Religious Belief and the Enlightenment with Ben Shapiro

Well, I'm pleased today to be talking to Ben Shapiro. Ben, I think, really doesn't need an introduction, at least not to most of you who will be there watching or listening to this, given that he's now one of the most recognized individuals on the American political journalism scene. In any case, Ben's an American lawyer, writer, journalist, and political commentator. He's written 10 books, the latest of which is "The Right Side of History: A Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great," which has become a number one New York Times bestseller. I think it's at number four right now. I think Ben just mentioned to me that he sold about a hundred and fifty thousand copies since it was released, and that was only a couple of weeks ago, so that's going very well.

He became the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the U.S. at age 17. He's also one of the most recognized current commentators on the new media, YouTube, and podcasts. He serves as editor in chief for The Daily Wire, which he founded, and is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, which runs daily on podcast and radio. He's managed to transform himself into a one-man media empire, and it's quite the accomplishment. He's also an extraordinarily interesting person, I think, to follow, and I want to watch his interactions with people publicly because he's an unbelievably sharp debater and one of the fastest, verbally fastest people that I've ever met.

So it's good we're going to talk about his book today, that's "The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great," and I can tell you right there, there's four reasons for social justice types to be irritated just at the, just at their, what would you call it, the daring of the title. So let's talk about it. Tell me about your book.

The reason that I wrote the book is because in 2016, I kind of looked around and, for the record, I didn't vote for either of the presidential candidates in 2016. Neither of them met my minimum standard to be President, based on the evidence. I looked at the sort of attitude that had changed in America. It used to be that we'd have elections, and they were really fraught. People were angry, other people were upset with each other, but the rage seemed almost out of control in the last election cycle.

In 2016, I was personally receiving enormous numbers of death threats for my positions on politics. I was receiving an enormous amount of hatred from the alt-right. I know that there are some in the media, like The Economist, who have falsely labeled me outright, which is hilarious to me since I've been their most outspoken critic for several years at this point. That year, in 2016, I was their number one target, according to the Anti-Defamation League. One of those tricky enough to be part of the alt-right and also their enemy, right? No, we Jews, man, various.

In any case, yeah, I was receiving all sorts of blowback for that. At the same time, I was going on college campuses and being protested to the extent that I was requiring hundreds of police officers to accompany me on certain college campuses. I started to think there is something deeply wrong here, and it's not just that we are disagreeing with each other, it's that there's a certain level of hatred and tribalism that's building up in American politics that I hadn't really seen before.

There was a feeling, like even back as late as 2009, that America was moving in the right direction. Post-Obama's election, there was a feeling like, "Okay, well, we have the same fundamental principles. We're trying to perfect those principles. We may disagree over the ramifications of those principles." Some of us may want more government involved in health care, some of us want less. Some of us may want more regulations in markets, some of us want less, or redistributionism or non-redistributionism.

But the fundamental principles, things like free speech, things like the inherent value of the individual, things like the idea that I'm supposed to generally respect your right to your own labor, these were all things that we sort of agreed on, and then we were trying to broaden that out to encompass further groups. As time moved on, it seemed like we were moving away from a lot of those fundamental assumptions.

He started to see rises in the opioid epidemic, in suicide rates. He started to see a general level of unhappiness crop up that was reflected in the political tribalism I was feeling but wasn't reflected more generally in actual lowered life expectancy in the United States for the first time in decades.

I started to think there's an actual deeper problem wrong here than just we disagree on politics. There's something deeply wrong here. We don't trust our institutions anymore. By poll data, most of us don't know or trust all of our neighbors. All of this stuff speaks to a dissolution of the social fabric. So why is that happening?

And this is nearly unjustifiable. I mean, if you look at us just from a material prosperity level, it's unjustifiable. If you look at us from a political freedom level, it's unjustifiable. We are the freest, most prosperous people in the history of the world, and yet we're totally pissed off at each other all the time, and we're filling that hole with anger and with social mobbing online and with woke scolding.

Where's all this coming from? And that led me to write the book, which essentially argues that we've forgotten the foundations of our civilization, the principles we used to hold in common, and have deep roots. When we forget those roots, we tend to move away from the principles themselves, and this is manifested in what I think is the great debate over Western civilization right now.

One side, which says Western civilization was rooted in good eternal immutable truths that were not always perfectly realized, and that over time we have moved toward greater realization of, and that's why the West is great. That's why the West has provided material prosperity to the vast majority of the globe. It's why 80 percent of people have been raised from abject poverty since 1980. It's why you've seen this massive increase in the number of people who are living in decent conditions.

It's also why you see a rise in democracy, a rise in political liberalism, small-l, kind of classical liberalism. All of this is the result of the West and so we ought to thank the West, and we got to look back to the roots and see what is there worth preserving. And then there's that, which seems I would say to be a viewpoint that would have broadly characterized both conservatives and classic liberals, as far as I'm concerned.

And then there's the second point of view, and the second point of view has cropped up and become very prominent in the West in the last couple of decades, particularly since the 1960s. That perspective is that Western civilization is really just a mask for hierarchy, that basically there are a bunch of power hierarchies that subjugate, not natural hierarchies, forcible, oppressive hierarchies. White people against black people, rich people against poor people, the powerful against the non-powerful, the 1 percent against the 99 percent.

All of these institutions—things like free speech itself, things like free markets—these are actually just excuses for domination and subjugation. They're not actual principles we hold to, they're not important principles. In fact, those principles have to be rooted out so that we can have a better humanity bloom in the wake of all of this. Now, in my perspective, this takes for granted all of the prosperity.

It seems to assume that the natural state of man is prosperity and freedom when in fact the natural state of man is misery and short life.

Okay, so that's an interesting thing right there that I've been thinking about quite a bit. It's as if the radical left, I mean there’s denial on the radical left of, let's say, biological differences between men and women, right? Everything’s socio-culturally constructed. That seems to me to be rooted in an even deeper denial of biology and nature in a more fundamental sense.

I mean, the left worships nature as something intrinsically positive. You see that reflected in the more radical forms of environmentalism and some of the more toxic anti-humanism that goes along with that, like the idea that we're a cancer on the face of the planet, or that the world would be better off if there weren't human beings on it.

But what seems to not be part of that, which is quite surprising to me, is any recognition that, although nature is let's call it at least inspiring, which also includes the positive, it's also an unbelievably deadly force. The truth of the matter is that the natural state of human beings is privation and want, right from birth.

