Hello, and welcome to Mythic Mind, where we produsue wisdom in the past between primary secondary worlds. Andrew Snyder and I'm glad that you're here. Hey, there, welcome to this bonus episode of Mythic Mind. I mentioned last time that there's a lot of things going on here between the book club, the Star Wars series, some other conversations that I'm having here and there, and so you're going to get some extra content here and there, and so this is a bonus episode as I was able to recently
speak with Spencer asc You, Spencer Is. We kind of have a real life connection that we've discovered through connecting on X But Spencer, coming out of Tennessee, he's interested in in Lewis and in you know, storytelling and fantasy, fairy tale, and so he recently joined up with Mythic Mind, and we decided that we wanted to plan a conversation, and we decided that we would talk about Lewis, which is obviously a very broad topic of conversation, and so
we started talking about Lewis from there. Really following in this this abolition of man idea of kind of dealing with the real versus the artificial. We moved from Lewis to Star Wars, to Tolkien to postmodern storytelling, and we kept kind of intermingling these ideas and so we cover
a lot of ground. It seems a little bit meandering at times, but actually there's this common thread of dealing with the question of the reality, especially in storytelling, and how do we the question of like, how do we maintain our feet firmly grounded on the real while engaging with a world that has embraced the shadow. It's not an easy question, but that's something that we at least start to deal with this conversation. I feel like it was a productive conversation. I hope that you enjoy it,
and let's go ahead and get started here. Oh wait, but factually, before we get started that conversation, I do want to mention, because we didn't include this in the actual conversation we had together, that Spencer is over on x at Spencer Underscore Ask You, and he recently started his substack at Spencer ryanasku dot substack dot com, and I'll link to both of those in the show notes to make sure that you follow him, make sure that you sub to a substack and just continue to check
out what he has to offer. But now let's go ahead and get into this conversation. All right, Spencer, welcome to Mythic Mind. You know we didn't have a super clear agender for this. I know we were talking about Lewis, and so I guess that's where we'll start. If you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, kind of who you are, what you have going on, and then you can go ahead and get into a little bit with your your your background with Lewis.
Sure, sure, I'm Spencer, ask you excited to be here only Mythic Mind, and I am an aspiring writer just recently released my substack. I've been releasing some essays and also a couple of short stories, working on writing a fairy tale right now, and a nonfiction book that kind of dives into a lot of the things that we'll be talking about today that I think really ties into that hideous strength and thing, especially that book, which I'm
sure we'll get into. And I live here in Columbia, Tennessee with my wife and just really fell in love with Lewis three separate times in my life. And I'll kind of give a brief overview of why that happened each time, and we can jump right in onto I mean, we could talk for hours on this stuff, I feel like, but you know, like most people, my first experience with Lewis was the Chronicles of Narnia when I was a kid,
and I remember I remember reading through them. And this is kind of a theme for Lewis with me, where the books I don't get the first time I read them end up becoming my favorites down the line. As a kid, I felt like the witch in the Wardrobe. I very easily understood, you know, I was. I grew up in the church. I saw the christ allegory and that story very quickly. Didn't get the Horse and his Boy,
didn't get the silver chair. But I still love these books and I read them several times in elementary school and probably the beginning of middle school as well. And then I got super into like westerns and sci fi, and I remember I found a copy of Enders Game and Dune and Hyperion by Dan Simmons and got super into sci fi for a while and came back to Lewis.
My senior year of high school. We had this thing called the Senior Project, and I was a public school in Mississippi, and they let you spend an entire school year researching something, and for me, I wanted to do the authenticity of Christianity, Like that's what I wanted to do.
I was like, I was really into apologetics, and so I got like the Least Droble books and the Josh McDowell books, and they kept coming back to this argument, the liar, lunatic or lord argument a C. S. Lewis outlines in Mere Christianity, and he also outlines it in the line of The Witch and the Wardrobe, which I had forgotten about until that point. And so I went and read Mere Christianity and got super into him again, read some of his nonfiction things like the Screwtape Letters and
you know, the basics. And then my senior year of college, Oh, and then I got really into fantasy. But that's when I read like Lord of the Rings for the first time. That's when I started reading things like Wheel of Time and all these other big fantasy series. And so I came back to C. S. Lewis during a philosophy course my senior year of college. I wasn't a philosophy major.
I was a music major and a business major. I did two years of you know, opera and composition, and then decided I wanted to get some business background because I wanted to move to Nashville and be a country music star. And my wife and I did end up moving here. We did end up doing the music industry for several years and got out of it. That's a
whole nother story. It was fun for a time. But so I had one more elective and I took a philosophy cat class and we read The Abolition of Man and and it was it was at Liberty University, so it was it was highly focused on Lewis, like that he had us buy an entire collection, but we really focused on Abolition of Man and it had you know, mere Christianity, great divorce, grief, observed, problem of pain, you know, all those intablished a man. And it was after I
read that book that I dove into everything else. It was then it was the Space Trilogy, and for me, Out of the Silent Planet rocked my world. The really interesting view that I'd never heard positive before about about death, you know, and the unfallen world and sort of that
medieval cosmology that Lewis is famous for. Uh, Perilandra after that became my favorite, and it was it's still I think a masterpiece, probably the best fictionalized account or argument for both God's sovereignty and the will of his creation. Thought that was brilliant. And then you get into that hideous strength. And I didn't get it the first time. I was like, this is strange, what's Merlin doing here?
You know? Who are these nice guys? You know?
But when I came back around again for my second read through, that's when it hit me a whole new way, especially kind of with what was happening in our culture, this anti humanism, transhumanism, neuralink AI, all that good stuff. You start to realize that in a lot of ways. C. S.
Lewis was prophetic about these sort of things. He predicted what was going to happen if we allowed, you know, science and progress without temperance, without being having it guided by temperance and wisdom and so and it's been NonStop from there, man, been NonStop from there?
