Abrahamic Faith in the “Age of Feeling” – Professor Robert George and Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

good evening greetings of peace and blessings welcome to the historic Princeton University Chapel the walls of this Chapel are witness to many great Interfaith celebrations and conversations including from the likes of people like Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali my name is Imam suhaib Sultan and I serve as your full-time Muslim chaplain here at Princeton University before we begin one logistical note is that for the Muslims who are looking for an evening space of worship for their Maghrib Prayers right outside the chapel across on the lawn you'll find these sheets that are laid out and so you can immediately after the event offer your prayers on behalf of the James Madison program in American ideals and institutions the Muslim Life program in the office of religious life and the religious Life Council who we would especially like to thank for giving up their Interfaith hour to make this event possible I would like to welcome you to this evening's conversation entitled abrahamic religion in the age of feeling featuring our very own Dr Robert George of the politics Department here at Princeton University and Sheikh Hamza Yusuf co-founder and president of zetuna college America's first Muslim liberal arts college based in Berkeley California it is my honor to introduce these two public intellectuals and Scholars who are shaping our society today Robert P George holds Princeton's McCormick chair in jurisprudence and is the founding director of the James Madison program in American ideals and institutions he served as chairman of the United States Commission on International religious freedom and before that on the president's Council on bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on civil rights he also served as the U.S member of unesco's world Commission on the ethics of scientific knowledge and Technology he is a former judicial fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States where he received the Justice Tom C Clarke award he is the author of in defense of natural law making men moral civil liberties and public morality The Clash of orthodoxies law religion and Morality In crisis conscience and its enemies confronting the dogmas of liberal secularism and co-author of embryo a defense of human life body self-dualism in contemporary ethics and politics What is marriage man and woman a defense of conjugal reunion what marriage is and why it matters his scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as the Harvard Law review the Yale Law Journal the Columbia Law review the American Journal of jurisprudence and the review of politics Professor George is a recipient of many honors and awards including the presidential citizens medal the honorific medal for the defense of human rights of the Republic of Poland the Canterbury medal of the bucket found fund for religious liberty the Sydney Hook memorial Award of the National Association of Scholars the Philip Merrell Award of the American Council of trustees and alumni the Bradley prize for intellectual and Civic achievement and Princeton University's president's award for distinguished teaching he has given honorific lectures at Harvard Yale University of Saint Andrews and Cornell University he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and holds honorary doctorates of law ethics science letters Divinity Humanities law and moral values civil law human Humane letters and judicial science a graduate of Swarthmore College he holds JD and MTS degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of Doctorate of philosophy from Oxford University in November of 2016 he will receive the degrees of BCL and DCL from Oxford please give a big round of applause to Dr Robert George and in conversation is Sheikh Hamza Yusuf president and Senior faculty member of zetuna college America's first accredited Muslim liberal arts college he is an advisor to Stanford University's program in Islamic Studies and the center for Islamic Studies at Berkeley's graduate theological Union in addition he serves as vice president for the forum for promoting peace in Muslim societies which was founded and is currently presided over by Sheikh Abdullah one of the top jurists and masters of Islamic Sciences in the world is the author of several books and scholarly articles and has translated major creedal Islamic texts into English books he has authored or translated include purification of the heart the content of character the Creed of Imam attahawi Caesarean moonbirths prayer of the oppressed an agenda to change our condition recently Sheikh Hamza Yusuf was ranked as the Western world's most influential Islamic scholar by the Muslim 500 edited by John Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin and on a much more personal and communal note Sheikh Hamza is a teacher and someone who is responsible for raising a generation of young men and women in this country and putting them on the path to God and love for the prophet peace be upon him so we welcome Yusuf to be in conversation thank you all so much for coming and please enjoy the conversation that is about to begin well thank you very much sohave on behalf of the James Madison program in American ideals and institutions I want to say how grateful we are uh to the program in Muslim life for co-sponsoring this event uh with us it's a pleasure to be working uh with Imam sahab and with arsha and all of our friends uh in the Muslim Community here at Princeton and a special word of Welcome to all our guests including our many Muslim guests who've come to hear uh Sheikh Hamza it's always great to bring Shay kamsa to the campus because not only do we get him but we get so many people really from the entire corridor from Washington DC to Boston uh who come to hear this eminent scholar and thinker and it's always a blessing for me personally to be together with my dear friend and collaborator uh Sheikh Hamza Sheikh Hamza and I have worked together on many issues the sanctity of human life the question of religious liberty the attempt to do something about the terrible plague of pornography which is ravaging our culture especially our young people most especially our our young men and working together with him is really a an enormous gift to me I admire Sheikh Hamza not only for his obvious Brilliance but for his courage takes a lot of courage to speak the truth out loud especially in our current climate Sheikh Hamza has put his very life on the line for the sake of the truth and for the sake of bearing witness to the fundamental values that are shared by the great abrahamic traditions of Faith so that makes it a special privilege to have the opportunity to to be in conversation public conversation in your presence with Sheikh Hamza so I'm going to turn it over to Sheikh Hamza just to give him an opportunity to say hello and then I'm going to say a word about the title of this evenings a conversation and launches Hamza okay the compassionate and prayers and peace upon all of our prophets and and our Prophet Muhammad first of all it's it's always an honor to come and and be with Dr George I obviously have great regard for his intelligence and his piety and his commitment to certain things that are very difficult because he also gets death threats for his positions as well and I think telling the truth in any time and place has always been a difficult thing and uh we are called to be Witnesses I think the abrahamic Traditions share that idea of being Witnesses the Quran says be Witnesses unto the truth and it actually says even if it's against your own selves so sometimes we have to acknowledge the shortcomings within our own Traditions adherence behavior and actions and this is an incredible venue to do this I think one of the things that both of us share is a love of tradition and I think one of the Hallmarks of true tradition is Beauty and one of the Hallmarks of a loss of tradition is ugliness hence so many ugly modern buildings so it's really nice to be in such an incredible environment good thank you Hamsa abrahamic faith in the age of feeling I suspect I won't have to say much about abrahamic faith you know what I'm talking about the tradition to which Muslims Jews and Christians all bear witness and make claim to the revelation to Abraham who is called by Catholics I'm myself a Catholic referred to by Catholics as our father in faith but other Christians certainly Jews and Muslims all say the the same thing we look back to that revelation of God to a human being to Abraham on