And what seems to happen so often on the radical left is that that's ignored entirely. It's as if the natural state of human beings is plenty and delight, delight in existence, and that all of the terrible things that happen to people in their lives are actually can be laid at the feet of faulty social institutions.

It's like three is such a strange position given that the evidence that nature is trying to do us in on a regular basis is overwhelming. I don't know if the left is so positively inclined in a romantic manner towards the idea of nature because that strengthens their position, that all of the pathology that characterizes the world can be laid at the feet of institutions, and particularly capitalist institutions.

But it still seems to me to be, it's a strange phenomenon. Well, it's strange, and it's obviously ignorant, but I think there's something else that really is going on here. The Marxists of today, many of them are arguing that what they're really wanting is greater shared material prosperity. I don't think that that's actually what's capturing the minds of people right now.

I think what's actually capturing the minds of people is the spiritual promise of Marxism, the idea that Marx lays out, even in the Communist Manifesto, when he is talking about the transformation of man. In his initial argument is that markets warp people, that people who have become meaner and cruder and ruder and more terrible because of markets, because they are self-interested, and that the markets emphasize self-interest as opposed to altruism, and therefore if you got rid of markets, then you could exist in greater peace and prosperity and plenty because human beings themselves would transform.

So it's not that the system itself would create greater material prosperity, it's that in the initial run, it probably would create more privation. It's that in the long run, human beings would be transformed in their souls by all of this, and then they would feel greater bonds to the people around them. That was the spiritual promise of Marxism.

I think that that's, at root, what a lot of people in the West are resonating. Okay, so that's a hope for something like—well, it's almost like a religious redemption.

Yes. It's a strange thing to, you know, I'm preparing for this debate that I'm going to have with Slavoj Žižek on April 19th, and I've been trying to think it through. One of the things that's really struck me is that not only are the solutions that Marxism offers error-ridden, to say the least, given the historical evidence, and I just don't see how anybody can deny that, although people certainly do, but that the problem that the Marxists originally identified seems to actually be vanishing.

I mean, as you already pointed out, there's an unparalleled increase in material prosperity among, not only among the rich, which you could complain about if you were concerned about inequality, but among the poorest people in the world. Like, we have absolute material privation, based on UN standards, by 50% between the year 2000 and 2012.

And the cynics say that's because we set the standard for material privation too low, which is $1.90 a day, but if you look at the curves that you can generate at levels of $3.80 a day or $7.60 a day, you see exactly the same thing happening. You see rapid increases in economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa, like, you know, 7% growth rates, which are more typically characteristic, say, of China or India.

And that's manifested in unbelievably positive statistical evidence, such as suggesting that now the child mortality rate in Africa is the same as it was in Europe in 1952. And so the Marxists' original complaint was that, you know, the rich were going to get richer and the poor were going to get poorer, and that that could be laid at the feet of capitalism, just like the fact of hierarchy itself could be laid at the feet of capitalism.

And it's clear that capitalism, although it does produce hierarchical inequality, just like every other system that we know of, it also produces wealth, and that wealth is actually being very effectively distributed to the people. You know, perhaps not primarily to the people who most need it, but to the people who most need it in ways that are truly mattering.

And so to me, the entire, the entire structure of Marxism is an anachronism. The problem is no longer appropriately formulated, and the solution tends to be deadly, if counterproductive, if not deadly. So it's—maybe here's something I've been thinking about too. You tell me what you think about this.

You know, some of it still has to do with the innate human emotional response to inequality. You know, when you walk down the street, you see a ruined alcoholic, schizophrenic, who's obviously suffering in 50 different dimensions. It's very difficult to feel positive about the state of humanity in the world, and it's very easy for a reflexive compassion to take over and say, "Well, wouldn't it be something if we could just retool society so that none of that was necessary? It must be someone's fault. It must be something that we're not doing right."

And you know, there's some truth in that because, of course, our systems could be better than they are. And it seems to me to be that unreflective compassion that drives whatever residual attractiveness that Marxism still has, apart also from the darker possibility, which is that it really does appeal to the jealousy that's characteristic of people and the envy, and which manifests itself as hatred for hierarchy on the basis that some people are doing better than me.

You know, so I think there's also a failure on the part of advocates of the free market to point out that free markets are good for what they are good for, meaning that the two things that are important to recognize about free markets are: 1. Free markets are there to create a generalized level of cheaper goods and better products at cheaper prices, more widely available. That's what markets do, and they do it brilliantly.

Well, that doesn't mean that markets are there to take care of the person who is unable to work. I mean, that's not something that markets are there to do. It's something I talked about in the book, the need for a social fabric. If you want a free market, you also have to have a social fabric that helps pick people up.

Now people on the left have said the government should be the social fabric. The government should pick those people up. And in large-scale cases, maybe that needs to be the case. But usually, it was religious communities and informal social fabrics that actually filled those gaps. Beyond that, there is a second problem, and that is I hear a lot of populists on both left and right make the statement that we just need to make markets work for us. And all I can think when I hear that is you fundamentally have misunderstood what a market is.

So Marxism is a set of values and then a system of economics crafted atop that set of values. So the set of values, as you said before, is that equality should trump prosperity, and equality should trump freedom, that equality should trump everything. So if equality trumps everything, then the only way to make everyone equal is to turn them into indistinguishable widgets controlled from above until we create an economic system to do that.

There are principles that undergird free markets. Free markets are not a human construction; free markets are a recognition that you are an individual human being in control of your own labor. That simple understanding means that you cannot support any other form of a market. Now, you can support some form of redistributionism at the local level. You can try and urge people to be more moral by giving to their fellow man.

But markets themselves are a recognition of a basic truth that Marxism rejects, which is that freedom and individualism ought to trump, and indeed need to trump, the need for equality. So the freedom versus equality battle is very much alive in our time, and because we have such freedom, people tend toward equality.

I think when you have—we should talk about equality too—because there are two important modes of equality that have to be segregated and discussed separately because people tend to confuse equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. Right? I think that it's perfectly reasonable to be a free-market champion, let's say, or at least an appreciator of the utility of free markets and to be strongly in favor of equality of opportunity, which means that you try to remove from the market system any impediments to people manifesting those talents that would make them effective and competent players in the productive market itself, not on the basis of the fact that that's counterproductive for everyone, the individuals, but also for everyone who could be benefiting from their talent.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. And I think that's inherent in the idea of markets. It's why when people use terms like crony capitalism, I always think there's no such thing. There's corporate—there's corporate cronyism, which is a better description of it. Crony capitalism is a self-refuting proposition. Capitalism and free markets are based on exactly what you're talking about, because again, the fundamental principle is I own my own labor, which means that if you impede my ability to alienate that labor, you are now interfering with my labor.