Well good, I yeah, I appreciate that story. Nownest, I'm a little bit envious in that I wasn't a super active reader as a kid. I mean I did read Narnia with with my parents when I was, you know, a young kid somewhere along the way as a teenager, I think I read the Screwtape letters. But beyond that, you know, I only really discovered Lewis as an adult early, just like a few years ago, when I was opened
up to fiction in general, starting with Tolkien. You know, I just kind of devoured that, and then first Lewis I picked up based off you know, I asked Twitter, what do I read next? The resounding answer was till we have faces? So I read that, and from that point I just I couldn't stop, and so I right to the to you know, the Space series or Ransom series. I'm trying to say Space, right, That's that's the wrong name. So the Ransom series to you know, Narnia again and elsewhere.
And you know, you said that Lewis is prophetic, and I think that's true. Anyone who's read was attentively recognizes that. Why do you think he was he was able to have that kind of intuition about where things are headed? What do you think set him up for that?
I think, you know, there are those authors that are out there. Another one that comes to mind is like a Doostowevski, you know, some of the great Russians, and and I think guys like Wendell Berry, who's not as well known, but he's still alive, he's in his nineties that have an insight into maybe even it's just pattern recognition. But I think, I think ultimately for Lewis, it was that pre modern mind. You know, a lot of people call him the last of the Medievals, and kind of
like Boethius was the last of the Romans. And Lewis was so so heavily invested, much like Tolkien, in the medieval mind and that cosmology, and I think he understood what education was about because I think, you know, I was thinking about this yesterday, actually saw something on Twitter that that made me angry, you know, of course, and I think that the pre modern mind, the medieval mind in particular, view to education as sort of this cultivation
of virtue, you know, the first the first aspect of education, the cultivation of virtue. And now it's just kind of and I'm not saying for everyone, but I am saying for some of these especially you know, stem fields and things, it's it's much more about credentials to be able to do your one thing very well, and the cultivation of virtue is not as important. And so I think for him or not even addressed at all, really, And so I think for him it was that he viewed the
world very, very differently. And it's a it's a way that we it's very alien to us unless we really really work hard and and read good old books and think deeply and try to kind of re enchant our world, you know. So what I mean by all this to answer your question, I had to veer off for a second.
But it was like for him, literature wasn't just a subject he had to study, you know, medieval literature in particular, it kind of provided like a timeless way of seeing the world that was lost with the advent of modernity.
And so for him.
He viewed the world as this kind of like glorious icon I he used the term iconic, right, And how if we with the new ignorance he called it the new ignorance that came with the scientific revolution, new learning and new ignorance. He wasn't, you know, completely against all this learning, but he recognized that once you start to concretize everything, once you begin to focus all of your learning on the quantifiable, then you lose something, you know,
you lose something. And what you lose is that understanding of the universe as like a single, complex, harmonious structure of divine order, you know. I mean, you can walk into an old cathedral and see you know, that kind of meticulous order and the saturation of light from the stained glass windows and all these sorts of things, and that was all a way of lifting our eyes, you know,
and really elevating. And so when naturally we focus on the quantifiable, but then because we're humans and we long for that cohesive mental model, the scientific world begins to make judgments on the non quantifiable, but it has no standing to handle ethics or theology or philosophy. And so I think for him, he was like, well, much like Dostowevski, he said, you know, we're losing something that makes us
very very human. We're losing something that is going to help tether us to the ethics and the virtues that would make scientific progress beneficial. And actually, now we're looking down the barrel of a gun that if we don't get control of this thing, we're going to you know,
it's going to be very, very bad for the world. Now, I think he was right, and so for him, it's pattern recognition, but it comes out of his understanding that if you aren't tethered via ethics or virtue to something bigger than yourself, something that transcends us, then we're going to run into a lot of issues. And it just takes a couple of generations before that is lost. And so I think right now we're kind of hopefully in this sort of reawakening where people are realizing the limitations
of this model and starting to return. But it's going to take some time. It's going to take a lot of hard work and intentionality.
Yeah, and I think that's right on. You bring up this distinction between his pre modern mind versus the modern or postmodern mind that we're interacting with today, And this is the distinction that I make a lot of times in my classes that in the pre modern world, whether we're talking about the pagans of the classical era, your Aristotle or Plato, whoever, we're talking about the medieval philosophers and theologians, they all have this idea that the reality
is what it is, it existed before us, just beyond us, and that there is a narrative playing out here. You know, Plato would talk about how, you know, all things begin with the good and rightly oriented are going to move back in that direction, you get something very similar, adapted by the likes of Augusta and adopted by the Medievals. You know, all good things come from God, all good
things are meant to return back to God. And so there is this story of reality, and the path of virtue is in finding our place within that story, playing the role that we are meant to fulfill. As once you move into the modern era, you know, in conjunction with the scientific revolution, we start to get some shifts in orientation where you get philosophers like even Rene Descartes,
the father of modernity. The one hand, he's looking for objective truth, but in a way that places himself, his own subjectivity at the very center of the quest of knowledge, and so it's not far removed from you know, the most foundational truth I have is my own existence too. All I can know is my own existence. You know that that modern to postmodern move is not a very big step, right, and then when you bring in the scientific revolution, which came along with modernity, and now we
have nothing has a purpose, a tay Loss. Everything is just whatever I decide to do with it. And so our scientific knowledge is not about better understanding this world in which we are nested. That's directed toward a common goal. You know, nature is no longer our sibling. Now it's just a thing we can do stuff with, yes, and then that turns itself onto you know, our own bodies and you know, all of that entails in the modern world.
And so yeah, I think you're exactly right that that Lewis had a much better understanding of what a thing is and what a thing is for, namely human nature, which is why he says that, you know, education without values is and that's what we try to do, and we want to have a neutral education supposedly, but he said education without values just makes a man a more clever devil. I think that's exactly right, that that education is meant to be for the formation of the person.