whom certain demands were made and with whom God entered into a covenant sociologists whether they happen to be people of Faith or not refer to abrahamic Faith as a species or perhaps the archetype of what they call ethical monotheism we understand monotheism the belief that there is one and only one God what do the sociologists mean when they say ethical monotheism this is the idea that the one and only God makes certain demands on human beings who are his creatures but special creatures unlike brewed animals special creatures animals yes but rational animals who are rational are free and who can choose and who can therefore choose good or bad right or wrong life or death and The One and Only God according to the traditions of ethical monotheism and joins human beings to choose the good over the evil the right over the wrong life over death and to be responsible for our choices so even if a sociologist is looking at the matter without any reference to personal religious Faith sociologist recognizes that faith is not simply the human quest for consolation or meaning from a Divine source but with the ethical monotheistic traditions there is a sense of being under moral obligations being accountable as rational and free creatures now what about the age of feeling that's an odd phrase or locution is it not what do we mean by the age of feeling I think the best way to explain it is this way intellectual historians and sometimes social historians are very fond of breaking up time into ages or epochs so those of you who've either formally or informally studied history we'll know what I'm talking about when I refer to the the tendency of intellectual historians to refer to the middle ages sometimes as the age of Faith the medieval period is sometimes called the age of faith in the age of faith Conformity to the truths of religion whether Muslim Christian Jewish Conformity the truths of faith was the Criterion of Truth of goodness of virtue the way we distinguished right from wrong desirable from undesirable worthy from unworthy and then the historians tell us there came a period called the enlightenment and they refer to the enlightenment as the age of reason and in the Age of Reason or sometimes called the age of science it was Conformity to the Norms of rational inquiry scientific evidence empirical or something like empirical fact that was the Criterion of Truth of goodness of rightness of virtue now of course those are oversimplifications and the historians who use those categories would be the first to tell you that there's necessarily oversimplification there it's not as if no one in the Middle Ages had ever heard of reason or that they dismissed reason in favor of faith on the contrary if we look at the great Jewish thinkers or the great Muslim thinkers or the great Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages and we can all name some of them we find that they are people who far from seeing reason and faith in a sharp opposition see reason and Faith rather as forming a Unity as relying on each other and supporting each other and being mutually supportive the late Pope Pope John Paul II whom we Catholics call say Saint John Paul II Saint John Paul the great had a wonderful image for this he said that faith and reason are like the two Wings on which the human Spirit ascends to contemplation of the truth we we know that a bird can't get off the ground no matter how hard it flaps if it's flapping with only one Wing if the other Wing is injured it takes the two wings and that was certainly true of the great thinkers of the abrahamic faiths in the medieval period And yet who can quarrel really with the characterization of the medieval period as the Age of Faith and similarly with the Age of Reason with the enlightenment it's a caricature of the Enlightenment to suppose that the enlightenment in all times in all places during the Enlightenment simply through religion over through faith over yes we see that in a writer such as Hume but not so much in some of the other writers of the period read some of the great Scottish enlightenment figures yes it makes sense to refer to the enlightenment as the Age of Reason but many of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment period saw faith and reason as not necessarily antithetical but if the medieval period was the age of faith and the enlightenment was the Age of Reason then what is the age in which we live how would we characterize our age what do people tend to treat as the Criterion of Truth as against falsehood of goodness is against evil as virtue as against Vice of right is against wrong was worthiness against unworthiness we'll hear my proposition which forms the title of our discussion or figures in the title of our discussion is there's a profound sense it's an oversimplification as these things are but still not entirely false I think it tells us something about our time if we say that we live in the age of feeling when the Criterion of truth of goodness of rightness is in a certain sense neither Faith nor reason those hard objective realities or so they were thought to be by the great medieval thinkers of the three abrahamic faiths or by the thinkers of the Enlightenment but rather something more subjective feeling and so we try to assess the validity of a claim by reference not simply to Scientific evidence or to the standards of faith but to feeling is there a reality Beyond feeling or is feeling what is fundamental is feeling what is ultimately real and this it seems to me hamsa is the challenge for the abrahamic Traditions perhaps it's also the challenge for the Eastern faiths I just don't know them well enough to be able to say it would be very interesting to enter into dialogue with some of our Hindu and Buddhist friends see how the issue looks to them but certainly the traditions of the abrahamic faiths have been formed with the idea that faith and reason are our fundamental criteria of Truth this is not to say that feeling is necessarily bad or that we learn nothing from the assessment of feeling or the the contemplation of feeling or for asking people how they feel but that feeling is not fundamentally what the reality is how one feels about something doesn't change the underlying reality of the of the thing so ethics for example for the great ethical monotheistic religions it's not simply a matter of Consulting one's feelings how do you feel about abortion how do you feel about the death penalty how do you feel about whatever the moral issue is it's what's the underlying reality that can't be changed by how you feel on the contrary the task if we look at the great medieval thinkers for example the task is to bring our feelings into harmony with the underlying reality say the truths of faith or what can be known by reason doesn't work the other way round and yet these ancient Traditions Living Traditions now confront a new thing and to what extent empirically do and normatively should our Traditions accommodate themselves to the new idea or ideas in the age of feeling and to what extent is it their Duty to resist to treat the age of feeling or some of its norms as not things to be conformed to but rather as ideas to be resisted lest the truths of the faith be lost and here I think is where the rubber meets the road and then I'll hand it over to Sheikh Hamza all of these great ethical monotheistic traditions in their traditional formulations make powerful demands on the faithful they require not just the specialists in religion the priests the rabbis the imans but all men and women they make demands to high standards of ethical conduct the virtues all of them honesty to chastity courage fidelity are demanded of oh and their hard demands in many cases to live up to it's not just the easy stuff at least as traditionally understood to be a Muslim to be a Jew to be a Christian is not an easy thing not only are there ritual demands in the case of Islam and Judaism also dietary restrictions and those sorts of things there are the high moral demands of ethical monotheism no matter how you feel about them no matter how much you might desire another man's wife you can't have her precisely because she is another man no matter how much you covet or think you could use better make better use of another person's property you can't take it no matter how you feel about it difficult demanding norms that can't be relativized or set aside on the basis of how anyone feels I'll close this opening remark by just telling a story of of a famous fellow Christian not a woman I've ever met but a famous Christian Evangeline in this case an Evangelical Christian singer known