Searching for God within Oxford and Cambridge | James Orr & Nigel Biggar | EP 194

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Hello everyone. I'm pleased to have two of the UK's finest scholars here with me today: Dr. James Orr and Dr. Nigel Bigger. Dr. Orr is a university lecturer in philosophy of religion at Cambridge. He's director of Trinity Forum Oxford and Trinity Forum Cambridge, and a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and The Critic magazine. Formerly McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, Dr. Orr holds a PhD and MPhil in philosophy of religion from St. John's College, Cambridge, and a double first in classics from Balliol College, Oxford. He's the author of "The Mind of God and the Works of Nature" (2019) and co-editor of "Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature" (2022), published by Routledge.

Dr. Nigel Bigger is the Regis Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, where he also directs the McDonald Center for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life. He's an Anglican priest, and his professorial chair at Oxford is tied to a canonry in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. He holds a BA from Oxford, a Master's in Christian Studies from Regent College, Vancouver, and an MA and PhD in Christian theology and ethics from the University of Chicago. Before his current post, he occupied chairs in theology at the University of Leeds and at Trinity College Dublin. Among his many books are the recent "What's Wrong with Rights" (Oxford, 2020), "Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation" (2014), and "In Defense of War" (Oxford, 2013), as well as "Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics" (2011).

Provocative titles! Well, thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today. James, why did you want to have this discussion?

Well, my first reason for wanting to have a discussion with you, and together with Nigel, is that I felt that you were developing a voice and a kind of acuity in the public square on questions of religion, of meaning, of transcendence, and those were the kinds of questions that drew me first to the academy out of the law. But the kinds of questions that I think have never been more urgent or more salient to individuals in the West, to society in the West. I thought this is an extraordinary opportunity to talk with you a little bit about your views on religion, and to hear Nigel's too, of course. We've talked a few, we've had many conversations over the years, and Nigel's been a great mentor to me. I had a few happy years with him in Oxford, but yeah, this is an amazing platform that you've carved out for yourself, and I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

So, what makes you think it's so urgent and salient now?

Well, I think that questions of identity, questions of belonging, questions of significance—both as those are kind of answers to them, are kind of positively expressed, but also negatively expressed—the sort of sense of crisis in the West, at the kind of level of individuals, but also trying to work out where it is we're going as a society, particularly now that we've slipped a lot of our moorings that used to anchor us in, as it were, a stable normative universe. We told certain stories about where we'd come from, where we're going, that broadly speaking were not believed by everybody, but broadly speaking gave us the kinds of parameters, the kinds of guardrails, the kind of coordination mechanisms, even the kinds of stigmas that helped us to pursue the common good together for all of our different disagreements.

Okay, so you offered an implicit description of identity there essentially, and that's quite interesting because so much of the current political discourse centers on a theory of identity, but it's not a theory of identity that's based on identification with a central set of stories or—so that's something that's very, very different. You also mentioned, in some sense, a collective view of the future.

That's right, yes. I mean, I think the fact that we're all talking about identity now in a way that we simply weren't before is not a sign that we all know what it means, but actually a sign that there's a kind of dislocation. Identitas in Latin doesn't mean anything at all; it just means sameness. I think you don't really start talking about something until it starts to disappear. I think it's Hegel who says at one point that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, by which he meant—there's lots of disagreement about exactly what he meant—but it seems to be the case that philosophy only starts to take a proper appraisal, a proper diagnosis of what's happened after it's happened, and really the point where it's too late to do much about it.

Right, so the question doesn't arise when everyone is in implicit agreement.

I think that's right. I mean, this is the old David Foster Wallace commencement address joke of the goldfish going for a walk one morning in the goldfish bowl, and another goldfish turns to him and says, "How's the water?" and the goldfish says, "What's water?" Well, we're now saying, "What's your identity?" Even 25 years ago, that would have been, in a sense, a meaningless question. What are you talking about? What is identity? I had a student the other day who came to me and said, "I want to look at identity in Augustine." I said, "Well, what do you want to do that for?" and he said, "Well, everybody's talking about it. The university's talking about it, the culture's talking about it. I thought I could go and read the Confessions and the Trinitate and the City of God and try and work out what Augustine has to say about identity." I had to tell him that Augustine would have been mystified if you'd asked him what he meant by identity. It meant something technical and really rather trivial and empty. But so these are new ideas, but they're very dominant ideas, and they're ideas that we don't really have the answer to, but we're happy to project onto the canon. We're projecting back into the past.

It reminds me of Nietzsche's statement about the question of morality. He said that when you're embedded in a culture that has a single morality, the question is what's right and wrong within that structure. But then, when you're subjected to the onslaught of many moralities, the question of what is morality per se starts to arise. And so the questions get deeper, and maybe that's a consequence of, you know, the intense cultural intermingling that characterizes the world now.

I mean, that's very rich, and it's enriched all of us, but it's also deeply unsettling, and it raises questions. And of course, technological transformation does the same, not least when it involves reproductive technology, let's say, and changes the relationship between the sexes.

I'm going to switch to Dr. Baker and ask him the same.

Could I just make a comment on this business of identity, Jordan? I mean, I do think that certainly in some cases, identity is hooked into some kind of grand narrative. I mean, I guess I think of human beings as we live our little lives, and we often need a bigger story to identify with to give ourselves a significance that, by ourselves, we just don't have. Now, that may not be the case everywhere, but I'm thinking particularly of nationalism. I'm Scottish-born; I identify as British because I both English and Scottish. I oppose Scottish separation from the UK. But when Scots people say, "I'm Scots; I have a Scottish identity," I want to say, "Well, okay, that's fine, but can you give an account of it?" It seems to me that one can hold identities to account in this sense that when I claim an identity, I'm identifying myself with something. So when I say I'm Scottish or British, I have in my mind a certain set of stories, a certain set of heroes, a certain set of values that I claim as my own and identify with. It seems to me that insofar as the stories and the heroes and the values have moral content, they are morally accountable and can be morally criticized. So identity is not a kind of—that's not bedrock.

Okay, so that raises another question as far as I'm concerned. A couple, first of all. You know we might not identify with who we are; we might identify with who we would like to be or what the ideal is. When you talk about our finite mortality and our longing for something greater, I mean, I would think of that as part of the prime of the religious impulse, essentially, that guides us towards the ideal that we're attempting to manifest. So there has to be something beyond us that we identify with. And then I would wonder if it's not abstractly beyond, let's say, in the form of a religious notion, then it gets truncated into something like nationalism or something political that then gets inflated in significance to divine status because the proper target of identification is lacking. What do you think of that?