So free markets are predicated on an idea of equality and rights and the idea of every human being made in the image of God, which I think is the single most important sentence written in the history of humanity. When you abandon the— we tend to think that these things naturally occurred. This is where you get into the Enlightenment argument. The Enlightenment argument is that you can just reason your way to these things.

Well, you can reason your way to these things; there are also a lot of other things you can reason your way to, including communism and fascism. The question is, what are your starting points? What are the actual fundamental assumptions that you make about human beings and the nature of the world that you then apply reason to, to arrive at something great?

And this is why I'm not a fan of the Enlightenment view that just if we start at tabula rasa we can come up with exactly the system that we've built today. I don't think that that's either historically accurate or philosophically accurate because we see that human beings reach a wide variety of conclusions based on different premises.

Well, it's also the case that it assumes that reason in fact, in some sense, can be complete in its ability to generate its own comprehensive axioms which can also be justified on rational grounds, and it's not obvious to me that that's the case. I think that's why the founders of the Declaration of Independence were forced to say, “We find these truths to be self-evident.” Right? You have to have a starting point, and this is something that I do believe that people like Steven Pinker, who I have a great amount of admiration for, make an error in their overvaluation of the Enlightenment and their devaluation of the vast historical epochs that produced the works of imagination, that produced the axioms on which the Enlightenment could originally emerge.

And you and I seem to agree, I think very precisely on especially that phrase that you just used. I mean, I think there are two statements in Genesis that are of equivalent importance. Actually, one of them—maybe there's three. One of them is that what God used to create order out of potential and chaos was something approximating a process that was characterized by truth and courage, and so there's an idea there, which is why I think God continually repeats after he creates day after day that the creation was good.

And so the idea is that if you face the potential of the world, which is, I think, something that human beings do with their consciousness, I think that's what consciousness is for. If you face the world with truth and courage, then what you generate out of that field of possibilities is in fact good even though you may pay a price for the truth in the short term. It's an act of faith even in some sense, which reflects that axiomatic presupposition that there's nothing that's going to improve the world more than forthright confrontation with the structure of reality and an attempt to abide by the truth.

And then you have that second statement, which is a miraculous statement, I believe, it's hard to see it as anything else, that both men and women are made in the image of God. We've already established the Creator and the Creator who creates in a certain ethical manner, and then that power or ability or virtue or privilege or responsibility is transferred to human beings, and it's transferred to men and women.

And I also find that actually quite stunning, you know, because there's no shortage of postmodern feminist criticism of the Judeo-Christian tradition claiming that it's fundamentally oppressive and patriarchal, and yet right at the beginning you have this incredible statement which seems to fly in the face of the anachronistic nature of the document, stating that it's not just men that are made in the image of God, it's men and women.

And that isn't obvious to me how that conclusion was reached so long ago. Yep, that's exactly right. And it's also important to note that historically speaking, if you look at surrounding documents for Mesopotamia, typically, the actual language that was used, the “image of God” language is actually not unique to the Bible; it exists in other cultures. But it was always the king who was made in the image of God, right?

So the people who are most powerful, who are mainly that, the extension of that to all human beings is a unique moment in philosophical history. And as you say, the idea that God has created an orderly universe and that we have the capacity to act out within that universe and to see God from behind, so to speak, that we can't necessarily see his face but we can see sort of the general outline of what he is intending.

And then another verse from Genesis that I think is deeply important is from the Cain and Abel story, the verse where God says to Cain, “Tim Shel,” that you have the ability to do better than this. Then he says, “Why didn't you accept my sacrifice?” And God says, “Well, it's in your control, you know, go out and do something about it.” And then of course Cain rejects that. That story is so deep, and I think it really is the story of what's happening right now.

Exactly, you have God's reaction. To Cain is that, “I rejected you because you could do better.” Right? And that's actually a kind of compliment even though, you know, if you're not offering up the proper sacrifices and things aren't working out for you, it might not be the kind of compliment that you want to hear, but it is a testament to the potential of the human spirit.

And so you're making the case in your book, and this is the, this is, what would you call it, an injunction, an encouragement to the Enlightenment types to look to their axioms and to think hard about how it could be that the idea of individual democratic freedom, for example, and all of the wonderful explicit political ideas that came out of the Enlightenment could have possibly emerged.

And I do agree that you have to have that initial conception of the individual as sovereign and that that sovereignty has to be associated with something akin to recognition of divinity, at least insofar as what's regarded as divine is regarded as the highest of all possible values.

And then it is absolutely surprising, as you pointed out, that not only is the idea of the image of God extended to men and women, but that it is not explicitly not the domain of kings who in fact might be more at risk for abandoning their actions as avatars of God, so to speak, than those who are in privation.

You know, you see that consistently in the Old Testament where the kings are being taken to task constantly by prophets who do appear to speak more in the language of God, let's say, and then you see it also in the New Testament with the insistence that the wealthy and powerful have impediments to proper ethical action that those who are less materially fortunate might not face.

Yeah, and that semantic is present obviously in the Old Testament. There's actually a passage where it's talking about the sacrifices, I believe it's in the Book of Leviticus, where it talks about bringing accidental sin sacrifices, and it talks about the common man and says, “If you shall sin, then you bring the sacrifice,” and then it says, “With regard to the Prince, the Nasi,” it says, “with regards to the Prince.”

The Hebrew word is “kasher.” It says, “When you will sin,” so the assumption is that if you have great power, the chances of your sinning are going to be greater because you are going to conceive of yourself as higher than others, and this is going to lead you down a pretty dark path.

The point with regard to the Enlightenment is that we actually have some counter-evidence of the Enlightenment being awesome all the way through if it is predicated solely on reason and not on a historic understanding of these principles, and that is the French Enlightenment. I mean, this was one of my key points when I was looking at Pinker’s book "Enlightenment Now."

But you again, you and I agree on this. I have great admiration for Pinker. I took a class with him when I was at Harvard Law School—he did a joint class with Alan Dershowitz. That was kind of fun. But Pinker goes 450 pages about the Enlightenment, and he never mentions the French Revolution once.

And I thought, I don't know how that's historically possible to do. The Enlightenment was not just David Hume and Adam Smith and the American Founding Fathers. The Enlightenment also was Rousseau and Voltaire and Robespierre. It was the, and it was the German progressive Enlightenment that had a real dark side in its—and human reason can lead you to a lot of different very bad places.