far and wide throughout the Evangelical Christian Community she left her husband for another woman's husband and when she did her public justification for an act condemned by her faith was that God would not have put into her heart her love for this new man or into his heart his love for her if he did not mean them to be together even though it meant abandoning their own families their it seems to me is the challenge for the abrahamic faiths in the age of feeling the Criterion of that singer for the rightness of an action is not Faith as such we know what the Christian faith or Jewish faith or Islamic faith says about adultery it's not even the demands of reason that wasn't her plea it was that she knew something about where she belonged and what it was right for her to do or at least not wrong for her to do in virtue of something subjective not objective something personal to her her feelings Hamza well you know that Plato considered the poets great corrupters of of societies and she was probably a woman that grew up on songs from the 60s that had lyrics like If Loving You Is Wrong I Don't Want to Be Right I remember that one or if you can't be with the one you love Love the One You're With yeah so those are those are perfect songs those are the hymns of the age of feeling right so yeah feelings feelings are important feelings are very interesting feelings in some ways are what make us human and but we we don't simply feel because animals we know feel animals have feelings we actually have dogs in our culture that are on Prozac because they're depressed veterinarians actually do use antidepressants on dogs one of the things that this dog whisperer says is that he's found that it's always the family that's depressed that makes the dog depressed it's never the dog he's just reflecting the feelings that he's getting the Vibes Good Vibrations or bad vibrations to quote another 60s song so uh one of the one of the problems I think with religion today is that it has lost in many ways it's true Defenders because historically the vast majority of people and today the vast majority of believers are people that um that feel in their hearts that what they believe is right and true and a lot of it is non-cognitive it's not really Faith it's not so much about reason for a lot of Believers but that Faith traditionally and as you well know was considered very flimsy faith and a dangerous Faith to have because somebody could create doubt in in their hearts and this is certainly what the devil the role that the devil plays whether it's a a human incarnation of that concept or whether it's doubts that come to the Mind however you want to call the Devil he's got a lot of names but the the the Muslims actually felt that that Faith had to be rooted in reason and this was the dominant opinion it was to such a degree that some Scholars actually argued that blind Conformity to Faith was unacceptable but the majority said if that was the case then we would have to say the vast majority of Believers did not have faith and so they compromised and this is from tajidina an 8th Century scholar from Syria who said as long as the faith could withstand the the loss of faith of the one that they were blindly following oh then it was true Faith it's an interesting concept so I think the age and you know Durant's famous history of civilization he's got the age of faith and then the Age of Reason which I think is a really problematic type of taxonomy because I think I think in some ways the age of faith is far more reasonable than the modern period because they rooted so much in reason and they thought deeply about what reason was and just to give you an example the ethical crises I mean you you're very well aware of the fact that Hume created a major problem and he made a distinction between prescriptive and descriptive statements so he said you could not get an ought from an from an is statement so if you had a factual statement you could not get some kind of prescriptive art from that statement so you can't say that cigarette smoking causes cancer therefore you ought not smoke but that's not something that can be proven demonstrably by any stretch this was this was the idea and obviously Kant this was a crisis for him to try to root virtue ethics in in some other in some other let me see if I can pull this down to root ethics in in in some other Foundation than it was previously rooted in and so he attempted to root it in in human reason but we know that all of the abrahamic faiths were committed to the idea of philosophical ethics that there was actually a way of reasoning in which you could arrive at a prescriptive truth from a descriptive reality and one of the things that I teach in our ethics course I teach the nicomaki in ethics and in book six he makes a very interesting distinction about this would be Aristotle Aristotle about descriptive and prescriptive truths he said they're different they're different types of truths and he argues that prescriptive truth is rooted in right desire and this is something in many ways of the modern world rejects this idea of right desire and Aristotle would argue and I think all of the great ethicists from the Jewish the Islamic and the Christian tradition would would agree with that argument that right desire is is the desire that leads to to happiness and and and fulfillment of of the of the human being and if the desire is perverted then it will actually lead to the opposite which is the soul becomes troubled and I think I think it's very hard to argue given the type society that we are living in now it's very hard to argue that people are happy when we actually look at the statistics in social sciences that we have out there I don't think people are doing very well on the other hand it's arguable that every time and place has these crises also but as somebody who I I lived in in a in a Bedouin culture and what really struck me in living with Bedouin is I didn't see anybody that had any signs of depression the people that I lived with in West Africa were deeply rooted in faith and reason this was one of the rare examples in human history of Aboriginal nomadic people that had a Scholastic tradition so I actually studied inside a tent Aristotelian logic with a Bedouin teacher which is really amazing and I'll just give you an example that in the Islamic tradition there's a fourth Century scholari who came up with a unique atomic theory of of the world and putting them in his book on the history of atomic theories actually argues in the chapter on Islamic atomic theory that this is a unique theory that it doesn't come out of Greek thought and um a lot of it's based on euclidean Geometry and the concept of a point but I remember once uh this student was trying to understand what he meant that the world was made up of atoms and my teacher he took a handful of sand and and he blew it and he said if the veil was lifted you would see everything look like this and and so here's a very primitive people on the one hand a very primitive Society but on the other hand they were grappling with some really really sophisticated ideas and it made me wonder what was it like in the great centers of civilization like Baghdad and fast and and Tunis and and Damascus if this is the Bedouin remnant of that tradition because Mauritania is one of the last places that really has this Scholastic tradition that they're holding on to it and and so I think the the importance and centrality of rooting things in reason for the abrahamic peoples was was it it was so Central to the tradition what's happened now is because of a loss of real metaphysics and and and as you know the the the most fundamental metaphysical question is why is there something as opposed to nothing and and this most people don't really that that idea does not occupy their thoughts but if they would allow it to occupy their thoughts their thoughts will will automatically make a uh an exponential leap from where they are in their unexamined existence to really having a difficult question put in front of them and I think modern people don't realize how profound that that question is and then the other thing I would add to that is because science as you know the the science today is is the only acceptable methodology to examine reality so empirical science is the is the only way that we can really examine reality that that philosophy in its in its medieval sense of the word or even ancient sense of the word is seen now as really um meaningless statements that that it's purely speculative thought and and that's because the idea if we're in this church and this is all we know of the