're like, well, here's what we think about aliens. I mean, it's in there, it's on, but the pages are taped in the Vatican.
- [51:32]
Ross Douthat
There is quite a bit about.
- [51:34]
Ezra Klein
In the Vatican.
- [51:34]
Ross Douthat
Here's what we think about it.
- [51:35]
Ezra Klein
There is some stuff about that stuff. But, you know, if you look at actual the history of Catholic cultures, for instance, in terms of like the afterlife, right? Zones like purgatory and limbo and so on have some kind of connection to people's arguments about ghosts and hauntings and that form of the supernatural. Catholic cultures have always been pretty hospitable to ideas about fairies. I don't know how I've ended up on nice New York Times podcast talking about the good people, but the idea of sort of like, there are angels and demons and then there are these sort of weird, like, trickster beings. If you asked me to like, make a case for Catholicism's capaciousness, I could make that case. But then the other thing is, and this is, I'm curious what you think about this, right. Is that one of the things I argue in the book, it's not an approvable assertion, right? But it's the idea that if there is this overall structure and order to the universe, and if there seem to be sort of higher powers interested in talking to human beings, then maybe you should assume that, like, God is not out to trick you. The universe is not a trick. Like, it's not actually presenting you with this sort of impossible, open ended question. It's basically, there's a certain number of big religions, they've stood the test of time. They've had a pretty powerful shaping influence on human history. Why wouldn't you go in for one of them rather than saying, you know, in good California style, like, I just have to remain perfectly open. I think that if you can accept that the universe might have been created with us in mind, then you should give deference.
- [53:11]
Ross Douthat
So I want to say that I loved the book. I really, really enjoyed it. And this was the point where it helped me clarify where my intuitions maybe go very differently, which is, I think, at a fundamental level, I expect that anything that has worked at mass scale across many different institutional regimes as an organized religion is likely to have conformed so much to politics and institutions as to have strayed from how profoundly radical whatever kind of spiritual truth might exist is. This is a way in which the sort of gambit I had at the beginning about Trump is, was connected to the meat of this conversation where I found the argument that you should assume that a religion's success over time is going to correlate to some kind of fundamental truth value. I felt you could take that both ways. I felt you could also take it the other way, which is to say that the religions that survive are going to be the ones that are institutionally compatible with many different regimes and often contort themselves into those regimes. And we talked about the Spanish conquests and the Inquisition. I've been reading about the Renaissance recently, Ada Palmer's great book on inventing the Renaissance. And I wouldn't say the popes of that era cover themselves in glory. I think you could say it's about forms of Judaism, about forms of Buddhism, which Buddhism is a much more complicated institutional story than people who have been raised in America on West Coast Spirit Rock. Buddhism, I think, tend to believe. There are all these questions where I think that. I believe that whatever sort of ultimate truth is out there is gonna be extremely inconvenient and strange. And as you said earlier, and something I thought was quite stirring, the sense that every moment might be a moral test, that a religion that took that truly seriously would end up being very incompatible with ruling regimes and would have a lot of trouble from them. Which, of course, at times, these religions have, haven't they?
- [55:18]
Ezra Klein
I mean, but then they've often conformed.
- [55:19]
Ross Douthat
To, you know, that as well.
- [55:20]
Ezra Klein
Right? I guess. See, I think you're making actually precisely the case for in different ways, both Judaism and Christianity as probably divinely founded, which is to say these religions have survived and persisted across multiple different kinds of cultures, multiple different kinds of regimes in each era. Exactly. As you say, elements of these religions have made compromises, have intertwined themselves in profound ways. Right? Like you couldn't get more intertwined than medieval Catholicism and medieval feudalism. And I think if you were a secular historian looking at that intertwinement, you'd say, probably whenever feudalism breaks up, Christianity is going to go away, too. Or Judaism, right? Judaism is a religion of temple prayer, religion that's centered on the temple and the holy of holies and everything else. You look at that as a secular historian, you're like, well, obviously, you know, if some empire, we'll call it the Romans comes along and destroys that, then, you know, Judaism is going to disappear, too. That's not what happens. Instead, you have these periods of intertwinement that are then shattered in some way. And in each case, I mean, the first thing to say is that the radicalism that you describe persists in those eras as well. And again, to go back to the point I was making earlier, this is something the religions themselves advertise. The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, right, is a story where the Jews are failing your tests, the tests that you, Ezra Klein, are setting. You're like, well, if this religion was really, from God. They probably wouldn't all become idolaters. And they're like, ezra, here's our holy book. It's all about how we became idolaters. But guess what? Then God did something new, and people did something new, and the story continued. And, I mean, I just think what you're offering, I think you think it's. I don't want to impeach. Yeah. I think you think you're setting God free a bit from what you see as the corruptions of Trump era Christianity or medieval Inquisition era Christianity. And you're like, no, God is bigger than that. Therefore, a religion that is always getting entangled with worldly power, that can't be where God is. But what you end up with is a Council of despair where you're like, well, the only religion that would be worthy of God is one that would be exterminated within, like, 50 years of its founding by the cruel state. You're ending up saying that a religion good enough to join could not exist on the earth.
