Jordan Peterson and Roger Scruton on the Transcendent

[Music] well on behalf of Ralston college and the Cambridge Center for the Study of Platonism it's an immense honor to introduce two of the foremost intellectuals of our age these thinkers Warner philosopher the other a psychologist are spiritual writers addressing the malaise of the soul in our culture John Stuart Mill in his magnificent essay on Coleridge wrote of Bentham Jeremy Bentham who above all others men have been led to ask themselves in regards to any ancient or received opinion is it true and by Coleridge what is the meaning with Coleridge in contrast to the utility of Bentham the very fact that any doctrine had been believed by thoughtful men and received by whole nations and generations of mankind was part of the problem to be solved was one of the phenomena to be accounted for this I think is true of both Roger Scruton and Jordan Peterson and I'd like to mention just a couple of points of convergence warned is an insistence on the importance of imagination as conversion to truth in opposition to a mere fantasy and an opposition to idolatry ideology as well as idolatry especially the idolatrous ideology of the postmodern Foucault derived consensus and an urgent return to questions about truth beauty and goodness and of course part of this is linked to what both perceive as the perilous position of the modern University they both argue that continuity of esteem needs to be Regained in the humanities and that the dominant strands of the humanities are leading to an impoverishment of the souls of students narratives both argue are not just stories of power but these narratives persist because of their truth so the importance for both Ralston college and indeed for the Cambridge Center for the Study of Platonism both of these thinkers is their insistence upon the relationship between muthos and Lagos between story and reason the insistence upon a hierarchy of values and their vision of Education as conversion to truth this conversation will be moderated by the president of Ralston College Stephen Blackwood Thank You Douglas for those inspiring and grounding words starting us off right in relation to the past that we wish to recover let me start I think with a very straightforward but perhaps difficult question where we were gathered around the theme apprehending the transcendent loosely to gather this conversation and I'd like to begin by asking each of you what is the transcendent what does it mean for something to be transcendent well if you let me start I take a position which I attribute also to Kant that that we have a very clear negative understanding of it we as it were advanced to the edge of our thinking in so many areas knowing that although there's nothing further that we can say that somehow the truth nevertheless not run out and that negative view I think needs to be combined with a more positive view which tells us that there are other ways not just maybe not thinking but some other way of crossing that boundary and as it were landing in the realm of the transcendent and knowing it from inside I think you know and that this is something that we understand very quickly in personal relations you know that when I when I address you I know that I'm addressing something which addresses me too but from a place where I could never be I couldn't look at myself from those eyes and I can't capture the thing that is looking at me from those eyes but nevertheless there are leaps of the imagination which can put me in your point of view and from that point view I can come to understand exactly what I am but in a completely different way from simply the ordinary empirical knowledge that I have of myself and I think that that sort of interpersonal understanding I would say we can adapt to all the other aspects of our world which are mysterious to us music for instance that's a beginning and I want to return to music a bit a bit later Jordan I think it's useful as an adjunct to that so so Sir Roger mentioned that the transcendent is what we bump up against when we realize our ignorance and so it's that which transcends our ignorance and and that in itself makes it an implacable fact unless you believe that you have no ignorance in which case there's no point in furthering a discussion with you so the transcendent is the fact insofar as it's that which transcends our ignorance but you can also think about it technically so and and and I think we know enough about how the brain works now so that not that we know much so that useful things can be said about that I you tend to represent the world in the simplest manner that you possibly can that works for what you're doing and so you don't actually see the world you see sufficiently useful low represent low resolution representations of the world and if they work then that's fine there's no need to adjust them and they're relatively easy to remember and to manipulate but now and then you have a misapprehension about someone let's say and you have a conversation with them and the conversation goes sideways and what that means is that the the thing that you thought you were conversing with is not the thing that you're conversing with and that manifests itself in error right so error is the place where the transcendent reveals itself and what is actually revealing itself is the reality that's outside and underneath your perceptions and so what you see in the world in some sense is a set of animated cartoons and a lot of that is actually a consequence of you seeing nothing but your memory because your brain is organized so that instead of going through all of the difficulty of having to look at the thing in itself you look at what you assume to be there and if you can get away with that so much the better but the thing in itself is always much richer richer than your apprehension of it which is partly why you make mistakes but also partly why you can continue to garner wisdom in the world there's always more there than meets the eye and god only knows how much more there's there than meets the eye and you can show this even in the religious sense to some degree because you could say that there's an element to the transcendent that instills people with a sense of religious significance you can do that by immediately scientifically by feeding people chemicals for example that disrupt the inhibition of perception by memory and then that puts them in a place where the transcendent tends to reveal itself sometimes an overwhelming force so this it's not some fiction that this exists it's the what's transcendent is more real than the reality that you perceive well let's pick let's pick up on that because the the the ancients in the medieval had a clear sense that it wasn't the world that was it was we ourselves as we make an ascent towards deeper truths higher forms of the beautiful as we ourselves become more self-conscious so it's not the world that's changing but but us I wonder if we could say how you understand the nature of that ascent that that that that that movement and and what brings it about well I I would be a bit wary of the metaphor of ascent you know I I think in Plato it's quite clear what he meant he wanted us to actually to transcend our earthly perceptions and our earthly way of seeing things and look on the world from from a God's eye perspective and this could be done if we enter the world of the pure forms and so on leave empirical reality behind I think actually insofar as the experience of the transcendent that I as I understand it is available to us modern people it's not that way that we get it perhaps about Sir Jordan might be right that there are these drug-induced experiences where things open up to us because old barriers are suddenly swept away but in my own case it is the concentration on the empirical reality which at a certain point flips from mere sensory understanding to a vision in that of its communicating something to me and I think this is what the literature and art and music do at their best they they read ascribe reality so that it is actually a communicating something to you it's not just there as an inert object before you and that sense of the transcendence is like discovering yourself in a mirror seeing in the world as a whole that thing in you that you could never identify in words you know the subject which is looking at it and it's not a mystic mystery but it's something that you can't then explain the different between a good writer and a bad writer of course is that a good writer will describe something in such a way that the thing described has the soul of the reader in it so so that might be the distinction in part between the thing and the meaningful thing right and that's a miss that's a very mysterious phenomenon in fact in some sense the the essence of phenomenon because that means to shine forth no as we're surrounded by empirical facts they're everywhere there's more of them than we can possibly count but some of them do emerge and manifest themselves as that as that conjunction between the factual and the meaningful and then that's what's gripping and if you're fortunate I mean to me that's also partly what what leads us onward and maybe in something approximating the ascent that you described is that the set of facts manifests itself as implicitly meaningful and that means in some sense that there is a call to you that isn't from within you I mean I don't know how else to put it exactly because your walk into a bookstore in a book will will will reveal itself to you you know or or you have a conversation and part of the conversation will trigger something in you or you're reading a