Absolutely.
I like I like that the distinction between the pre modern and the modern, you know, it's there was this like like we were talking about with the medieval cathedral. There's this cohesion that's focused on divine harmony and resonance. I mean, Lewis talked about he used musical terms all the time, like he used the arguments of transposition, right. So, and this is very platonic in that you have the
let's just take a Beethoven symphony as an example. You have the fullness of a thing, but you can't play that on your own, and so we have we transpose it to a piano. But and it's it's a reflection of the real it's a reflection of the totality. But it is just that it's just it's just what we can put human words to. So there's something that goes beyond what we can really argue with our with our
mouth or with our brains. And so we're doing our best at, you know, creating this resonance with who we're supposed to be, the ought to kind of the way things ought to be and will be, to that hope that he always presents. And then the modern mind sees
it more as a domination or power. And once again that's that comes straight out of that postmodern jump like you're talking about, where the only true moral decision is based off of who is excuse me, is in power at the time, and and that just leads to all sorts of problems on its face, the arguments fall apart within the within the presentation of them. You don't really have to rebut them because you can't make a value claim at all. And yet they are making a value
claim about what they're saying. And so yeah, I think that it's I think we're living in the fruits of that sort of jump, and it's a it's a weird time.
So obviously this modern position, this post modern position of you there are no transcendental, transcendental values. Yet here's how we ought to put together society and here's how you ought to live. Like, it's obviously irrational at the core, and that's something that Lewis is demonstrating, and so recognizing that, like how do we rationally engage with that, recognizing we're not actually dealing with reason, Like, I don't know, what do you think about that?
Oh goodness, that's you know, that's a great question. And that's that's I think the biggest hurdle we have, because you're dealing with two competing world views that share nothing. Really, you know, they can't both be true, and you have a you have a society, and I don't want to put everything on the systems though it is though it is there. You know, the systems are there, and they're doing what they do. The principalities are doing what they do,
you know. But you have entire generations now that view the highest good for their life is that momentary happiness, Like that's the that's that's the mark by which they judge if they've lived a good life is if they were happy more times than they weren't. And happiness is fleeting, and happiness can be selfish, and it's not bad to be happy. But I think, I think if I have my choice between happiness and joy, you know, we we we would argue the joy. And and I think joy is a virtue.
You have to cultivate.
It's it's a gift from God, and it's also something you have to work towards really understanding. And so part of it, it's like the arguments don't work for most of these people.
And so.
What I would say is there's something about story that does a better job of presenting that truth than the arguments. Right, Like, let me just give a quick example. So we watched our nephews this weekend and I bought them a little they're seven, five and two and they do everything together.
So I can't just like pull out the full Lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe and read the two year old would be like running through walls, right, But I got this really short, illustrated version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and I'm reading it to them and it gets to the point where as Land's introduced and Asher, the five year old says, just like Jesus, you know, And I'm like, Wow, you don't realize how profound that is, because for him, I could have sat
down and told him the story of Jesus and he's heard it. He goes to church and you know, we've shared those things with him, but he saw it in story and it clicked for him, you know. And so I think in a lot of ways that I think what's so pernicious about this new worldview, this postmodern worldview, is it's also taken over Hollywood, it's taken over books, it's taken over everything, and so people aren't engaging with
good stories. I mean, you had something like the Lord of the Rings films that came out twenty plus years ago that spoke to the entire world.
Why is that?
Because it was so and they're not perfect adaptations they you know, nothing can be. But I think they were good adaptations, and they did a good job of at least showing this the virtue, self sacrifice, heroism, all these sorts of things that in the modern world we kind of scoff that is kind of old fashioned or or you know, I don't know, kind of pretention whatever it is, like, oh, just the old guys are talking about heroism, like they don't they don't understand what it's like to be you know,
gen z or millennials, you know. And so I think part of what's been so tough and why we've lost so many cultural battles is because people aren't engaging with good stories. So if I think, if to answer your question, I think the arguments are important more so for for me, for us, you know, as we are, as we are already on the side that's trying to cultivate that virtue and those values in us.
I think for the.
People that are outside, that are immersed in that postmodern worldview where nothing matters, the nihilism that you know, nothing really matters. You know, people don't matter. We're just you know, parasites on the planet where it can't you know, whatever they say, I think it's going to be engaging with good stories, fictional and nonfictional, like story of heroism, stories that kind of you have to breathe in and breathe out to get. You know, it's it's not just consumption.
It's not just media to be consumed. It's something to live with and let kind of permeate your your your your being. The Tolkien's like that, you know, it's like it's it's it's a Christian story. I don't get the arguments online that it's you know, it's like obviously a pre Christian world, but it's a very Christian story. And but someone coming to that for just an adventure story might struggle be like, oh, you know, what's what's all
this he's doing here in these in these books. But when you come there and you begin to live with it and sit with it, you begin to be changed by it. And so I think that's that's going to be the major systemic change that has to happen, is we have to take back story. And yeah, I think guys like Lewis and Tolkien are a great place to start.
Yeah, I think that's that's well said. You know, when I teach my philosophy classes of the State University. I you know, we'll do the main I guess maybe not mainstream. A lot of people aren't even making ston As read that the classics anymore. But you know, I'll have them
read traditional philosophy text. But I also throw something in there, like, you know, I have them read Beowolf, because you know, you read Beowulf and nobody there well, very few people, even our post modern culture, are going to look at Beoolf and Grendel and say that they're on equal moral footing. That's all subjective. You know, who's who's the hero here? I don't. I don't know. So you know, it's like everyone recognizes the heroism a Beowolf, and he's a hero
precisely because he stands for integrity and honor. He puts the world into order. He holds his own life rather cheaply in light of a surpassing value that he is trying to attain. Like he he is a hero in a sense that anybody, like almost anybody, almost any postmodern who would elsewhere say all morality and truth is subjective, They're gonna read the story like they know who the hero is, they know who they ought to admire. And
that's because I mean the reality of virtue. I mean, you know, if you get to the Latin roots, it basically means like madness, like the way that a person is supposed to be is tied into our human nature. And you can only reject that at the level of the superficial, at the level of the propaganda. But the reality always reasserts itself, you know, just like I'll ask my students, you know where at the beginning of the semester.