- [57:45]
Ross Douthat
Well, I don't think I'm saying a religion good enough to join cannot exist on the earth. I'm not trying to set God free from anything because I genuinely am not sure it's not a pose for me. I think a couple times in this. You think I'm making an argument when I'm actually genuinely confused, or if not genuinely confused, genuinely uncertain. I find the uncertainty radical, and I will say within my own belief system, to the extent it counts as a belief system, which I'm not sure it should, mystery and uncertainty is both very much at its heart and, to me, very comforting. When I was younger, I just had a crippling fear of death, just really, truly terrible mortality anxiety. And somehow what eased it for me was eventually coming to the view that I just was never going to know. And I don't know why I found that comforting, and I don't know why that has stuck, but I did, and to some degree it has. So when I say this, I am actually not saying that I think I have some answer here that you don't. I really don't. I'm actually testing my intuition.
- [58:50]
Ezra Klein
Success.
- [58:52]
Ross Douthat
I want to hear your answers.
- [58:53]
Ezra Klein
And I'm not trying to beat too aggressive. Ezra. I think that, as you know from reading the book, I think that the intuition that a lot of modern people have about that, even if you concede that materialism is too limited, there is just this fundamental unknowability hanging over everything. I think that intuition is mistaken. I think it is correct about Certain aspects of religion. I think there are issues in religion and questions in religion that hang over every tradition imperfectly resolved. I'm not here to tell you I've resolved the problem of evil. Problem of evil is a real problem. It's a real issue. Again, I think it's an issue that's sort of there and acknowledged and wrestled with throughout the Old and New Testament. But I don't think you're going to sit down and just reason your way into a solution to that problem. I do think, though, that you can get a little bit further, like just even in the example that you cited, I don't know what your sort of metaphysical perspectives as a kid were, but I certainly agree that I would personally find it more comforting to believe that death is a mystery than to be Richard Dawkins. Right. And believe that death is just the absolute end and never could be anything else. I just think it is, in fact, more probable than not that after you die, you will meet God, whatever God is, and be asked to account for your life and so on. And that's not inherently comforting.
- [60:15]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, you and I have had this conversation. It could be quite terrifying.
- [60:19]
Ezra Klein
But I think it's. That's quite terrifying. But I think that it is something that is reasonable to believe that should give you a little bit more than just a sense of mystery. And more than that, I think it is what God himself, in his infinite mystery and power, wants you to believe, which is why he has me here talking to you. I have said heaven sent.
- [60:42]
Ross Douthat
I've often thought of you in my life as heaven sent.
- [60:44]
Ezra Klein
Ross. No, I mean, I'm, you know, doesn't. It doesn't mean good things about my final destination. I'm just an instrument. But I guess the argument I'm just making is I think one can get just a little bit further than just mystery itself.
- [61:29]
Ross Douthat
One argument you make in the book, you sort of give the example, like the canonical example of if you believe in a merciful God, how do you explain the child with leukemia? And you basically say that in any reasonable understanding of God, any reasonable understanding of religion, you can't. You can't possibly understand the plan. You can't possibly. We were, in a way talking about this with Donald Trump, that this sort of unfolding of things will always be so far beyond the human mind that the idea that you've, like, poked out a contradiction is a little bit ridiculous. I actually agree with that. But then I think that when it comes to the organized religions, you say a few times that you sort of Just have trouble believing a providential God would allow these religions that are wrong, that are wayward, to expand and thrive in the way that they have. And I think an intuition that people like me have is that it is hard to say that some things can be resolved by. Well, a God who is good will not allow X to happen. And some things have to be resolved with. You can't possibly understand why God is allowing X to happen or Y to happen. And so questioning it or being unwilling to take this on faith is unreasonable.