scientific paper and much of its dull and then all of a sudden there's something that sparks outward that's like a port that's a portal into the transcendent and that is a place where the fact and the meaning converge and that's a phenomena we don't understand very well it has something to do with its convergence with the narrative that drives us whatever that happens to be yeah I think that's a good way of putting it actually it connects with the general problem of what the humanities are in the university I've always assumed that in some way or another if you're teaching literature or musicology or or history of art or anything you are opening young people to those moments when the world ceases to be a mere accumulation of facts and as it were addresses you and that requires literary criticism it requires opening yourself to experience in a way that it requires a serious education of a Elkind and i think that if we thought of the humanities as directed towards that we can see why they might be one way to fill the moral void that grows so easily in people's lives so young had this idea which I really love it's a very sophisticated idea it's it's it's his idea of how the self first of all so the self for young this Christ was a symbol of the self so the logos was a symbol of the self so that's sort of what would you say it's the divine essence of humanity and the image of that is a symbol of the self and for young the self was the totality of the individual across time and space so it's whatever you are as as a transcendent object that's a good way of thinking about it and then can imagine that that transcendent object also has to interact with you and the world moment by moment and his belief was that those times when that space of meaning opened up so there is that convergence between the fact and and the gripping of the fact was the manifestation of the self which is this transcendent object in the specific moment of time and space and therefore a call forward to move towards revealing that totality as much as it can be revealed and so it would be partly and that would be partly revealed by then following a meaningful pathway and it would be the case that if you're engaged in the teaching of humanities and literature that you are trying to engage exactly that part of the person it's to pull them into the story and to and have that open up to them and then that's a portal it's not it's not words on paper it's it's a portal to their to their further development towards this this the manifestation of this higher and more transcendent mode of being that's like the Hindu idea of the transition from the samsara to Brahman isn't it that you suddenly you pass through a barrier that can't actually be described because you can only know it when you're on the other side of it and but when you're on the other side of it you're looking back at the thing that you've left and seeing it in as it were for the first and knowing what it means I guess that's a little connects a little bit with what Douglas was saying about about coda Ridge that you know that that Coleridge was an advocate of a form of education a form of knowledge which shows the meaning of things as opposed to the mere facts accumulated by Bentham and people like that both of you have done quite deep dives into twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies and both of you have been very trenchant critics of the ideology the various forms of nihilism in in our own culture but I think all of us tire of a a kind of negativity that has come to be very prevalent in in our culture not simply the nihilism but then we can criticize the nihilism we ought to criticize it both of you have been have been brilliant critics of it but I what I take to be at work in both of your in in in the work that both of you do is is not fundamentally criticism but a turn towards something positive a a recovery of a sense of the transcendent I'd like to have a that have a turn for a moment to what does that recovery look like where do we start well if we're thinking intellectually the world of scholarship and education that we both belong to has turned as you say in this negative direction always preferring debunking explanations of everything so reducing them to the lowest motive that it's not truth but power that we pursue in all that through kody and nonsense and I think the only response that is to come up with bunking explanations of so to speak try to put back into the subject matter one's own inherent belief in it and to recognize that you know that when we're not around on this earth for very and we do have an obligation to find the things that we love and not the things that that we reject and that those things that we love the best way towards them is to look at the things that other people have loved that's what a culture is it's the residue of all the things that people have thought worthwhile to preserve and teaching that will again reconnect us to what matters well and there's there's also ways of providing a pathway forward by making the Fukien arguments let's say about power more high resolution and one of the things that I do in my lectures in my public lectures that I think is rather comical is to take an and poke fun in some sense about the idea of power as the fundamental foundation for the hierarchical structures of the West I think well you can think of the West as one large-scale low-resolution totalitarian tyranny the tyranny of the patriarchy or you can decompose that which is in some sense is to transcend the concept and I think well I asked my audience is what they think about the the tyranny of plumbers or the tyranny of massage therapists well because it's it's dead relevant it's like let's say you need a plumber and you do need a plumber everyone agrees that you need a plumber and because there's hell to pay otherwise and so and then the question is well how is it that you go about selecting a plumber and the answer isn't that there are roving bands of tyrannical plumbers that go door-to-door telling housewives that if they don't use their services the service of the most tyrannical plumber that there'll be mafia-like consequences what what happens instead is that you look for the plumber who is most able in your estimation and in the in the in his reputation as distributed through the community for being able to fix pipes and run a business and engage in an honest transaction with you and that's competence that's not power you see in what I see as most corrosive about the postmodern type suspect those who've derived themselves from Foucault let's say is that the idea that every hierarchy or the hierarchy as such is predicated on power is actually an assault on the idea of competence itself and that in turn is an assault on the idea that there are real problems that can actually be solved well then if you dispense with all that and it's only power there's no real problems to be solved and there's no noble ways of solving them even even as in even in as concrete a manner as a good plumber would solve them which is a not not a trivial thing and so then you deprive people of you deprive people of that of that sense of purpose in their life even even at the high resolution levels you know when I've insisted in my lectures that you know if you're the sort of person who runs a small diner that it's incumbent on you to run the highest quality small diner that you possibly can because what you're doing there is not merely providing people with basic nutrition there's way more to the space than meets the eye and your noble what would you say acceptance of your limited responsibility is also simultaneously a way to transcend that and that can be a place where the neighborhood meets that can be a place where tired people revivify themselves before they go off to do their difficult work that can be a place where you can mentor your employees and help them develop their life like it's a rich it's an unbelievably rich microcosm and to take on the the care and aunt ending of that microcosm as a responsibility is also a great pathway to meaning and a necessary and meaning is something that's well not epiphenomena and not dispensable but absolutely central to to human thriving in the psychological and practical sense yeah but we do have to try and understand why it is that there is such a charm in the Foucauldian position why is it that people want to believe that all the best things what we think of the best things in human relations are simply disguised forms of manipulation you know that that the whole feminist view of the relations in men and women for instance which is founded on this deep myth that men are exercising exercise power as agender to use the fashionable world the word / / women and that all study of this is just a way of revealing that power and and the capillaries through which it flows you know I think there's a will to believe this and why is one of the big questions that I think we have to try to understand is it that when people lose some kind of transcendental religious faith that they are automatically fall into this great pit of resentment as of the Nietzschean kind to try and find the the oppressor in every relationship or is there are there truths that they are exploring as well is there are there forms of power or forms of human relation that look like power from one aspect but are perhaps also look like tenderness and dependence from another aspect and that they've just are emphasizing one half of it or something like that I think there are they're real questions as to how it is that our culture has got into this position yeah well that's the question below the claim