They'll they'll tell me that everything just made up, everything is social construct And I'll say, okay, who sees a moral difference between serving the soup kitchen and committing genocide? It's like, okay, maybe you have to go to the extreme examples, right, But if there's any place where people are willing to say one thing's good and other thing's bad, the follow up is what makes good things good? That's
what Plato asks. That's the youth of dialogue, and that just is such an easy way of helping people to recognize they don't really believe the things that they say that they believe. They don't live as if they believe the things that they say that they believe you know, you can't fight for justice or the quality or you know, whatever ideal people might put up there unless you believe
in ideals. And so I agree with you. I think that stories have such a important role in just helping people to see themselves in a way that they're not going to willingly see themselves in their postmodern context. So I don't know, I mean, where do you want to go from here?
Well, I can add to that.
I think I think you're one hundred percent correct. The issue that you run into is I think one of the primary, maybe the primary fundamental What's what I'm looking for? What makes this postmodern thing? It's the stuff that makes it up right, It's it's it's cognitive dissonance. Is this
just what I'm trying to say? Because you have people, you can point that out to them, Like I've seen I've seen this argument online many times about someone will come up and start trying to debate somebody who's arguing for objectivity, and they'll say, well, what about slavery, with
slavery bad? Well, yeah, of course, And they're like, but there was a time when the majority of the world, you know, if you ask the majority, they'd say no, slavery's fine, and for some reason, there's they always sidestep this. People go a long that they'll do a lot to keep their worldview intact, you know, even ignoring things.
That are flat out.
Ridiculous on their face, like what you said. You may have had a different experience if you're teaching philosophy students, because they're probably trained in philosophy, you know, and there's something there that that if you are if you're doing that, if you're kind of immersing yourself in that sort of mode, then you can probably see the logical errors.
But there are a lot of people.
In the modern world that can be presented with that logical error and still just kind of clamp down around the lie. And so I don't know, like, I don't know how you begin to win that groundback as a culture without doing it person to person, Like we need more people that are out there like what you're doing. Obviously you have a class, but it's very different than just putting out a book that no one no one's going to read, or or you know, talking into the void.
You know.
It's like there's something that happens when you engage with someone personally and you kind of getting wrapped up in each other's stories that I think can maybe start to break down those walls. But it's a very challenging thing when you present that, well, the only I mean, because the reality is and this is one of those little kitchy, pithy statements that I heard growing up in the evangelical church. That is so true, and now it feels like a stereotype,
so people kind of brush it off. If you're saying there is no absolute truth, then that is the one absolute truth, right.
You always have to.
Make an exception for one, right because if and just like what you said, if you show one difference between telling a white lie to your parents and committing genocide, if there's one differentiator there, then they can be everywhere. And now you have to start making these value claims. And how do you do that in a secular, post Christian world when people are completely fine with living in that cognitive dissonant space.
It's very, very challenging.
Yeah, and this is when I think that Socrates really becomes helpful in that, you know, you look at the way that he argues with people. He doesn't only say a very lot in the Platonic dialogues, he just he asked clarifying questions. Now, obviously he has points in the way that he's doing that, but what he really does is he at least rhetorically expressed an interest in the person he's talking to, gets them to just give an
account for the things that they believe. And you know, eventually, if you get down to the roots and you recognize, well, actually are no roots, that then creates the right kind of vulnerability to have I think, a more productive conversation. Not not always, I mean sometimes. I mean even those dialogues, you know, a lot of times you get to the endpoint where the supposed expert recognizes they don't know what they're talking about, and they'll just you know, run away
or just ignore the problem. Right. But I do think that that Socratic method is very useful in that you're not necessarily actively arguing there is objective truth. There might be a place for that, but just in asking questions and helping your conversation partner themselves to better understand their own position or lack thereof, I think does a good job of helping people get kind of disenchanted with postmodernism.
At least that's been my experience. You know, reconnize that there's not really anything there and that it doesn't account for the way that they live in their lives, which then asked the question, well, what could account for the way that I'm living my life? You know, it's kind of similar to what we've been talking about with morality. I mean, even like the issue of beauty that you know, my students will usually tell me that beauty is entirely
a social construct or. It's all subjectives and the beholder, you know, something of that nature. But then I'll have them go to the local art museum and do just a short little assignment, very easy academically, but you know, tell me one piece of art that stands out to you as being particularly compelling and tell me why. And then do the same thing with something that you find
kind of off putting and tell me why. And the vast majority are going to pick, you know, some kind of like Renaissance painting or you know, some classical image from an older time when we're trying to deal with actual reality, and just about all of them discount in modern art, which is quite nonsense, right, It's it's intentionally meant to deconstruct our understanding of reality, and so these classical images, just seeing out to them because they're beautiful,
and we know that, like you have to program yourself to reject the reality of beauty, just as you have to program yourself to reject the idea of morality. But even that can never go all the way down to your soul because it brings back to what made Lewis, so as do like, we have a nature, we have an essence, we have a purpose, and we know that if we're honest with ourselves, right.
I like what you just said.
You know you have to program yourself to to deny these things, to deny these realities, I think. I mean, you see it in Lewis. I don't know, have you Have you seen this book before?
Yeah? See I have not read it. Amazon recommends it to me all the time, but I have not read it.