- [62:41]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, I don't think you should take on faith that the major world religions are providential. And I think you could imagine yourself if you lived in a world where the dominant set of religions all practiced human sacrifice and, you know, I mean, you can imagine that kind of situation. I think the case for taking the big religion seriously, therefore you've pushed me on this effectively. Yeah. Can't just rest on their size and scale alone. You do also have to think that in the aggregate they've had what you, as someone who has particular moral intuitions given by God, one hopes at some level have had a positive impact on the world and shaped it in positive ways. And also that they have. And this is also sort of important to my argument that they do have real overlaps. And I think that they do. I think the major world religions, if you look at them just and sort of analyze the ethical perspective of the major world religions, you do see a certain kind of overlap. It is not enough to say these things are big and present and you have to take it on faith that they're where God wants you to be. You do also have to actually look at them and pass some kind of judgment on them, as I so often do.
- [64:04]
Ross Douthat
I want to go back to fairies, please. One of the other arguments you make.
- [64:08]
Ezra Klein
Is that the organization, you should call them the good. You don't want to attract too much of their attention. So why don't you call them the good people?
- [64:14]
Ross Douthat
The good people, Which I actually, I will admit I am unfamiliar here and did not know that.
- [64:18]
Ezra Klein
So forgive me, you've come here to learn.
- [64:21]
Ross Douthat
Well, actually, this is exactly what I'm about to say. What just happened? Which, depending on whether or not you believe in the good people, I guess, which is that one of your other arguments is that if you come to the view that the world has supernatural or extra human forces, intelligences, agents, et cetera. Right. If you are a seeker of that sort, that one thing the major religions have, which is, I think it's fair to say, has been largely downplayed in a lot of modern society is actually a belief about those dangers and arguably experience with those questions, including maybe what to call and not call the good people. And one of your arguments here is that there is more spiritual danger once you accept some of these premises than people often give credit to. That it's not just about belief or unbelief. It's about the possibility of falling into the wrong beliefs, of listening to the wrong voices, of following the tricksters, of following more demonic forces. And one thing you appreciate about Catholicism is a little bit more openness to that world of forces. I just found that interesting. I always find your kind of openness to the occult to be. I don't know. I don't want to say.
- [65:38]
Ezra Klein
Openness to the occult is not what I want to advertise, is not how.
- [65:41]
Ross Douthat
You want to talk about it.
- [65:41]
Ezra Klein
Well, I mean, the reality is that, like, you know, in the book, as you know, I have an entire chapter on sort of supernatural experience and weirdness. And I actually debated with myself how much to write about things that are explicitly demonic. Catholicism, obviously, has a special focus on this through the Office of the Exorcist. There's lots of literature on the demonic and demonic possession. And I ended up feeling quite uncomfortable writing about it too much. And so there's a couple paragraphs and some footnotes, and people who are interested in it can follow that material. But there is a kind of. Yeah, there's a kind of balance that you want to strike as just an observer or a writer between sort of acknowledging those kind of weirder and darker and more disturbing realities, but not like focusing too much attention on them. And maybe the joke, or is it about saying the good people right. Is sort of.
- [66:39]
Ross Douthat
We both think about joking part of that.
- [66:41]
Ezra Klein
Hey, now. Part of that perspective. But I mean, this is one thing I'm absolutely certain about, is that if there is a realm of supernatural experience that is real, that is not just your brain chemistry, you can access it maybe through altering your brain chemistry and taking ayahuasca and whatever. But if that reality is real, it is 100% dangerous. Like, dangerous and especially 100%. Well, not 100. I don't mean, like, every aspect of it is dangerous, but I mean, it is certainly dangerous.
- [67:16]
Ross Douthat
There are dangers.
- [67:17]
Ezra Klein
There are. There are serious dangers within it.
- [67:21]
Ross Douthat
Tell me about your views on. On psychedelics.