Yeah, well, I think that's a danger, isn't it? That the grand narratives we identify with, we divinize them; we give them an absolute status. And nationalism, at its worst, does that, of course. So the nation becomes god. The fact that was—was it talked about, or was it, you know—it's fixture, I think, talked about the nation being immortal, but the member of the nation, of course, is not. But you gain a kind of vicarious immortality by belonging to the nation, which always continues, which actually it doesn't, but never mind. But there is a really religiosity to that. But I don't think that all identities have to absolutize themselves in that way.

So I identify as British—American. I could have lived and worked in North America all my life; I chose not to because I felt commitment to this country. Does that mean that I think that the UK is eternal and absolute? Not at all. I mean, it didn't exist before 1707; it may not exist if Scotland separates.

So, but you have a place for the relationship with the absolute in your life, and so it's conceivable that the nation didn't have to expand for you to fill that gap. I mean, I know in Quebec, there is a very interesting poll, you know, Quebec was the last Western country in some sense to undergo the transformation from deep religiosity, almost feudal religiosity, to secular status. That didn't happen until the 1950s, and then Quebec abandoned Catholicism at a rate that was just absolutely staggering. But the Gallup organization indicated that if you were a lapsed Catholic, you were ten times more likely to be a separatist.

Oh, right. Right, a piece of information I was looking for for years just on that. I mean, I've noticed, and there's no proof here yet, but I've noticed that the rise of Scottish nationalism is correlated with the precipitate decline in membership of the Church of Scotland now. So I'm wondering, is there a kind of transference here from Presbyterian religion into Scottish nationalism? I suspect there is because that reminds me of another central Nietzschean idea, which was that a couple of ideas was that as a consequence of the death of god, which is, of course, something that Nietzsche decried, he thought it was a murderous act, that we would become prone to either nihilism or a form of radical communitarianism. He identified that essentially with communism, or at least with the spirit of communism at that point. And then, I would say that the rise of fascism—these are, in my interpretation, these are fundamentally replacement religions, except that they have pathologies associated with them that a genuine religion—and we could talk about what that might be at some point; it was one of the questions you guys proposed—they have pathologies that genuine religions, in some sense, manage to skirt. Do you think that that's a viable hypothesis? I mean, it's sort of predicated on the idea that we do have a deep religious instinct that's associated with the necessity for us to adopt an identity.

Yeah, so when people observe a kind of mainstream conventional religion, they kind of—the religious institute gets displaced. And so in the case of Nazism, most obviously, you get quasi-religious rituals; fascists were particularly good at those, were non-verbal, so they were harder to critique. But they created a sense of the transcendent. So yes, I think that that is a plausible hypothesis. The question of what kind of religion resists that is an interesting one. But I guess religion has always had a problem with degenerating into idolatry, that's to say the identification of something human—a piece of sculpture, a temple, a nation—concrete as divine. And that, of course, is a form of religion that monotheism, be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, has been against because God is God and God is transcendent, and God is barely understandable by human beings.

And that this is right, and there's an insistence on that. I mean, part of the insistence, while the present-day insistence in Islam of not making images is, I believe, it's a variant of the same doctrine that you see in the Old Testament against making idols. And I think it's an attempt, when it's working properly, to protect the concretization of the absolute. And that is this psychological barrier against idolatry, which I think ideology is a form of, and I suspect, although I don't know, that it's etymologically related as well.

And so, you know, you posited right at the beginning, Nigel, that we are destined, in some sense, to search for something beyond ourselves; that that's part of our actual nature. I guess I would wonder too if that—Piaget, the developmental psychologist, posited the existence of a messianic stage in late adolescent development. He didn't believe everyone hit that stage of cognitive development, but that many people did. And that was the point at which radical enculturation should take place, but it was in—it involved the turning outward to broader world concerns and the desire to join a cause. And maybe you can see that really intensely between the ages of 17 and 25, something like that.

So, university students are primed for that, and then they're offered ideology now, I think instead of—well, instead of what it is that we're trying to lay out, what the alternative to that might be.

So, yeah, I wanted to ask you guys, James, did you have something to say about all that?

Well, I mean, other than that to say that, you know, there's sort of obviously good nationalism and bad nationalism, and often the distinction is made between patriotism and nationalism, and Nigel's written very well about this, but it's often overlooked.

I mean, I think that a lot of the problems today, certainly as we've been a part of the debate in the UK in the last few years, has been this question of, "Are you a citizen of anywhere, or are you a citizen of somewhere?" A lot of the deep divides in our society flow from that basic distinction—the distinction that the sociologist David Goodhart drew a few years ago. A lot of the differences that we're having apparently, a lot more trivial, flow really downstream of that.

So, there's an idea that Eliade had about the continual disappearance of God, because he looked at Nietzsche's pronouncement and said, "Well, God has vanished into the stratosphere of abstraction many times throughout history. This isn't the one-time only." The danger of an abstract God that can't be represented is that he becomes so detached from human affairs that it's as if he's not there. And so the Catholic Church maybe produces saints as intermediaries and priests to sort of link the absolute to the proximal. But I wonder too what happened with Brexit in the UK. I mean, I thought of that in some sense as a Tower of Babel phenomenon, is that people felt that their representation in Europe was so abstract that they were no longer connected to their land, to their town, to their community. And so the distance between them and the central authority became too great, and there was a longing for return to something like the concrete.

Which I had some sympathy for, but it begs the question too, is like maybe there's a rank order of identity, and so you are a patriot to your land, but that's nested under an affiliation to something that's absolute that isn't associated with nationalism. I talked with Stephen Fry a little bit, for example, about the utility of having a monarch. It's sort of analogous to that, is that the monarch is an abstract figure, but exists, and you can have affiliation to her like the prime minister does and still be in charge of the state. And it's like there's a hierarchy of identities, and the hierarchy has to be structured properly, or the parts start to contain the whole in a way that's pathological.

Yes, yes. I mean, I was just thinking as you were speaking that certainly the way a lot of the arguments for thinking of one's love of country as a form of piety in the tradition of moral theology start from the most intimate and the most immediate. So it's love of parent, your biological parents—you didn't choose your parents; it's as it were you're thrown into this relationship with them, but it's the most intimate relationship there is. And similarly, the thought is that you owe your loyalty, your loves, your affections to your community and so on and so on in ever-expanding concentric circles.

But I think both Aquinas and somebody very different, someone like David Hume later on in the 18th century, stressed that there are as it were a kind of—there are diminishing returns as the concentric circles move outward and there's certainly a limit, and it's not an ideal limit but it’s simply a function of our finitude and our fragility, and in the Christian tradition, our fallenness—that we can't as it were love every single human being; we can't love humanity in the abstract, and nor can we love every single human being with the same sort of intensity.

So that might be a more positive way of thinking about why we ought to, what Augustine calls, our common objects of love, or we treat our common objects of love as broadly proximate but organized by the horizon of a kind of transcendent orientation towards the source of love, which of course in the Christian tradition is God himself.