world we don't know about Princeton let alone New Jersey let alone the United States let alone the planet Earth let alone the universe we're just in this church and we've been here all our lives and this is all we've ever known and if somebody escapes and and comes into the church and tells us there's a whole other world out there most of the people in the church would find that very difficult to believe that this is all they've ever known and one of the problems with with with modern thought is they deny the possibility of Ever Getting outside of material reality and yet thought itself is an immaterial reality and therefore thinking about it is already being outside of it because Consciousness no matter how hard they try they have never proven that Consciousness has a has a material basis this is I think the important aspect of of the philosopher Thomas Nagel the Contemporary atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel's uh critique of uh contemporary scientism whether it's darwinian or uh or or otherwise that we cannot come up with a material purely material scientistic explanation of Consciousness itself it does seem to be an immaterial reality Archie we're having trouble aren't we oh I'm sorry yeah it's probably this is the good part how's that is that better all right I apologize all right yeah yeah sorry about that she comes to just said a whole bunch of good stuff I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry you missed it let me uh try a thought that what you said just provoked uh in me and maybe it'll give you a sense of what he just said uh what you described the idea that the only way of getting to the truth of something actually understanding something was the use of the scientific method this is what Hyatt called scientism right yeah uh philosophically defended by The Logical positivists in the early part of the 20th century the Vienna school and so uh that strikes me as a form of fundamentalism right uh it's uh it's not false all the way down because you can learn a lot of important stuff through science what would be without science and there's some things that cannot be studied except by the scientific method but of course it the problem is what it leaves out what we can know uh by other intellectual activities other ways of of inquiring including things like meaning itself um on the other hand while I agree with you that uh there's a strong prejudice in our culture in favor of scientism especially in some sectors of the intellectual class in The Sciences themselves although there are plenty of scientists who reject scientists but still sometimes there and in the social sciences right where an effort is made to try to explain social reality which are after all reality phenomena that are constituted at least in part by human deliberation judgment choice and action trying to explain social reality uh by purely scientific methods which you know has to be a failure if you understand that people have in addition to all sorts of other things freedom of the will right so it can't be you can't just account for uh human activity comprehensively the way you can account for the movement of billiard balls across a plane across a billiard table or something like that well I agree with all that uh it seems to me that at the same time there's a kind of fundamental fundamentalism at The Other Extreme which takes the form of uh ideologically takes the form of post-modernism right and that's the idea that nothing can be trusted intellectually that intellectual work whether it is in literature whether it is in history whether it's in the Sciences themselves in the extreme case is simply rationalizations for power right and what what what the goal of intellectual activity should be is essentially manipulative right you know uh shifting power gaining power for the powerless if we if that's our if that's our thing getting power for for oneself if that's once uh if that's one's thing and it seems to me that too is a form of of of fundamentalism you know if you're going to understand uh literature and history and a lot of other things among the things you have to understand are power relations right uh but that's not the whole picture that's only uh part of the picture perhaps a relatively small uh well I I yeah I think those and those ideas if you look at the the fundamental influencers behind those ideas they were all alienated individuals and not as an ad hominem attack against them but if you look at Dairy da derida was a a Jew raised in Algeria in a very alienated environment Michelle Foucault was a homosexual in a society that did not accept that behavior as normative behavior and and Edward Syed who really starts postcolonial studies is is a Palestinian disenfranchised in his own land so I think that the appeal of a lot of the post-structuralist critical theorists is very strong because it's it's their voicing those who people consider having no voices but when you look at the intellectual history of where these ideas come from they also become I think completely disempowering ideas I I find them completely disempowering ideas and and they end up also not allowing for any metaphysical understanding of what the world means to me as an individual like what is happening here and and when you remove God from the equation then I think critical theory makes perfect sense but when God is still part of the of of the way you're understanding the world critical theory I think especially in its post-structuralist iteration is the single most dangerous thing to uh Theology and to abrahamic metaphysics so if you disenchant the world you would expect both of those things scientism and post-modernism or post-structural I think so because science has largely if we look in our country about 80 percent I don't know the exact figures but a large number of our scientists are actively engaged in the military-industrial complex and so science in some ways scientists have prostituted themselves to the The Temptations of serving power to put this in a in a critical theory way of looking at at the world and and and and I think for instance I don't think anybody with true Faith could ever invent the Napalm bomb I just don't believe that I think if they had an ounce of ethical uh character they just could not come up with a bomb that burnt people and and one one of the most terrifying things to me is that when the Viet Cong began to build large ponds in the middle of their Villages so when the Napalm came they would run and jump in the water a scientist here developed waterproof napalm as a way of preventing that from happening and so I think a lot of what has happened in our lifetime the 20th century has been one of the it actually has been the bloodiest Century in human history wars fought on ideological grounds but having very little to do with religion unless you Define religion as ideology um which is what Christopher Hitchens exactly I think they all try to do that and I don't think it's really fair to religion I mean human beings have obviously ways of um understanding the world and these these modern ideas certainly materialism and Marxism have been very appealing to large numbers of people and mostly to people that have been oppressed one of the things I find really fascinating in Marxism is the quote that religion is the opiate of the masses like this is this is Mark's great statement of religion but it's never quoted in its entirety because what he said was religion is the sigh of the oppressed it's the heart of a heartless world it's the soul of a soulless place it is the opiate of the masses in other words it's a way of numbing the pain of the world now what what our modern world has done it has removed religion to fulfill the function of a actually healthy opiate and it's replaced it with a real opium we have a huge opioid crisis right now in this country people are numbing themselves to the pain of the world because they have lost spiritual grounding in what the world is and what it has always been I don't I think one of the myths of the modern world somehow is that um I think the whole idea of progress and this idea that human beings can transcend their nature and now we've got transhumanism which is is really they're giving us a utopian a technological Utopia they're going to remove all of these problems with being human through this transhumanistic adventure and they're spending billions of dollars it's not a joke they're spending billions of dollars on this and this is something C.S Lewis in the abolition of man was one of his great concerns and I'm amazed at his prescience to really call attention to these these