It's great.
It was only released in twenty twenty two, but it's really really good. You know, like you said, there's you can program yourself and that's that cognitive business maybe I'm talking about because at the deepest levels, the people that are saying there are no there's no value to truth claims are still making truth claims. They may be disordered, they may be bent to use, you know, a Ransom trilogy term, but they're still like aiming for that in
some way. They're still aiming for resonance or harmony. But they are doing a poor job because once again they've had to take what was natural here and twist it to fit it in there.
I think that that.
Book covers a lot of these things we're talking about. I think you'd really enjoy it. But what I was I was gonna say, and I had something I wanted to pull up. But yeah, so yeah, this was the quote, the exact quote from the book that I think speaks
to this. This, then, is what is at stake when considering Lewis's admiration for medieval cosmology, because for him, the medieval universe was not just a system of exploded scientific beliefs, but the natural icon of transposition, the greatest example of the spiritual world expressing itself in the limited vocabulary of the physical natural world. And one of those ways that we are transposing those things is through art and through
the beauty of art. And so you look at the decay like you were talking about the modern art and how it's intentionally meant to subvert our expectations or our desire for beauty and they call it good or there's that hubris involved. You know, this is a good thing. You know, we see that in culture right now. We're subverting everything you know to be true about about heroism and that's a good thing. Here's why it gets you to it's it's the Star Wars model. I still get
mad about that. I mean, we should tal about Star worse for a second, but yeah, I think that you're absolutely right. It's it's the Socratic method getting people to recognize because if you're preaching to them, they might be more closed off. If you get them to reveal it to themselves, eventually they get down to the bottom and they're like, what what is this? Where did it come from?
Jordan Peterson talked about the fact that everyone that calls themselves a nihilists aren't really nihilists, and I think that's that's true. It's like you may you may say you are, but the way you live your life, the way you order your your days, the way you order your relationships,
most people aren't nihilists. So there's that disconnect between the brain and the soul in the people that would claim that because they still, like we said, are making those truth claims often and over and over and over, when they decide to brush their teeth rather than not, when they decide to you know, call their mother rather than not, you know, things like that.
Yeah, and as Plato says, everyone by nature seeks the good. Now that the problem is that we fall short and we value lesser goods over the ultimate. We don't recognize the the good that is behind good things. But as you said, anything we do you brush your teeth whatever, like you know, even if God forbid, you decide to kill yourself, like you do that in the grossest nehilistic act,
because you believe that's better than an alternative right. And so even if you are moving in a profoundly negative direction, you still do it because you believe that's better than a different move. And at that point you're you're still dealing with different pathsive meaning of even fixed meaning, at least from the way that you're looking at it. And so nihlism really is, it's an impossible position to be
in because you're always making choices. Now, you know, you mentioned Star Wars, We're I know, we're kind of just meandering all around, and that that's fine. It's all really, you know, we are we just started a Star Wars series over here, and so I mean, I don't know what announces do you have to bring here now that you brought it.
Up, Well, I will say that I'm watching and Or and I'm actually kind of mad that I like it because I've been I've been so mad at what most of Disney has done there. I still have issues, you know, it it does kind of what it did with The Last Jedi at times where it conflates the the what you would argue is the good guys and the bad guys, and you see, you know, there's that still going on.
And I you know, I get people want that now, they want nuanced characters, and but I think there's a way to have nuanced characters without making them morally gray. It's more challenging, it takes a little bit more intention. But I think of the Last the one that always
comes back to me is the Last Jedi. When you have this, you have this idea, and it really I didn't like the movie at all, really from the beginning when he threw the lightsaber over his shoulder and I was like, oh, so this is what it's going to be you know, this is what's happening to my beloved Star Wars.
But really, when you had.
The the I think Canto bite was that the planet that they were on with the it was like the Vegas planet. And then they escape with the Guermo del Toro character, I think the Urbanicio del Toro is that his name, and he gives them that long exposition about how the rebellion and the empire are the same, they buy their weapons from the same people. They It's like, Okay, I know you're making a claim about the world and
it's probably pretty true. Like at the end of the day human governance and governments are are they lean towards corruption? I mean, I think at the end of the day we have to take the scripture seriously about principalities and how it's very very hard, very very hard. That's why I'm kind of skeptical of the idea of Christian nationalism.
I don't know, we don't have to get there, but there is something to be said when you were given governmental power that it kind of like the one ring, it'll corrupt you, even if you feel like you are the one that has the strength to wield it. Properly, and so I get that they were trying to make it apply to the real world in some way, but at the end of the day, it just came across as preachy. And we're also not there on Star Wars to explore, you know.
The real world.
We're there to get a story of good and evil and a light overcoming darkness. And and I think it's really interesting. In the old trilogy there was no real talk of like the light side of the force. It was it was the dark side, was the distortion of way things really were. And so that's kind of tying back into the Lewis thing. Look at what we did. You know, It's like, rather than harmonance and resonance with the way things ought to be or the way things are,
you have a distortion and then you have. Now in modern Star Wars is very much this kind of this dichotomy where they're trying to find balance in between. I just think that there's something dangerous about that and also something less interesting about that than the original trilogy, where you understood there is the force and then there's the distortion. Does that make sense?
Yeah, I mean I think what made the original trilogy so great is that is an archetypal fairy tale. And so you know, we are we're dealing with the reality of good and evil. And as you said that in the original trilogy, there's not this dichotomy between the light side and the dark side. There's the force in the dark side that the distortion. I think that starts to get a little bit blurred in the prequels not quite so clear, but there's a pretty clear division between the
good guys and the bad guys. And so you know, I kind of get the prequels to pass. You know, we're moving away from the original, but I still think there's some value to be had there. But by the time we get to the sequel trilogy, you know, when we have you know, ghost Yoda destroying the old Jedi Temple and Jedi sacred texts, and you know, now we're just gonna follow whatever intuition entirely that there is this more of a yin and yang understanding of the force.