Jordan, I fully agree with you that we inhabit kind of a range of identities, some more local, some more regional, national, global, and then religious. Each thing we identify with gives a certain meaning to our lives and a certain significance. Just wondering, in terms of your encounter with young people, at what point does religious identification begin to gain traction?

Well, I think there's a variety of answers to that. One is that one pathway in is the diagnosis that the desire for deep meaning and also deep responsibility is there and valid and in everyone, and to be encouraged and recognized. So there's that, and then there's a serious discussion about, I would say, about love and truth and the pragmatic utility of both, and both as expressions of faith. You know, because you can't say, "Well, there's evidence that love in the broadest sense is the most effective manner in which to orient yourself in the world." You could make a counter case that it's power, for example, and you can't prove that speaking the truth is for the best, and partly that's because people get into trouble for speaking the truth all the time.

But you can say you can stake your life on those two things and see what happens, and that there's an adventure in that, and that appeal to adventure—that's really attractive to especially young men but to young people in general. And then there's one other element, which is part of it has to be the removal of rational objections. It's like when I did my biblical lecture series, I said I was going to stay psychological about it except when I had to become metaphysical because of my limitations of my knowledge. I was trying to make sense of it, like how can you have a relationship with this book that makes sense so that you're not crucifying your reason but using it alongside of you and so that it's not mere, let's say, superstitious foolishness with regards to your axiomatic presuppositions of the form that the rational atheists criticized so well, let's say.

So, you know, I said, well, I brought reverence to Genesis. I said, this book's been around a long time, and there's a possibility that there's something in it that I don't understand that's appealed to people across history. Let's approach it from that perspective and see what we can make of it, and that seems to have proved extremely popular—like sort of unbelievably popular.

And so when you mentioned this desire for a deep desire, in a sense for being responsive, both of those connect to me as it were something that is given an objective to which we are accountable. It reminds me of what your compatriot Charles Taylor once wrote in his best, shortest book—I’m glad to say "The Ethics of Authenticity." He said reflecting on authenticity, as being the kind of universal popular value we all recognize. He said authenticity only makes sense when there's a wider given horizon that gives it significance.

So choice only significant within a context that gives it significance; otherwise, choice is caprice, it's whimsy, it doesn't matter at all. And so I suppose they—I mean seeing this through Christian eyes as I do—what we have here is a recognition of the need for, if you like, a given moral order within which we have freedom, and the freedom is what makes us responsible and makes our decisions and choices really heavy with significance. But there is something that is given and we didn't create it, and a large part—not the only part—a large part of the affirmation of there being one God is that there is not just a physical coherence to created reality but also a moral coherence. One God.

Okay, so a couple of things I want to talk about there. So, you know, if I look at authenticity from the psychoanalytic or the psychological perspective, you talk about Carl Rogers and the humanists now. Rogers, who I admire greatly and who taught me a lot about listening, technically, he was a humanist, but he was a Christian seminarian to begin with, and I wanted to be a missionary. And so his psychology of human possibility is secularized Christianity right to the core. Now, it's his talk about authenticity, so he thought if you wanted to be a good therapist that you had to be integrated.

And so he talked, he's making a case for something like this hierarchical identity that we just discussed. So imagine your identity is probably properly structured hierarchically with the utmost at the top where it's supposed to be and with everything in its proper place that constitutes you in the broadest sense. And then you speak in some sense from the center of that, and so there's a kind of alignment that goes along with truthful speaking that represents that authenticity, and I think that's equivalent to—well, it's equivalent to trinitarian phenomena in my estimation.

You know when there's this emphasis in the gospels on the possibility of the spirit of God inhabiting a group or an individual, especially in terms of their relationship with one another, their dialogical relationship with one another. There's really something to that, like it's not a—it seems to be you can enter that space when you're authentic in the psychological sense, but it also means that the words that you're using spring up from the depths, from the integrated depths, and that is associated with being possessed by the ideal at that moment.

It's something like that, and you can call that forth out of people, right, if you're engaging in a serious and honest dialogue with them and you trust and you want the best from them, then they step up, and then you can have that kind of conversation, and it's ennobling for everyone, and everyone experiences it that way.

Can I just suggest that, I mean, we're using the word authenticity, but as listening to Nigel and listening to you now, Jordan, it seems to me that you've actually expressed two very different and opposing sides of how one understands authenticity.

So, Nigel offered the idea that authenticity, as it were, requires or presupposes or requires an author with a capital A, should we say, some sort of given objective framework that we don't script our own narrative; we have to as it were deal with the world as it's given. You have elaborated beautifully—and I'm not saying that the two can't be brought together. I think this could be a very interesting next phase of the conversation. You, in drawing on Rogers and talking about the secularization of the sense of authenticity and the currents of pneumatology and the spirit in the New Testament, at the beginning of Acts, are taking a more, shall we say, self-scripting, self-authoring idea in account of authenticity.

And this goes right back, I suppose, to some ideas about how those might be mediated. I mean, I don't think you're not speaking with your own voice when you're authentic in some sense because your proximal concerns are not relevant—all you're trying to do is to state what you believe to be the case at that moment and to be an honest response to the surrounding. It isn't agenda-driven except at the highest levels of that hierarchy.

So the agenda might be love and truth, right? But it isn't anything proximal; it's not like. So for example, if I was trying to argue against you and defeat you, that's philo nikea, which I just learned—the love of victory. If I was possessed by the spirit of the love of victory and was attempting to defeat you, then I wouldn't be speaking in a fully authentic voice. It might be a more authentic voice than being cowardly, but it's not as authentic as one that would be inspired by the highest possible motivations.

And my sense has been that it's something like truth nested inside love that constitutes that highest level of ethical striving. And so that speaks from within you, perhaps. And it's strange that that would also be associated with authenticity because in some sense it's not you, but it is. It isn't because your definition of authenticity, which really is in the sense, it's you expressing your grasp of the truth, but it's not just you expressing yourself, whatever that means.

I mean, the common understanding of authenticity is self-expression. Whenever someone says that, I think, "Well, you know, how do we know yourself is worth expressing?" How do I know myself is worth expressing? But your way of putting it ties authenticity to my grasp of the truth so that there is something apart from me which I'm relating to which gives it a kind of objectivity and seriousness and lack of caprice.

So, okay, so a couple of things off that. I mean, this insistence by the radical left on lived experience and its validity—but it might be a stumbling towards something like that.

Okay, right. Okay, well, then the next thing, so let's leave—I’ll put that up—but then the next thing I'm thinking about is I've really been struck constantly by some of Jung's descriptions of Christ as a member of the Trinity. Because Jung makes much of John's sense of Christ, the Logos that's there across time, which I read something as something like the creative consciousness that's involved in the bringing to awareness of being, something like that.