- [67:24]
Ezra Klein
So I have never taken psychedelics. I've never been at an ayahuasca retreat. This is entirely based on reading and conversations. My view is that some psychedelics almost certainly open you to contact with non human spiritual entities and that they do so in a way that is different from other forms of spiritual experience. In that, again, not in every case, but it can be sort of a shortcut. But that shortcut means that you're entering these landscapes without the kind of preparation that not only the traditional religions, but the shamans who use ayahuasca in the Amazon, right, or wherever they use it, would say is necessary for these, these kind of encounters. And there's, you know, a Twitter joke or a social media joke, right, about, you know, getting one shotted by a six dimensional Mesoamerican demon or something like that that people make about these kind of drugs. And that's a joke, but I don't think it's entirely a joke. And so, yeah, I think that that possibility is real. And it does not at the same time mean that lots of people can't take these drugs and have mystical experiences that just sort of convince them that there's more to reality than just the material. And that is a correct view. So in that sense, the drugs teach you something real about the world, but it can be like anything in human life. And one of the points I try and stress is that religion is not like out there in some compartment where it's totally different from every other thing and you can't argue about it the way you argue about other things and so on. No, like in other aspects of human life, dealing with the supernatural is like dealing with the natural. There are good things and bad things and dangers and opportunities. And you just want to be aware of that before you throw yourself into a realm of experience that you might not be prepared for. But I haven't done it. And you have, or have you say what have you? Yes. So you have immediate information that I may not have. But one could argue that doing those kind of drugs and coming back from it not with a sense that you've been possessed by a Mesoamerican demon, but coming back with a sense that, man, there's more to the universe than I thought, but I can never possibly figure out the truth. Also could be a deception that has been imposed upon you.
- [69:58]
Ross Douthat
It could be all kinds of things. I will say without going into any detail, that I had once an incredibly profound and mystical experience that was, to my genuine shock, completely Jewish in nature and not from a side of Judaism that is a side that I had been brought up in and that I've never been able to shake. And that has made me much more open to My own tradition than I would have thought.
- [70:29]
Ezra Klein
Okay.
- [70:29]
Ross Douthat
And it actually.
- [70:30]
Ezra Klein
Can you give me a bit more?
- [70:31]
Ross Douthat
No.
- [70:33]
Ezra Klein
Okay, okay. That's fair.
- [70:36]
Ross Douthat
But what I will say about it is that.
- [70:41]
Ezra Klein
Okay, okay, Wait, wait, wait. So I've done a lot. I've done a lot of these conversations, right. And this is not the first time when someone in a conversation who is officially sort of a mysterian, as you are, has said, oh, but by the way, I did have that one experience where it did sound like God was talking to me. I've had a few conversations like that. And so what?
- [71:03]
Ross Douthat
I want more frightening than that.
- [71:04]
Ezra Klein
Okay, well, even better.
- [71:08]
Ross Douthat
I'll give you a little bit. I wonder how happy our editors are going to be about this conversation.
- [71:11]
Ezra Klein
Oh, I think they're happy.
- [71:16]
Ross Douthat
It felt for a very punctuated period of time, like a veil had been ripped open, and you could feel how terrifying these forces really were. This is not the part where I'm a mysterion. This is a part where some things are very hard to know where to put. And I've been trying to figure out what to do with this within my own tradition.
- [71:40]
Ezra Klein
Right.
- [71:40]
Ross Douthat
I'm, you know, in terms of what I am seeking, I'm actually seeking something closer to home. Not something completely open, but it has to also feel real to me. I need to feel some gnosis from it, as is put in the book.
- [71:52]
Ezra Klein
But do you have to?
- [71:54]
Ross Douthat
Well, I feel I do have to, I guess.
- [71:57]
Ezra Klein
Why isn't that so? Again, without, like, over describing your own experience to you? Like, why isn't that enough to say, okay, the God of my fathers in some way gave me a glimpse of what, you know, why we're Jews and not mysterians. And I'm just gonna go to my. I mean, you need to, you know, pick a politically appropriate synagogue and so on. Right. And there are all kinds of issues with that. But I'm just gonna go. I'm gonna go to synagogue even if I don't feel gnosis. Like, I mean, I don't feel gnosis from Sunday mass with my oversupply of children. Right. I mean, occasionally, maybe you seem more.
- [72:40]
Ross Douthat
Comfortable with that than I am.
- [72:41]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, a lot. Well, this is an interesting psychological thing that I've found in these discussions. I think part of it is having been around other people who had spiritual experiences. Right. And sort of observed them and therefore accepted that, like, okay, some people have profound experiences. I don't. Maybe I would if I took ayahuasca. But it's okay for me to be a person who Isn't getting gnosis all the time, but is like, I feel good at mass. Not always, but most of the time. But it just seems to me that like, you know, when you're called before the throne of, you know, the Most High and the cherubim and seraphim are there and you're like, well, I wanted some gnosis. And God is like, I gave you gnosis. I gave you the big dose.