We're we're a lot more manique in here of you know, good and evil and perfect balance. It's just we we lose track of what made Star Wars so great, and that it is this clear line. I mean, you have ambiguity still, I mean, and even Tolkien talks about this that you know, a lot of times he's criticized for being too black and white in his morality, just because he believed morality is black and white. They are separate things,
you know. In one of his letters, Tolkien says that you know, on both sides of the war on World War One, in particular, on both sides of the war, that you have men, and you have orcs, you have demons, and you have angels. Not to say that there's no difference between the acts and the Allies, but at the same time, like people are people, and you could tell a story about the corruption of the Allies, but that's
not a fairy story. A fairy story helps us to recognize that, yeah, some people may walk that line between good and evil, but good and evil themself always have a line. And so you can have an apparently morally ambiguous character. I mean, and Tolkien has these. You know, Borimir for example, right, like he he is a hero, but also he obviously has a villainous tendency to him or even denethor you know that he could there's ways of looking at him as something of an ambiguous kind.
Of figure. But morality is not ambiguous, right, and I think that's what makes talking so compelling. And even in the Jackson adaptations, which you know that they change a good bit, but I think that they maintain that basic reality of the well, the reality of good and evil. And I think that's one reason why that has spoken
to so many people. Why these movies are still relevant, you know now in twenty twenty five, you know, across the globe, because they speak to deep human realities that even postmodern people are deeply hungry for, which just makes me wonder, like, aside from an agenda, why why is Hollywood keep producing these stories that no one's going to talk about a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now, when obviously it's much more effective,
even just on a marketing angle, to tell good stories about good and evil that people want, people buy, people talk about for years to come. But they don't do that because I guess they just don't want to.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, I have one point.
I want to make a boy the prequels, but let me address this first. You know, at some point you start to wonder because they keep losing money on these on these kind of movies. You know, it's like, well they have a run out of money. Well who knows that. You know, it's all tax rite offs for them, and they make one Top Gun Maverick and they cover their
losses for you know, two or three years. You know what I'm saying, it's it's and and Top Gun Maverick is just an example because it was one bright spot amongst a year of ridiculous I mean, it was also just a fun caper. But you know what I'm saying, it was very clear, like you had your heroes, you had your But I think they view themselves as the people that are saving the world. I think they honestly
view themselves as heroes. And they're they're very they're very cemented in their belief that once again this iron that idea that they are the virtuous ones and that it's their job. They recognize the power of storytelling or propaganda. I'm gonna call it propaganda. And so for them, it's like, I don't care if this loses money, if this just changes one mind, right, So for them, because good and evil don't exist in the same way, we'd understand, all
that's left is the narrative. And I don't mean like the narrative story. I mean it is a narrative of a story, but the anti narrative of reality, right which is there, which is what they're trying to push. And so I think, honestly, the reason we keep getting it is because we have activists that have taken these jobs rather than creative people that are in tune with that that resonance, you know, and you get you get those examples every once in a while we're like, Okay, that
was a really good story. And I also I always want to have a conversation with those people that wrote it to try and figure out what is their worldview? Are they just are they double agents?
You know? Do they view themselves as kind of moving.
Through the shadows doing work or did they just kind of strike gold once every ten times?
I don't know.
It's it's complicated. But that comes back to the idea that we just need to have I think people on to use the term our side, the people that are kind of engaging with these things as they are.
We need to do a better job of.
Creating culture, of creating art, of creating books and movies and things that speak to the truth of the world, rather than walks the fine line and tries to be subversive, and you know, just for the sake of being subversive and deconstructing what I wanted to say about the prequels and just really diving back in real quick, even in the prequels, and I give them a pass too. I went and saw The Revenge of the Sith in the theaters for the twentieth anniversary, and in a lot.
Of ways, it's it's it's not a good movie.
I mean, I love it. I love it, and that's what's so funny. I love it, and I'm also like, you know, some of this is kind of.
Or you know it. The setting was.
Interesting, the execution wasn't always interesting, I guess is probably what I want to say, But I have a nostalgic.
Flare for it.
But you see, even in the prequels, what it meant to bring balance to the force, even obi Wan says this to Anakin was to destroy the Sith, not join them. So there's this idea that the dark side, and this is kind of this ties back into Tolkien and CS Lewis.
It's not balance and.
That oh we have to balance the good and evil. It's that, oh, the evil has gotten out of balance. Evil has become too powerful. The way you bring balance is not by holding both and becoming gray. It's by diminishing the power of the evil and elevating the power
of the resonance the force. And you, I think it's so funny that they took the idea that Palpatine presented and have made that the basis on which they've made New Star Wars, because it was the one that was living in the distortion that really brought about that sort of dichotomy. Oh, you have the light side and the dark side. It was a deception rather than pointing to
the reality. And so but they took that speech from Palpatine about Darth plagis right, and now that became the balance was no longer a destruction of the dark and an elevation of the harmonious. I guess it actually became a dichotomy, right, And I think it's really interesting that they took that from the deceptive one in the story and made that the basis of the story moving forward, That balance is actually becoming a gray Jedi.
So Disney's his real padawan, Yeah.
Exactly, dude, Yes, Disney was Palpatine's padwan.
All along. I love that.