things another person is Louis Mumford who's I don't think read anymore but Mumford to me if you read mumford's uh Trilogy on the Pentagon of power Mumford saw what was happening as well and so I think a lot of our intellectuals in in the 20th century were very troubled by what they saw coming but what's confronting us right now as a species without the ethical tools that allow for really serious prescriptive answers um we we're I think we're right now we're we can we can possibly completely lose our Humanity are we addicted uh culturally uh to consolation and comfort in other words is that why people are turning to opioids or or treating religion as mere consolation it sounds as though you know when my father used to say that Hollywood could never do tragedy yeah yeah it's it's just not capable of doing try they always had to make a happy and happy ending yeah because tragedy is the two halves of of life on Earth the comedic and and the tragic and and so um I think I think people do want to in the end the world you know I I tell people um that I talked to about this I actually did uh a lecture called the 17 benefits of tribulation which has really helped a lot of people I actually heard somebody tell an incredible story the other day about it but one thing I tell them is that the world is designed to let you down that it is fundamentally designed to let you down because you cannot put your faith in the world if you put your faith in the world you will always be let down and I think that the this diabolic impulse this idea somehow that the man can solve all of his problems and this is certainly where technologists reside they reside in this world that we're going to get it we're going to have a technological we're going to have a pharmaceutical solution to these problems and and these problems can never be solved technologically they can't be solved pharmaceutically and I don't believe they're going to be solved through transhumanism I think transhumanism is just another arrogant attempt at playing God well I'm sure you're right about that to go back though to this question of religion and and consolation I don't think anyone can deny that among the things we look for in our faith and among the attractions of faith certainly the abrahamic Traditions again I don't know as much about the eastern traditions one of the things we look for is consolation right and some of the great Saints in the different Traditions have well the Holy Spirit the gift of consolation of the Holy Spirit right in Christianity um and yet Marx's account and you were right to quote the whole thing to get it in context uh and it's far less dismissive of religion you're right when when you hear it in context still he's focusing all the way back in what the 1840s right uh on the consolation side of religion but religion makes tremendous demands so where does that fit into the picture uh the tribulations maybe are not so bad right because you get something out of them suffering is Redemptive and if you put your faith in the world you're going to be disappointed right but it's not I agree that suffering is Redemptive King preached that Martin Luther King preached that notion but it's not the suffering itself that it seems to me God is looking for in making the demands on us the demands the basis of the demands is not the suffering will do you good the challenge will do you good right because then the challenge could be anything it's that in fulfilling these demands you grow you are enriched your humanity is fulfilled you you rightly um cited Aristotle earlier and his teaching that uh that the ethical life is the way of to use the Greek now you read modern translations of Aristotle and udiamania is almost always translated as happiness there was a time when that was not misleading because there was a time not all that long ago when happiness was a morally inflected concept it didn't just mean a desirable psychological state where you go around with a smile on your face that might be induced by Valium right or being placed on Bob nozik's experience machine or something right we still can can perceive a little of that sense of the morally inflected notion of Happiness if if we hear a statement it sounds archaic but we still understand it we hear a statement like happy the man who walks in the way of Justice right we know that doesn't mean that the man who walks in the way of justice is going to have a smile on his face all the time and being a kind of Valium type type State because we know the man who walks in the way of justice is probably going to suffer right it's probably going to suffer and yet that's the happiness that Aristotle has in mind so I think it's better to translate today language shifts we understand that today to use the second term you used which is fulfillment or flourishing or flourishing and it seems to me that in ethical monotheism certainly in the Jewish and Christian and Islamic traditions God imposes these demands because these are the way of human well-being right the suffering may have benefits it certainly has costs but um this is the way of odaimania this is the way of right of flourishing and of course the traditional philosophy that I myself represent and and work in the so-called natural law tradition uh is a tradition that attempts to understand by way of rational sure deliberation inquiry right understanding judgment tries to understand the basis the rational basis in the well-being of the human being of the uh of the moral Norms uh Hume as you pointed out at least thought that he introduced uh the distinction between what is and what ought to be the descriptive and the prescriptive but then as you pointed out uh if we go all the way back to Ariston and centuries upon centuries before it used and it's developed then by you know the greatest Thomas of all time or the greatest Aristotelian of all time Thomas Aquinas uh he develops it and this is the idea of the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning right so practical reasoning is our reasoning of the sort that enables us to grasp the intelligible point of something as providing a more than merely instrumental reason for our action which could only present a reason to us if it is capable of being understood as an aspect of human well-being and fulfill our own others our community but some aspect of human well-being and fulfillment so take the example that you used of cigarette smoking uh sure uh the fact that cigarettes cause cancer is by itself just isolated just the fact right how do you get from there to you ought not to smoke cigarettes well Aristotle or Saint Thomas Aquinas would say there's an additional premise that's provided by our deliberation our our judgment's a practical reason and that is that among the aspects of our well-being and fulfillment that we grasp is providing intelligible reasons is our physical well-being it's not the only one there's our intellectual well-being yeah there's our there's our well-being as social creatures or the quality of our relationships our friendships our familial bonds and and and so forth there's the intellectual there's the there's the social there's the there's the there's the the physical we there are many many dimensions of our all-around well-being and right and fulfillment and what the Norms God demands of is these demanding requirements that are imposed by the ethical monotheistic faiths are not God punishing us or even testing us or limiting our Pleasures that's right but but showing us the way to to fulfillment I think the in in the Islamic tradition and I was going to bring this about the book that you wrote uh conscience and its enemies in that first chapter you talked about those necessary conditions and and you mentioned for instance just human dignity the idea of human preservation of family the protection of family and then law that you needed to have a government to protect life and property and and I wanted I told you this before I wanted to write an article called uh when when Robert George meets fajradino razi or Imam because Imam Joanie who was the teacher of al-ghazali and if if [Music] to Islam what Aquinas is to Christianity I think we have a window for him do we not no this is [Music] said that there are six things that religion came to preserve and you identified most of them in that in that article he said the first one was life itself the preservation of life because we cannot know that life is Sanctified except through a supernatural means to do that we we can sanctification sanctification yeah that it's Sanctified uh we we can obviously through reason we we can make arguments that thou