of power and so I mean I've thought about that to some degree and here's three possibilities I mean one is the accusation that all there is is power is the justification for use of power of course so that's that's handy if that's what you want to use so then then there's another problem and that goes along with the the failure the willful failure to distinguish competence from tyranny and power let's say because we might think of power as unearned Authority something like that because we need a definition of power and I think that there's a resentment at work there that's very very deep I think it's it's deep in the biblical sense which is that there is a proclivity for those who do not manifest what they could manifest in the world and thereby fail to watch the success of those who do manifest what they could manifest the world and succeed and become embittered by that tremendously embittered and then to label that is power and then to attempt to destroy it because it's simpler to do that than to do the radical internal retooling that would be required to set things straight internally I'm sure that's right that that's one explanation of why people are always tempted by the zero-sum vision of relations his benefit is my cost sort of thing right yeah I wanted to pick up on that that the the the very widespread view that things are zero-sum which is of course the language of power what's the antidote to that what is that how does one overturn the the ideology of power how does one transcend that with a nonzero-sum truth or approach to life I personally would say that the first thing to recognize is that there are positive some games you know that's what the the real theory of the market tells us that there are whole realms of human transactions where both parties gain from from their shared engagement and though that doesn't won't drive away the real source of this this difficulty has subdued what Jordan was referring to you know that people's people's resentment at the success of others when they cannot match it or cannot easily match it will not know or will not mention which is evil works yes exactly and because of the labor of re re conceiving your own position in such that you actually have to do something about it you know that it's there are some there's something lazy about the zero-sum vision yeah but it's not a you know it's not a vision that successful people have you know any level of reality and you can actually combat that to some degree by make it high resolution again by by making examples just like because very few people actually believe once they observe that all the Nation ships they've had with other people have been zero-sum now you might get some very disadvantaged people and and these people do exist who've been taken advantage by virtually everyone they've ever encountered in their whole life like that does happen but most of the time all you have to do is remind people it's like well think of someone that you loved even briefly think of a friend that you've had it's like well you you successfully negotiated with that friend to do things together because otherwise it's not a friendship and it has to be successful negotiation which means your friend has to be happy with what you were doing and you have to be happy and so and then wasn't it the case that you were both happy or doing that then either of you would have been doing something else alone and and isn't that evidence in your own action and your life for the existence of nonzero-sum games and they're dependent on successful negotiation is we can both have more than we would otherwise have if we can come to a consensus about what we'll both pursue and it's very few people when you make it personal like that and high resolution again it's very few people who are willing to pursue their ideology of zero-sum of a zero-sum reality so far down that they'll actually use that to characterize their most intimate relationships now I would say that someone who does that by temperament is literally psychopathic because the psychopathic view of the world is absolutely that it's a zero-sum game yes I think that's right but of course we have a whole body of literature about sexuality which is trying to establish that that that sexuality is the exercise of power of one person over another you get it already in Sartre was Being and Nothingness where he almost is almost by logic that that a serious sexual desire for him ends up as sadomasochism because you cannot extract from the other that gift of his freedom which which is what you're looking for because his freedom is his and not to be obtained by you and therefore you can only do this by sort of tearing at his flesh getting him to confess in the extremes of agony but he can't do it you know this kind of thing I know that's a very perverted vision of what sexual relations are but you get that image used by Simone de Beauvoir and all kinds of feminists to essentially to D legitimize the idea that there is such a thing as as love for the other sex well there's there's I think it also masks a more fundamental problem that's really a biological problem like it's a misapprehension of a genuine problem but part of what sex does is temporarily subordinate the individual to nature and the species and so there is a domination there no and if if if a woman decides to have a child then she is going to undergo a series of extraordinarily radical transformations and she's also going to end up in a situation where in all likelihood something else becomes fundamentally more important than her and there so there is a there's a sub it might be voluntary subjugation but there's a subjugation to nature and and that's built into the fabric of existence and I think it's very easy not to want to grapple with that because it's such a profound problem and then to to make that as secondary consequence of something like unbalanced power relationships between the genders but of course our traditional religion offers you selves for this that the rite of passage in which which joins man to woman the rite of passage which makes birth an experience of the whole community and death likewise and you know the sense also that in these great events one is occupying a position in law in a moral space that has been occupied by generations before one and so on this normalizing of these huge transitions I think is something that that we've always depended upon religion to provide is sacralized yes and having taken that away or or ignored it or try to live without exactly without the idea of a sacrament and we're actually at a loss when these great transitions occur as well because it is the case in fact that to to engage in the integration of sexual with your individual life is a series of sacrifices so for example if you get married that's a sacrifice because it's a sacrifice of all other people and so it's a sacrifice of that possibility and then to have a child is the sacrifice of all the things that you could have done otherwise then having that child and - but - - as you pointed out to make that part of a broader tradition to say that well that is a sacrifice and there is a loss that goes along with that but what you gain as a consequences of if as of immeasurable significance in contrast to the loss and one of the things that's really struck me in this lecture tour that I've been doing so I've been in about a hundred cities and one of the things that I've been talking to people about is its meaning and I suppose its meaning in relationship to the transcendent and and the necessity of meaning as an antidote to suffering and to malevolence and the hypothesis is something like well meaning is to be found in responsibility and and this is a it's a revelation to people because they haven't conceptualized it that way before it's like meaning isn't it isn't happiness isn't self-esteem and it isn't momentary pleasure isn't any of that it's it's the it's the bearing of a sacrificial burden and that that actually works to enrich and ennoble your life in ways that make the tragic element of it tolerable and - and to keep you from bitterness and so these things that are put forward as subjugation like the subjugation of woman to the to the catastrophe of birth let's say or even the the indignity of of patriarchal Union is all of a sudden something that you can take on as an aspirational goal rather than something that's a mere imposition on your on your moment to moment freedom as a relief to people to hear that and to know it of course now I agree with that but there is also the sense that in the world in which we live we're obviously people have been detached to a great extent from the any continuous religious tradition there still is a sense of loss as a people they don't they know that they they're missing something but don't know quite how to identify and that's one reason for thinking for them thinking that it it's been taken away something's been stolen from them and they look around at the people who are at ease in the world and successful and seem to be you know on good terms with themselves and think of them as the ones who've done the stealing and that is a dangerous attitude and I think it's well it's surely that is part of what erupts in all these strange academic disciplines like gender studies which simply have as their goal the undermining of the existing order without anything positive to put in its place and I don't know what that those those academic studies recruit people all the time from this fund of of isolation this from the sense a sense of loss without an ability to identify the thing that's been lost that's the cult-like element of them because