The metaphor that I like to use with regard to Western civilization is that Western civilization is a suspension bridge, and then on one end, it's over a river of, as you would say, chaos. And on the one end of the bridge, the big pole is these fundamental assumptions you have to make about the nature of the world that I don't believe could be arrived at other than through some form of divine revelation.

This would be the Judeo-Christian tradition. And those principles are things like, we have free choice. That's an assumption you have to make and is not implicit in scientific materialism.

The idea that history has a progressive nature, you can improve the world around you, again, that is not a—that is reliant on an assumption you have to make. The idea that human beings are held to a morality that they themselves do not subjectively create out of emotional means, and that is something that you have to make an assumption about.

The idea of objective truth itself is something you have to make an assumption about. And that's an assumption that I think can be made most specifically by the idea that there is a mind outside of us that creates that objective truth and stands behind an ordered universe. All of those are some Judeo-Christian values.

I think there's evidence for much of this. You know, one of the things that I've been discussing with my audiences is, you know, it depends obviously on what you're willing to take as evidence, but it isn't obvious to me at all that you can establish a functional relationship with yourself unless you hold yourself responsible for your actions and you regard yourself as a free agent, in at least in some regards.

Like obviously, we're not omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. That's clearly the case. We're subject to stringent limitations, and there are situations in which our actions devolve into determinism. That's obvious neurophysiologically—it has to be the way the world works that once you execute a decision, there comes to a point where that decision is manifested in something approximating a deterministic manner. I think the evidence for that is overwhelming.

But that doesn't mean that when you're looking out into the future and you're contemplating the many paths that you could take that what you do to make your decisions then is deterministic in a simple manner. I think if that was the case, there'd be no need for consciousness at all.

And then I look at how people react to themselves: we hold ourselves responsible despite our own inclination for the sins that we manifest, for the manners in which we wander off the path. People wake up at 4:00 in the morning, and they berate themselves for the actions they took that they knew they shouldn't, and for the inaction that they manifested when they knew they should have acted.

And if we were masters in our own house without that central moral compass, there'd be no reason at all for us to wake up and torture ourselves to death with our moral inequity. And if you have a friend or a family member and you insist upon treating them as if they're a deterministic agent with no effect on the future and no responsibility for their choices, it's actually impossible to have a relationship with them.

You can't even have a relationship with a two- or three-year-old if you insist upon infantilizing them in that manner and not attributing to them the choice that enables valid punishment, let's say, on the one hand you've done something wrong, and you need to be held accountable for it, but also valid accomplishment on the other, which is that you've done something that you didn't have to do that was voluntary, that's deserving of approbation and reinforcement.

And we act that out, and then the next level of evidence seems to be that if you found your quality on propositions other than that—that the sovereignty of the individual and the responsibility of the individual—the whole thing goes sideways so rapidly that it's almost indescribable, and it doesn't just go sideways. It goes sideways and down.

And so like, I don't know exactly what to make of that as a proof, you know? It's a strange sort of proof, the proof being that, well, there doesn't seem to be any reasonable way for human beings to organize their social interactions at any level of social organization without accepting those initial, I would say, Judeo-Christian assumptions that this is right.

And then this is where the main debate happens between me and Sam Harris, because Sam will reason himself to those assumptions and away from those assumptions and to those assumptions in a way he'll use those assumptions in building other assumptions, and I've said to him before, I feel like you're using bricks from a house that you just turned 40, so you can't really do that.

This is why I say, on the one hand, you have to have those Judeo-Christian assumptions, and those, by the way, undergird even the very concept of reason, because the idea of reason is that you are using a willful process of thought in order to convince someone else, predicated on the notion that the other person's opinion is valuable and that you shouldn't just club them over the head and take their stuff.

I think that reason has implicit moral biases, and those moral biases you can't reason your way to, as I said, it's an evolutionary biology perspective. There's no reason for reason other than if you think that maybe you can convince—unless, especially in a world of non-mass communication, what is the reason for reason?

Right? In a world that pre-exists mass communication, what is the reason that you need reason? Wouldn't force be more effective? For most of human history, it was significantly more effective than reason. Certainly, it's what the radicals on the left would argue even now.

I mean, and the idea of reason seems to be predicated so—and that would go along with the idea of free speech, which I think is also equally grounded in these underlying axioms, is that, you know, each of us as sovereign individuals have a valid mode of existence about, and there's something unique about that valid mode of existence.

And it's also something that can be communicated, and that part of the reason for rational discussion is that the ability to share that unique and valuable element of private experience with someone else is salutary, but it's also salutary in a manner that allows for the mutual spiritual transformation of both of the people that are involved in the discussion. It seems to me that you can't—if you're pro-reason, you've already bought that argument.

Exactly. This is exactly right. And so faith and reason, to this extent, are not in tension. Faith undergirds reason because you have to make fundamental assumptions even to get to reason. And this is why I think that one of the things that has happened, and it's really unfortunate, I discuss it in the last chapters of the book, is that when you take away the assumptions that undergird reason, reason itself collapses.

It's not that reason sustains appears on top of the structure. Once the structure falls, reason falls that too, and we return to our sort of tribal naturalistic roots that are quite dangerous. This is why I say that you need Jerusalem on one end of the bridge; the other end of that suspension bridge is reason, meaning that we can't be theocrats.

We can't look at fundamentalist religious texts and take them as complete literalism and then hope to develop as a civilization on the basis of that complete literalism. So you have to look to which of these commandments, for example in the Torah, are directed toward human eternal human nature.

So I would suggest that commandments that are directed toward reigning in certain appetites are directed toward God's understanding of human nature. That certain injunctions with regards to how we behave in the Ten Commandments, these are predicated on an understanding of human nature that is truly profound and worthwhile preserving.

It's also worth noting that the story of Western civilization is the expansion of these principles out from the tribal and toward a broader range of humanity. And that's why the book is not just an argument of, “Here's how I interpret the Bible and here's why that's right.” It's an argument that historical development was necessary after the Bible. So it is not just that the Bible solves all your problems.

It's that God understands, even from a religious perspective in Judaism, and I think in Christianity too, that we are going to apply human reason to these texts. That's from a religious perspective. From a non-religious perspective, the point I'm making is that you have to take these fundamental assumptions, whether you like them or not, that are religiously rooted and then apply your reason to develop from the fundamental assumptions that we have already stated.

And that tension is what allows the suspension bridge to continue to function. That doesn't mean that it is always equally solid throughout time. It isn't because the tension sometimes wavers. Sometimes reason takes dominance; sometimes Judeo-Christian values or Judaic biblical literalism takes dominance.