So it's maybe identical to consciousness itself, at least in its higher stages. It's very abstract, but then there's Christ the carpenter, who lived in a particular time and place, which is kind of a mystery because everyone asks, like in the movie "Jesus Christ Superstar," you know, "Why that time in that place?" And the answer is, well, it has to be some bounded time and place. And so if we're—if what Christ is is a representative, in some sense, of what a human being is, is that there's a divine aspect to us which is this creative consciousness that's very abstract, but it's also localized intensely, you know, in a historic—in a particular historical context.

And then each of us is unique in that manner, but there's something universal about each of us too that enables us to reach out to each other and also gives each of our individual lives a larger significance that otherwise they just wouldn't have at all.

Well, yes, and the significance, you know, one of my students once asked me a brilliant question: is like, "If all stories have the archetypal structure, why not just tell the same archetype over and over?" And I thought, "Wasn't that so interesting?" Because what you want is you want old wine in new skins, so to speak, right? You want the universal story particularized.

And then I thought, "Well, that's exactly what Jung said about the figure of Christ: it's the universal story particularized." And both of those—like both the particularization and the universality—it's the intersection of those two that produces the meaning. It also produces, I guess you'd say meaning, but I would say human dignity because on the one hand there is individuality; no one quite grasps the truth or speaks the truth in my time and place like me. So in a sense, everyone is a unique prophet and has a unique responsibility; but we are commonly subject to a universal order, universal obligations, a universal calling, which endows our little lives with a larger significance.

I mean this oscillation that you've been describing so beautifully between the universal and the concrete, the general and the particular—you touched on it earlier, Jordan, when you were talking about the iconoclasm of Judaism and Islam relative to the shocking acceptance and indeed embracing of particularity in the form of the second person of the Trinity incarnate as a human being.

So that the sort of shocking Christian claim is that God leaves his authenticating signature on not just on the processes of history but on this particular carpenter in first-century Palestine. This is what gets Hegel and others just so excited; that it seems to be this final synthesis where everything can as it were come to a resting point. But as Nigel says, it also underwrites the dignity and the value, the intrinsic value of human beings.

And others have written about that—that's another major question, you know, and this is something I think the new atheists don't take into account at all because they have this enlightenment orientation and they attribute the idea of human rights. It's like their historical sense is truncated at 400 years ago, and that's really odd because so many of them are biologists, you know, and they should be thinking across the millennia.

Now, that can be a problem for religious thinkers too because it isn't obvious that the worldview of the Bible is a 13 billion-year-old cosmos, but you know, I don't believe that our notion of rights is an Enlightenment product. I think the Enlightenment articulated an implicit Judeo-Christian view of man and expressed it brilliantly in many political documents, but that the roots of that explicit construction were mythological and ritual and centuries or millennia or far past that old. And I actually don't think that's debatable.

I think the idea that, you know, the dignity of the human being and the rights of man emerged in the Renaissance, let's say, in the Enlightenment and out of nothing is a completely absurd proposition. It's much more reasonable historically to look at the narrative precursors to that idea.

Yeah, no, I agree entirely with that. I mean, it has been established that the notion of natural human rights can be found in the 13th century, in the medieval period, and Larry Seidentop recently wrote a book called "The Origins of Individuality," where he locates the notion of the value of the human individual in a biblical Christian narrative. I mean, the kind of archetype of the individual is the prophet—the one who responds to the call of God, who's called out from the mass of people. Indeed, poor old Jeremiah is called out to speak against his people alone.

And it's that relationship between the individual and the call of God that creates the individual and draws them out of the mass. Right, you see that so often in the Genesis stories. I mean, Abraham's a classic example of that too. I mean, he's a failure to begin with. I mean, he's like 80 years old and still living in his dad's tent, and then he's called by God. And all that happens to him for the first section of the story is one bloody awful catastrophe after another. It's like—and you think, well, do you believe these stories? Well, here's the question: what's not to believe about that? It's like there you are, you're a dismal failure, and you're not living up to your potential, and then some—you’re inspired by something that forces you outside of your proximal self and makes you feel guilty and ashamed if you don't manifest it, an enthusiastic, which means possessed by God if you do manifest it—and then you do, and then, like, it's one catastrophe after another. It's like, who doesn't believe that? How is that not life?

I mean, it seems like there are at least sort of three possibilities. There's a kind of the enlightenment creator's account of dignity just coming out of ex nihilo, coming out of nowhere with Kant and others, which gives a kind of universalist basis to rights and a kind of cosmopolitanism that is based on pure rationality and nothing else.

Okay, so here's something that's interesting, James. So let's say that's true. Well, then why not postmodern critique that rationality out of existence if there's nothing behind it that is more fundamental than a mere proximal European rational construction? Why can't we just blow it away?

First of all, attribute it to the West, which I think is a big mistake because I don't believe that's true. But then also just replace it with another rational construction if there's nothing transcendent about it, nothing deep.

Well, I think a quick answer to that is to say we didn't need to wait for the postmodernist; we simply needed to wait for the 1790s and the reign of terror that was orchestrated, of course, by devotees of the cult—literally devotees of the cult of reason that was set up in Notre Dame proclaiming liberty, equality, and fraternity, even as the bloods and heads were running in the streets, right?

And in the cathedral, as you point out, which is so symbolically relevant, indeed, indeed. So, the question that then is that, you know, what we now can't take seriously the Kantian claims to universal reason, and we can't really take seriously that—and I think the postmodernist would have some force to what they have to say—that deracinated reason that tears us away from any kind of locality, any kind of the sort of messy contingency of human development and human upbringing.

I mean, it's not an accident, since some people like to point out, that Kant never had children and never went further than 10 miles of Koenigsberg. And yet had this extraordinary impact—I think it was the German poet Heine who said that Kant was far, far more deadly than Robespierre, because whereas Robespierre simply decapitated a king, Kant decapitated God.

That is to say, it would be helpful, I think, for the audience for you to talk a little bit about Kant because they're not going to be familiar in that way.

Sure. Well, I mean, just a kind of a 90-second digest. I mean, Kant, he—1724 to 1804—was known as the kind of sage of Koenigsberg, which is Kaliningrad now, now Prussia. Broadly speaking, he has had an enormous impact, a subterranean influence these days, I think, because he's just so darn difficult to read. German is really only just becoming a philosophical language; a lot of his early writings are in Latin. But the explosion occurs in 1781 with the Critique of Pure Reason, and what's so fascinating about that is that it's a critique that is of reason. That is to say, a critique of reason's tendency always to overreach itself beyond what could possibly give and be given in sense experience.