they do I would say to some degree prey on people whose interpersonal relationships have been irreparably damaged right I have a hypothesis about about the feminist end of the postmodern radical leftist movement so and this is something I've talked about much in public but but well but here goes this should give me in lots of trouble so so and there's a variety of things that are tangled together here so we don't know how female biology would manifest itself politically male biology does female biology is going to and that's because female political activity on the largest possible scale is a relatively new phenomenon so so and it isn't obviously the case that men and women's views of the world are going to dovetail precisely so here's a hypothesis you tell me what you think about this so one thing that a woman really wants to know about a man or perhaps you might say one thing that feminine and he wants to know about masculinity is that it's not a predatory tyrant okay so and here's why I mean first of all there's fragility and feminine sexuality to a greater degree than there is in male sexuality because women bear a higher price for sexual misadventure let's say and are perhaps more prone to exploitation by force but more than that part of being a woman is having the possibility of bringing something extraordinarily fragile and vulnerable and valuable into the world and the first concern might be are you a predator fundamentally are you a predator and so what I see happening in the in the feminist disciplines like gender studies is the politicization of that accusation and the accusation is prove to me that you're not a predator like in your fund in the fundamental element of your masculinity not only historically but now because the cost of you being a predators is too high now I feel that that's an inappropriate I think that's what's driving the demolition of the idea of presumption of innocence for example we'll start with presumption of guilt and prove to you'll be proved to me that you're innocent and I think the problem with that isn't that there are no predatory men because there are plenty of predatory men the problem is is that the courageous way to deal with the problem of the predator is to offer a hand in courageous trust and to invite forward a partner from the monster that's the that's the mythological manner in which this is supposed to be undertaken the courageous a parker aegis part of the woman's journey let's say is to face the monstrosity of a man and to invite out of that something more noble to emerge and there's courage in that in genuine risk and I think that that's foregone in the accusation process and then the the other element of that seems to me to be that well if you are a predator and you're irredeemable in your predatory nature then the best thing to do is to render you harmless and if we're going to obscure the relationship between competence and power and assume that all of your striving upward is merely a manifestation of power then what we'll do is we can you as much as possible so that harmlessness can replace virtue and I see all of that driving these resentful disciplines in there and the reason am is the amass key with the man yeah that's the evil queen yeah yeah because we have the evil king right that's the tyrannical patriarchy well the evil queen is lurking somewhere yes so the problem is I know it a lot of this is true but our society does not seem to have the capacity to put that to one side and celebrates the normal the the the fact that most men and most women are not like that and that there is there is a natural desire and need of the sexes to love each other to be united and to create children and so on and that that the old stability that that was built upon this has gone so I mean that and nobody wants nobody in the intellectual world wants to celebrate there so so I just I had this interview a few a month ago or so with a woman from GQ and she was fully on board the the predatory mail train let's say and you know when people like that interview me they start talking about the patriarchy and I say well I I don't believe in the patriarchy I don't buy that conceptual structure what's so interesting and this has happened more and more over the years as they've developed us first of all the person that I would be talking to had some idea that it was hypothetically possible to reject the idea of the patriarchy but now when I say I don't believe in it it's it's that ideas meant with stunned disbelief it's like what what do you mean you don't believe in the tyrannical Patriot everyone knows that's true and I think well so here's your hypothesis so this is the hypothesis that throw history the fundamental relationship between man and woman is one of parasitism and exploitation that's it and so and that's the case I guess until 1960 and the publication of The Feminine Mystique or something like that but that's the entire course of human history and then when the when it seems to me that the appropriate story is that men and women labored mightily under their terrible constraints for for uncounted centuries cooperating together by and large to to build some body of security and and freedom and stability so that they could raise children and have a somewhat harmonious and productive life and all of a sudden it's become not only questionable to put forth that as a proposition but somehow tyrannical in it in in essence just for positing it as a reality but that's partly because isn't it because of this peculiar view that the underlying all this there's a kind of social structure that would this is being created the distinction between men and women doesn't have its basis in nature it's its basis is in the institutions that we have created and since we created them we can change them that there is there's been it's sort of a kind of almost hysterical invasion of everything by the idea of human choice if there is if there is a structure to the relation between men and women then we ought to be able to change it and of course chain we might mean that I have to change my sex in order to to conform to the way things are but that also has become a choice well and is is is not a very very constant focus on division whether between man and woman or between left and right orbit or between this race in that race or any other way in which we might we might divide people according to groups isn't that very polarized fracture that fractured polarization a sign of a loss of a common human culture of a universal plane in which we all we all are as human beings and and so if if that that's if that's if that is so I suppose what I state to be so very urgent in our time and and I wonder it might be difficult to find anyone who at least when you go down to a high enough level of resolution as you say Jordan would not think this is true that we must recover that sense of ourselves as entities that participate in a universal and transcendent plane that we have a common cult that I see myself in the other as you were saying earlier Roger and I'd like to have both of your thoughts on what strategies were means for that recovery and perhaps we can focus particularly on the the the the questions that we started with with art music you've written too extensively an architecture of course Roger and you've thought long and hard about the humanities Jordan what is it what is the character of recovery how do we bring that about well if I may begin I think that there are well first of all you have to identify those aspects of the human condition that move of their own accord towards reconciliation you know a rather than conflict and and division of the sort that you're referring to and we are very familiar with them it's not just that just love which of course is something very complex in and can't be can't be just conjured from the skies but there are there are other aspects of our condition that we can educate through first first of all through studying examples and then through imitation and then through self-discipline obviously forgiveness is one of these things and the habit of putting yourself in another person's perspective looking at yourself from outside and wondering whether you know the you are as so seen acceptable to yourself all those you know of course again religion of the Christian religion at least was built upon that's kind of intellectual discipline the discipline of seeing your neighbor as yourself and seeing yourself therefore as a mere neighbor and I I suspect that you have we have to revive those basic moral disciplines not for the use of people who don't have the overarching faith their belief in transcendental judgment into which we will be all calls but whom nevertheless have to be shown that we do live our lives as an object of judgment nevertheless and here are some guides you know just read Anna Karenina for example I know it takes a long time for facebook addicted youth to read Anna Karenina but they still hope you know and and they're likely to listen to it so so well because maybe more people can listen then can read I mean so so let's let's think about literature for a bit and so now if you read something like a Dostoyevsky novel or Anna Karenina you're not really reading the account of a single person's life what you're reading is it's like the author has taken a variety of lives and amalgamated them and unified them into something that's like a it's like a compilation of lives so it's life it's like life writ large so that's what fiction is it's more true than than reality because just like a mathematical abstraction can be more real than the thing that it represents in some sense the fiction is