Yeah, I do think it's a good point, and that is one reason why I you know, when I first saw the prequels, you know, everyone hated on them for a good while until the nostalgias started to redeem them a little bit. But in my recent rewatch, I enjoyed them. Like, I mean, yeah, we can see that the the problems there, but they do maintain a certain continuity, even if it's in degraded form, a certain continuity with what made the
original trilogy so great. But yeah, I mean, moving on, we just I don't even know really what Star Wars is anymore. The problem is Star Wars doesn't know what Star Wars is. I mean you look at the the sequel trilogy and you know, I mean you got changing directors with different visions, and you know, there's just there's no continuity anymore. And you know, I feel like, in the original trilogy, we're telling this archetypal, really existential personal tale,
you know. The the prequels take that and kind of adapt it to more of a political kind of scale. But then once we get to the Disney era, it's like they're just doing stuff. And I guess that that goes along with the fragmented postmodern worldview of there's no united idea behind anything, so we're just doing stuff. And I'm star Wars is always going to have its fan based no matter where they go. It's just it's established that
kind of credentials. But at the same time, like, I'm not convinced that this is what people.
Want, right, And I think you're right.
I mean, the viewership will prove that, you know, you have a pretty good show at and Or. That was the least popular release that Disney did at the time. I think it's getting it's kind of renewed now, like a renew interest for season two because it's actually really really interesting TV. But yeah, I mean, even going back to the sequel trilogy, Force Awakens, I was okay with.
I was like, Okay, there's a couple.
Of things here that I'm like, eh, you know, it doesn't make it didn't feel earned, it didn't feel these sort of things.
I didn't like what they did to Han Solo though. I feel as if.
They had landed Kylo Wrinn's story it you maybe could have made it make sense. But it's in the light of the next two movies that I got more angry about the death of Han Solo, you know, and I saw what they were doing. It wasn't and it wasn't
a tool for the story. It was a way to push their idea that we should kill the past, right, which is I mean, I think even Kylo Wrinn says that a couple of times, like or someone says that, and Yoda says that good grief when he's burning the Jedi Temple is and he doesn't say that exact thing, but that's that's what they're saying. That's what they're that's the value they're proposing, is that all that old stuff
doesn't matter. What the truth is really in here, right, You can find it if you look deep in here, right, and so and even down to Rise of Skywalker. Somehow Palpatine returned, you know, in the Banded Universe, in the Dark Empire comic books, I mean, somehow Palpatine returned. But it felt earned in those, even though they're not great comics, but they still tried.
You know.
It wasn't just salvaging a trilogy where no one knew what was happening, you know, and no one knew was going on. It was part of the story and it was part of Luke's journey in the expanded Universe. He actually goes and turns to the dark side for a little while he's playing a double agent. He's trying to learn from Palpatine to see what made him so powerful, and then he takes that back to his new students and says, we're not going to do this. This is
how you avoid this trap, right. It was actually education. It was a cultivation of some sort of virtue, a way to sidestep the trappings that so many had fallen into before. And so I think that you just have in Disney the Padawana Palpatine.
I love that. I'm going to start using that.
Yeah, I mean going to the Force awakens one of the things that first really upset me, especially in my recent rewatch. This is my first time watching it since the theaters. I just have not been inclined to return to this era. That when I kind of like the character of Finn, or at least the potential that he had, I think he could have been an interesting character if they did better with him. But when he first really comes on to the stage and starts interacting with Ray,
he's a very kind of chivalric kind of attitude. Right, He's always he's trying to serve her, trying to protect her, you know, trying to play that kind of nightly sort of role toward her. And then she doesn't really resist that directly. The problem is she scoffs at him trying to protect her. She's trying to serve her, trying to
you know, play that sort of role. And that was one of the early signs to me of what Disney was doing here that we're not even outright rejecting, we're dismissing as absurd or juvenile traditional values, even like the relationships between the male hero and the you know, the the his feminine counterpart, right, and that right there just alerts us to the fact that we're engaging in deconstruction here,
like that that's what this is all about. And then Last Jedi just takes that to the most clear level when we get the you know, ghost Yoda of all people, you know, destroying the Jedi traditions, and you know, all of the character arcs that we get in the original trilogy are just massacred. I mean, with Han Solo being just this deadbeat divorce he dad who has no relationship with his family to loose Skywalker, drinking milk from a
space cow in isolation. Everything just so degraded that they they essentially did what Kyla Ren did, right, they killed their father. And that's exactly what the series is. That being said, no, actually I have not read any of it yet.
Well, it's it's interesting you bring up Han Solo because Han Solo becomes so heroic. You know, him and Lea get married, they have twins, Jason and Jaina. They have and they have Anakin. Anakin was no, yeah, it was Anakin Anakin Solo and you have this continuing story of that saga. And he's a great father and he's also a war hero and he's it's it's it's such a dichotomy for someone who grew up reading the EU to see what happened to him, and and it made very much.
It made a ton of sense when you start bringing in the sort of subversive deconstruction sort of things. Why they had to make him that way because every person in these every male I'm just gonna say, every male hero in these stories, they had to make look pathetic and they had to be saved or redeemed by by the Ray character or even in the Obi Wan series.
They made Obi Wan a bumbling idiot, and he's he's he's redeemed in that sense and saved over and over again by an eight year old Leah, you know, and just watching he's like. One of the most ridiculous moments was they're at this like gate.
Did you watch the show?
Yeah, when it came out, but I don't remember it very clearly.
So so, so they're in They're on a desert planet and there's this laser gate, right, and and they could literally walk around it to keep going because they were on foot, they could really walk around it.
He's like, what do we do? Huh?
And she takes a blaster and like shoots it and it shuts off. I'm like, what The only point of that was to make him look stupid? And it was just deeply offensive and and and we have to ask ourselves. I find myself wondering, why do I care so much about these characters that I get so angry when they take a dump all over them? You know, Like, why does it bother me so much? They're just made up characters?
But kind of going back into our original conversation, they're actually they're actually not like that they're fictional, but they also speak to something that we want to be, that that we can aspire to or try to emulate. They they it a good heroic story, resonates with what we know to be true about the universe, with what we want to be true about ourselves, the way we ought to be Scius.
It was always talked about the ought tos.