- [73:25]
Ross Douthat
Here's, here's, I think where the question of organized religion becomes than complicated. As I said, it comes from a part of Judaism that is not the one I grew up in or even really know how to find out there. It's definitely there. I can find it. I could talk to people in Judaism about it, but it's stranger. And the reason it felt.
- [73:44]
Ezra Klein
You mean the mystical part of Judaism?
- [73:46]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, it's a much more mystical part of Judaism. Hold on, let me, let me finish my thing.
- [73:49]
Ezra Klein
Yeah.
- [73:50]
Ross Douthat
And in part because I had so little experience with that, had to actually find the structure for what it was later that it didn't feel like something my own mind had just invented. Right. Whoa. I don't know if that got caught on the camera, but part of the ceiling tape just fell down in front of Ross. You can take your signs where you get them.
- [74:14]
Ezra Klein
Okay.
- [74:15]
Ross Douthat
There you go. This will be better on video, this particular episode.
- [74:19]
Ezra Klein
Yep.
- [74:20]
Ross Douthat
So. And then you go to, sorry, things happen. Then you go to your sort of space that's more organized and what you're seeing doesn't track that at all.
- [74:33]
Ezra Klein
No, that's fair. And honestly, we had, I mean, as a kid we had experiences like that in my own family where my parents, especially my mother, we were Episcopalian, which is, you know, a very anti mystical part of Christianity overall. And my mother had these intense experiences in a context of like charismatic healing services. And then we wanted a church to go to. And it was hard to find, starting in mainline Protestantism, a church where it seemed like the thing that she had encountered was also there in some way. And I think in the end, you know, we went through a lot of places and ended up as Catholics in part because I do think Catholicism does a good job of saying, look, we're not expecting the Holy Spirit to descend constantly all the time. We have, you know, it's a ritual religion and the sacraments work whether or not you're feeling a blast of God's presence. But it is a reasonable desire to feel like the encounter you have has some relationship to what is being done on the altar or done in the Rituals, I think that's completely understandable.
- [75:42]
Ross Douthat
One perception of these drugs or medicines or whatever you want to call them is that they're pretty profound spiritual technologies, if you believe in them from that perspective, as opposed if you believe they're just inducing some sort of random firings of chemicals. So you might imagine this is something that in a world that got disenchanted, you would want these big traditions to try to take on, to try to build some containers of safety and knowledge around them. But they seem like a thing that can pretty reliably create an experience that actually connects people in a very profound way to their home tradition. Now, it can do other things too. But as you say, that's true for a lot of things in religion. Why should they not be used as that? Why treat them as a cult as opposed to perhaps a somewhat providential thing that emerged at this time when people badly need the help of things that create a kind of re enchantment and breaks the shell of logic that makes for many faith so difficult?
- [76:45]
Ezra Klein
No, I think that's a fair question. And I think one answer is that they like all things that operate in reality from a Christian perspective, they must have some providential expression. And the Catholic view basically is that you're not supposed to try and commune with spirits, speak to the dead in certain ways, like you shouldn't go to a seance. Like, there's a certain set of supernatural experiences that Catholics are not supposed to seek out. And there's some biblical warrant for this. And there's sort of the explicit teaching of the church. And the simplest way to express why that is maybe is to say that the Church thinks there's a certain set of things that we know God is present in, and then there's a certain set of things that are just like opening doors. And God and his providence can certainly be there when you open the door, but we don't have any kind of guarantee of that. And by opening the door, you are opening yourself in a way that is fundamentally unsafe. Now, again, does that mean that someone can't come to God by taking a psychedelic? No, absolutely. Someone can under this theory. But for the church itself, or for Christians in general, there is a sense, I think, that like, well, once you are in, then you aren't supposed to go looking in those places anymore because we just don't know what the potential dangers are there.
- [78:16]
Ross Douthat
Here's the other skeptic interpretation of what I just said. The very fact that you can reliably induce mystical experience, it just shows that this is Just random firings of brain chemicals that this should make you much more skeptical all the way through that mystical experience has any truth value to it at all. The fact that something that in the case of lsd, a Swiss chemist synthesized just mere decades ago can be some sort of reliable portal to people feeling like they had some kind of mystic experience, it actually implies that none of this was ever mystic at all. That there's some kind of pattern of brain chemicals that you can fire off. Then in the same way, some patterns will make you depressed and other patterns will make you think your body is itching and other things will do. One of those patterns creates the misapprehension of the numinous. And that all this is actually not an argument for any kind of belief. None of it is spiritual technology. What it shows you is that there's kind of nothing here. And it actually just explains away a huge category of experience that leads people towards these fantastical claims.