it's like it's like a portrait if you sit for a portrait you'll sit and the artist will paint you and then you'll sit again and then you'll sit again and then you'll sit again and so the portrait is actually a composite of you and so it's got a richness sometimes that a photograph can't match and a fictional character is actually a composite of many people and so the opportunity to read a great work of fiction is the opportunity to place yourself in the perspective not of merely another person like you do in normal discourse in the mundane setting but to place yourself in the perspective of a compiled character so you experienced that extraordinarily powerfully with Dostoyevsky's crime and punishment to put myself in the position of this student who was nihilistic and who had every reason to commit murder and it's an unbelievably intense novel because everybody in the novel is hyper real and we think of fiction as falsity or or or or as untruth and it's not it's it's it's abstraction an abstraction isn't untruth it's it's more than truth often and so the humanities can help us walk through the souls of others and because we can imitate and it's one of our primary remarkable miraculous abilities we can imitate the the compiled characters that we encounter in literature and mythology and religion and that does help flesh us out and ennoble us and we can we can I just wrote the foreword to Solzhenitsyn's fiftieth anniversary version of The Gulag Archipelago the abridged version and I ran across his fervent wish that people could learn from what he communicated all the horror and suffering to put themselves in the position of both the perpetrator and the and the accused simultaneously and to decide that that's not the road to walk down and so the advantage of placing yourself in the position of other people is that if they're good people then you can be like them and if they're not good people then you can avoid that pathway and then you don't have to learn that through through the agony of direct personal experience in the short span of your life there's nothing more there's nothing greater than you can do for people than to introduce them into those patterns stories so that they can gain from the catastrophes of the past mmm no I agree with that oh but of course in fiction one's also concerned to identify if you're writing fiction identify with a character in order to understand that character because it's not as though you can you can't actually grasp a character from the outside you have to be able to see through his eyes what it what the world is in which he is and that is I think an exercise of the imagination which I value greatly and you don't necessarily come to the conclusion that therefore I don't want to be like that it might be just enough to say now I see that that's a possible human being and your knowledge of the possibilities is amplified and your sense your ability to position yourself in those possibilities also I think right so that's a matter of differentiation as well as direction yes no no I think sometimes in my more dire moments that this opposition to cultural appropriation right so the idea that I'm not allowed anymore to imagine myself safe fictionally as a woman or us or as a character from another ethnicity or even to play the role that role as an actor I think that it's it's part of the assault on the idea of the individual and the nonzero-sum game because it precludes the possibility that I can take on the role of another in an understanding manner and actually facilitate a dialogue and that undermines the claim I would say that everything is only a secondary consequence of power because if I can actually bridge that gap well then I'm not isolated in my group or my ethnicity or whatever it is I can I can become partly you and we can communicate and I would say because of that literature and art is a great threat to ideology especially of the group identity kind and of course they're perfectly aware of that which is why the radicals on that side of the equation are doing everything they can to to reporter from the New York Times who wrote a rather scurrilous piece about me she had done the literature degree at at Columbia a bright woman and she told me in all honesty and apparent transparency that she had no idea this is how deep this is this has become saturated into our culture she had no idea until she until she had graduated from Columbia that there was any other way of reading a work of literature except through the postmodern lens and the postmodern lens is well who are the groups that are being represented and what power games are at play and who benefits and and I mean I don't know if because she turned out to be quite a strange person but so I have no idea if that if that was a ploy on her part or whether that was like a like a naive what would you call confession but it's increasingly the case that that is how literature is taught in my home province of Ontario the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario wants to start teaching literature from a postmodern critical perspective in elementary school to demolish it well there we are I mean I'm in favor of cultural cultural appropriation I mean I'm a product of it i appropriately idea of the English gentleman and you know and I try and made myself be it and I know it's a failure because that's part of doing it well yeah yeah i but i've understood the world from the inside in another way but in I just wrote a book of stories which was just reviewed by somebody who says you know this these stories make cultural appropriation into a virtue and so I felt good about that they they begin with a an inside view of the psyche of a terrorist of an Arab terrorists who's who has a legacy of vengeance and who is a failure and whose loss I try to make real in in the feelings of the reader as he reads it and and then the subsequent stories show the same kind of loss in completely different people I wanted to bring up that book of stories actually souls in Twilight by Sir Roger Scruton it's a series of five short stories of five I think is that five short stories each which are portraits of a character at a certain moment in time I think it's safe to say Roger that they're all tragic stories in a sense what I found so moving about those stories is that these are individuals in states of dislocation anchor 'less seeking depth meaning truth stability and yet in their confusion in their darkness willing against that very thing that they seek or you might say violating or transgressing that sacred thing that they're longing for that's not what's beautiful about book what's beautiful is that in the reading the reader her or himself comes to a sense of what that longing is for positively a sense of the the stability of love or of home or of relationship and and and I suppose what I want to ask following up on this is that that seems to me a profoundly redemptive vision that you have in that in those beautiful stories Roger and that that it's showing the persistence of the beautiful and of the good even in its absence that I can read that story and have a perception of what positively I am I am looking for and just to refer to it something that you say in in one of your books toward and that that even through an experience of evil one can develop an apprehension of what the good is and wondering if you could each say something about the that you know either either there is a reality to these transcendent things where there is not if it either just a construct goodness or beauty and truth or they have a transcendent and and sovereign persistent reality and I'm wondering if you can each say something about the the persistence or sovereignty of these things even amidst our darkness and suffering well I I would say that in tragedy when tragedy is really effective there is a Redemption offered in this through suffering that the the the the we we encounter the possibility in tragedy that a human being can through the most noble motives also bring about on a pot down upon himself destruction and destruction is no different from the destruction it's going to afflict all of us in the end anyway but here is somebody who who has faced it down in some way that his nobility his nobility of nature and his ability to go out towards others in a condition of love and Rickon reconciliation has not been taken away from him and the spectacle of that is all the more intense because nevertheless the you know death intervenes and takes him away as it will take you and me away but without having had the chance to reveal a nobility or even to acquire it you know I think that for that reason it's very important that in literature the noble characters are seen in a condition of loss sometimes that their and their their Redemption comes because even though they've lost what we all must in the end lose there is that in them which is struggling towards reconciliation with their own condition and with others it's the sense that they are living as another and not as herself you know that's tears I think it's a crucial thing that the Gulag Archipelago is often viewed as an endless documentation of the horrors of the Soviet enterprise but it was an investigation it was an experiment in literary investigation and that isn't what the book is about the book is about Solzhenitsyn's observations of people in those terrible situations who did not contribute to the terror and who transcended it and the unbelievably power powerful impact observing that had on him and the personal transformation he underwent as a consequence of observing those people and the decision he made because of seeing them in their