And if your bottom line is you collapse the reason, you end up with theocracy. If you collapse Judeo-Christian values, you end up with nihilism. It's sort of the basic argument. Okay, okay. So, you know, one of the things that Sam is afraid of, and you know, there's some validity in this fear, and I think he tends to apply this more to the state of Islamic fundamentalism.

But the same argument can be made with the other religious traditions, you know, evangelical Christianity, for example, and maybe Orthodox Judaism, who knows. The danger is that we'll take these revealed truths which differ and that holding them as absolute revealed truths will make us parochial, tribal, and the consequence of that will be all sorts of catastrophe and horror, right?

And you know, one of the things I learned when I was studying the Old Testament—that this was very interesting—a Jewish friend of mine sort of clued me into this because one of the things he told me was that Christians who emphasized the New Testament tend to parody the Old Testament God to odd, somewhat unfair degree, casting him as much more tyrannical in some sense—the God of wrath versus mercy.

Yep, right, exactly. Exactly. So I took that seriously, and especially when I was reading the Abrahamic stories. And you know, you see throughout the earliest writings the idea that, in some bizarre sense, God can be bargained with, right? And so you see that even in the Cain and Abel story because Cain actually faces God with his complaints and says, “Well, you know, here's how I look at the world.”

And God excoriates him because he believes that he's looking at the world improperly, and I think for good reason, but there is the implication that you could have a conversation with God and hypothetically learn something. But then that transforms even more when you see that the stories that follow.

So Abraham directly intercedes with God in favor of Sodom, right? Right, because— And he makes a pretty what would you say extreme case for redeeming Sodom, which seems to have degenerated into quite the, they did quite the state of hell, trying to entice God into not being more destructive than necessary if there's any goodness to be found.

And he actually does that successfully. And so that's very interesting. So even though God is absolute in his judgment in some fundamental sense, there is this kapow seifer dialogue, which seems to be an analogy to the idea that reason and revelation can coexist and bolster each other in some sort of upward development.

Well then, this is exactly right. And then the idea of natural law, which the seeds are there in the Judea value system, I think natural laws more fully fleshed out in sort of Greek teleological sense when they talk about the idea that Aristotle and Plato, when they talk about the idea that you can look at the world around you and discover the purposes of the world around you simply by using reason.

Well, in the genetic sense, there’s the idea that God abides by the moral code that he himself created and you can ask him questions about it. In fact, the very name Israel is in Hebrew, Sorrell. Yes, sir, I'll literally means "struggle with God." Yes, there is this—and that's a remarkable story.

It's Jacob. I always get Jacob and Joseph confused. It's Jacob who crosses the river so he hasn't crossed back to his homeland, right? He hasn't returned home after his hero's journey. He sent his wife and his children and his belongings ahead to try to make peace with the brother that he's seriously betrayed.

And he's had his adventures, and maybe he's learned his lessons, but then he's on the bank of the river, and he's visited by an angel who appears to be God. And he wrestles with him all night, and he comes out damaged, right? Which is an indication that this sort of like the Egyptian idea when Horus encounters Seth and has his eye torn out—that there's some high probability of damage that if you encounter the divine, even in some positive sense.

But he wrestles with him all night, and then defeats God, apparently in some sense, and is allowed to move forward with his adventure and then is given this new name. And the name really struck me when I started thinking about it because what it does imply, I think this is such a positive message, and I don't know how to reconcile it precisely with the Jewish claim of chosen us as a people, because my reading of that particular text seemed to imply that the chosen people are precisely those who do in fact wrestle with God and so that they take these ethical questions seriously.

They're not accepting them without question and without thought because there's no wrestling there, right? But the real morality comes in the struggle between the revelation and the freedom for thought and choice. I mean, I think that it's a beautiful idea.

And one of the things that's fascinating about that is if you read the rest of the book of Genesis, every time in Genesis somebody's name is changed—because there are several name changes, right? Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah. There are several points at which there are angels who come and basically change the name, or God changes somebody's name.

That's their name going forward. When Jacob is returned Israel, he is not called Israel consistently from there to the end of death. He—the names are used at different times. So sometimes he’s Israel, and sometimes he's Jacob. So the idea there is that sometimes he is the best version of himself, the version of self who struggles with morality, who struggles with God, who tries to come up with proper solutions.

And sometimes he's still the old Jacob, the old Jacob who ran away from Esau and who served seven years unjustly under Laban and all the rest of it. So it's really fascinating. One of my favorite stories is that this has been deeply embedded in Judea tradition for a long time, the idea of struggling with God and struggling with the dictates of morality.

Because part of Jewish tradition is of course the idea of the oral tradition. The idea that we were given a written document on Sinai, but then there was an oral tradition that was also passed along to Moses that was the interpretation of the written tradition, which in some ways maybe a backfilled justification.

But I think that there's a fundamental truth to it. There’s a segment that I quote in the book from the Talmud. It's a really amazing story where it's part of these sort of apocryphal stories, what they call the Aghada. And you, you, in Talmudic parlance, there's a story where there's a rabbi who is in an argument with a bunch of other rabbis about a particular point of Halakha, of Jewish law.

And this rabbi is arguing. He’s saying the rabbis and the other rabbis vote one way, and he votes the other way. So he loses, and the rabbi who loses says, "Listen, I know I'm right. Not only do I know I'm right, if I'm right, let the walls of this synagogue close in around us."

So the walls start to lean in, and then the rabbi said, "You know what? That's not evidence. That doesn't show that you're right. It just shows that the walls were closing in." He says, "Well, you know, if I'm right, then let the river outside start to flow backward." So the river starts to flow backward, and the rabbis say, "It's still not evidence. We're not going to take that."

He says, "Well, if I'm right, let there be a bat kol, that there be the voice of God literally come down from heaven and say that I'm right." And sure enough, a voice from heaven comes down and says that he's right. And the other members of the Sanhedrin, they say to him, "You know what? None of that counts because God gave us a rule, and the rule is that we have a majority rule in this body right here. And so our interpretation is correct, and yours is wrong."

And the conclusion of the story is that God asks—one of the angels asked God about it. And God says, “My children have defeated me.” And the idea is that God is happy about this. God wants us to use our reason to take those fundamental principles that he gave us and then develop those across time.

I would also interpret this to some degree from a psychological perspective, you know, because—and this might be far-fetched speculation, but I don't think that it precisely is. I mean, I do believe that our cognitive structures, our cognitive function are embedded in narrative that seems to be a right hemisphere function, and that the right hemisphere is the source of intuitive revelation.