And so he's got the critics, the metaphysicians, and the rationalists—Leibniz and Descartes and so on—in his sights there. There's that—but it's also, if Milton's warning—Milton's warning about the dominance of Satan, just out of curiosity, because I always saw Milton's Satan is always trying to transcend God. Yes, and he's the light-bringer, right, in the spirit of rationality in some real sense.

Yes, yes. Well, there are some who would characterize Kant's impact like that, certainly. But in that period 1781 to 1790, he's just as it were—it’s the critical philosophy—he starts to get more interested in TR in 1793 with the notion of evil, and suddenly evil comes back in something that was inexplicable within the terms of the critical philosophy. He suddenly realizes that there's something that can't be reasoned, and it's interestingly not the good, which has tended to occupy Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas; it's evil.

Perhaps he was affected by reports of what was going on in Paris in the early 1790s, who knows? But his impact is enormous. When we talk about the turn to the self and the Enlightenment period, there are many important figures, but I think Kant is the archetype; he's the point of no return. There are very few philosophers in the history of philosophy where you can describe with the adjective "pre" and "post." There's Socrates; everyone who comes before Socrates is a pre-Socratic, even though there were some very fine philosophers before Socrates. Similarly, we talk about pre-Kantian and post-Kantian philosophies. So his impact is enormous in terms of this turn to the self, the primacy of reason, confidence in cosmopolitanism, and a certain very coherent account of the role of subjectivity in aesthetics and an account of the moral life and ethics—just obligation, not the good—that is entirely sealed into the sphere of practical reason, ethical reason.

And he then—

Okay so—you know, you started this, or at least to some degree, with a discussion of what happened in Notre Dame Cathedral with the elevation of reason. And I thought about Milton at that point. And so is this—is it reasonable to point to Kant and say Kant is the philosopher who in the West and the Enlightenment figure who elevated reason to the position that God once occupied?

I think that's a fair summary of how a lot of people would interpret Kant's impact. Some would take a positive view of that; some—

Yeah, it's the birth of secularism. We don't—and it's not so much an antipathy to religion and to God; there's also a sense of hope and optimism.

Well, and warranted. I mean, look what happened when everybody became able to think. I mean, our technological mastery is part and parcel of that process; it's not all negative, but it's still a matter of getting everything in its proper place.

You know, I read Milton as warning—that when reason is elevated to the highest place, that hell follows quickly behind. And I think about that, for example, there's nothing more rational than Marxism. All the axioms are wrong, but all the logic that flows from the axioms is perfectly rational, perfectly logical. And I mean, that's why Solzhenitsyn was able to make the case that what happened under Stalin was true communism. It was the axioms playing themselves out; they were arrayed logically.

And so rationality—I've been talking to some cognitive scientists recently too, you know, and they're interested in artificial intelligence and the development of independent thinking machines. The people who are really working hard on that are very interested in the idea of embodiment because they're not convinced that intelligent systems, abstract systems, even can exist in the absence of embodiment—that embodiment is tied to—and so there's an element of embodiment that's sort of something like the proximal concerns that you were talking about that seems necessary for proper cognitive operations to take place.

One of the interesting things about Kant—and I think he's onto something here—is that one of the things that haunted him was the idea that what can be given in sense experience and our understanding what was then a new fully Newtonian physical universe didn't fit in, couldn't accommodate what really mattered: rationality, the soul, freedom, and God. And this worried him. He was trying to develop a way of understanding and making room for these notions.

And I think with AI and cognitive science and so on, my worry is always—well, first of all, I want to ask the cognitive scientists: Have you cracked the mind-body problem? That is to say, do you think hard?

They're trying.

And in a sophisticated way, you know, as far as I can see.

Well, the question of the mind-body problem is whether or not a complete science, the most sophisticated science that was possible to generate, could fathom the mysteries of consciousness. That is to say, could purely physical causal processes generate reason, intelligence, and consciousness?

Yeah, well, I think the answer to that is yes, but when that happens, our notion of matter will be radically transformed. Because that sort of assumes that we understand matter and we don't understand consciousness. It's like, no, we don't understand either. And when we understand both, both will be radically different.

Well, it's certainly the case that in Anglo-American philosophies, what was unthinkable is now a live option in the philosophy of mind, and that is this doctrine of panpsychism—the idea that the concrete material universe somehow exhibits mind-like or conscious properties.

And that's…

Okay, so I'm going to make a segue from that. So I had been playing with some ideas here recently that, if you guys don't mind, I'd like to run by you a bit. I've been thinking about what people might mean when they talk about God. And I want to tell you how I got to this point first.

So there's this idea that's coming out of this postmodern and Marxist critique of the West that the primary organizing principle of—first of all, social institutions in the West are structured according to Western axioms—that's the first one. And the second one is that they're structured according to the arbitrary expression of power.

And we'll start with the second one. I think that is antithetical to the truth, and the reason I think that is because when I've met men of goodwill who are successful in functional organizations, they're creative and productive and honest and generous and kind and mentors. And they might deviate from that when their desire for power overtakes them, but that's a deviation from the genuine spirit.

And so then I was thinking, I had this vision at one point, and it was like an ancestral vision; it gave me some insight into ancestor worship. And I had this vision of all these men that had had an influence on me in my life; I could see them all. And it was like the positive elements of them were the same, and then that sort of extended back into history a bit.

I was thinking about historical figures, and this spirit shining through. And I thought, well, the spirit that shines through the ancestral figures, that's equivalent to the Old Testament God—that's the animating spirit of civilization.

Now, I'm not making a metaphysical claim here. I'm saying that, you know, we already talked about the fact that when we're in a deep conversation there's something the same about us that's operating, and I would say like a biologist like E.O. Wilson would agree with that. We wouldn't be able to communicate with one another if we were talking about something that was fundamentally human, because we wouldn't understand our axiomatic presuppositions.

So we have to be speaking from the particular to the universal in order for us to communicate. So the question is, what's the nature of the spirit that inhabits you when you're doing that? And then I think of it as this benevolent spirit that operates through history; it's responsible for the golden thread of philosophical conversation down the ages.

And that would include the spirit that wrote and arranged the Bible, operating in different human beings. And that's a nod to the notion of its divine inspiration. And so I was thinking, these aren't attributes of God that the atheists consider because they reduce it to a set of relatively absurd axiomatic presuppositions.

But there are experiential elements to this, and so I think we exist within a hierarchy of values, and that selects our attention because you pay attention to what you value. And there's a unifying tendency in that hierarchy of values because it has to be unified; otherwise, you exist in contradiction with yourself and everyone else.

So there's a tendency towards unity, so that's part of this paternal spirit. I think Mircea Eliade made much of the war of gods in mythologies; it's a very, very common theme. And what happens is the gods' war, and one god comes out as superior; he's the dominant god.