Right, And when you see that happen, it's like it's like watching a friend get betrayed, you know. And so I think that's why when peop are like, why do you care so much? Just don't watch it, It's like, no, no, the these are these are my friends. These these are people that matter to me even though they're fictional, because I see in them what I hope to become, what I hope to be in my own life. So yeah,
it's a very weird thing. They did the same thing with one of my other favorite fantasy series called The Wheel.
Of Time.
On Amazon Prime. There's a moment at the end of the first book that Cement's a main character's role, and they took it away from him in the series and gave it to let's just say, more marginalized communities, you know, and It's like I'm watching this and I'm just I don't understand. You have a built in fan base of millions of people. These are some of the best selling books of all time, and they're best selling because people
love the characters. And then you come in and you do something upside down and it will push away these people. And then now you no longer have that millions of person fan base built in anymore. You're now having to scramble, and they just keep doing it over and over, and I think it's just a sign of that brokenness that we're talking and this sort of idea that they're trying to use power, institutional power, to warp the natural inclinations
of people to aim for that good. They're hoping that if they bang it down your throat enough, if they just hit you in the head over and over enough, that eventually just be like, okay, whatever, Yes, heroes don't exist, there's no such thing as good and evil. But what they're actually doing, I think is they're creating radicalized traditionalists. And I think we're kind of starting to see that.
You're seeing a huge reaction and it's getting more and more violence not the right word, because no one's killing each other over it, but more and more passionate. With every time they destroy a story, you're getting more and more people that are saying, like, this is ridiculous, I want my heroes back, and so to go back to that original thing we were talking about, how do we change this. Well, part of it is they're going to keep doing this because that's what they want what to do.
They're nice, you know, they're in ice. They are trying to anti humanize everything, and you're going to have a building resistance that's going to come back and say no,
you're not going to do that to our stories. And I think eventually people will get angry enough that will have sort of a parallel artistic economy where you have Hollywood and then you have something else that is you're starting to see that with I think things like the Rabbit Room and there there are these there are these people that are starting to push back and create good
art again. But it's going to be a matter of it's a slow, slow process because the institutional powers on the side of Hollywood and now we have to kind of build something on the other side and hopefully eventually those converge again into good storytelling.
Yeah, and of course, the danger here is that the reaction can become well reactionary, you know, it can become political where you know, yeah, we don't like this, you know, so called progressivism, that the secular movement into nothingness, and
so we're just gonna, you know, reassert ourselves. You know, this is where you get the militant right, which I think can be a dangerous move you know, that's in the direction of our side, but sort of missing what made the good things of tradition good, right, and so it's important that we maintain, you know, the virtue of the pre modern era that Lewis appreciated so much, that we've maintained this assertion of reality and not just the assertion of our side.
You know.
It's it's like when, you know, when when Joshua's preparing for the Battle of Jericho or the Angel Lord shows up, and you know, he says, are you on our side of their side? The response he get says, no, that's that's not the right question. The question is what side are you on? Right?
Not you know, you had you you risk with that reaction. Obviously, the militant right sort of idea. I me and my wife were talking about that recently, like you're radicalizing a lot of young people and you don't realize it, and there are people that feel hopeless and despair and those can become dangerous people. But also on the artistic side, you risk just making propaganda of your own. And I think that's where the storytelling tied in with virtue, with
trying to access this medieval understanding. The more and more people are trying to do that through people like Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and the more and more people use that to inspire their stories, you're getting stories, You're not getting propaganda. And that's the challenge is fighting fire with fire, And I think if we have anything to learn from good grief, any of our greatest stories, you know, fighting fire with fire, barmere with how we can use
this one ring to fight the evil one? You know, why we have this powerful weapon, why don't we use it?
You know.
That's always going to corrupt you at the end of the day. And so I think that getting away from the idea that we have to respond with our own violence, our own propaganda, we have to stay true to that harmonic resonance with with the narratives and the storytelling that we know have built the scaffolding of minds like C. S. Lewis and Tolkien and and really try to access those. I think that's where the power of storytelling comes into play.
Joseph Campbell talks about it, you know, Youwing talks about it, and I think that we have to make sure that that becomes the core of our of our or that's the heart of what we're doing, and not revenge, if that makes any.
Sense, right' it's you know, we don't follow Vaders because he's our father. It's about redeeming our father, right, It is that we want to recover what is good within our fathers, within tradition, and that's what we want to recover, which I mean, you know Star Wars pinging back there. I mean, you know, it's it's the idea of redeeming our father versus simply killing our right. That's the difference between the different trilogies. That's the difference between utimate What
is that we're talking about here? We want to recover what is good, not merely follow authority whatever that means. Right, We're good. Well, we hit on a lot of I think really important topics here. I mean, is there anything else that you wanted to mention in this conversation.
Man, I mean, I feel like we we got off Lewis. But that's okay. It was it was all tied into the same sort of things. I'd love to come back and at the time and talk more specifically till we have faces or that hideous strength. But yeah, today, man, I feel good. I feel good about that conversation.
Good. Yeah, yeah, I feel like Lewis. Maybe that's maybe that's too broad. It's easy to go into everything adjacent to Lewis, and I think everything we talked about is adjacent to what Lewis was doing. Yes, so maybe next time we'll pick one particular book and go from there.
I'm down with that, all right.
Spencer, Well, thank you for joining us, and we will definitely do it again sometime.
Thanks, Andrew, appreciate it, man, Thank.
You all right. Well, I hope that you enjoyed that conversation. I certainly did. I look forward to having Spencer on again at some point in the future. In fact, I think he's going to join us for the next Star Wars chat coming up soon. But I do want to quickly remind you that we do have a couple of Mythic Mind courses underway. We've got Hannah's Latin course just started, Josh's Paradise Loss course just started, and my course on a Brief History of Ideas begins the week of the eighteenth,
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