Now, whatever metaphysical implications that has, I have no idea. I also know that many religious experiences seem to be characterized by preferential activity in the right hemisphere. So there's something very strange going on in the right hemisphere, and then we have a left hemisphere that's argumentative and parliamentary and logical, and obviously in order for us to make our way in the world, we have to have a continual dialogue between the intuitive axioms that are offered to spontaneously in our imagination by the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere, who does a critical analysis and tries to lay that out in some logical and let's say logical and algorithmic manner.

But the left can collapse into a kind of unthinking tyranny as a consequence of that, and the right, without that corrective, can, what would you say, stray too far down imaginative paths and no longer be applicable to the fundamental day-to-day problems of the world. So we need that balance.

And it is a strange thing that we have these two hemispheres, which implies that we need two ways of looking at the world, and I don't think that it's unreasonable to look at the relationship between that and then assess atif or something like the revelation of intuition and the corrective power of rationality. But you can't dispense with the intuition.

It seems to do something like ground you in the world and to provide you with your fundamental axioms. I think that's right, and by the way, that seems to me how an enormous amount of scientific discovery takes place. You know, people have a flash of intuition, and then it's a question of them.

And that's how you come up with a hypothesis. Right? Well, they often backfill too, you know, like scientific journal outlines how you came to your hypothesis through a process of rational deduction step by step, right? But that isn't what happens.

What happens is you have a hunch of some sort, and often I've seen this especially with intuitive scientists. They have a hunch that actually sounds irrational when they first put it forward. Sometimes it takes them months or even years to backfill that intuition with the rationality that's necessary to communicate its integrity to other scientists.

And so the narrative that’s written in the scientific document is actually a kind of, well, it’s a kind of formalization, but it’s also predicated on the assumption that it's linear rational thinking that leads to these intuitive hypotheses. Sometimes that's the case, especially if it's incremental change.

But those major leaps forward are like the introduction of new alternative axioms, and then they have to be tested by rationality. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think that's also the story of history, that you have these intuitive leaps. And yeah, there’s a history to those intuitive leaps, and you do have to have both.

You’d have to understand the history of those intuitive leaps, and you also have to understand what an intuitive leap has actually taken place. I think you can make that argument about revelation. I think frankly you can make that argument maybe about the Enlightenment, that there's some intuitive leaps going on. But those intuitive leaps have a history and don't exist in the absence of the backstory.

So the intuitive leap of the Enlightenment, at large part, at least politically, seemed to me to be the full articulation of the idea that the human being, made in the image of God, had intrinsic worth that transcended that which was being allowed under the feudal system. You see that first, I would say, in the transformation of Renaissance art.

Because what you see is the divine figures, for example, Mary and Christ, to take a single example or to take two particular examples, start to remove themselves from their iconic representation and become genuine individuals. And so that’s a bringing down of the divine to earth, but it’s also an elevation of the individual, right?

Is that these were real people; they were like us. And at the same time, you see this spread of the idea that each individual is sovereign and worthwhile. And I do think it's out of that that comes eventually, the powerful anti-slavery movements and the demand for universal suffrage.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, and this is the part where I become rather perturbed when people suggest that the evils of Western civilization are unique while the goods are universal. This is the part of the argument I've never understood from people who are highly critical of Western civilization. They point out correctly that Western civilization has been responsible for an immense amount of evil.

There's tremendous racism endemic in Western civilization. There's religious persecution. Obviously, there's genocide against, you know, my extended family. I mean, this sort of stuff was part of Western civilization. It is. But here's what makes Western civilization different. All of those things exist in virtually every other culture throughout the vast span of time. The good stuff is the part that we don't have a really good explanation for.

The good stuff is the part where we have to say, "Okay, what drove all the good stuff to happen?" Because, unlikely, well, like one of the things I can't understand, this is a real mystery to me, and I can't explain it except—and maybe this is an intuitive idea because I haven't laid it out as well as I might have—but one of the things I cannot understand is how any countries escaped absolute corruption.

Because most of the countries in the world are absolutely corrupt. The police are corrupt, the politicians are corrupt, the unions are corrupt, the corporations are corrupt, the currency is corrupt. The day-to-day interactions between people are corrupt. And in the really corrupt countries, the interactions between family members are corrupt. You know?

So you get situations like, well, East Germany, which is a bit anachronistic now, where, you know, one out of three people were government informers. It's like—and corruption is easy, man. It's the Hobbesian way of the world. But then there's a handful of countries, and I would include Japan and South Korea among those, where corruption isn't the fundamental rule where trust is the fundamental rule, right?

I can't see how that could have manifested itself except within the confines of a religious belief system that insisted above all on the enactment of a higher moral ethic, right? Something outside of politics, something outside of self-interest.

It’s a weak argument because I still don't understand it. I don't see how a country can make that transition from fundamental corruption to honesty. It's an absolute miracle as far as I'm concerned, and a number of countries have managed that. And they are—almost all are either Western countries or highly westernized countries.

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s exactly right, and it’s also when you examine different places on earth, what you see is that the social fabric is going to decide the character of the country. And this is why when people start saying, “Well, we should apply Nordic solutions in the United States,” and say, “Well, is our culture the same as the Nordic culture?” Because maybe that solution is not going to work.

I mean, these sort of one-size-fits-all attempts in terms of political policy to just apply things randomly everywhere and then assume they will go exactly the same, it's obviously untrue. Most famously in sort of the classical neoconservative foreign policy conception that you could plop democracy down in the middle of the Gaza Strip and suddenly then suddenly everybody would be in favor of free markets and peace with your neighbors.

And this sort of institutions tend to be successful when people are—when people teach their kids the right things. Well, that's also part of the reason that I made the argument constantly to Harris and other atheists that they're Judeo-Christian whether they know it or not, right?

And the reason for that is that all of their embodied actions presuppose the Judeo-Christian ethic. The only thing that isn't religious about them is their articulated post-Enlightenment rational representation of the world. And I do think you see that in Harris quite frequently because he does believe in evil. He does believe good; he believes that the proper way of proceeding in the world is to move from evil towards good, and I can't—you know, I've had the exactly the same conversation with Sam.

It’s been a bizarre conversation even on the notion of objective truth. So Sam, it’s kind of weird because you and Sam and I, I would say that I’m as a religious person more closely aligned with Sam’s vision of what objective truth is, and you’re sort of American pragmatist, Percé, version of what objective truth is.

