Truth as Glorious Adventure | Douglas Murray | EP 376
The people that you and I spend a certain amount of our lives railing against is in part because they are censorious bullies. They want to tell you and me and everyone else what we should find funny, what we should read, what we should say, what we should think, how we should act. In my mind, it's an invitation which I decline. These people, who are so primed, so unfunny, so tediously repressive in everything they do, don't stand a chance in the long run.
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Hello everyone watching and listening. Today, I'm speaking with author, columnist, and political commentator Douglas Murray, who's been on my podcast a number of times. We talked about his latest book, Not So Long Ago: The War on the West. We discuss how a misguided purpose leads to abject misery and hopelessness; the cowardice of experts who choose silence—experts and others, let's say, who choose silence in the face of malevolence; the psychology of fear; and the necessity of willful exposure to combat that fear.
So, we went out for dinner last night to Royal 35, which was very good. That's a steakhouse that looks like a classic mafioso place, as far as I'm concerned, but they make great steaks. One of the things we talked a little bit about was your burgeoning interest and purpose, and so I'm curious about that.
The first question I have, I guess, is why you think that's attracted your interest— that particular topic. I think it's because I just increasingly noticed, as I'm sure you do, that it's the question underneath or miss all questions in our day. A lot of the things that you and I spend a considerable amount of our time railing against are things we critique or criticize, find holes in, push back against. But you're always confronted by the fact that you're dealing with somebody who believes that they find their sense of purpose from the thing that we find, you know, untruthful, irritating, or worse.
You see all of these versions in our day, I think, of misguided purpose, right? Used for the wrong ends—meaning found in places that really don't give much satisfaction, but give people the drive to get up in the morning and act; sometimes, well, often malevolently. More often than not, perhaps, irrelevantly. But it seems to me that this sort of meaning crisis is one that many of the people that you and I have problems with, should we say, are actually addressing.
I mean, in their own inept and sometimes malevolent way, they are sort of speaking to adapt. Well, one of the things the left goes very well—there's a developmental psychologist named Jean Piaget, who is a great psychologist. He called himself a genetic epistemologist, actually, because he was interested in knowledge structures and how they developed. He really thought he was a practical philosopher.
In any case, he noted that human children, as they develop, go through stages of development. Each stage was, in some ways, a different—you could say, a different theory of being. The last stage that he identified was the Messianic stage. Developmental psychologists haven't paid much attention to that because they tended to shy away from anything that smacked of, let's say, religious thinking, even though Piaget was motivated fundamentally by the desire to bridge the gap between science and religion, which, by the way, I think he did quite well.
The Messianic period is late adolescence, and you might think about it anthropologically, I suppose, as associated with the need for individuals of that age to move away from their immediate local friendship group, which would have been the bridge from dependence on their parents to identification with the broader culture. What they're trying to find at that point is something like a sense of universal purpose, right?
And that touches on this issue of purpose, obviously, and meaning. And you, in the way that you laid this out when we began this discussion, you implied a number of presuppositions—that there are malevolent purposes, that there are fractured purposes, that there are counterproductive purposes...