ultimately tragic circumstances transcend that to to to transform his life from the bottom up and to write this great book and to reveal the utter catastrophe of that entire ideological movement and so you do see the light most clearly when it's superimposed against the darkest possible background and so and great literature which pulls people way down into the depths and in in this in this in this compiled fictional manner then it also does at the same time highlight what's what's what's the opposite of that so I tell it by reading of your your your your work both of you there's an implicitly theological character here and we can't speak about the transcendent in a certain sense without being theological and you know why is it that we can't just the lights just can't be completely shut out I mean if if if evil and darkness were the sovereign principles as we say metaphysically well they could it could just be all the lights could just be completely blackened and yet that's not what we see and I'm wondering if you would each comment on the what you take to be the I think what wouldn't what might be a theological articulation of the facts on the ground if the facts are that you can't shut the lights right out that they're still there what what's going on there I totally agree with what Jordan said about the Gulag Archipelago and that goes back to just ask is from the House of the Dead you know his account of being in a Tsarist much milder with kind of imprisonment but nevertheless it was full of almost a vacation compared to comparison I agree but nevertheless he described these characters who for whom that everything had been taken away but he also notes that in each of them you I can find the spark of God something which Janacek repeated when he made this into the into that wonderful libretto for his opera and anyon I try to show in music how these derelict characters will suddenly shine with that with that light from another source but it doesn't come just from what they are in that those circumstances but from something higher and I think you know I would say one is always obliged to use metaphors when we get to this point but it is true that to that you can find in someone even in the most deprived and desolate circumstances that on which you can blow to cause the spark once again to delight up inside him and that is as far as we get to meeting God but there is no reason to think that we need to get any further in my view that's what people everybody saw in Maximilian Kolbe when he offered himself in the in Auschwitz for you know to as a sacrifice and while he was canonized you know suddenly you see that there is something else in all of us in which in in circumstances however severe and deprived will will shine from it with a different light and make those circumstances worthwhile because they produced that light it could be in some sense the mercy of God that keeps him hidden from us because if you imagine that your sacred duty is to blow on those embers that you described even among people who are in desolate straits then every time you fail to take that opportunity then you tilt things badly towards what they shouldn't be tilted towards and it could be that the revelation of your inadequacy in the face of that moral duty which would be in some sense equivalent to an encounter with God would be enough to tear you into pieces and so maybe you get glimpses of that now and then because that's that's all you and your current depraved moral state could stand of seeing of the face of God I think there's something to that that's what Seimone very says things to that effect I think yeah and yes I often heard in the old communist days when I used to travel around Eastern Europe and and meet people who are in really dire straits they said similar things you know that that that God would reveal himself but in these circumstances the revelation will be something too strong what I could bear that's a beautiful image you've given us Roger of blowing on the embers within blowing on the embers of transcendence I'd ask you both about the forms of culture and institutional life that produce that blowing on the embers in the individual it seems to me both of you have a very deep sense of the dignity of the human individual of the individuals connection to the transcendent the grounding fact of our existence what would be the forms of culture that we would say to be necessary or most most inclined to foster in the individual that blowing of the flame well I think the most accessible form for most people is music and music to me is the most representational form of art because I think that the world is made out of patterns and we perceive some patterns as objects but fundamentally its patterns and what you want is all the patterns of the world to interact harmoniously and in something where every element is related intelligibly to every other element and I think that when your life is in harmony that you can feel that and when you're dancing to beautiful music you're acting that out it's the music is the is the music of the spheres and you're participating in the patterning of your being in accordance with that structure and that gives you an intimation of of transcendence and and it's it's not criticized about that's the thing that's so lovely about it is even as our society has become more cynical and more self-destructive and more deconstructionist the power of music has in fact grown because it speaks to that eternal harmony and the reality of that eternal harmony in a way that that mere intellect cannot deny and I mean I was always amused I went to this show The Ramones a punk band from New York it was the loudest car I never heard bye-bye a good factor of 10 my ears rang for like 3 days afterwards and there were all these like nihilistic punk rockers all crammed into this theater and below me there was a mosh pit and it was like ants on a frying pan they were just smashing into each other and throwing people around up above them and it was quite rough and they're all having this beautifully transcendent musical experience which belied all of their nihilism and it was and they absolutely thrived on it it was like an even the lyrics were harsh and nihilistic but it didn't matter because the music even if it's right even if had in its rough form was something that United them in the sense of this like pattern beauty and brought them together and so exposure to music that's people died without music it's like music is everything I mean it's not everything but I beg it's every degree about about the beauty of this particular experience I think actually dancing is an extremely important phenomenon partly because traditionally dancing was dancing with someone the width has been taken out of dancing and the head bashing and so on that goes on with heavy metal and the Reich is dancing against someone you know that the witness of the dance is that there's something real we see it in Scottish reels and things like that where the whole community is dancing in an orderly way recognizing that their need for law and order and taking pleasure in it now I find that a very near to a transcendent experience I feel a kind of narcissism has crept into them the dance through recent forms of dance music but I mean that's my old geezer attitude or or is or is or is it simply to say that there that that the principle itself is sovereign everyone thinks about the logic for example of Dante's Inferno which because evermore degraded forms of knowing and loving that that the mechanism of the the nature you might say the nature of the soul is the same at the top of paradise as it is at the at the bottom of Inferno but it has these infinite gradations of wholeness and so I don't think we have to say that that that the the mosh pit is is is is is equivalent as a work of art to to Beethoven or Palestrina or Yana check but rather that perhaps what's going on in in in that is nonetheless a longing for the pattern and the the recognition of the other that you use you say but but yes but your original question was how do we how do we coax people back into that into a life which is based on the recognition of the other rather than the gratification of the self because that's essentially what we're talking about I think within today at least and I would say teaching people how to help others the role of the teacher it's a very dignified one but it it is only so if the teacher actually thinks that he is helping the pupil to a body of knowledge that he has access to and that sense of helping other people is a very rare thing and it's it's made more rare by the the welfare state and the ready availability of subsidies for subsidized life without leaning on any particular person you know and I think relations of dependence are actually very positive if they are accepted on both sides you know and I think it's something that we don't teach and the boy scouts movement and all that they used to teach young people these things teach people how to go out and help those who needed them and how to make those little Saturday to day sacrifices and eventually through the process of imitation and imagination a character grows based on that I feel that there isn't any obstacle to this it's a very simple form of Education all of us can do it and all of us who have children do do it I'm sure Jordan does it with his children the same as I with mine of course it you know you're always disappointed they always go away into their court corner with their with their wretched little iPhones and so on but nevertheless it some of it rubs off and you know that in the long run they will be capable not just of finding