And I thought, well, that's associated with the moving together of tribes. Each tribe has its own narrative, and it's represented by a set of deities. And when the tribes unite in conflict and cooperation, their religious stories fight in abstract space, and there's this proclivity across time for that to organize itself into something like a unity—that's the origin of monotheism.

And that's the spirit of God as well. And then I thought—I won't go through all these attributes because I can bring them up one at a time—but then another one is I was thinking about this common trope in American sports movies, and I'm pointing to them for a particular reason.

When you're engaged in a sport, you're trying to hit a target. And if you do it well, then everyone celebrates you. And that's the opposite of hamartia; that's the opposite of missing the mark.

And so there's this collective celebration of the tendency of excellence in cooperation and competition to hit the mark, and everybody celebrates—that's worship. Everyone worships that; they don't even notice it.

That's the same spirit. And then there's this movie theme, and the Americans are very good at mythologizing this sort of thing. So you imagine that the victorious quarterback is carried out of the stadium on the shoulders of his teammates, supported by his school and the town in triumph, and the cheerleaders are waiting for him.

And you think, well, why would men elect one of their members to be the most attractive? And the answer to that is because that's how you see the path. It's something like that. And that's a manifestation of the same spirit; that's not power.

And so this thing that we re—and then I'll close with this. One of the things that really hit me when I was doing my Genesis lectures was the realization that the word "Israel" meant those who struggle with God.

And I think that's a way better definition of belief—true belief—than reliance on an axiomatic set of explicit presuppositions. It's like this is something you contend with, right? It's like, what's the ideal? Is there an ideal? If there is an ideal, what nature is it? Is it a personality? How does it manifest itself across time?

We don't know the answers to this, but we can definitely wrestle with that. We wrestle with that, and that's the right pathway, I think, is the wrestling rather than the dogmatic insistence that a particular—sorry.

Well, that's a lot. Can I wind you back to your earlier impassioned statement that you're not making a metaphysical claim here? Because it seems to me that the phenomenon pushes in the metaphysical direction in this sense that you're talking about all these people who have shaped you for the good.

And in a sense, it's as if they've been animated by a kind of spirit—a kind of benevolent spirit. Well, you know, as it were, remain strictly secularist or naturalist, then in a sense this spirit is simply a product of these people.

But now I suggest that the lived experience, if you like, or the phenomenon of the spirit, as experienced by these people, is not that they possess it; rather, than it possesses them. Absolutely. It obliges them.

So in a sense, the phenomenon pushes toward something that is metaphysical.

Well, okay, so let's—so let me add another wrinkle to this that's related to something that James—that James said. Well, we talked about consciousness per se, right? And this is where the metaphysical starts to become interesting, is that this spirit that calls and impels and judges as well and is in part the voice of conscience and all of that, I can't distinguish it from the active action of consciousness per se.

And we don't understand the metaphysical status of consciousness now. One of the things I've been thinking, for example—I wanted to talk to Richard Dawkins about this, and I'm afraid he'd slash me into ribbons, so I'm somewhat hesitant to do it. But, you know, Darwin talked about natural selection a lot, but he also talked about sexual selection a lot.

And until recently, the last 30 years or so, biologists tended to concentrate more on natural selection. But, you know, women are hypergamous in the extreme; they mate up and across hierarchies of competence or power, I think competence fundamentally. And that means that our whole evolutionary history was shaped by the selection of consciousness.

And so the mechanism that generates random variation and allows for the menu from which the selection is made might be random, but the selection process is bloody well not random. And it looks to me like men's consciousness elevates men to positions of status, and women's consciousness selects those men.

And they're not selected on the basis of power; that's not true. That's not even true of chimpanzees, by the way, and they're more violent and much more primitive than we are. So, like that deep ethic that we're talking about doesn't run itself out even—it's certainly not only human.

And Franz de Waal, who I'm going to be talking to at some point on this podcast, has made very much of that— you know that there's this natural ethic that you see emerging in chimpanzee behavior in their hierarchical behavior within troops.

So he said the tyrannical chimps get torn to shreds by their subordinates, who band together. You can dominate the group with power, but it's very unstable.

If I could just chip in here, I mean, well, it's obviously the case that there are behavioral patterns that can be described as certainly altruistic and that we, as it were, can describe as ethical. And it's certainly the case, Jordan, that you can theorize that what's going on in, say, sexual selection is the operation of consciousness.

But don't forget that somebody like Dawkins is going to say that there simply is no such thing as consciousness if by consciousness you understand some element of reality, some ontological ingredient of reality that is somehow not fully reducible to underlying neurological states.

I read Dennett's book on consciousness, which was aptly criticized as consciousness explained away. It's by no means the best book I've read on consciousness because I don't think it wrestles with, because the ontological significance of consciousness is equivalent to the ontological significance of being.

Because the mystery question is how is there anything without awareness of it? And good luck solving that issue. And even if it is reducible to the material, my answer to that is, well, that'll just make the material transcendent in a way that we don't understand.

So you can't say you have omniscient knowledge of the structure of matter, and consciousness is reducible to that. It's like, no, you don't. You don't know anything about matter at the fundamental quantum level, let's say. It's so mysterious and peculiar.

Absolutely. But what we can at least say—and this is a very Kantian thought—that it's a condition of the possibility of any successful empirical or scientific inquiry into the way the world is that we are a subject; that we exercise our consciousness; we exercise our reason and we exercise the laws of thought.

So I agree with you. I mean, I think the problem with the new atheists is not so much their atheism; it's their a priori commitment to the doctrine of metaphysical naturalism, which is roughly the idea that all truths are scientific truths or reducible to scientific truths, and it's a non-starter.

The far more interesting golden thread that you talked about earlier, sometimes known as the perennial philosophy, yes, exactly—that is the thought that being—capital B, being—is the fundamental metaphysical question.

And once you start approaching deep philosophical problems in that way, then you do start to see a remarkable convergence between Abrahamic monotheism, Vedanta and Upanishads, the question of whether Brahman and Atman are one—that is, say, being and mind and the self are one.

We see it—those sorts of questions are also not particular to religious systems, so think of somebody like Heidegger. You know, Heidegger is supposed to have spawned the kind of the great atheistic tendencies in 20th century existentialists and phenomenological philosophy. He says the fundamental question is why is there something rather than nothing?

Absolutely. Why being?

Absolutely, yeah.

So, okay, so there's the metaphysical. So part of what this hinges on is the metaphysical status of consciousness, and you can make a case that that's equivalent to this question is—well, what? I mean, David Chalmers, who's maybe the most well-known cognitive scientist studying consciousness, you know, he has one set of the hard question, you know, the hard question about consciousness. But for me, the hard question is the question of being itself because I can't distinguish between being and awareness.