- [79:29]
Ezra Klein
Right? And to be clear, I don't think that one should ever rest the case for the existence of God or the supernatural on psychedelic experiences alone, anything like that.
- [79:43]
Ross Douthat
But near death experiences in the book, right? There's fasting, right? There's a lot of induced mystical experience or mystical experience in moments of extremists. And you do take it seriously. So I guess I'm asking why not just the brain chemical?
- [79:55]
Ezra Klein
I think what one should take seriously is the fact that clearly our minds exist in a dynamic relationship to our bodies and to physical reality. And religious experience, again, to take the Barbara Ehrenreich example, there is the kind of religious experience that falls on people unbidden in some way. And I have seen this happen. And I think it's a little bit hard to tell a brain chemistry story where it's like, why do human beings suddenly have this God apprehension thing that just sort of turns on? Like, where did this apprehension device come from? All our other apprehension devices are evolved to meet some sort of actual reality.
- [80:38]
Ross Douthat
Well, can I force you to steal me on this? Because if you've ever read an Oliver Sacks book or familiar, I mean, as you are, I know with mental illnesses there are many things that happen in our brains where you might say, why do we have something like that that can ever turn on? But we do.
- [80:54]
Ezra Klein
Yes, but religious experience and spiritual experience are at the very least in a distinct category from mental illness in that people who have religious experiences are very often entirely sane and entirely aware of the strangeness of the experience they've had and so on. Again, which doesn't I take your point about the olver sack stuff like you could just say, okay, well, people's brains can misfire in this way and it yields mental illness and they misfire in that way and they think they're encountering the numinous or something like that. I don't think that's an impossible view to hold. All I'm saying is that the religious world pictures already takes it for granted that your body, the physicality of your body has some kind of connection to your apprehension of the divine. And most of the time you are not supposed to be apprehending the divine. And this goes to your, you know, to go back to your vision. Right. The idea that like religion is a scaffolding, okay. Like reality itself is kind of the Silicon Valley guys who say it's a simulation, right? Okay, well, it's a world that you're supposed to be in, you're supposed to be in this world. Whatever God is up to doesn't work if we're not in this world most of the time. And having a spiritual experience is getting our mind a little bit out of this material world, but it's not the way things are supposed to work all the time. We're here as material, embodied creatures for a reason. But yeah, I don't think there's anything internally contradictory about thinking that the clear link between the physical and the spiritual means that you could reduce the spiritual to the physical experience.
- [82:32]
Ross Douthat
I always enjoy that there are these two completely opposite theories of what the brain is doing. And I'm not saying one isn't much more accepted than the other. But there's the understanding, the more materialistic sense of it, that everything in our experience is the brain. And then there's the theory that I've heard from some consciousness researchers that exist in the near death experience world that some of the psychedelics people believe that the brain is a kind of like a reducing valve. Yes, tell me about that thought.
- [83:00]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, that's just the idea that whatever the mind or soul or consciousness is, is capable of this much wider apprehension of reality, including divine realities, whatever those may be, that aren't really fully compatible with like being an embodied creature in the world. And so to be an embodied creature in the world, your mind's capacities and experiences need to be reduced, funneled down to the sensory inputs being processed by your eyes and nose and mouth and ears. And so that's why when you have moments, when you shake up the brain, when you put the brain in extreme circumstances via fasting and these kind of things or when you reach the threshold of death, the mind's experience doesn't actually seem to contract, it seems to expand. And one of the challenges in explaining something like near death experiences from the materialist perspective is that they are described not as fragmentary hallucinations, dreamlike experiences, random, chaotic. They are described as more real than real, incredibly intense. They carry back into people's post near death experience lives. They cause big changes to people's near death experience lives. And it really is a little bit hard to tell an evolutionary just so story about why the brain is wired for some Darwinian reason, to generate its most intense experiences at a time when for most people you're just going to die.
- [84:36]
Ross Douthat
You talk in the book about something you call official knowledge. What's official knowledge?
- [84:41]
Ezra Klein
Official knowledge is the knowledge about the world that is considered normal and respectable in publications like the New York Times, Ivy League universities, most Wikipedia entries. You know, the things you find very.
- [84:58]
Ross Douthat
Strange things on Wikipedia.