And with that said, I don't know where Sam is getting his version, right? I'm getting my version from the idea that God created an objective truth that the mind of man can ferret out from time to time. And Sam’s version is, what? Like, I just don't understand how evolutionary biology results in anything remotely approaching the idea that an objective truth is possible.

I see evolutionarily beneficial stuff happening, right? That if you come up with an idea that makes your species more likely to predominate, then you hold by that. But that doesn’t make it objectively true; it makes it objectively useful, which is a different thing.

I also don't see how it's a straightforward matter to get from reliance on evolutionary biology, say, as your fundamental way of orienting yourself with regards to reality, the world, and something like the primacy of rationality and the ability to extract out from that rationality something approximating a universal morality.

I can't see most of these three things fitting together at all. This is right. And even Sam's moral standard, which is generalized to man flourishing, there's a lot of play in those joints. I mean, I've asked him several times—I was on my Sunday special, and I asked him to define human flourishing, and I was pointing out to him that the vast majority of human beings disagree on the very nature of what best constitutes...

If you talk to religious people about what human flourishing constitutes, they're not going to tell you about all of the nice stuff they have in their house. They're going to tell you about their ability to teach the religious precepts to their kids.

If you're talking about human flourishing on an evolutionary level, and presumably that would assume us having more kids rather than fewer kids, and in developed countries we have fewer kids rather than more kids. So what exactly is the standard for human flourishing other than sort of what seems likes?

I think part of the way that he circumvents that problem is that is by pointing out that it might be possible for us to agree on what constitutes unnecessary human suffering and to work for the opposite of that. Like, it makes it kind of, right? And we agree on cruelty, I think.

And that's why, we even agree on that, is the trouble. I'm not sure that we agree on that either, because it's not like there's been any shortage of high cruelty warrior cultures in the past. I mean it was certainly the case with Rome, right? Or cruelty on behalf of a greater good, right? You could easily make the case for cruelty on behalf of human flourishing.

I mean, Hitler did. It’s an evil case. That’s the whole point. Okay, that's the—that was the case of communism. That you break a few eggs to make an omelet. That is the higher human flourishing is the roots, is the interest of the majority. That’s not rational.

I mean, one of the things I really liked about Solzhenitsyn’s book, The Gulag Archipelago, was that, you know, he makes this—he makes an anti-Enlightenment case in a very matter because he says, “Well, look, here’s four or five axioms or six or seven axioms. They’re derived directly from Marxism. And if you accept those, and then you act rationally as a consequence of your axioms,” and of course the Marxists would claim that those axioms were derived by rational means, that all you get is something approximating all hell breaking loose.

And so what’s to be the case is that there is a necessary set of underlying axioms, and I do believe they’re coded properly in the Judeo-Christian ethic that if you then act upon rationally, you get something approximating whatever progress we’ve managed to make and a promise is substantive.

Yep, totally agree. And this is effectively the case that I'm making in the book. I think that the big difference we have right now in civilization is the difference that was first articulated, I think beautifully, by G.K. Chesterton in his sort of contrast between left and right. His analogy—and it’s a beautiful metaphor—is that you're walking through a forest and you come across a wall. It's just this old, archaic wall, old stone wall.

You don't know why it's there. If you're on the left, your first instinct is, "I don't know why this wall is here. Probably I should tear this wall out because why is the wall here? I don't know." The person on the right, the kind of conservative or traditional person, the traditionally minded person—their first instinct is, "I don't know why this wall is here. I'm going to go try and find out why the wall is here." And then maybe I'll think about tearing it out.

And that’s the case I’m making, I think, with regard to our civilization. There are foundational things in our civilization that maybe it's possible to remove that particular Jenga block and everything stands. But I'm not going to pretend that just because I don't understand the reason for this particular revelatory principle that the revelatory principle isn't important and undergirding and therefore a reason imposed by people who are just as smart as I was.

There's a certain arrogance to two people who are living now that they were much smarter than people who came before. No, it's just that you're standing on those people's shoulders so you can see a little bit further. But the truth is, they were probably seven-foot. You're probably a four-footer.

Yeah, well, it's definitely the case that my intellectual attitude changed quite substantially when I decided that I was going to risk taking the religious texts that I was studying with some degree of seriousness. Mike, and I came to that through Solzhenitsyn and Jung, I would say fundamentally because they made a strong case for things.

Let’s say they made a strong case that there were presuppositions encoded in those narratives in a dreamlike manner, the same way that Piaget did, that we couldn’t do without and that we should be very careful in dispensing with them in that arrogant, rational manner. So that you treat—you start by treating the text with a certain amount of reverence and with a certain amount of ignorance, right?

It's, there’s something here that you don't understand and you should probably assume that it's worthwhile because it's being kept rather than to leap to the proposition that you and your ignorance can clearly see why it's unnecessary.

Yeah, and I think that the greatest impact, the saddest part of this, is that the greatest impact in terms of throwing away the stories of our heritage basically is that that impact is generally not going to be felt in the urban centers with people who go to Sam’s lectures or listen to his podcast.

Those people have a worldview that they have shaped by listening to stuff like Sam's or Steven Pinker's or Richard Dawkins, and that worldview—well, I think it may not be fully coherent; it coheres for them. But the problem is that you apply that to people whose main draw to morality is not going to come from listening to these particular sources.

The people who got their social fabric from churches in the middle of the country in the United States, the people who have built a social fabric along with their neighbors, because they have a commonly oriented goal. And then you take that away from them, and you offer them, “Go find your own purpose. Good luck with that.”

Yeah, that’s right. They’re not going to turn into fully fledged humanistic, positively thinking Enlightenment types merely as a consequence of abandoning the religious superstitions. It’s exactly the thing that the Enlightenment types I think are naive about.

It’s now—and then to build up is sort of the way that I put it to Sam. Yes, you can tear apart my religious tradition, and you can probably do so in an entertaining way. I mean, you do, obviously, and then how are you gonna build? What exactly are you building? You know?

And I can do the same thing to your worldview, but then what am I building? The question is going to be, what are the foundational—we're not standing—we're not standing on the first floor of the building. We are standing on the top floor of a building. You can’t go at the bottom floor with jackhammers and then expect that the top story is just gonna stay there.

Instead, that’s not how this works. Yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly it. So, all right. All right. Well, look, um, I promised that I’d let you be at 1:15, and it’s 1:25. And so I don’t want to take up any more of your time.

I’m very pleased that your book is doing well. I hope that it does accomplish what you set out to accomplish with it: to make the case that it's much more appropriate for us in the modern world to continue to consider the Enlightenment, first of all in its faults as well as its virtues. It's a very important issue.