You can think, well, there's an objective world without subjectivity; it's like, well, try to think that through and see how far you get. You just run into problem after problem with it. And I mean, there's technical problems at the level of physics as well, but there's certainly metaphysical problems.

And so then the question is, well, what is the cosmological significance of consciousness? And that's a central question, right? Maybe that's the central question.

And when I look at the inside of a Christian cathedral and I see the Logos spread out against the sky, because that's what the dome is, as affiliated with the sun, there's this proposition that consciousness is what engenders reality itself and that we partake in that.

And let's say we abandon that notion. It's like, okay, well then do you have any dignity as an individual? And then we get into the postmodern question.

Well, are you there as an individual at all? Are you just part of your immutable physiological characteristics—your sex, your gender, your race—that's matter, man? And there's no individual soul there? Well, why can't I just reduce you to that? What are you going to use as an argument?

Well, I just have just a very quick thought, if I may. I don't want to sort of keep butting into too much, but a very good line for Dawkins and others to remember—and you should remind him of it if he comes on your podcast—is that metaphysics always buries its undertakers.

That is to say, every time there's an attempt to say we can all of that mumbo jumbo that was being talked about by those clever philosophers or those stupid religionists—that's all gone now—that's a warning sign. It's a sign that there's actually total confusion and all sorts of kind of fragmentation in the quest for meaning, in the quest for the answer to the question of the meaning of—is that the abandonment of the perennial philosophy?

It's an attempt, certainly, to reject it.

And, I mean, if you look in, say, pedantic systems, you look in Indian philosophy, there were materialists. There was a school of materialism, but it was a relatively small and short-lived belief system. You see materialism in the Greek-Roman world; you see it in Democritus, Democritus's atomism. You see it in Epicurus, of course.

But it is a minority report. There is—it’s quite a strange superstition in ancient thought. And I mean, just to talk it apart a bit, James, because you mentioned earlier that among—I think it was cognitive scientists that you were discussing—that discussion of panpsychism has become non-heretical because there's a notion that there's a mystery in matter.

See, but it isn't materialism in exactly that—that's the fault; it's perhaps deterministic clockwork materialism that's essentially Newtonian. And we know that's not right. I mean, it's proximally right, but beyond that it's not right. Matter is a very deep mystery, and I can't see how you can get rid of the problem of consciousness by positing a materialist substrate when there's no way that you can get rid of the metaphysics of matter very quickly.

I mean, you mentioned David Chalmers, as you say, this brilliant young philosopher who in 1994 published his PhD thesis, "The Conscious Mind," which brought back in onto the table that what he called the hard problem of consciousness. And he passed that in different ways—that there's something absolutely irreducible about qualitative experience.

But the problem that then opens up that he—that then I think leads him towards taking panpsychism very, very seriously is the idea, well, okay, we've got consciousness; it's a hard problem. We just can't get rid of it. And yet we can't get rid of matter either. We can't get rid of the truths of the physical sciences.

And we—but we can't work out how on earth these fit together. They couldn't be laws of nature; they couldn't be psychoanalytic or psychological laws. The laws of thought are fundamentally different from the laws of nature. So how do we fit these two together?

And panpsychism at that point, though it might seem crazy to the person on the street, suddenly start to seem quite an attractive account of the nature of ultimate reality.

And I suppose just as a quick footnote to that, once you're there, materialism, Dawkinsian materialism, is Dickensian and long gone. And the dialogue between the perennial philosophy and anglophone philosophy of panpsychism is back on.

So elaborate on that. That's what stopped me exactly because now I'm trying to figure out, well, there's this—we should define panpsychism again for the audience, but then, okay, so what sort of dialogue does that open up as far as you're concerned?

Well, my view is that panpsychism—it's early days, at least in its modern contemporary iteration. I think you can say that Aristotle, if you read the "De Anima," Aristotle's treatise on the soul, there's soul all over the place—that the plants have a nutrition (soul), animals have a perceptual (soul), and human animals have both of those; and irrational rational souls.

So as it were, all of organic life is minded. If you move to the basic framework of Abrahamic monotheism, then, look, if it follows very naturally that if you've got an axiomatic commitment to mind at the bottom of the universe, as it were, my—the creator is a minded being, is ideal; it's not material.

And everything, all of reality distinct from God is created, and including, as it were, space-time, then the idea that the universe, as we discover it, as we come upon it, is shot through with mind is legible to mind—to the minded inquiry that happens when cognitive scientists are trying to unravel the mystery of the brain.

It's suddenly you've got an isomorphism there between consciousness.

So does that mean—does that mean that there's this insistence in the Judeo-Christian tradition that God is outside of the material world and outside of time and space and that what that does, in some sense, is deaden material? It deadens matter.

And then when God disappears, we're left with dead matter. So, so where's the dialogue between the advocates of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the panpsychists?

Well, there's only one time that Aquinas ever loses his cool in about 10 million words that he wrote, but one is with this poor guy called David Adino who dared to suggest that God might be a material being, which to which Aquinas said, "Queer est idiotus," which is simply stupid.

So the idea that the creator could be somehow bound up with his creation was a simple logical impossibility within Abrahamic monotheism.

Is there any difference between the mind-body problem and the God-the- spirit and the material world problem? Are they the same problem on two different planes?

Jordan, that's an extremely acute question, and it's one that has puzzled me for a long time or at least attracted me. I think you're absolutely right to say that there are all sorts of interesting structural, metaphysical, and theoretical parallels between understanding and fathoming the God-world relation and as it were the mind-world relationship, the human mind, the soul, or the soul-world relationship.

Because absolutely no—it could be that we're the contact point between God—outside of time and space—in the material world. But then that does beg the question in the panpsychism question, which is a very interesting one.

So that's precisely the claim of Christology. I don't have a lot to say to this discussion, but just two points, Jordan. A moment ago, you talked about, you know, in the Christian vision God is other and absent, and matter is there deadened because that's not quite true, is it? Because in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the spirit of God is present in the world.

And also you have the incarnation, so even if one doesn't want to say what—one doesn't want to be stupid, as Aquinas thought, and say God is material, I don't want to say that. Certainly, it's not true to say that God and the material world are divorced.

They're not.

So that's one. I wouldn't say—I wouldn't say that it's—I’m thinking about it; I'm trying to think about it with regards to the idea of this animating spirit—the, let's say, the spirit that engenders the perennial philosophy.

If that unitary principle is lacking, and we talked about the unitary principle as the spirit that engenders the perennial philosophy, if that unitary spirit is fragmented and lacking, then something corrupt comes in to fill the void, or something partial or something limping and crippled in some sense, right?

A pathologized religion.