shalt not you know Murder unjustified killing but the the argument that it's that the soul is Sanctified is something that comes from a supernatural source and so he argues that preservation of Life preservation of property is another one the idea that that human beings they need a certain modicum of goods to live and those goods that are in their possession should be protected from other people aggressing on them and preservation of religion itself which you missed the the the the the the preservation of of religion and then preservation of intellect so for instance um number four right exactly number four you got five out of this it was I was I was definitely impressed you think of a baseball right so so and then he said preservation of family and present the last one the sixth one was preservation of human dignity I got that yeah and so those six things according to Islamic law all of the laws in Islam go back to preserving one of those six things so the prohibition of alcohol is to preserve the intellect the prohibition of murder to preserve life the prohibition of theft to preserve property the prohibition of fornication and adultery to preserve family and the prohibition of torture is to preserve human dignity there's no law in Islam that you cannot preservation of religion and so what what's fascinating to me is that comes after says we can reduce all of these to two principles that religion is here to accrue benefits for human beings and to ward off harm and this as you well know was the fundamental reason why within ourselves are these two forces the concupiscent or the desirous force the the appetitive soul and the irascible Soul this soul that gets angry real indignation so the the appetitive saw this the appetites that we have are to to benefit our bodies and the the irascible is to ward off harm but when these two override the regulator of of those two which which is reason right when when Imam talks about the pig Soul the dog soul and the sage soul and and so the pig Soul needs to have the shepherd right making sure that it doesn't overeat itself or eat its own young because pigs will eat their own young if they they're hungry enough and and and then the dog Soul ends up can attack the like this poor woman who lost her face she recently died she had tried to commit suicide and the dog was trying to wake her up and bit off her face trying to wake her up but it was her own dog so it wasn't trying to harm her but in the end it did harm her trying to save her so the dog Soul when it takes over will end up harming even though it's there to benefit and so adds a fourth component which Aristotle didn't see and I think it's very interesting and I thought a lot about this and he might be wrong but Aristotle thought that if these three were in Balance which are the three virtues right because the virtue of the the sage the virtue of reason was wisdom or Prudence The Virtue of the irascible Soul was courage and the virtue of the appetitive Soul was temperance he said if these three were functioning in accordance to right desire and and working then it resulted in the fourth cardinal virtue which was Justice gazali argued actually that Justice was the faculty of balance and one of the interesting things you use the word deliberation that we can we deliberate which is from De libere which is out of balance like we weigh things this is what the reasonable human being will do when they're confronted with problems is to weigh things and and and to deliberate and in many ways we're living in a world where we have lost balance were were profoundly out of balance we're out of balance and I mean one of the things this this is a great example of complete Insanity you know the plastic bottle and I will give an example I brought a Bedouin here from West Africa he's a brilliant man really well versed in a lot of Sciences and we were in Arizona in New Mexico and uh I was teaching a course there and he was with me and this person took one of these cups and drank some and threw it in the garbage can and he asked me what is that and I said what the garbage can he said why did he throw that cup in there and I said well those cups are made for one-time use and he said that is a very bad sign when a civilization reaches that level of extravagance like he was horrified by that because he grow he healed the sin of luxury luxuria he he grew up in a place where everything is recycled because desert people live with very limited resources and so the idea of creating a bottle to be used once and thrown out is complete Insanity and we've got we this is not sustainable nobody can argue for the sustainability of a lifestyle of going to Starbucks every day and getting that cup and just throwing it into the garbage can and recycling is a total lie I mean so these these are real problems of balance yeah it's hard to know you know how far to press this and how things are related to each other but but Pope Francis has made one of the themes of his pontificate the idea that we need to turn away from this path we've gone down what he calls the Disposable Society right so on the one hand he does this critique of disrespect for the environment treating everything is disposable as exploitable is usable but he sees that rightly or wrongly he's connected with a larger attitude of disposability that we dispose of relationships if they're no longer giving us our kids aren't getting what we want out of them whether it's a personal friendship cast a supremities whether it's a marriage we cast a wife or a husband aside whether it's a relationship with an institution whatever happened to institutions right you know there's no loyalty Fidelity to the institutions and that you know there's probably something to now you know on the one hand you can't say well look because people are willing to throw away make one use of plastic cups and throw them away that that means they're going to throw away spouses that's true but it's related well that's the question I think it is related and it's about loyalty you know Jackie Robinson he didn't he refused to be traded at the end of his career he he because he was a Brooklyn Dodger so even even it's odd to think about that but there was a time when people actually had real commitments to they worked in corporations for careers and the idea of moving to like head hunting now this idea that you could because when you have a society where avarice avaricia you know I I was just at UC Berkeley and I gave this talk to a group of students at UC Berkeley and I asked them if they knew what the seven deadly sins were and and yet first of all they asked what are sins but no I'm just kidding but um you know and sin is a beautiful word because sin the word in Arabic for sin is which has the exact same meaning as Sin in in Greek in Hebrew and in English Old English it's an archery term really yes for missing the mark and one of the things they asked uh Magic John no it was uh Jordan the basketball player what do you think about when you miss a shot and he said too far too short too much it left too much to the right you know in other words you need to read yeah and so archery it was was it's taught in so many traditional cultures because it teaches you that the flaw is always in in it's not the target it's in you and so sin is missing the target it's it's mistaking and apparent good for a real good and this is something that we don't understand but what what I said to them was that the sin of greed is not to be greedy one time the sin of lust is not to look on another person lustfully one time or two times or even ten times it's actually a state of being to be in that state where it it has taken over your soul and in that way it's a mortal sin because it's putting you in a state that is so dangerous for your own fulfillment it it will destroy the possibility to be fulfilled in this life and possibly in the next life and and so the idea of how do we then Rectify this and this is where religion and the ethical aspect of religion one of one of my favorite quotes from Confucius is he said when I was 15 I set my heart on learning when I was 30 I had no more doubts when I was 40 I knew the Mandate of Heaven when I was 50 when I was 50 I knew the Mandate of Heaven when I was 60 my ear was obedient and when I was 70 my I could fulfill my heart's desire without going astray that that idea of working on the self which you talk a lot about in your book about self-mastery that idea has been so removed from the the the spiritual being of the human being and the where we see it is in sports we see it in sports incredible discipline in sports I mean our great athletes