- [85:00]
Ezra Klein
You can. But to their credit, in a certain way, the editors of Wikipedia try to impose some of the same assumptions about the world that are shared by most of the formal institutions of knowledge creation out there.
- [85:16]
Ross Douthat
One of the things that has happened to you over the years, and you've written very beautifully about, is you've had profound struggles with chronic Lyme, and it made you more open to the way a lot of people feel failed by official knowledge and the institutions that produce it. And I've been interested in how that experience, which I think is laced in some ways through the book, the generalizability of it for you, like what happens when all of a sudden, what is official knowledge no longer conforms to the world as you experience it, and the sort of crowbar of skepticism that places between not just you and, you know, that particular institution, but maybe you and all of them simultaneously. If this could be wrong, if this could have failed me so profoundly, well, who's to say it's not all failing me so profoundly?
- [86:12]
Ezra Klein
Yes, no, that. I mean, that is the feeling that you have. Right. And so I had still have to some degree, but I'm much better. A chronic illness that is not officially recognized by the Centers for Disease Control. And indeed, to say that you have the chronic form of Lyme disease is to identify yourself in some way with just the world of everyone from RFK Jr to Holistic Wellness practitioners and so on. A whole world that is held in severe disrepute by official knowledge. Official medical knowledge, you say?
- [86:44]
Ross Douthat
Kind of pointing at me.
- [86:45]
Ezra Klein
Pointing? No, no, no. I mean, I think at the you know, this conversation has been the most serious blow to official knowledge since. No, I don't know. Yeah. And so that obviously, like, I really was sick, I really did get better using a combination of really strong antibiotics and other stranger things that are not recommended by the cdc. But it really did work. And I am morally certain both that chronic Lyme disease absolutely exists and the CDC's recommendations are absolutely wrong. So then the challenge is, you've seen that the pillar of official truth has a hole in it. How many holes does that mean that there are? And something that I have very self consciously tried to do in my own thinking about this, and this applies to arguments about religion and religious belief as well, is to not assume that because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, it's wrong about everything. That seems like a big mistake. And two, not to assume that because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, one important thing that really affected my life, that all evidentiary standards should be thrown out or anything like that. But that's clearly a really hard psychological balance to strike. I think you just see this. I saw it myself. I spent a lot of time in worlds of chronic illness and alternative medicine. And people just for totally understandable reasons, became full spectrum skeptics about anything the government said, anything that the American Medical association said. It was just, if they're wrong about my illness and my experience, they must be wrong about everything. The pull of that is incredibly strong. And in the case of religion, I think one of the things, understandably, that nice secular agnostic people fear about going too far with, like my arguments is that the next thing you know, we're going to be throwing out all of modern science and progress and locking up Galileo and so on, all of these things. And I don't want to say that that's not a legitimate fear. There clearly are ways in which religious belief and religious doctrine can end up being an impediment to finding out what is true about the world. I'm interested in what is true about the world. In the end, that is my goal. And your goal, right. Hopefully all of our goal as journalists is to figure out what is true about the world. And I think to my mind, very clearly, certain things are true about the world that have to do with God and the possibility of the supernatural that are not encompassed by current official knowledge. And I think the modern liberal project is correct, that there are just limits to the kind of certainty you can have and how that certainty should cash out, certainly in politics. So there is a balance. And yeah, anytime you're Trying to correct an official consensus, you are looking for a balance where the correction doesn't become an overcorrection.
- [89:54]
Ross Douthat
When we were young bloggers so many years ago.
- [89:57]
Ezra Klein
So many, many years ago, yes.
- [90:00]
Ross Douthat
It felt then the political system seemed deeply polarized on taxes, on foreign policy, on the Affordable Care act, on. And I'm not saying those polarizations don't still exist. They do. But we seem more fundamentally polarized now on official knowledge than on anything else.
- [90:21]
Ezra Klein
Yep.
- [90:21]
Ross Douthat
And the parts of the Democratic Party that were sort of outside that consensus, led by a figure like RFK Jr. Have sort of become parts of the Republican Party. The parts of the Republican Party, they're more inside that consensus and want to stay there. Some of them, like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney, have sort of moved away from at least the Trump Republican Party. So the coalitions, which used to have a mix of people sort of inside and outside official consensus, now are split between them. And this feels to me like one of the things that has really deranged our politics, that the parties are sort of imbalanced in terms of their relationship to institutions. Democrats may be too trusting. Republicans much, much, much, in my view, too skeptical, with sort of too little sort of empirical and grounding anymore. I guess I was curious before you said. Yep. A bunch of times, if you agreed with that way of.