And then that, of course, leads to the question, well, how do you know when a religion is pathologized and when it's not? But we got there to some degree today, and I say, well, part of the hallmark of a religion that's got its act together in some sense is that it locates evil within rather than without.

And that's an interesting proposition, and it seems at least worthy of consideration. And, yeah, that's important because it generates humility and therefore generates a certain restraint in the way you treat other people you disagree with.

If you don't have that, you can't have a liberal space; you have people shouting at each other.

So I think that's really, really important. I mean, and maybe part of it too is the Socratic insistence upon ignorance. It's like I’m fundamentally ignorant and prone to malevolence. Fix me, right?

It's something like that.

Yeah, yeah. And who would argue with that?

Well, Socrates might argue with that. I mean, Socrates, he does think that knowledge is key, that ignorance is—the awareness of our epistemic finitude is crucial. He thinks malevolence and wrongdoing is just a failure of knowledge.

So that, as it were, moral failure is a kind of cognitive failure or it's an epistemic failure. And, I mean, Aristotle can't handle that at all; he thinks that there's actually something deep within us that leads us to go wrong.

But, yes, I mean that Socratic idea, the Socratic principle of dialectical diversity—that is to say, of kind of fruitful friction between two or more positions—is, I think, that model which is at the heart of the Oxford and Cambridge model.

That is to say broadly we do have lectures, and we do have seminars from graduate students, but that sort of the idea of a tutor in a room—a supervisor with one, two possibly three students—and as it were modeling that kind of dialogical collaborative inquiry into the truth is, that's what we're doing, is hopefully right.

And you can—like I said, it's very difficult to overstate the audience's hunger for that, especially when it's working. I mean, people are drawn to it and pleased, very pleased that it's happening.

And there's public demand for—I mean, when I talked—you know this—when I talked to Harrison in Dublin and London, we had like 8,000 and 10,000 people, and it was a good faith conversation, you know? And when we asked the audience if they wanted to switch to Q&A or continue the dialogue, they were overwhelmingly in support of continuing the dialogue.

And we've underestimated that. We've underestimated public intelligence, partly because of technological shortcomings, I think, is that there is a hunger for this.

And it's being fed by ideologies. If it isn't fed properly, it's fed by ideologies. And I don't know what to make of the ignorance versus malevolence idea.

You know, I mean, it's a little a column and a little column B because I do see the delight. Like, let me get tell you a quick story, so you tell me if you think this is ignorance or malevolence.

So when I debated Slavo Zizek, I did a 15-minute critique of the Communist Manifesto, and there were a lot of radical leftists in the audience, and they'd come to hear Zizek, you know, take me apart.

Although that isn't what happened in the discussion; we just had a discussion. And I mentioned at one point that the Communist Manifesto was an incitement to bloody violence and mayhem, and like a fifth of the audience laughed and cheered.

And it was that freudian revelation of unconscious motivation: you know they're all individuals in the crowd, so they're masked; they can manifest their darkest motivations without fear of revelation. And it just stopped me cold for about 10 seconds.

And I thought, yeah, yeah, no kidding. It's like, we'll go dance in the streets when things are burning. And is that towards some higher good or is it just—it's about time those bastards got what they deserved?

And it isn't obvious to me that that's a manifestation of the striving for higher good. I mean, it's complicated, right? Because if you identify evil in some sense, you have an obligation to deal with it.

But then if you don't identify the evil that's within and you externalize it, your motives are suspect right away because it's just too convenient. And you might say, well, that's ignorance.

And I do think that's part of it, but the convenience factor—it can't be overlooked. Like, first of all, your moral obligation is only to persecute those who are evil, so that lifts a huge weight off your shoulders.

And then you get to do anything terrible you want because you've identified the adversary himself and it's not you. And if that's ignorance, it's so deep that it transforms itself at that point into a kind of willfully blind malevolence.

That's how it looks to me certainly—that's true. I mean, I've been reading more and more of René Girard recently and the way he describes these sort of crowd pathologies and the way that a kind of mob can, as it were, lose its mind through mimetic desire, through simply imitating what they take the rest of the crowd to be doing.

I find yes, they're imitating a central animating spirit too, right? I mean, they're imitating something that you might think of as technically satanic, and that animates the entire crowd.

And it's very difficult to explain something like Nazi Germany without going down that pathway.

Yes, yes.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yes.

I think that—that's certainly right, and I think the problem in the modern context is that technology and social media in particular, of course, has catalyzed that kind of—that mania, that more malevolent spirit in the crowd, and it's escalated that.

The possible ostracism and any kind of digital star chambers and council culture and so on and so forth, and it's something that we're going to—well, the genie is out of the bottle.

It's very, very difficult to work out how we get—I'll tell you something that's pretty interesting is, you know, when I have a conversation like this and it goes well, and then thousands of people comment, the comments are unbelievably positive.

And so it's possible for that conversation to be de-pathologized in the presence of the appropriate conversation. I mean, if you look at that conversation with you on me park— that the comments are so unbelievably positive that it's difficult.

They're as positive in a shocking way as Twitter mob comments can be paused, can be shocking in a negative way. And so then it's up to people who can engage in an intense dialogue at the edge of what we know to do so.

And I think increasingly to do so publicly because that the technology affords us that possibility.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes, it's not all bad and it can offer forms of belonging, even though it's only virtual belonging that can really satisfy an urge for community and a sense that atomization, the atomization that we've seen over the last few decades, can be overcome.

Yeah, and I think a lot of the possibility too of these dialogical investigations that might have been isolated to Cambridge and Oxford to become part of the public dialogue—wouldn't that be something?

So I'm pretty sure both sides would benefit from that sort of exchange. And another ground of hope is, is my consistent experience has been that the noisy, shouty, illiberal people are a minority.

There's a much larger majority of people who are uncertain and intimidated but in the right circumstances could be liberated and would welcome this kind of honest rational give and take a reasoned kind of exchange.

So I think that that's a ground for hope too, and whatever the disadvantages that the—in the disinhibiting effects of social media are, well, maybe we could get fortunate, continue this conversation at some point at Cambridge or Oxford with some other people.

That would be really good if we could manage it as far as I'm concerned. And once we can travel again, and once I can travel, I really like that.

A lot.

I like that a lot. Good.

Thank you very much for agreeing to participate in this.

And it's really good to see both of you again, and hopefully we'll, at the right time, do this again, and maybe with some other people too.

So if you guys can think of some other people that would be good contributors to this, you know, we could open it up a bit, and that would be, if you think it's worthwhile, that would be good as far as I'm concerned.

Absolutely.

But let's work on seeing each other in the flesh over here sooner or later.

I like that a lot.

I like that a lot. Good.

Thank you for having us, Jordan.

Well, thank you very much for the conversation. I really appreciate it.

I have to say goodbye.

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