love but also of offering forgiveness and and working for reconciliation I don't think in the sort of narcissistic culture which is propagated by the media and by the universities that that they're being pointed in that direction that is true but then it's up to us to point them in another direction I think as an academic we talked already about that place where the meaning and the fact are conjoined and that's the proper place to lecture from because people who lecture constantly make the presumption that they're there to deliver a set of facts but there's an infinite set of facts and so at the very least you have to select the facts and there's a mechanism that selects the facts what what you want to do as an academic is is tell your students through through direct discourse and also through action about something that you've encountered that's that you've fallen in love with and to and to communicate the love that you have for that the love for literature and and not to say well you should read this book but to say well here's this book and here's what it can open up for you and this is how it does it and and this is what you'll gain from it it's an inestimable gain and there's some struggle in it but but there's a there's something in it that's of unbelievable utility and you have to believe that in order to communicate it and then that's hope that opens one of those doors you know and maybe some students will step through that and think well maybe that sounds like something I need I'm in this dire situation and I need something I need a life raft need a they need something to boy me upward and it's going to take some effort obviously because nothing worthwhile comes without effort to communicate that commitment you have to these to these to these phenomena that phenomena that we already talked about to beauty and to truth and to literature and enter the classics in the humanities it isn't enough just to say what they are and to transmit them it's to it's to manifest yourself as a living part of that tradition and to and to show yourself thereby as a model for living out as much as you can what that tradition represents and to show that that's so much better than like a short-term pleasure seeking nihilism that they're not even in the same conceptual universe and people are far more open to that they know already people know especially when they're hurt they know that happiness is fleeting and that suffering requires a sustaining meaning everyone who's lived knows that and so to say well here's some balm for the suffering and it's profound and deep and and here's what it's meant to me and here's how you can incorporate it into your life it's like people are absolutely starving for that or dying of thirst for that I mean this connects with what you earlier said about the curriculum that the old way of teaching the humanities was in that manner as objects of love this is what I have loved what previous generations have loved to and handed on to me here try it out and you will love it too whereas the postmodern a curriculum is a curriculum of hatred it's directed against our cultural inheritance one after another the works are paraded before us stripped naked and thrashed you know by what by revealing whatever ideology or power structure is being concealed within them and that of course is not why they were written and it's not how they should be understood it's not why they survived an example like this is the best that the best of us could produce and it's nothing why should you bother doing it and it means that students who go through that curriculum come out with a sense of the hopelessness of everything and thus are successfully educated by postmodernist standards yeah yeah I suppose that's right but you know there's no reason why one should one should accept this one all all good things begin in the in small areas because because two or three people you know well as Christ said two or three are gathered in my name you know there am i with you but the same is is in all cultural activities it's a perhaps a friendship will will be game it will start up a reading group and out of that reading group there'll be others come in gradually if it's founded on love of the thing that's being studied and offered it will always triumph in the long run over this negativity the problem is the negativity is subsidized is subsidized by universities who are paid for by governments who are paid for by taxpayers and so on and the the answer is to take away those subsidies and and deprive education completely of money and it will be back with us again that's right I super I suggested something like that in public in Canada not so long ago to cut the budgets of the universities across the board by 25 percent and let them sort themselves out because but the the no subsidy idea at least forces those who provide education to do it purely on its merits and the fact that these counterproductive disciplines let's say have been subsidized for so long has given them a power that's far far outstrips their their credibility and their attractiveness alright now I wanted to to point out will this this this chat may be seen by a few people online at some point and draw attention to vet that we're all wearing the poppies of course is a is is is is this symbol of respect and memory for an inheritance of our own past for the the suffering that has given us or at least protected and given us so much that we hold dear I'd like to ask you both about memory and the inheritance of the past and and what it means to have a pedagogy what it means to have a pedagogy of the transcendent in relation to our past how do you open open those those those doorways and and perhaps a if if the spirit moves you to speak about works that you love that you've been able to open up to others one of the reasons for remembering you know in the way that we remember the Armistice in the First World War one of the reasons is is gratitude and gratitude is in short supply in our societies today and it's the it's the the greatest gift that we can offer in fact as sorts of people who are dead because what else can we do except to acknowledge what their sacrifice so I think that gratitude is a fundamental part of memory there are of course accumulations of guilts and and so on and those are being emphasized all the time in the postmodern curriculum all the all the ways in which we are not entitled to our inheritance but I would think in the face of that we have to insist on the ways that we are entitled to that inheritance if people have died for it forth and for our sake you know that is a fantastic in title that we enjoy and we should feel grateful to them for that I mean when it comes to no actual works or of art or whatever which have opened the sense of the depth of one's own inheritance that I think is a very interesting question as so many of them but but just to mention only one the bar b-minor mass to me that's a door into the end they hit the hold the whole European inheritance going back to the crucifixion clarity there it all is encapsulated in music music you know celebrating the universal claims of the Roman Catholic Church were written by a Protestant you know that it's and offered as a gift you know to mankind and there it is and there's such things so transcend any any minor historical details that one recognizes that that is what the past really is for one that great depth of inheritance that can't be enumerated but just enjoy it just to follow up before we turn to Jordan Roger at the beginning you talked about a how great literature great writing is writing in which the reader finds himself finds herself taking Bach's mass and B minor you've spoken about the this unfolding of the self that is found in these great works or the reflection of the self I know at least I think you've written about the the unfolding of the theme in in in in of that mass in particular but and certainly in other other of your writings the unfolding of the theme and music could you say something about the I know there's a huge question but the way in which the unfolding of the theme in music is an unfolding of the self it's a really provocative way of putting it it is true that when you listen to a theme in music you are not listening to a sequence of notes something begins in that first note and endures to the final note and it goes on all the way through even though there are spells of silence it's still going on in the silence so that our ability to hear something as a theme is already a contribution that we make it comes out of us so we've identified with that mu movement that movement is it's there in the world because it's there in us but but in so many ways all our inner life is interrupted and unfulfilled and it's full of things that start up and then beat round and I think that is one of the fundamental experiences of human beings that there's an inner disorder that things never actually come to a conclusion but here uniquely movements begin and come to a conclusion this is and that conclusion is is complete it's a satisfaction of the unsaturated nature of the first movement of the first beginning theme and it's an an experience what why do we value that I think we value a value it in the same way as we value tragedy because it gives completion and closure to things that otherwise wouldn't ever have them and things that are transient as well because it does have a beginning and an end and the end doesn't invalidate the utility of the of the entity that's right hmm so in the gratitude I mean that was that was exactly the theme that sprung to mind for me as soon as you asked that question I mean one of the