Hamza Yusuf - The Young Being Pushed To Live A Life Of Meaninglessness

i mean that's the one that deals with proportionality and this idea that the human being straddles these two abysses the abyss of nothingness and uh from from which he came and the abyss of infinity by whom he came and and he argues in there that only god can know both nothing and infinity we're incapable of that and it seems to me that nihilism is people that are looking at the nothing and forget about the infinity and they've in a sense turn their back on that and frost has a wonderful poem about uh the people that look out at the sea uh they cannot look out for they cannot look in deep but whenever whenever was that any any thing that prevented them from doing it and it seems to me that you know the the the nihilist is looking instead of looking at the ocean of infinity he's looking at the the wasteland uh on the shore he's he's looking the other way and and i think um is that our children and and plato reminded us that give me the stories you tell your children and i'll give you your culture that our children are growing up on a type of uh a popular culture that that is so corrosive um and over time i can't see how they could not fall into a type of despair uh that the the the uh the meaninglessness of life that's presented to them constantly that that would be the result how how can we be better at doing what um i think compt has an essay on a pyrocalia and leo strauss uses that term uh when he talks about liberal education the idea that vulgarity which our culture has become very vulgar and and and vulgarity for the greeks was a pyrocalia it was inexperienced in things beautiful how do we restore beauty to our to a culture that seems to have really lost it because our language is is based on the richness of its literature and its poetry and and there's something in uh in in rhetoric as you well know uh called copia which is this idea of acquiring a fund of expression through deep reading i i think the loss of of the ability to read is is really something tragic in our culture i know just for a fact in dealing with students and testing them on very difficult sentences that because they don't have grammar they end up getting lost in in in difficult sentences and not really being able to to see what main clauses are and i think when you a civilization you know it the difference between a civilization and and islam and christianity are founded on books and and and arguably even the pagan the great pagan civilizations were founded on books there is no socrates or plato without homer and and so books are always at the root of of of a civilization if we lose the ability to access books um through the loss of language through the impoverishment of vocabulary in these things i don't see how we can have a rule of law which is based on on a deep study of language because uh all reading law is a great book by scalia just about the importance of knowing how to read deeply so that that you can ascertain what laws mean we're having a debate now about textualists and originalists that try to understand what exactly does this mean and and how do we interpret it so i i i'm still looking for some answers about how we because i just barry sanders wrote a book that i read years ago called a is for ox why our children are dying to read and and john taylor gatto told me the the uh the great teacher from new york um he told me that he taught in inner cities uh he taught in harlem and and he said that it was so difficult to when they were when the students were all collectively together because they postured about not wanting to you know oh you know i'm i'm i don't need this uh this knowledge but he said when he got them in private they were dying to read they wanted literacy and and and that gets back to all men by nature or human beings desire to know i think and that gets right to shows about nothing because uh that that columbia program which john erskine started and the reason that he started that program was the fact that he saw that the elective system of which there was an immense amount of resistance when it was first introduced at harvard um that there were he saw that students no longer were speaking to each other that there were students that were specializing in this and specializing in that and that troubled him so he started that core program one of the problems today is that core program which is so incredibly rich and and really despite the fact that a a large part of it is western um it it was informed by so many different civilizations as you know aquinas was reading avasena he was reading gazali he was reading farabe he was certainly reading averages even russia was a major source for him in understanding aristotle he disagreed with him on some things but people forget that he he he saw him as as as certainly albertus magnus his teacher was a great a veroist and so uh we forget that this this is civilization that we we got uh in fact i think aristotle says that the reason mathematics developed in egypt was because they gave the priests leisure time so they could actually think about things and and this is something that uh i think we're uh our leisure time which was meant to develop our souls and and to refine our hearts uh has been reduced to shows about nothing so i think a lot of people uh in the end i you know i think people uh they you know they lose this immense opportunity that we have here this short time that we tarry here and and the quran's first commandment was read to read and i think islam like christianity developed an incredible civilization of literacy and that's why i one of the things that jacques barzen in his uh in his book from dawn to decadence he has a chapter about what he called primitivism you know the kind of russoian fallacy uh where people look at very primitive life as some kind of an ideal and uh and i i think that that to me is a great uh tragedy because the the life of the mind the fact that we are unique amongst uh creation in that we do have minds and we have this ability to grapple with nothing and infinity as concepts which is something that the god who created our imaginations gave us those imaginations uh to be able to do that and that's something so extraordinary and to squander this incredible opportunity i just i feel for our young people because they're given relativism in schools they're taught doctrines that this really is meaningless and then they're told on the other hand about rights that they never ground in anything nietzsche who was dealing with with the collapse of metaphysics uh in amongst the europeans um he wrote in uh the collapse of cosmological values that one of the he he gives these three different degrees of nihilism or nihilism and and he says that the second one is a loss of of of a holistic view of the universe this is where nihilism arises out of it arises out of this loss and in the discarded image i mean that's one of the things that c.s lewis talks about is that the thing he envied most about the pre-moderns is they really had worked it all out and had such a holistic view of of the world and understood it within that holism and so getting back to that being whole again i mean it's interesting that healthy comes from whole you know the the word the root of that word is is from the same route that we get whole from to be healthy is to be whole and it seems that we're so fragmented neil postman wrote a very interesting book in my estimation called amusing ourselves to death a very prescient book despite the fact that all the signs and symptoms were there at the time but it was really about popular discourse in the age of show business how do we overcome the reality television show about nothing that our political discourse has become one and the second for all these people that are really having a difficult time uh in isolation and and what's interesting about kierkegaard says that to the ancients isolation was a great gift he said the only thing that modern people can think about doing with it is to punish people like you put them in prison they go into isolation but it was the ancients wanted to the sunnyasi wanted to go off to the mountain the monk wanted to go off to the cell the the muslim wanted to go into halwa so the prophet salallahu went and isolated himself in on the hera pascal does say that the unhappiness of our species is due to the fact uh that we're unable to sit alone with ourselves in our rooms

Channel: HumbleBeliever

Views: 97,199

Keywords: Hamza Yusuf

Id: nofLuuUkCsk

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020