have phenomenal discipline and then they go tear up bathrooms exactly and and this and musicians also in Europe you're a great musician and you know how much work it takes to actually achieve that type of of Mastery but the idea of mastering the soul has really been removed from our civilization and that that to me is the greatest tragedy well let me tie that back uh as best I can to the to the theme of of this conversation uh what she comes as referring to in my own thought is uh a position that I've been pushing very hard that that while there are many different types of freedom uh many different important and valuable types of Freedom including our basic civil liberties and so forth that the most important type of freedom is not freedom from anybody else's oppression but rather self-mastery freedom from being a slave to one's own Wayward desires or passions or feelings or emotions where one is in control of oneself and of course my tutor on this since I haven't ever actually thought of anything new I get this from Plato Aristotle is great teacher and and Plato taught that the goal in life for each of us is to get our souls properly ordered he wasn't afraid to use the term soul he he's not from a an ethical monotheistic traditional though very interestingly in Plato's dialogues you'll be reading along and it seems that he is haphazardly using the plural gods and God In The Singularity yeah it's translation he very often uses God sometimes it's God sometimes it's the gods and uh my own um study of this has persuaded me that uh the distinction basically comes down to this that when he's invoking Divinity more or less ritualistically he goes along with the with the flow of the time and refers to the gods the honor Greek polytheism but when the concept of divinity is doing any real analytical work in the arguments he tends to go to the singular still I I think it's I mean I would argue that because we know that Arc is a uh is an Indian Ark so we know that that a lot of the origins of Greece are from India and in India there is a very strong argument that Hinduism is a monotheistic tradition and that the Hindus distinguish between what they call nirguna and Sir Guna these are two qualities of the Divinity and and these the sirgona is the the the various ways that God reveals himself and these become personified in deities but they're actually only personification the brahmanas know this but the common people tend not to know it um and and and and the nirguna is what in Christianity they would call the godhead that it is the Transcendent unidentifiable that the doubt that his name does not the Eternal Dao and so I think it's Pro the way I read it and this might be just my own desire to see Plato and I know you know that the seventh letter Plato is very clear that he never articulated his true Doctrine so the idea that Aristotle and Plato and Socrates were not in a religious tradition I think is completely false but my point okay and many of the early Muslim Scholars considered the possibility of Socrates being a prophet and Plato yes and Plato and Aristotle students of a prophet that's interesting some of the early Christian fathers speculated about whether Plato might have had either a some access to the Hebrew scripture or B had been given a special personal revelation of the content of the Hebrew scripture because they couldn't otherwise account for his wisdom right but uh where I was going with the point about self-mastery that uh Sheikh Hamza introduced is Plato's teaching that the the our our goal our mission is to properly order the soul and the Soul does have Parts these there's the appetitive the spirited and the rational and when we're disordered the rational is no longer in control right appetite right typically feeling is in control that's feeling yeah right and so what happens to reason what happens to rationality in that context well we all have the experience in this Fallen World we all know what happens it's not just that reason disappears on the contrary reason now gets harnessed by Desire by appetite by emotion in the cause of cooking up rationalizations for conduct that is in truth morally wrong right and so what happens sin what happens is we damage our own character we damage our own whatever else whatever harm we do externally the fundamental harm to ourself is unavoidable by the disordering of the soul and then it's got to be put back into shape and that's very right difficult to do it requires discipline it requires Mastery where the soul is ordered properly of course reason is in charge it's not a stoic or Buddhist Doctrine in which the goal is to eliminate desire or eliminate feeling or eliminate motion no that's not it and the Traditions into which uh Plato's thought that Plato's not contributed to are not Traditions that say get rid of Desire get rid of emotion no there are Traditions that say make sure reasons in charge it's balance it's balanced that's exactly right it's back to that concept of in a way of Justice it's it's getting things in right order where reason has the controlling hand over desire now you'll want desire because you want to get things done right but you want to get good things done and this is what enables us to distinguish right desire or good desire right from Bad desire since desire is not just a given right and a good desire fulfills the the human being in in in in a true sense of that meaning that it contributes to his eudemonia whereas wrong desire I mean one of the things that our Scholars say is that Disobedience out of pleasure is always followed by by a constriction of the soul and that obedience that often involves constriction of the Soul because it's hard to do is always followed by an expansiveness and and it's one of the signs that you've done something good is that it's followed by that what what in the Quran calls you know that that there's it feels good and and this is why people don't like to exercise but but after they finish exercising they always feel good so when we do things that are good for ourselves that we don't like they're always full what follows is something very very positive whereas when you eat that cheesecake that initially appears very desirable but afterwards you're like why did I do that exactly and this is you know these are these are very mundane examples but when it gets to sin like really because the cheesecake isn't gonna put your soul into Perdition but but that other person's wife will and and uh and and those will never leave and we have an innumerable films where the the scene after the sin is yeah why did I do and it's just our common experience I mean it's our Human Experience um back to religion we mentioned earlier uh Hitchens efforts to blame all evil on on religion by identifying the great ideologies that produce the bloodbaths of the 20th century on religion at the same time I think uh in in in trying to rectify that uh slander against religion we have to acknowledge as as men of faith that much wrong has been done and is being done in the name of and much of your witness of course right right now and and you so courageously you know born the the consequences with the threats against your your yourself is an effort uh within the uh Islamic uh world to stand up against uh crimes that are being committed in the name of religion and uh I don't doubt at least in some cases sincerely not not just where religion is being used as a cover uh for something else but you know we look at the history of Christianity uh we see the same thing now now you know it's been the numbers are not anywhere on the scale of what fascism or Nazism or communism produced just in terms of the death toll but or capitalism or liberal secularism I mean if we look at the abortion Holocaust right I mean there's a million dead Iraqis yeah true enough so we um we we have to I think uh uh you know face up to that reality as well but not I think by um um rejecting anything about religion itself right but but rather by drawing on the resources and here of course you've done it brilliantly as well as courageously the resources within our own traditions for the critique right of the forces within our Traditions that have resorted unjustifiably right the violence I don't see any alternative to that it seems to me wherever evil is being done right in the name of faith people from that faith have got to draw on the resources of that Faith right for the critique of the wrongdoing otherwise it's just going to be constant War well I think one of the the great crises and calamities of the current situation is that that the the face are enlisted in um in in in political