But also to continue to consider it as a continuation of a process that started thousands of years before and that can't be just casually dismissed on the presupposition that the Enlightenment was drawn out of a hat by a magician, you know, four hundred years ago with no developmental precursor.

I think that's an—it's, you know, the only thing that's remarkable to me about that is that the people—so many of the people who are Enlightenment types, like Pinker and Hitchens and Harris, are also evolutionary biologists—and Jesus, they should know better, man. It’s like, even people like Frans de Waal, you know, who’s been studying chimpanzee behavior, has shown very clearly the evolutionary origins of a rather profound proto-morality.

So even you're not looking at this from the perspective of divine revelation, whatever that might be—and that's a great mystery, you know? Because I think often divine revelation is the revelation of our true nature to ourselves, and you know that might be metaphysically mediated, God only knows.

But there's a lengthy developmental history preceding the development of anything like fundamental moral assumptions, and the evolutionary biology seems to support that presupposition powerfully. And so that's another contradiction in the Enlightenment viewpoint that I just don't get. It's like, well, as far as you’re concerned, as an evolutionary biologist, everything has a history.

That should be marked off in the hundreds of millions or at least the tens of millions of years. And yet this radically important transformation in the manner in which human beings conducted themselves—we'll that was just something that emerged out of nothing, right?

It’s like, it’s so funny because it’s a—it’s a ex nihilo argument. It’s like, well, we were ignorant feudalistic Christians squabbling among each other in this superstitious morass, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere in some sense, came this brilliant new way of looking at the world.

And I don't see how that's in keeping with that deeper view of history that's necessary if you're an evolutionary biologist. Yeah, I obviously agree totally with that and I find it kind of hilarious. So a lot of the presuppositions that are made are fundamentally at odds with a lot of the other presuppositions that undergird the system of thought.

When you see, you know, I was talking to Pinker just recently, really like two weeks ago, and I broke this topic. You know, he did agree, by the way, to have a three-way discussion with you and I.

Yeah, I mean I’d totally be interested in that. Yes, talk to the CA people, and we’re gonna try to set it up because I think that would be great. We could—we could see what you see. We’ll have an all-right festival.

That’s—is now everybody’s all right if you—two Jews, two Jews in a self-help—in Canadian. It would be C, because one of the things that struck me so interestingly about the last time I talked to him was as soon as I broached the argument that these Enlightenment ideas were founded in something that looked like a metaphysical religious narrative, whatever its origins.

All he did was point to all the negative examples of what religious structures have managed, right? That seems to be to be such an unfair argument because it’s an avoidance argument again. Then that’s also stuff that non-religious structures have created.

Like, that’s the question is not why bad stuff happens in religious society. The question is why good stuff at all. Yes, that is—the question is especially given that it’s inappropriate to conflate religious structures with tribalism, correct?

You know, especially because you can look—I mean, you might want to blame human evil on the proclivity for us to gather together in groups under a religious hierarchy. But then you’re stuck with the problem of chimpanzees who do exactly the same thing with the equivalent degree of brutality with no religious thinking whatsoever.

And so I think it’s perfectly reasonable to point out that religious thinking can become a variant of tribalism, but it's no more fair to blame human social conflict on religion than it is to blame the existence of hierarchy on capitalism.

The greatest tribalism that I’m seeing in today’s world has not only nothing to do with religion but is actively anti-religion. The greatest tribalism that I’m seeing right now, whether you’re talking about the intersectional left that creates hierarchies of value based on your group membership or whether you’re talking about the white supremacists, which is militantly anti-Christian and sees Christianity and Judaism by extension as a weakness that—that’s pure tribalism.

White supremacy has nothing to do with overarching religious instincts. In fact, it says that overarching religious instinct is quite bad. One of the great anti-tribal forces in human history has been the presence of religion, is a point that Robert Putnam makes in "Bowling Alone."

He pretty supposed that diversity was our strength, as the nostrum goes, and he then found that ethnic diversity in a vacuum doesn’t actually create strength; it creates diversity. What he said is the only two things you get with pure ethnic diversity are increased protests, marches, and increased television watching.

But if you have a common purpose, if you have a common reason for being together, then ethnic diversity and experiential diversity is our strength, and it's really great. Right? There you go to a church and you see a diverse group of people, all of whom came from different places, and they all care for each other and they’re all taking care of each other and they all have different stories to tell and enriching stories to tell.

That's how you build the society. To play the same axiomatic game exam—it's predicated on these underlying revelatory truths, the most important of which, as you pointed out, is the notion that human beings are made in the image of God, which, you know, it’s one of the things because I’m—you know, I tend never to take a religious view if I could take a scientific view.

I never take a metaphysical view if I could take a reductionist view, you know? It’s a form of mental hygiene in some sense. But there are statements, there are biblical statements that are so unlikely that it’s very difficult for me to account for them reductionistically or even biologically, even though I’ve done my best to do so.

And that the idea that you extract the best out of the chaos of potential with truth, that’s one man because that is one daring metaphysical statement. And that requires a tremendous amount of courage to even attempt, and I do believe that it’s true. I’m not sure it’s not the most true thing that’s ever been written.

But then a close contender would be the one that you identified, which is, well, men and women are made in the image of God. It’s like, who the hell would have thought that up? But as much, it’s such a, it's so crazily irrational in a sense, it flies in the face of everything that you see about human beings or virtually everything that you see about them—their hierarchical arrangement, their relative weakness, their mortality, their flawed nature, their sinful nature, their innumerable inadequacies.

And then to say, in spite of all that, so long ago and at the beginning of this civilizing tradition, that well, yeah, despite all that self-evident pathology and radical individual difference in power and ability, that each of us has a divine spark. It’s like, ha, it isn’t—it’s an amazing thought, and it’s an inspiring thought.

And I hope that at the end of the day, that's, if we're gonna take away one message from, I think, this conversation and in general, if loons had one message out to the world, the idea that you’re made in the image of God and so is everybody else. If we build on that, I think we can build something.

That's an excellent place to end. Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Orden, it's really good to talk to you, Ben, and get with your book, and I hope it has the effect that you're hoping for. I hope that we can make a strong case, especially with the Enlightenment types and even the atheists to some degree.

I hope so. I think that in the end, we can all be on the same page, but I think they're gonna have to recognize the value of tradition just as we respect the value of reason. Great. Right. Awesome. It’s a sword.

Okay, man, I love to see it. I see.