things that I found find profoundly disquieting about the modern radical what would you call it ideology that is so no so unfortunately dominant on campuses among young people is that it's unbelievably ungrateful and when I when I walk outside and there's not a riot and death in the streets I'm having a good day that's my sense of history it's like I'm constantly staggered by the fact that so much works all the time it's absolutely I met this guy a while back and he'd been in a motorcycle accident he really got hurt man he was he was pretty much half destroyed and he worked as a telephone lineman he worked with this guy who had Parkinson's disease who had was equally destroyed in a slightly different way and the two of them together could climb up a telephone pole and continue their job and I thought this unbelievable infrastructure we have that just an absolute bloody unknowing ongoing miracle is sustained by people exactly like that you know they're having very difficult lives in a country like Canada they go out in the middle of the bloody winter where you die it's frigid and something breaks and they fix it and the lights are on the lights are on all the time and I come to somewhere like Europe and to me it's an absolutely overwhelming experience to see Kings Chapel today to wander around this city I just staggered that people produce this and so amazed that we could do it and so grateful that it exists it we were talking about King's chapel the people who started it didn't live to see its completion they were they were driven by this nobility of transcendent vision and they produced these enduring forms and out of the bloody misery of history we've erected all this spectacular infrastructure that we're so fortunate to be part of them the none of that gratitude is taught and it's partly not taught because people have no sense of the absolute catastrophe of history I mean for me the Hobbs it's like nasty brutish and short that the simplest and most likely social circumstances catastrophe punctuated by hell and to see that not happening in a sustained manner constantly and to see things improving around us and and to be reliable in that manner and then not to be grateful for that it's like it's an unbelievable combination of ignorance and wilf ignorance ingratitude and willful blindness and it does no-one soul any good it's so good to walk down the streets of a beautiful town like this and to be open mouthed in non-ironic amazement at what's here and so and to not instill that sense and young people to for them to understand that they are standing on the bones of generations of people who suffered to make this possible despite all their errors and have brought this forward it's like yeah well Hobbs is a very salutary lesson actually because he did look into the abyss and stepped back from it and reported on it and and we and as did Solzhenitsyn and we post-war baby boomers haven't had that experience and I had a little glimpse of it in the old communist days but we only saw the edge of it then you know but still the scent the sense that it is there always beneath your feet and that the crust is as thin as it it can be in certain places that I think is something that young people do need to be taught without making them get gloomy about it but to recognize that they they're lucky a last question before we open up for a few questions here it seems to me that the the backward-looking that we've talked about you had a wonderful phrase a wide-eyed open-mouthed non-ironic engagement I think he said walking around this transcendently beautiful town of Cambridge which houses this August and ancient and beautiful institution we you mentioned Jordan was seeing the King's chapel earlier today that those who started the work knew they wouldn't be those who would finish and those who finished knew they had inherited to work that they had not themselves begun and so I suppose I want to ask we've talked about the the the the necessity to turn back with gratitude to the Past to our inherited past and I want to talk also about the possibility of building in a creation these chapels and buildings were built at some time you yourself are a composer both of you authors of books that many many people have found depth and truth in so I want to to ask about the possibilities for for for Renaissance for rebuilding or building a new at new buildings new forms of community new forms of art perhaps new buildings of old forms of architecture new colleges and universities new more healthy and beautiful forms of courtship new forms of flourishing arts and music it seems to me so important that that we not lose sight of the fact that precisely the abiding truth of the transcendent in us gives us hope to to answer that call yeah it must be the case that when when describing our cultural inheritance we are not just describing something that's gone we must be describing something of which we are still apart and which we which has to changed as we are changing to accommodate us all this was said by Eliot in tradition and the individual talent you know that that the artist must be constantly trying to say that new thing that that he came into the world to say but he can only say it if he adapts his style to the the inheritance of the tradition thereby transforming the tradition and transforming himself and we all there and there is no formula for doing this because a formula is precisely what what destroys the creative act but we have to assume that new things will come and they will come through as as they always did in the past through fasting and prayer you know and the occasional glass of wine in my case Jordan well we could concentrate I suppose on building the future instead of criticizing the past I mean it's necessary to decompose to reconstruct you know those those acts can't be separated but the decomposition is the prerequisite for the reconstruction and you know what I've been recommending to people is that they they start on whatever scale they can start on with whatever's in front of them because they have more in front of them than they think these these these these circumscribed areas that these small places that people can call their own even if it's the only their room you can start to do something creative and beautiful there I mean I've suggested to people that they start by putting the room in order and that implies a purpose it's like well your room is somewhere that you exist it's it's it's a place that surrounds you that tells you how to be is put it in order so at least it isn't screaming chaos at you in a soul-destroying manner make it pristine and and and and orderly in in a fashion that suits what you're aiming at so have a name and then this is perhaps a chapter in my next book well maybe you start by putting your room in order and then you make it beautiful and then you learn how to make something beautiful and to make something beautiful is to make it worthwhile and to participate in that transcendent meet and in that transcendence maybe you need one certainly and for your future self which is also others you know this idea that people are fed even of self gratification let's say as an antidote to nihilism well take your pleasure in the moment it doesn't even work for you because you're stuck with you tomorrow and you next week and so even to treat yourself properly is to treat yourself as part of an ongoing community but I would say start by you start in the world if you have some wisdom and some humility by taking the potential that lies dormant in front of you and interacting with it in the logos like manner with truth and with love and by transforming that potential into whatever you can create out of it that's good and even if it's it won't be small if you do that you can transform your whole household by transforming your room you can transform your whole neighborhood by transforming your house like these things spread very very rapidly and that is right there in front of you you know and people think they're impoverished now that they don't have any opportunity and that and the opportunity is hidden from them by their by their by their unwillingness to take the steps that are necessary to put what they could put in front of them in order and and and to and to produce the beauty instead of the ugliness where they could do that and I don't think there is anything more powerful than that that works I've had thousands of people tell me that it works you know personally and come and talk to me every day now on the street and say my life was in terrible disorder I had no vision I wasn't abiding by the truth my relationships were fragmented I've decided to make something of myself whatever that might be I've decided to adopt more responsibility and to tell the truth and things are incomparably better and so that's that's there for everyone to take and regardless of your circumstances and I know that some people have what appear to be larger opportunities and more privileged in front of them but that also makes they're commensurate and moral responsibility larger so there's a certain balancing that's a natural consequence of that so now recognizing the nature of the finite there's a train one of us needs to catch we're going to have to draw this conversation to a close but not before we've all had a chance to thank both of you for everything you do to fan the flames of the transcendent for your readers for your listeners for all of us thank you very much both of you [Applause]

Channel: Roger Scruton Official

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Length: 92min 35sec (5555 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 14 2018