conflicts like right now the the Iranian Arab crises I mean it's it's not about Sunni Shia conflicts this is about Persian Arab politics and and and and yet religion is always enlisted I I it's kind of overly I consider it I consider it's impressed yeah you know it's forced into it's not enlisted it's impressed and and so that that's a real problem but I think that if we look at the the major crisis in Islam right now it's it's a crisis of authority and the Catholics have an advantage because they have the magisterium and and so the the the the the the pope and the and the Sea of cardinal they can they can determine what policy if for one of a better word what What doctrine not relying on charismatic Authority exactly and and and and that helps to a great deal the Muslims are like the the rabbinical tradition we have a Scholastic tradition which traditionally was based on what was called isnad or chains of transmission so one of the things they always ask Jesus you know who are your teachers because they want to know what the rabbinical chain is are you from hilal are you from who's your teacher so we can know what school you're following and just like in the juicers you have certain acceptable parameters outside of that you you have things that are considered heterodoxic or outside I mean I don't know if the Jewish tradition would use that word because they tend to be more of a of a Praxis than a than a doctrines but they certainly would have heteropraxic um uh normative standards within their tradition um but Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a rabbinical student um that that would not happen in Catholicism because you could not have somebody that could happen in Protestant tradition so you could have evangelicals that decide to kill an abortion doctor because they actually believe that this is a mass murder and I'm ridding the world of some evil and and that certainly happens here and and like John Brown the law of God is above the laws of of men so he murders slave owners exactly uh and Nat Turner who was a profoundly religious uh African-American slave who was who was a preacher he was trained in in an Evangelical tradition so that aspect within the Islamic church is very problematic now the only people that have a type of magisterium right now are the the Turks and the Iranians the the Shia tradition so the Turks have a very uh a standardized tradition so that all of their Scholars go to the same schools and learn the same books the Iranians have the same situation the sunnis it's Anarchy right now and this is a great problem for us because there's so many normative tradition has really broken down and so I represent in essence you know to help people that are from other faiths I represent a more Catholic tradition and a lot of people say oh Islam needs a Reformation my response is this is the Reformation you guys don't know your history because the Reformation was one of the bloodiest periods in European history in fact there's an argument I think it's a fallacious one that the secular State emerged as an Arbiter between the great Catholic Protestant conflicts but Kavanaugh I think really destroys that argument in his book The Myth of religious violence so this is where this is where we stand now I'll just finish my my argument and and this is something that that I end up being attacked from traditionalists as well because I do consider myself a traditionalist or a Neo tradition whatever you want to call me um ossified tradition is not tradition when tradition becomes sterile which is what happened as you know in the Catholic tradition which created the Protestant Reformation when tradition becomes sterile you get Protestant response protest responses to that the the traditionalists in the in the Sunni world have not come to terms with the real critiques that these fundamentalists have made about ossified tradition and so they're not taking ownership that they have a responsibility to why these these Protestant responses to tradition have emerged and and that for me is something that that irks me that the fact that they have not taken we haven't had a Council of Trent and that and that's what I would argue that the the the the Sunni Scholastic tradition really needs to have a real Reformation a counter-reformation and and I would argue and I like this distinction that I got from a Catholic writer that tradition is the Living Faith of the dead but traditionalism is the dead faith of the living and I think what we have today is the dead faith of the Living Well Phil excuse me for saying you know as an outsider what it looks like to me is what people like you and Sheikh Abdullah binbaya represent is not a kind of protestantism if by protestantism we mean a kind of Luther and Calvin Rebellion what it looks like to me you guys represent within the Islamic world or at least within the Sunni tradition is something on the order of Erasmus and more right I think that's a Humanity it's a religious humanist critique of an ossified traditionalism in a certain way it's the radicals against whom you have spoken and who have threatened sure your life who represent not not to not to slander Lutheran calendar sure who represent a kind of a true protein not a renewal movement but an a kind of correct Calvin was great too I mean Calvin was a great Theologian yeah no question about it um you know one of our greatest Scholars Imam he was an Egyptian ninth Century said that that stagnation with the texts with the revealed texts is always error and leading astray it leads the individual astray and and it causes him to lead others astray so there has to be an active Dynamic tradition and Sheikh Abdullah represents to me an active living tradition I'll give you one example in the recent Marrakesh declaration that Sheikh Abdullah did in in in Morocco on the right side of the rights of Muslim cultures traditionally Muslims traditionally have viewed that there's two two possibilities for non-muslims living in Muslim lands one is if they don't submit to the sovereignty of the Muslim states then the they're killed right this is their fault uh until they do its dimitude they do it's dimitud right these are the to this is the binary that that most Scholars adhered to for centuries actually made I think a very compelling argument from tradition and and Donner's book on Muhammad and the Believers Fred Donner who's one of the uh he's I think Yale trained but or Princeton maybe I think oh that would be Fred Donner I think might have kind of out of Princeton but he wrote a book called Muhammad and the Believers arguing very much even though there's some real problems with that book but he argued very much what Sheikh Abdullah is arguing that the original vision of the Prophet salallahu was an egalitarian society that enfranchised the Jews and the other face in the community and this is proven by the historical document which is called the constitution of Medina and so Sheikh Abdullah argued that this constitution of Medina has never been abrogated and that the the verse in chapter 9 of vimitude did not abrogate this verse this Constitution and he says that this is the most appropriate way of living in the modern world with other uh with other communities and and so he was Reviving something that had literally been dormant in our tradition for 1400 years well I'm very sorry to have to bring this conversation to a close but I do want to thank all of you for coming out this evening I want to say God bless you uh and I want to say a special special word of thanks as always to my great friend our great friend here at Princeton thank you uh Sheikh Hamza for blessing us with his presence here this evening to Echo Professor George Commons we're very thankful for the conversation it was very enlightening and Illuminating I am sorry about the audio technical difficulties if you go to the James Madison program website or the Muslim Life program website within a week we will have a recording which will have a very clear audio so I hope that you will go and catch the parts that you may have missed early on I know that a lot of the Muslims here are concerned about their evening Maghrib Prayers when you leave the chapel there is a field right across from us and we have laid out tarps and you can pray over there and just start praying when you get there organize yourselves and people can pray in shifts thank you also very much and thank you for being here take care and have a good evening okay

Channel: Hamza Yusuf

Views: 103,268

Keywords: Islam, Hamza Yusuf

Id: Lu8ZkauTlrw

Length: 90min 37sec (5437 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2017