Q & A - Sir Roger Scruton & Dr Jordan B Peterson - Apprehending the Transcendent

There are two ways of meditating on death. One is the morbid way, which is a kind of avoidance of life and a sense that nothing is worthwhile because it's all going to come to an end. The other is the creative way of recognizing that your mortality is a fundamental part of all that you hope for. You know, when we fall in love with another person, one is consciously taking under one's care a mortal being. It's the sense of her fragility and her mortality which is fundamental to the love that one feels towards her, in my view.

If you try and exclude the thought of death, then that love is weakened, and the sense that you have that she is absolutely dependent on that love, and of course will one day escape from it through death, is absolutely a part of what love is. That is why we find in erotic love a kind of redemption. That's what I would say. I would say as well that it's an aid to concentration and focus. You don't have much time, and there's plenty of problems, and it's going to be a hard road no matter what.

So, get at it. You know, for years when I was in my 20s, the first thought I had when I woke up in the morning was, “Life is short.” Really, literally, it happened to me for years and I thought, “No time to waste. There are things to be done. There are things that need doing. Get the hell up! Make yourself efficient. Aim at something that makes the transience of life worthwhile, because such things exist.”

Then do everything you can to manifest everything you can within that mortal frame. It adds to life a seriousness that would otherwise be absent. I'll tell you my plumber's story because that makes it concrete. I've done a lot of home renovation. I've worked with lots of workmen on very creative projects, as a matter of fact. That was very entertaining because, with carpenters, for example, we built a quite strange and unique third floor on my house in Toronto.

I invited the carpenters to contribute. I told them what the overall view was and what we were trying to produce, but if they had creative ideas then I was welcoming them because I wanted them to be fully on board. I didn't want to tell them what to do; I wanted to produce something beautiful with them fully on board so that it was likely to manifest itself in the best possible manner.

That competence that I described, rather in a utilitarian manner, is almost immediately transcended by something that's more potent and more valuable in the actuality of it. If you're participating in a project like that and you invite people into a reciprocal relationship, then the relationship begins to transcend the particularities of the project, and then the project goes wonderfully well.

That is a reflection of something deeper, and it touches on something that Sir Roger mentioned: the statement by Christ that if two or three people are gathered together in his name, then he's there. You can infuse every relationship you have with precisely that spirit if you're cognizant of it and careful. I mean, it's unfortunate and far more than that. It's a thing to strive for, and you won't manifest it perfectly, but that can be there.

In all the particularity, you have the singularity of the project itself, the practicality of it. There's a reason that Christ was also a carpenter, right? A house that's not built on truth does not stand. Those particular relationships should partake of that divine, the divinity of ultimate reciprocity, and then both are elevated.

The narrowness of, say, capitalist trade is insufficient, but it's embedded in something that, when it's not a zero-sum game, is far deeper than that and far more gratifying. If you're careful about such things, then the projects that you involve yourself with, even somewhat mundane ones, can take on a much more beautiful and productive nature.

Well, it's not frustrating; it's compelling, and it works. So, yeah, I would just add to that, what Jordan has said really, is that in a job rightly done, the divine is imminent in some way. You know what George Herbert said: “In whose sweets of rumors for thy laws makes that, and the action fine.”

Okay, we leave out these days that “drug makes drudgery divine,” but Herbert was absolutely right about that. If you ask the question, “Where does God enter the ordinary life?” it is in that sense of doing something for its own sake and acquiring the habit of doing so, and not wanting a reward beyond the thing.

This connects with Aristotle's conception of what a virtue is as well. One shouldn't despair that there is a moral education available to us, even in a world where there isn't a formalized and shared religion that will bring that aspect of things to bear on human life.

What I would say is that happiness means, ultimately, the fulfillment as a person, and that isn't the same as gratification of your desires. It means the kind of transformation of your being such that you can look on what you are and say, “For all my faults, I accept that thing.” When an occasion comes to rejoice, you accept it and enter it rather than asking yourself, “Do I deserve it?”

That avoidance of joy, which many people have, is actually a kind of narcissism. The happy person goes out and embraces the occasion for rejoicing, and he does so because his own nature is at ease with itself. You can incorporate this into it. Of course, there's a lot more to it. One has to have, as Aristotle says, “Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.”

What he meant was that if you don't have the virtues, you're treading always on thin ground, that you will fall through. You know that wonderful moment when at last she is going to say yes? Your nature as a predator is revealed, to use Jordan's image, and you fall irrecoverably.

But anyway, that's brief discourse on unhappiness. For me, I find a tremendous—first of all, there's an alliance between happiness and gratitude, and you touched on that. If you're going to accept the tragic reality of life, let's say, then it's also reasonable to accept happiness when it comes your way and to be grateful for it.

To be grateful for it is to accept it and to enjoy it while it makes its presence felt. It's something that visits, I would say, and you can invite that visitation. I would say I do that primarily by playing. I was very playful with my kids and my wife and still am. I mean, most of the time with my kids, it was non-stop jokes of one form or another.

My daughter can barely say anything that isn't a joke of some sort. I hang around with comedians all the time, and I usually have my best discussions with them. My best friends when I grew up, especially when I was a young man, were people who were inveterate joke tellers. Mostly, what we did was competitive humor.

The whole goal of a social gathering was to see who could say the most outrageously funny thing, and that was unbelievably entertaining. If that comes along and you can participate in it, and you can play, so much the better. It's even useful to touch things that are difficult with a playful and light hand, which is partly why I travel with Dave Rubin in my lecture series.

Because Dave's a professional stand-up comedian as well as a serious person in his own right, all of the very disturbing lectures that I put forward—because I think they are disturbing—are laced with humor. That purpose is purposeful; it's necessary and desirable.

But that doesn't mean that I think that short-term happiness is a goal, which I certainly don't think that it is.