- [91:18]
Ezra Klein
No, no, I absolutely do. Although. Yeah, I mean, I would. On your last point.
- [91:22]
Ross Douthat
Yes, you would.
- [91:23]
Ezra Klein
Well, I would push harder on. I think one reason that Donald Trump is president again is precisely that the party of official knowledge seemed to do a lot of really crazy things, and that made people more sympathetic to the party of outsider knowledge. But look, now the party of outsider knowledge is in power.
- [91:44]
Ross Douthat
But let me add to that story just in one way, which I think the polarization had already happened, and that's actually part of what that period represented. One of the things Democrats didn't have during that period was actually enough skepticism of the institutions of official knowledge, which I think you would agree that the people pushing a lot of the ideas that you see as destructive from them, and some of them, I probably also feel were ultimately destructive, were doing so wrapped in the garb of official knowledge, wrapped in credentials coming out of universities, et cetera, that it was in part actually an institutional monoculture on the Democratic side that created a loss of some of some antibodies that might have created some friction between that and going way too far.
- [92:31]
Ezra Klein
Yes.
- [92:31]
Ross Douthat
And then now you have the other side in power, also without any antibodies.
- [92:35]
Ezra Klein
Yes. And I think one of my disappointments about the Trump administration in the first three months is just how pure and uncut its outsiderism seems to be. And, you know, I think it was an open question when Trump was reelected, would RFK Jr be running HHS or would he be running the President's Council on Making America Healthy again? Right. And we got the timeline where he's running hhs. And you can multiply examples. And I think in many of those examples, you can see a version of the problem that I identified to you just now, which is that you can see it in the trade and tariffs debate, this assumption that the experts got something big wrong and therefore Peter Navarro should make trade policy. And the second does not follow from the first. And the huge challenge for conservatism right now is to figure out how you generate some kind of stability of actual expertise in a party that is now temperamentally, completely anti establishment populist and so on. I think there was a hope that the sort of Silicon Valley faction that migrated into the Republican camp in part in reaction to some of the failures of expertise that you just acknowledged, would sort of play a version of that role. And I think definitely Elon Musk has not played a version of that role to date. So the Republican Party is a party in search of a stable system of official knowledge generation besides whatever Donald Trump decides. Right. And doesn't have one at the moment for the foreseeable future.
- [94:20]
Ross Douthat
Always. Our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
- [94:23]
Ezra Klein
So I'm going to give three books on religion that connect to my attempt to sort of shift what official knowledge or the official knowledge of New York Times podcast listeners think about religion. The first one is a book called from about 20 years ago by a physicist named Stephen Barr called Ancient Physics and Modern Faith. That is, I think, despite being a little bit dated, is still really the best overall survey of sort of where arguments in modern physics that relate to religion stand and how a reasonable person might think about it. It's not a dogmatic book. It's a very open minded and interesting book. So that's book one, since we were talking about near death experiences. There's a million books about near death experiences, many of them bad. I think people who are interested in this subject, interested in the conversation. One recommendation would be a book called after by Bruce Grayson, who is a, I think, psychiatrist or neuroscientist from the University of Virginia who just has a good overview, I would say, from a perspective of a practicing physician of why people take these strange stories seriously. And why it might unsettle a materialist worldview. And the third book, I mean, honestly, Ezra, since you've, you know, maybe this is unnecessary since you conceded so much ground to the mysterians, but I think a final book that's useful to people who listen to this show and are like, what are these two guys smoking, talking about consciousness? Like, this is a book that was very controversial in the philosophical community when it came out, but a book called Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel, who's a famous philosopher, not religious, but arguing for the fundamental limits and problems with a materialist framework on the world. And it is a very short book, which is why I don't hesitate to recommend it. A lot of books about consciousness are not short, but this one I think you can read and get a sense of why intelligent people might at least be inclined towards an Ezra Klein style, mysterious, if not quite towards the militant Catholicism of Ross Douthit.
- [96:32]
Ross Douthat
Ross. I enjoyed it a ton. Thank you very much.
- [96:34]
Ezra Klein
I enjoyed it as well, Ezra. Thank you so much.
- [96:55]
Ross Douthat
This episode of the Ezra Klein show is produced by Eliza Swift, Fact Checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones with Amin Sahota and Afim Shapiro. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassillon, Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobel, Kristin lin and Jack McCordick. We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Seymour and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.